Last Wednesday, August 24, 2011, I received a call from my brother; “Hey, bud, mom died.” were his words. I was caught off guard. Kat and I had just seen her the week before. She seemed to be doing as well as somebody living with cancer can be; she had a plan. For reasons that I honestly can’t put into words, my relationship with my parents had become strained. We didn’t speak that much and less frequently saw each-other. Since her passing, the entire process has seemed sterile and emotionless; Catalog her pain medicine for disposal, arrange her cremation, write her obituary, and plan the services.
When I was a child, my granduncle Martin died. This was my first experience with death. I was probably 6 or 7 at the time, and thinking back, I don’t think I could have picked Martin out of a lineup - I can’t even put together a mental image of him now. I do remember, though, how upsetting his death was to me. Whether it was my age, the strangeness of a funeral, or just seeing all the people around me upset from his passing, I remember being emotional, siting in the back of our family’s station wagon with my brother, wiping my eyes and blowing my nose on his tie.
“Oma”, my grandmother, and I were much closer. Oma was my mom’s mom. For as long as I can remember, she lived five minutes from our house. We frequently went over just to visit for a while, or have “supper” with her and her second husband, Carney. I was 8 or 9 when Oma passed from cancer. I don’t remember my parents telling me about her death, but I do remember being at Oma’s house with my dad after she died. I was walking around the family room where the hospital bed had been, seeing pictures of Oma and our family, and it hit me that I would never see this person again.
Some years later, Carney would join Oma. I don’t remember much about his passing other than the issues that came from dealing with his family; financial and property disputes. Hell of a memory.
In 2008, Kat and I were moving out of our apartment and closing our our first house. My dad was helping us move and he received a call informing him that “Nan”, his mother, had died. Nan lived in the Baltimore area for my entire time knowing her. Looking back today, that’s less than two hours away, but if we saw her six times a year, that was a lot. I specifically remember thinking to myself “you need to put this away, too much going on today to deal with this.” What I don’t remember is “taking it back out.” For whatever reason, I decided I would speak at her funeral. I wrote two eulogies for that service. The first eulogy was arguably angry. Why would a woman decide not to live close to her only son and his family? I remember reading it over the phone to my mom, and her response essentially being “You can say what you want, but you may not want to say that.” My revised eulogy was decidedly more even-tempered, trying to focus on the positive things that I could recall about Nan.
I’m not sure if it’s a biproduct of growing up, or just the way that I’ve learned to handle death, but I’ve been expecting that moment when it “hits you” the past few days since my mom’s passing, and it hasn’t come yet. I’ve never in my adult life described myself as an emotional person, in fact, if you ask Kat, she’d probably tell you I’m an angry person. I’m accepting of not being overtly emotional, but I’m hoping I’ve not grown to be numb.
