RIP

My mother-in-law passed away on Thursday. She was a conundrum to me, a knot of contradictions that I will likely never unravel, perhaps because we were in almost every respect entirely opposite. I loved her, but the wonderful and humbling thing about Brenda is that she loved me more. More than I loved her, more than I deserved, more than was even based on reality. She just loved.

Her funeral was, I must say, the least grief-stricken such event I have ever experienced. Without an ounce of triumphalism or phoniness, every member of the family and every one of the scores of friends that came to pay their respects were sweetly and calmly certain of seeing her again. Not that they weren't supporting her husband and sons in their loss of her physical presence in their daily lives, but it was with a certain gentle, caring warmth--a warmth that was worn and comfortable, like an antique quilt, not tinged with fear or grief or even emptiness. It was exactly as if she'd taken leave of us all for a long trip, and everybody had shown up to help out until we were all reunited again. There was that kind of shared, practical purpose, and that kind of untroubled anticipation.

Of course, this is what I've always believed about heaven, but for me, that kind of faith is something I have to remind myself of--especially these days, when I have a husband whom I need in a way I haven't needed anyone else in my adult life (which is to say that my daily life would become virtually nonfunctional without him, so intertwined are our domestic responsibilities as well as our emotional lives), and when it's a constant struggle not to be overtaken (at least not on every front) by contemporary parenting anxieties over my children's health, safety, psychic wellbeing, and development and my role in all of it. In this delicate web of interdependencies and responsibilities, I've come to care more about mortality than I ever did before.

Sure, I remind myself that it's eternity that matters, but it's easy for that truth to become a marginal note on a page that I'm writing entirely about this life, a note that ensures that what is on the page is factually correct, but that has been shifted out of the body of the text. And so, as much as I didn't really want to have to face this day--the donning of black, the shuffling off of the children to strangers in an unfamiliar church basement, the floral sprays, the body, the crumpled Kleenex, the introductions over deli trays--it's also a day that I don't ever want to forget.