"Hey look! It's a piece of metal!" declares my eight-year old nephew Tucker, reaching into the foot-deep hole. It is spring, six months after my mother's death from cancer at seventy-two. We are holding the ceremony to bury Mom's ashes in the family plot in Titusville, Pennsylvania. As if discovering a rare Egyptian artifact, Tucker holds up the dime-sized blackened object to get a closer look. No amount of parental cajoling will separate him from the thing in his hand. We all agree it is possibly a cap to one of Mom's molars. I look at my younger sister. This might be upsetting her - honoring the curiosity of youth at the expense of the dead. Her face red with emotion she suggests that Tucker give her the new treasure to hold for safe keeping until they got home. I can sense her sadness and confusion. The object is like a talisman, a reminder of a physical connection now gone forever.
After the trip to Titusville we return to our families: my brother and I to Washington and California, my sister and father back to Maryland and D.C. We speak to each other daily, a habit formed during Mom's illness. We need the contact, need a map for moving forward.
"I can't stop thinking about her body," my sister Bebe says, calling me one afternoon as I am driving home from Safeway. "Cremation. It's so brutal.".
"What do you mean?" I say, pulling the car over to the side of the road. The Bay Area summer fog has lifted. A swath of Mexican Sage blooms along the edge of a nearby garden.
"Think about it. Mom's beautiful skin, her fingers, ribs, the breast cancer scar, the whole of her – burned to cinders in a flaming hot oven, reduced to a little bag of creamy-gray bones and ash."
Bebe worked almost daily on Mom's body, massaging her feet, legs and neck to keep her comfortable. Months before Mom's illness she had begun a massage therapy certification program. She had come to know Mom's body intimately.
"I can still remember the feel of Mom's neck, how it was stiffer on one side than the other," she says.
I too remember, but my mind fixates on different details: Mom's strong nose, her full Eastern European lips and heavy eyelids.
I mention our mother's small, soft hands, how remarkable that she kept them so beautiful despite years of tough, daily work in the garden. My sister agrees.
Then we talk about the irony of my sister's historically difficult relationship with Mom. To live near this moody, artistic and opinionated woman was hard for my sister who has a quieter, gentler temperament. She struggled to find common ground with our mother, had to temper her own high expectations of grandparenthood, to negotiate Sunday dinners and lifestyle differences. My brother and I related to Mom across the continent through letters, phone calls and periodic short visits.
Alongside our father, my sister had been Mom's main medical advocate: she had asked the technical questions, pushed for the best care and demanded the honest answers. Finally it was Bebe who accompanied Mom by ambulance to Suburban Hospital's Oncology Ward where difficult-to-diagnose, terminally ill patients came for final care. My father, brother and I, dazed and exhausted, followed her lead.
On the second day of her stay at Suburban Hospital we learned she had probably developed cancer of the spinal fluid, the kind that goes straight to the brain's central nervous system shutting things down fast. That same day we were asked what kind of hospice care we wanted and our father, desperate to feel useful, his grief so hard to manage, began drafting Mom's obituary. She slept most of the time, the morphine coursing through her veins to ease her breathing, but it was possible she still heard and felt us. My sister, hearing my father murmur something about the obituary, sternly admonished him to stop — she felt Mom's feelings were at stake.
Many months after my mother's death it came to me that years of my living so far away from her had fostered a mental habit of conjuring her in familiar postures - sitting at her desk, weeding in her garden, standing by the kitchen counter eating sliced cucumbers — and that I had taken on her mannerisms and intonations because it kept me physically connected to her in the only way I knew how. Perhaps the years of physical distance had protected me from what Bebe now felt so viscerally.
I imagine my sister sitting on the couch in her red-walled living room, the children tucked in bed. The T.V. is on but she isn't paying attention. She's looking down at her hands lying still in her lap. The clock ticks quietly and the minutes pass. Without realizing it, she is thinking about tomorrow, how if Mom were alive she would drop off the kids at her friend Mary's house, then stop by the nursing home for a brief visit. Then she catches herself. She imagines tomorrow will be hectic with two massage clients, food shopping, and the kids' homework. She braces herself, gets up from the couch, and walks through her silent house turning off the lights one by one.
Anna Edmondson is a writer living in Oakland, California. She has written for The Washington Post and the anthologies Oakland Neighborhoods and 27 Powers. She is currently writing a memoir about Poland, mothers and daughters, creativity and the natural world.