Chinaberry Sidewalks (27 page)

I went home for dinner but couldn’t stop worrying, so I called the hospital. “She’s resting comfortably,” a voice lilted over the phone, and I used that as an excuse to call an end to a difficult day. I figured it would be best to get some sleep and head back over in the morning.

I’d just turned off the reading lamp when the phone rang and a woman informed me there had been a change in Mrs. Crowell’s status. I didn’t get what she meant by status and asked for a clarification, and she carefully explained that it would be best if I came to the ICU as quickly as possible.

We jumped in the car and sped off, with Claudia driving and me struggling to make sense of the news and fearing the worst. “This feels all wrong,” I confided to her.

“Yes,” she said, “I know.”

The doctor was pacing the hallway outside intensive care, his indecisive manner now replaced by well-rehearsed professionalism. It wasn’t what he said so much as how he was saying it that made me regard him as warily as I would a used-car salesman. I can honestly say I would’ve rather heard “Mr. Crowell, your mother’s had a really bad reaction to the blood thinner” instead of “Complications have arisen as a result of things we’re not sure of yet.” Perhaps I’m being dismissive of his good intentions, but it seems to me now that “Your mother’s probably not going to make it” would have been not only more accurate but also a more compassionate assessment than “We’re watching her closely.” But then I didn’t have the prospect of a malpractice suit hanging over
my
head like a moldy cheese.

When I realized he was trying to cover his ass, I eased up on the guy. Given what had transpired, I’m sure that he, too, was wishing I’d taken her to St. Thomas. “You can relax,” I said truthfully. “I have no intention of hitting you with malpractice. Just tell us where we stand.”

“Not so good. It’s a hemorrhagic stroke and most of the brain is involved. Whether the Coumadin caused the hemorrhaging, I can’t say. It’s rare, but there are cases where that’s happened. She’s in a coma. With this much damage to the brain, her bodily functions will start to fail. It could be an hour. It could be six. By the way, did you know your mother had a stroke in uteri? The CAT scan picked up dried blood from before she was born. It looks as if she was predisposed to hemorrhage.”

Caitlin walked in as I was telling the doctor to pull the life support, winced at the sight of her Nana Zeke, and leaned her head against my chest. It was a slow Sunday night in intensive care. The lone nurse on duty wore the countenance of a loving soul who’d spent more than her share of late shifts witnessing family gatherings such as ours. With her kind permission, we had the run of the place.

The three of us climbed into the bed with my mother—Claudia by her right ear, Caitlin her left, and me at her feet. We sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “Amazing Grace,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and “I’ll Fly Away” a cappella. We poured packages of salted peanuts in cans of Coke—something she’d always done—and drank to her health. Caitlin brushed her hair, and we each took turns thanking her for the difference she’d made in our lives. It was a lovefest fit for the Queen of England.

Claudia caused the big send-off’s first dip in energy. One minute she was laughing about something Miss Cozy had said or done, and the next her eyes were fluttering like cartoon window shades. Caitlin and I traded shrugs and waited. “She wants me to speak for her,” Claudia said almost apologetically. My wife is the recognized psychic around our house. Lost papers, misplaced car keys, and which pile of dirty laundry a favorite item of clothing is buried in are among her specialties. Channeling the spirit of her nearly dead mother-in-law, however, was beyond her usual range. But knowing that their relationship involved modes of communication only they could understand, I waited to hear what the two of them had to say as one.

“Cozy says, ‘Be of comfort, my sweet babies, for I am happy!’ ”

Claudia had barely finished delivering this parting hallelujah when my mother’s heart rate shot sky-high while her blood pressure took a nosedive. A few seconds later, a flat digital line and a lifeless body were all that was left to show for her long, uphill battle.

Whereas the moments after my father’s death were marked by profound beauty and involuntary serenity, in my mother’s case it wouldn’t have seemed out of place if Claudia or Caitlin or I had said, “Catch ya later, Zeke, we’re going out for Chinese food.” Clairvoyant high jinks notwithstanding, my mother’s passing was just that casual. We thanked the nurse for her kindness, collected Miss Cozy’s belongings, and arrived home just after dawn.

As was the case with my daughters’ births, my parents’ deaths were unique to their personalities. Being a sensualist, a backwoods dramatist, and a lover of the limelight, my father made a big production of coming back from the dead to enjoy four more days as the center of attention. To show his appreciation, he left us a stunning reminder of the magnificent creature we knew and loved so well. My mother, on the other hand, having never been comfortable in the physical world, put in a brief cameo at her going-away party and split the scene posthaste. In keeping with the flinty wisdom and wry humor that defined the last years of her life, Miss Cozy’s passing was a testament to her belief that once the spirit is gone, the physical remains amount to nothing more than a discarded piece of clothing.

That said, my mother’s death was just as awe-inspiring as his. Knowing that she was the mastermind of her own exit strategy—and I’m as sure of this as I am that the sun will rise tomorrow—was deeply comforting. It was a display of willfulness that I often dreamed of as a boy when she made herself a volunteer doormat for my father’s muddy boots. One of the gifts of orphanhood was my certainty that they’d both outgrown or, more accurately, outlived their childhood conditioning. Another was my conviction that in the end she was a wise and powerful woman, and he a kind and gentle man.

The next day, Claudia, Caitlin, and I commandeered a freezing private room in the morgue’s basement where, with the funeral director’s permission, I watched my wife and daughter bathe and moisturize my mother’s skin, paint her fingernails and toes, curl and comb her hair, apply makeup, and dress her body in the blue negligee she’d picked out for the occasion. With only a thin sheet between her modesty and my nervous hands, I made my lone contribution to the project by helping the girls shove her into the girdle she’d insisted on wearing beneath the negligee. Occasionally, the funeral director would appear, ask if we needed anything and, shaking his head, hurriedly disappear back up the stairs.

With twenty or so close friends and relatives in attendance, the private wake was a riot. It’s a tradition in the Crowell family that, on holidays and special occasions, after eating, we go around the dinner table and everyone says a few words—most times, more than a few—about what that particular event means to them personally. My daughters decided that a standing circle around the coffin was the only fitting send-off for Nana Zeke. What the girls didn’t know I knew was that later on they planned to hold a big gossip session when they’d speculate about what their grandmother would’ve made of the speeches given in her honor. Since I was given the job of seeing that everyone gathered around the casket understood that they were being invited to say as much or as little as they wished about what Cauzette meant to their lives, I perhaps should’ve told them that they were surrounded by a pack of she wolves and had best be careful with their words. But I’ll admit that my daughters’ collective sense of wicked humor is to me a complete joy.

As a courtesy to my mother, I invited her pastor and his wife and informed the preacher that, once everyone in the circle had spoken, the ceremony was his to finalize however he saw fit. As luck would have it, my crazy cousin Charles—who was as well known for his drunken yarns as he was for the ubiquitous nonfiltered Camel cigarettes dangling from his lower lip eighteen hours a day, and who’d recently discovered the truth and beauty of Alcoholics Anonymous
and
the Lord, both on the heels of a nasty hangover—would be last to speak before the preacher took over. I could see the pissing contest coming before we’d gotten halfway around the circle.

Charles was more talkative sober than he ever was drunk, when by his own admission he could “out-blabber Fibber McGee.” He eulogized, philosophized, moralized, politicized, itemized, criticized, and spoke longingly of the perils and pitfalls of “drankin’ likker” before delivering a half-hour monologue on the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, his personal savior. Then he started in on Aunt Cauzette.

His fans in the circle were squirming to keep from howling with delight. A few, namely my daughters and Larry, egged him on with “A-
men
” and “You tell ’em, brother.” Those who didn’t know him were either aghast or in awe of his audacity. He took ten times as long getting his piece said as the rest of the speakers combined.

To borrow a phrase from Charles, the poor preacher didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. He did, however, grasp instinctively that in the wake of such gale-force testifying, he was pretty much in a bind. He made a brief comparison of heaven to the house Solomon built in the Book of Chronicles, in which the Israelites would never be made servants and instead would be captains of the army and homemakers of the highest order, which theology invited Cousin Charles to hold forth on ivory thrones and golden footstools and lions lined up on both sides of marble steps and something about ten thousand horses and whether or not old Solomon and the Queen of Sheba had something going on the side and the fact that drinking wine out of golden vessels was just as bad as chugging it from the bottle and—

“Now hold on a minute, friend,” the preacher said irritably. “Solomon’s mansion was a fulfillment of the prophecies. He ruled over all of Israel for forty prosperous years and was buried in the city of David. Kings and queens alike came to pay their—”

“And then along comes that no-account boy of his,” Charles hastened to say, “ole Reboham or whatever his name was, the one that drove the whole blamed mess into the ground.”

I hated interrupting the debate but knew it was time to quell Charles. I thanked everyone for coming and asked the preacher for a closing prayer. He obliged with a meat-and-potatoes farewell to Sister Cozy and bolted for the door. I can’t say I blamed him.

My daughters were ecstatic because they were sure Nana Zeke would’ve loved seeing Cousin Charles mess everything up. I was secretly thrilled that he’d gotten out of hand but had some doubts as to whether my mother would have enjoyed him hogging the preacher’s airtime. Since we’d run an hour and twenty minutes over the schedule, I tipped the funeral staff generously and called it a day.

“I could hear Cozy’s voice as clear as if it were mine,” Claudia said quietly that night. It was three a.m. and she and I were lying in bed, unable to sleep. “She said she wanted me to speak for her. I asked her if she needed to use my body the way Patrick Swayze used Whoopi Goldberg’s in that ghost movie with Demi Moore. She said, ‘No, silly, I just want you to tell ’em somethin’.’ Then she added, ‘You better make it quick because I’m outta here.’ I almost didn’t say anything because I was afraid you’d think I’d completely lost my mind. It was her, though, I know it was. No one can tell me it wasn’t.”

A few days later, closing down my mother’s apartment, Claudia and I found letters addressed to every member of the family, the text of each ending with “Be of comfort, my sweet baby, for I am happy.”

Her body was shipped back to Texas and laid to rest next to the boy she married.

I grieved over the loss of my mother much longer than I had for my father. Early in the second year of a general melancholy, I began to make peace with the possibility that this sorrow would never go away. Out of that reconciliation came the notion that the most fitting tribute to my mother, and indeed my father, would be to put the sadness to better use.

The impulse to try to sculpt a narrative out of my family’s history started when I remembered introducing my mother to Roy Acuff backstage at the Grand Ole Opry in 1991. Identifying herself as a lifelong fan, she told the most popular country musician of her generation that she’d met the love of her life at his concert in the Buchanan High School gymnasium, obliging everyone present, myself included, to imagine this had taken place only a night or two before. The courtly superstar paid rapt attention and then said his most treasured memory from that evening was of two young lovebirds whose faces shone from the audience with the light of love everlasting. The meeting lasted no more than three minutes, but I wish it could’ve gone on forever. My mother floated out of Mr. Acuff’s dressing room, an eighteen-year-old girl again. “Why, Rodney, he was just like I always knew he’d be,” she said, as dreamily as any girl of her era would’ve, had she chanced to meet her favorite matinee idol. “And didn’t his hair remind you of your daddy’s?”