My sister asks why I only write about the good times. They were mostly. Our mother could be your toughest critic, highest bar and also front-line cheerleader with glittery pom poms shaking for you fiercely at each finish line. Doing your best in our home was unspoken and expected. We were latchkey kids, being instilled with independence. We were often met with after school “love notes” found on the kitchen counter in her distinct script-print hybrid that would read, “Start the Stove Top Stuffing. Move the laundry to the dryer and fold while it is still warm. Clean your fucking room, it is a pigsty. x, Mommy.” She asked for little, but expected a lot.
She had uncertain moods on days and moments that would shock you into pleasing mode. She was fun and free spirited, and then could suddenly yell, shrill loud claps; in disgust, frustration at something seemingly small (like ignoring the pile at the bottom of the stairs) or in utter disappointment while you were trying your damndest. Disappointing our mother was your own worst punishment. You never needed to be grounded, for you had already beat yourself up black eyed and bruised. Pleasing her was winning the top shelf prize at a boardwalk game. You can barely carry that kind of pride, but its weight and enormity became the scale and measure for everything we ever did or would do. She was beautifully hard to please.
Our stepfather, Peter, summons my sister and I for a lunch in Manhattan. I recall it taking place somewhere in the 70s, East side and a stunningly unremarkable choice. It is Christmas-ish as the decorations hang in my memory above our table. He probably has something financial to share. My stepfather is very maps and coordinates and mom was the fun cruise director of their lives. He always seems stern and serious in his lawyerly ways, even when I try to see his love for her. For us. His baritone, stunning height, and slow delivery, make conversations unfold like rehearsed opening arguments for a case he is presenting. I imagine he may be selling our house on Hubbard or settling her will. He told us she had a small life insurance policy, a box accidentally checked on an AARP/real estate application, that just covers funeral costs.
This is six months after our healthy, vivacious, fifty-year-old mother has dropped dead. She was taken from us on a fine beach day in July by the lightning stroke of a brain aneurysm. Suddenly and unexpectedly in a wave of uncertainty and promise of a future we imagined—she is swept clean from us. There on Sandy Hook National Park and gone with zero good-byes.
I have been pacing through dense fog, arms swimming in molasses. I am stuck, boulders on my back, but moving them from here to there. Work to home. This may be grief, but it is too fresh to know. I am two years post wedding and this was to be a beginning of my new life and not an end. Nobody helped us in the death department, or talked to us about healing. Bereavement unspoken, revealed only in notes of condolences. We are strong like her. Daughters who will always be ok, like her. Over it and onward seem to be the expected walk forward. Try to be proud without her, my inner heartbeat.
I keep flipping one thing over and over in my mind, as sense digs its nails in. Where is God? Where was he or she or whomever is in charge up there? All of those Hebrew school years and “be a good girl” and Mom and her amazingly big heart and transformative fundraising efforts at The Women’s House and Count Basie Theater. The time I put the stolen stuffed animal back in The Royal Box gift shop. Momentous life changing efforts folks had continuously relayed that she brought to them. Mom was good. So, where was God? Our mother’s death is the stuff of the evening news. This time the unthinkable lead story is us. Silly, selfish me of past tragedies. We were now amazingly, the “other people” who have this bad luck. And where is God in all of it?
I used to believe there was one great being, pulling strings and making merry for the well-mannered and benevolent. Peter tells us, “only the good die young.” I am less about a good Billy Joel reference in wrapping up my whys (thanks very much) and I know this cannot be his logic talking. My insides are coursing with this obsessive questioning. I am awake with it, like a drug in my veins. The Leiner girls have been knocked off their sweet and steady balance beam of a life. I am reeling in the deep end, drunk and drowning in what ifs. I say this out loud to exactly nobody.
I have also batted about a vision of being a contestant on Jeopardy. Mom always dreamed of winning on a game show. Wishes unrealized. She could fill in the puzzle on Wheel of Fortune before any letters appeared. She was magic with words and let us watch a tiny portable tv in the kitchen with dinner some nights. My answer to the daily double, “The worst thing that ever happened to Barri Leiner for the win Alex”. “What is, my mother died?” Alex Trebek will bestow all the prizes upon me, it is the least anyone can do.
“I struggled with whether or not to tell you girls” Peter starts, over lunch. Mommy had wanted her organs donated and we were part of the final decision on this. All but her eyes were ok with us—Danna and I agree. I have no idea what sister and I thought she may need to see where she was going. Her Real Estate listings in heaven? Us, down here? They are her most “her” body part. We make crazy fucked up decisions in this state. Like not speaking at the funeral. We also decide she does not require hose or heels for being buried, but insist that all of her own make-up be used by the mortician and delivery clothes and her floral zip top beauty essentials to them. We have this conversation over her body writhing up and down in a hospital bed, chest cavity rising and falling, falsely alive like a patient in a coma, but dead with the beeping aid of a life support machine. Tubes and air. The medicinal odor floats about us. “The hospital called to tell me, they found early stage liver cancer and had to donate her organs to research,” he finishes.
The why. There is an answer to my why. This is what he almost did not tell us and it was not his story to keep. Why I walk in circles of wonder. Mom would have suffered from liver cancer; a hideous disease that would have broken a spirit so grand. I contemplate the long farewell of this insidious illness and know that it would have made her an awful, angry and reclusive patient. Losing her hair. Giving in to a daily fight that would leave her self-conscious and vein. This ending has her going out as an awful wretch. It is an end I do not wish to trade for the one we got, even for a few more years. He almost did not share this colossal piece of our puzzle and death making detail. It hangs the picture in an entirely new light. This reframes six months of why. He has no right to have kept this from us, for even a day. I don’t recall any of us eating or how we parted ways that day. But God was there.
I recall the OB asking me at the twelve-week check in, if I wanted to know the sex of my baby to be. My first. This was less than two years after Mom had died and we moved from home in NY to Chicago. I am certain I said yes to this escape plan to wiggle out from under having to deal with the hulking burden of missing her. My husband has a new job, and I will have a baby. Mom would have hated my leaving. It was my first deception in her absence and a middle finger at death. My inner discomfort was a tight pair of support top hose. It hurt. Sucked me in. And would not let me breathe easily. I was surprised as the words fall out loud, “If there is a God, then this is a girl.” I now believe my mother may be pulling strings or trading favors of reduced commissions in the sky. I so desperately wanted the mother daughter relationship I had lost. The tiny heart beating taps into focus on the grey screen as Dr. Levin rolls freezing goo over my belly with the push of the sonogram machine in her hand. Numbers and lines stretching and measuring on the computer screen. I don’t need her to tell me. I know.
