The Sunday Memory Drawer - 28 Years Ago Today

My mother passed away.   Well, effectively, she really left a week earlier but machines in hospitals can make extended life so artificial.   I can remember it all like it was yesterday, not 1995.  And, in each iteration, the same thing did her in.

Those damn cigarettes.  They were with her at every turn of the day. And were always destined to be the ultimate downfall that no prescription drug or a session with a psychologist could fix.  Lungs that were likely as black as night.

The smokes took their toll and she was ultimately destined to have an oxygen tank attached to her.  In retrospect, that luckily never happened because, indeed, my mother would have tried to smoke with it in the house.  I'd still be paying off the lawsuits from those relatives of people who expired in the apartment explosion she caused.

Instead, in a weakened state, it would be a broken hip and pneumonia from hospital immobility that would stop her heart on New Year's Eve.  My very first act of the new year would be to sign a "Do Not Resuscitate" order.  She would die "officially" about a week later.

And then precipitate one last adventure for us together.

In what can only be categorized as another example of "life's absurdities," I had gone down to Montefiore Hospital with the expressed intent of telling my mother that it was okay to let go and move on. 

Except when I got down there, she was already gone.  Gone gone.  Not the metaphor.  She wasn't there.  The bed was empty.  

Nobody at the nursing station could give me a straight answer as to where my mother had wandered off to, given that she had been in a week-long coma and not really up for excessive wandering.  But they did tell me she had passed away in the middle of the night and that they had tried to reach me by phone and then by telegram.

By telegram?  Was it suddenly 1938?  These are snafus that I would explore legally over the next few years.  But, for now, Mom was gone.  And whereas I could account for her soul, I certainly had no clue where her body was.  But I was assured that all was okay and that I should go ahead and commence with making the necessary arrangements.

I was a lucky only child.  Neither one of my parents wanted elaborate funerals.  No wakes.  No visitations.  No gawking.  I certainly...and gladly...honored their wishes.

As a result, I went to my office the next morning.   There was nothing else to do.  And my mother would have appreciated my efforts to maintain a "routine."  And then the call came in from the undertaker.

"Er, we hate to bother you but we can't get your mother out of the Bronx?"

Huh?  What?

"Somehow she wound up at the County Coroner's office and they won't release her to us until she is properly identified?"

You're kidding?

I never knew where the Bronx County morgue was.  I learned that January afternoon.  As I stood on a loading dock where the previous night's collection of frozen stiff homeless bums would be dumped down for their own ignoble ends, I decided that I better do this identification pretty darn quickly.  And get my mother back to Westchester where she belonged.

Unlike what you may have seen in the movies, Mom was not pulled out on a slab from a refrigerator.  There was no dramatic pulling back of a sheet.  When you identify a body, you do so from a photograph that they show you. 

As they flashed the snapshot in front of me, I admittedly looked at it very quickly.  And, as long as the lady in the photo wasn't Black or Asian, that would be my mother.

It was her. 

And I thought about the ultra-weird events of this day.  How unpredictable it all was. 

How perfectly scripted for my mother, who had surprised me all her life.

I had Mom cremated and I comment frequently on that irony of that act.  Giving her one last good smoke.

I think that, even with the public persona she liked to display, she would have smiled at that joke.  I certainly always do.  

If you know somebody who smokes, tell them to stop.  Now.

Dinner last night:  Grilled bratwurst.