Memorial for an anxious future

“Amen,” my mom finishes saying grace at the dinner table.

My dad and I begin scooping food onto our plates while my mom pushes her chair back, stands up, and walks back into the kitchen. The TV is on, blaring the news which I’m trying really hard to ignore because I hate most broadcast news. It doesn’t occur to me that she’s still gone until it’s been at least five minutes, and when I turn my head around see my mom washing the pans and any plates I used to cook.

“Mom!” I yell, “come eat.”

“I’ll be there in a minute.”

I stand and march next to her, sticking my head over her shoulder and watching her hands rub the excess food bits off a cooking pan.

“You can wash this later. Can we eat now?”

“Just start without me,” she persists.

I want to argue with her, but I know that I should just let it go. It's one of the stranger quirks I’ve noticed about my mom now, and I don’t remember whether she used to be like this all the time, but if she notices something, thinks about something, sees something that she perceives to be unresolved, she has to resolve it. Has to.

It’s her M.O., and it drags us to the most interesting of places, into the most interesting of situations.

There’s really no right time to start thinking about the logistics of dying. Because something like death actually has logistics. Which, no one wants to deal with because that forces you to acknowledge that we’re all gonna die and why in the world would you want to use any living hours on the logistics of death.

You know, questions like: Where do you want to be buried? What happens to your assets? Do you have a will? Do you have kids, and do you leave them anything behind? Who makes life or death decisions for you if you’re incapacitated?

I suppose having kids is a good marker for whether you should make any progress on these questions. But nevertheless, I imagine most of us never do until it’s too late because we’re either dead, or not in the right mind to make these sorts of decisions. All of which confirms my experience with, and as a part of American culture—we really don’t know what to do about dying.

My mom, on the other hand, is both an exception and perhaps too enthusiastic about all of this. She’s brought me to see a lawyer to ensure that everything she started ten years ago is still in order today: her will, trust, and even things she doesn’t know but that the lawyer will remind her need to be taken care of.

I’m mildly unnerved, sitting in a room with my mom, with the lawyer suggesting amendments. Adding me somewhere. Power of attorney. Advanced health care directives. Increasing the one-inch binder another few pages with even more legal jargon I can read but can’t understand.

“So, can I ask you something stupid?” I ask, pleading with my eyes and hoping the lawyer understands that I have no idea what the hell I’m looking at.

I’m lucky my mom did make a will, and forced my dad to too. It’s made getting the right legal powers much easier than it otherwise could have. It doesn’t change that in my mind, there’s something weird that all of this was started so early, maybe too early. It’s as if death is a train coming at midnight but my mom’s already standing at the platform at sunset.

“I think Mom really wants to see grandma,” my brother once told me. Makes sense. Maybe that’s why she wants to be ready for whenever that train comes.

It would also explain why my mom has also asked me to take her to a local cemetery, which is where my mom has already bought a burial site for her and my dad. Yes, she also started taking care of this more than ten years ago. When I was in high school, in fact. Way before the “angels and idol worship” incident of a couple years prior.

“Why do you need to go?” I ask, feeling my heart jump a little.

“I want to make sure that I have paid for everything.”

She has a folder that—like the will—is almost an inch thick, stuffed with papers and receipts. Everything looks like it’s been taken care of, but my mom asks about some insurance forms and what certain checkboxes mean, and I have no answer for her. Which means I’m again along for the ride.

As we pull up to the entrance, a woman hands me a small USA flag with a wooden dowel, which I place in the cup holder next to me. It happens to be Memorial Day.

“What can I do for you?” a lady asks after my mom, dad, and I have been seated in a room that feels like something out of a horror flick if not for the sun shining through the window, with all the samples of caskets, diagrams of why one burial method is better than the other, and glass chandeliers, glass tables, and well, glass everything.

“Did we pay for everything already?” my mom asks, opening her folder and letting all the myriad of papers shine forth.

It turns out my mom has paid for everything, except for some day-of expenses. The lady turns to me and asks if I know whether or not we will want a ‘member of the clergy’ to speak. I laugh, only because I literally have no idea.

“Well you don’t have to decide now,” she tells me gently.

Good. Because imagining it, and trying to decipher whether one layman saying a prayer counts as a 'member of the clergy,' seem like things I don’t really want to consider at the moment.

“Oh,” she continues, “you haven’t chosen a casket yet.”

This seems like a very large thing to miss, and knowing my mom, we have to take care of this, now. Which means the woman leaves for a minute—leaving me to lean back in the chair and cross my arms and wonder why all of this has to happen now—and comes back with a giant binder full of caskets.

“Do you know what kind you might want?”

I can feel my mind beginning to crack. I really don’t want to think about which casket my parents will look good in.

“What’s the cheapest one?” my mom asks. Typical.

While she decides, and asks for my opinion and I’ve learned from my brother to just make one up even if I don’t have one, my mind wanders again to the idea of planning for death. There’s the logistics, like we’re doing now, but I wonder if there’s a healthy way to mentally and emotionally approach it too. Is death also just a transition that you can plan for? Morally, should you even plan for such a thing? What is it like to live in a culture that accepts death as something to be planned for?

Some part of me knows that I should be, and am very grateful to my mom for taking care of this now so that my brother and I don’t have to make a single decision when their time does come. But did it have to happen this way? Is there a better way?

And then my mom shocks me with a question I really did not anticipate but honestly should have.

“Can you take us to the burial place?”

This actually freaks me out. I don’t know what it is about my mom’s intent, but I don’t want to go. I want to go home. And it takes every ounce of focus to follow the car in front of me as I slowly drive the narrow roads to a grassy hill that's already been filled with many, many tombstones.

“Bring the flag,” my mom says, looking at the stars and stripes in the cup holder, “is that okay?”

I oblige, but I have a bad feeling about this.

We slowly march up a hill, weaving in between gravestones, with my dad holding on to my mom and I’m shuffling a little ways behind them.

And then we get to a little patch of grass that’s just waiting to be dug up, like the area it’s surrounded by. It barely seems bigger than the size of a twin bed, and immediately I wonder how you could fit two caskets in this little rectangle.

“This is it,” the man who brought us here says.

“Thank you,” I reply, as I’m programmed to do without thinking. Because I’m not thinking.

“How about put the flag down here?” my mom suggests.

I forgot I was holding it. But I do as she says. The wind picks up and the flag flaps in the wind.

“Put it deeper.”

Why? I ask myself, but do as I’m told.

The three of us are standing there, but suddenly my parents disappear and in my mind, it’s just me. I’m alone, standing here, planting a flag in the ground, on my knee, at the exact place my parents will be buried. If it’s possible to feel like you’ve been transported to the future, this is it.

A future where I will be here, just like I am now. Doing the same motion. In the same body positions. I’m both perfectly calm and feeling like I’m on the verge of hyperventilating.

I recognize that I will one day come here to honor my parents. I ask myself if I’m honoring them now.

I remember when I was in high school, on the drive home from this cemetery, my mom started yelling uncontrollably. It’s a moment that will always be a mystery to me, but if I had to guess, she was distraught and felt alone—like she wanted to be done with the logistics of this life, and wanted to be ready for what’s next. I wanted to help her, but had no idea how. I just didn’t understand it when I was a teenager. I think I only barely understand it now.

Anxiety is what my mom’s neurologist claims is probably at the root of many of her problems.

“I really don’t think there’s much we can do,” he said flatly, when we visited for the second time since I’ve been back. He ran most of the same tests, my mom failed in more or less the exact same places.

“I mean, she’s just improved so little since last time that I really don’t think it’s related to the medications,” he added, almost frustrated. “I think she has bigger problems to deal with.”

“So, there’s nothing we can do about her memory?” my cousin asked.

“You know, her memory's really not that bad,” the neurologist stated.

I wanted to laugh. Really? I almost yelled. You just named a medication and she promptly forgot which one it is. Twice.

And then I told myself, this guy probably deals with situations that are way worse.

If anxiety is at the crux of who my mom is, then maybe one of the best things I can do is help relieve her all as much of it as possible. My mom has always said—in obvious conflict with what she otherwise believes—she doesn’t want to die yet, that she can’t die yet, because she still has things she needs to take care of. Don’t we all.

And so when I finally come back to my senses at the cemetery on Memorial Day, when we’re back in the car, I take the folder from her and put it next to me in the driver’s seat.

“I’m going to hold on to this from now on,” I try to suggest, but really I just demand.

She nods.

I hope, this way, her burial never crosses her mind. She never sees the folder and so never has to think about it. And if she does, she can ask me and I’ll tell her I’ve taken care of it. End of story.

I’ve since taken control of a number of things besides that folder. I pay for her cell phone bill. I pay a number of utilities. And I’m constantly on the lookout for other things that might cross my mom’s mind.

We got into a scuffle once, when I found out my mom was writing checks for her electric bill even though I’ve been paying them online.

“Oh no…” she groaned. “We need to call them.”

“I’ll take care of it, don’t worry,” I tell her, feeling her anxiety swelling as if it were tangible like sweat dripping off her forehead.

I do take care of it, and I also post a piece of paper on a large cabinet door. On it, I write down the utility company, and every other thing I handle for her. I know she’ll always think of things. She’ll continue to worry about them. But I hope that maybe when she sees this list, this list that I now add my parents’ cemetery name to, she’ll realize that they’re all taken care of, and she doesn’t have to think about it.

In some ways, I feel like her smartphone assistant. Okay Dan, why does this bank account have this dollar amount in it? Hey DH, which medication to I have to stop? Homster, what was the name of the cemetery lady we talked to?

I know all the answers, and it’s not the worst thing in the world.