So my wife's mother died.
We'd been 45 minutes away in a small town known for white squirrels. People connected to my wife run an annual event there. We'd seen her mother that morning, but, given the frail and failing condition and the palliative diagnosis, she wanted to see her again on the return trip.
My wife became convinced her mother would die that night. They'd been at odds for many years, and she lived a large part of her girlhood with her grandparents. Circumstances have changed in recent decades. We came in recent years to know the person her mother once was, and might have been, had her life not strayed so far off a stable path.
After a long wait, we finally returned home. A half-hour later, just after midnight, they phoned us.
Requiescat in pace.
The funeral was small, because my wife has few relatives and her mother, for a long stretch of her life, lived like a hermit, become a neighbourhood legend in a house with an overgrown garden and piano music playing from the windows at odd hours. The few relatives, a couple health-care people, a few of my family, and a handful of our friends come, and three women whose presence draws attention and unease.
"Who are those women sitting there?" asks my wife's closest friend, in hushed and tremulous whispers.
We tell her later.
The staff informed us when we arrived the coffeemaker wasn't working. I drove to a nearby Tim Hortons to put in an order for coffee for the post-service dinner. Singularity Girl-- though by now she's long been a woman and mother—left the service early and did the pick-up run. I'd trust her with my life; picking up coffee was an easy matter.
My wife is a singer, so she sang at the funeral, Handel and Dvorák.
My sister plans to visit two childhood friends she has not seen in more than a decade, and the mother of one, a nonagenarian who lives with her daughter. She says she would rather see people at least once, now, rather than just turn up at their funeral-- or vice-versa.
Ashes to ashes.
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