My mom’s obituary, 3 years after her death
After several close relatives died within a couple of years of one another, my mom started calling my sister Cindy and me – the designated family obituary writers –The O’Bitches. She laughed about that moniker for the rest of her days. (She was decidedly less enthusiastic about the fact that somewhere along the way, we also started calling her Ma – “It reminds me of Ma Barker” – but that stuck, too.)
And when our Ma died over a decade later? By unspoken agreement, The O’Bitches did not formalize her passing.
The manner of her death is not what mattered. It didn’t define her. Even so, by its very nature, death became part of her story.
She started feeling ill in June 2018 – and 4 short months after that, she was gone. We cared for her at home; our families worked in shifts, preparing her meals, and encouraging her to eat. When she no longer wanted food, Cindy created elaborate strawberry ice-cream milkshakes into which we poured the meal-replacement drinks that she hated. If not for the darkness that we could see in the distance, it might have been a heart-warming scene: Our old-lady-dog Smudge slept on the blanket beside Ma’s chair. Ma’s three grandchildren took turns sitting with her and watching black-and-white movies. Another sister, Kim, drove here from another province and curled into Ma’s tiny loveseat. When Ma would let us, we washed and dried her hair. “Oh! It looks so nice!” she would say.
When she was too weak to travel to the doctor’s office, her doctor made a house call. For the first time ever, Ma didn’t bake her signature banana bread for the office staff. “You know, Joy, that was just so nice of her, but I’m not sure I’m up to making banana bread.”
Her humor carried us through those dark days. The very last words that she spoke out loud to us, several days before she died? Cindy and I were struggling to move her from her bed to her walker, and Ma piped up, “I have such useless daughters!” You had to know her sarcastic humor to know how hard we all laughed. And, later, how hard we cried, knowing that she was still taking care of us.
To back up a bit, and for context: After we were all adults, and had the freedom to move anywhere we wanted, we did not live more than 10 minutes away from her. That’s how much we relied on her. And during the last 14 years of her life, she lived in the same house with me and my husband, in a beautiful suite that she nevertheless dubbed The Bunker.
After she was gone, the silence was the loudest thing we had ever heard. We very slowly started going through her things – like peeling an onion, we opened one drawer or cupboard at a time. Often we’d glance at the contents, then just close the drawer again. Surprisingly, some of the things we found made us laugh out loud. “It feels so good to laugh,” she would say.
We weren’t in a hurry to clear out her presence, and so her home (The Bunker) became a place to which we’d retreat for comfort. To see flour still powdering her measuring cups and mixing bowls meant that she had just stepped away to get another ingredient. To tend her plants meant that they were still loved by her. To sit at her table with her teapot meant that she was still listening. That’s how we processed our grief.
What is a legacy, really? Is it the career that paid the bills? Is it family? The degrees that line the walls? The gardens you have tended, and places you have lived? Is it Polaroids of vacations, and people, and Christmases?
Legacy is the smell of her hand lotion, the clothes she wore. Her favorite sweater, hanging on the back of her chair. It’s her needle and thread, her cookbooks and crosswords, her solitaire game, her voice in our heads. Her laughter.
Through the silence, I know this: Whenever I bake, or cook her recipes, I hear her voice, still teaching me: “Watch the sugar when you measure it – it jumps!” And you know what? It does jump. She made the best gravy, and now I make the best gravy. I hear her voice still directing me to add flour to the cold water. How much? “Oh, I don’t know, Joy – three or four forkfuls? You’ll learn to judge it.” She taught me how to make turkey dressing, and then – when she thought I was ready – her legendary Yorkshire Pudding. We both rejoiced to see them rising in the oven. (She was as surprised as I was.)
Legacy is comfort food. Up until only a few months before she got sick, she would still surprise me by making chicken noodle soup for my lunch. I took photos of these comforts because I was over 50 years old and my mom’s soup still made everything a little better.
More recently, however, my attention turned to this box. My mom wrote my name on it, taped it shut, and for 40 years, I moved it from one house to the next, from her house to mine, from one room to another. It eventually migrated to the back of a storage-room shelf, where it was out of sight for 15 years.
When I saw it on the shelf, I wiped off the dust, took it into her kitchen and opened it. It was, in fact, a time capsule, a family record, a childhood. A legacy.
When we were kids through the mid-1970s, our parents didn’t buy toys the way many parents do now. Brands and logos meant nothing to us. Sure, my two sisters and I had Barbie dolls and some Barbie-branded clothes, but we also had a mom who was an expert seamstress. So she did what she loved to do: she sewed. She not only made many of our clothes, she also made Barbie clothes. And sometimes, if she had leftover scraps, the Barbie clothes were miniature versions of our own clothes.
Our dad traveled a lot, so Ma lived the life of a single parent. She would work during the day, drive home and make dinner, and then she would take care of literally everything else – and those responsibilities usually involved a dog, a horse, and (once) twelve pheasants that my sister rescued. But, after we were in bed, we’d hear the crinkle of tissue-paper patterns, the scrape of her pinking shears on the table, followed by the rhythmic whirr of her sewing machine.
Our Barbies were impeccably dressed. We played with them daily for years, until – one sister after another – we all eventually outgrew them. One day we crammed everything into cases, and then we never took them out again. And somehow, after all these years, the clothes still look almost new.
The detail is astounding, really, and of course we didn’t appreciate it then. The lace, the ribbon, the tiny buttons, the matching accessories – all of it was just so Ma. She didn’t do anything halfway.
I have learned so much about her since her death. There’s always something to learn, even when it’s a lesson. Her own mother died when Ma was only 36. I don’t know how Ma navigated the next 50 years without her mom. We didn’t remember our Gramma’s laughter, but we knew her tiny handwriting on recipe cards and letters. We knew her humor and love of Christmas. We knew our Gramma’s legacy.
Carol Munroe Birck lived until she was nearly 86 years old.
© 2021, Joy Birck