I Didn’t Attend My Mother’s Funeral

The eulogy I couldn’t give. The obituary I never wrote

I did not attend my mother’s funeral. She died on December 25, 2018. My father was comforted that his wife died on her favorite holiday, feeling like God gave her the gift of release from her suffering for Christmas.

She was not buried by her people. She was buried by my father’s people. There was no obituary in the paper for her. Whether that was because of an oversight, indifference, or a lack of knowledge about her life, it doesn’t matter now.

I do not have any guilt about skipping the interring of my mother’s mortal remains into the cold Idaho ground. She’s buried in a rural cemetery in a place that’s barely a name on the map. View. The place is pleasant enough, I’ve been there before — for the burials of my paternal grandparents.

The place is dotted with the graves of McBrides. I’m confident she would hate the idea of being buried there.

It doesn’t matter now.

I should have written her obituary. I’m the writer of the family.

It did not occur to me that nobody would write even a basic life sketch for her. I have tried every month since Christmas of 2018 to write an obituary for my mother. Every month, I have failed.

The problem is, I have to write more than an obituary for my mother. While I can easily pinpoint the specific day of my mother’s death, I do not know the date my mom died. But the woman who was my mom, the woman who nurtured me, was long gone by the time my mother died.

She was born Sandra Mickey Fowler on August 1, 1955. She and I were born in the same hospital in Pocatello, Idaho. She hated the name Sandra; everyone except her mother called her Sandy.

The biographic details of Sandy’s life, like those of most of us, are not very interesting.

She and her older brother, Keith, grew up in Blackfoot, Idaho. Her unique middle name came from her mother’s nickname. Esther Myrtle Gray Fowler also hated her name. Everyone called her Mickey.

Sandy’s father, Nestor Milton Fowler, went by Bud and was in charge of the Idaho State Psychiatric Hospital in Blackfoot. He hated his given name, too.

Sandy attended Idaho State University in Pocatello, where she met my father, Jay McBride, and got married before her 21st birthday. They had four children. I’m the oldest.

Even this last detail doesn’t matter much now. They are both dead. My father died five months after my mother passed, while I was awaiting surgery to remove the malignant tumour from my kidney. These biographic bullet points can’t tell you much about Sandy.

What does matter?

It matters that Sandy loved to dance and sing. She took ballet and voice lessons. While her parents’ Baptist congregation frowned upon dancing in general and musicals in particular, Sandy’s mom made sure she had the opportunity to participate in both.

Her favorite flower was the lilac, but she was also fond of lavender, even though she was horribly allergic to it. (I inherited this inconvenient allergy and passed it on to my son as well.)

It matters that Sandy was a gifted visual artist, a gift she also shared with her mother.

In my lifetime, Sandy was several different people. She was my mom. She loved, nurtured, and doted on me and my three siblings.

But, gradually, Sandy became a character we kids referred to as The Reverend. The Reverend saw and conversed with angels and demons with increasingly regularity. The Reverend was a bitter woman who saw evil in everyone and once chased my youngest brother with a knife.

The Reverend stole packages from doorways and hoarded vases, clothes, and tchotchkes of every type imaginable.

I don’t know exactly when my mom completely disappeared, but it was around the time I left home for college.

After years of untreated mental illness, Sandy was hospitalized with heart valve complications. She had a heart murmur as a result of a bout of childhood scarlet fever. It was during this stay that she was given antipsychotics. The Reverend faded away, mostly, but Mom never returned. Instead, she became the woman I call my mother.

My mother was different from my mom. Mother mostly sat quietly and rocked back and forth in a quasi-catatonic state. She was mostly indifferent to me, my wife, and our four children, her only grandchildren for all of her life.

Mother would sometimes give way to a muted version of The Reverend. It was frightening. Because of her instability and my father’s penchant for emotional abuse, my children rarely saw my parents.

Mom was dead, but there was no funeral. No closure. I miss my mom.

It matters that when Sandy died, my youngest brother also declined to attend the funeral. Both of us were estranged from our parents, putting up barriers for our own well-being.

It also matters that Mom loved music. The only instrument she played was the record player. I loved to listen to her sing along with the Carpenters. Mom would blast music while Dad was at work, and sometimes she would plié, pirouette, and chassé as she vacuumed and mopped.

Her favorite music was Christmas music. Mom would listen to Christmas records all year round. Dad had made a rule that Christmas music was only allowed between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. But when he wasn’t around, Mom would put on a Bing Crosby or an Andy Williams album and glide through the house. It didn’t matter what month it was. Mom was a different person when my father wasn’t around.

If I close my eyes, I am in the living room on a sweltering July day. The windows are all open, and Mom is singing Silver Bells along with Bing while she mops the kitchen floor.

Father’s Christmas music fatwah also extended to Christmas decorations. On Thanksgiving night, after cleaning up the dinner she had made, she would stay up and decorate the whole house in Christmas splendor. Waking up the day after Thanksgiving was like being transported to Santa’s workshop. Every year, she decorated differently. Every year, it was a new Christmas miracle.

When mom wasn’t singing Christmas carols or dancing to the Carpenters with a canister vacuum in her hands, she was watching, listening, and singing to musicals.

Thanks to my mom, I have Oklahoma, The Sound of Music, Guys & Dolls, and The King & I memorized.

Mom was good at keeping secrets and drank a glass of chocolate milk for breakfast and before bed almost every day of her life.

I have other memories of Mom. Things that she said and did that changed my life. But those are still far too tender for me to share. If I possess any empathy, courage, or creativity, it is because of Mom. She really believed I could do anything.

I wish it didn’t matter that my mom was stolen from me before I was ready to lose her. But who is ever ready to lose their mom?

The hole I have in my heart, the heartache I feel for the loss of her kindness and mirth in my life, far predates Christmas 2018. That pain is decades old, but still feels fresh.

When someone who matters to us dies, we never get over it. All we can do is move forward and try to use that pain as a pathway to help heal others.

I did not go to my mother’s funeral because I had been grieving the loss of my mom for two decades.

When it comes to writing about someone who has died, I don’t think the dates and resume details count for much. What matters is the love the deceased left behind.

Every day, I keep her legacy alive by loving my four children the same tender way she loved my siblings and me before she morphed into The Reverend and before she decayed into our quasi-catatonic Mother.

Sometimes, I blast music in the kitchen and dance as I do dishes and clean the counters and floor. I love Christmas as much now as I did as a child, and I mourn her passing by decorating the hell out of our house and listening to Christmas music whenever I miss Mom, regardless of the time of the year.

Much to my surprise, I became a visual artist in my forties, after Sandy died. That too is a tribute to my Mom, and a product of her love of beauty and her indomitable belief in me.