March 2002
Part Four

The next morning we meet our brother and sister over at our mother's studio apartment and start boxing up and removing her things. We break her bed down and lean the pieces against a wall. My sister suggests we stay in Mom's apartment the rest of our time here in San Diego. At first I am not sure I want to because it is a little unsettling to be in her apartment now that she is gone. But after thinking about it I agree to it. It will be cheaper than another motel room.

On Monday my sister and I drive to the mortuary, arriving before our younger sister and our brother and his wife. We are taken into a meeting room and asked to fill out a form that will be used as a funeral notice in the local paper. I'm never sure when something is going to make me cry and I am surprised when I start crying after filling out the form. By the time we finish it my brother and other sister have arrived . My sister, who was not there when our mother died, wants to see her body and we are told that this can be arranged. I ask my sister if she really wants to do this (we are not sure how Mom looks now) and she says yes.

We are lead downstairs and into a large room and then to a hallway. When I turn the corner into the hallway I am shocked to discover it is not a hallway but a smaller room where my mother's body lies. I quickly turn around and step back into the other room. The image of my mother lying there is burned into my brain. How did my mother look? Did she still look like our mother? Yes, I was shocked only because I did not expect to see her.

My sisters have just entered the larger room and are walking toward me. I tell them Mom is just around the corner and that she looks fine. Do they want to go in and see her? Yes they do. We step into the room and walk over to her body. As I look at her this time, I realize I am seeing my mother as she really looked for the first time in many years. The medications the doctors gave her made her face and body puffy. In death the fluids have drained away and she is more beautiful than I remember. I forgot how thin her nose is. How pronounced her cheekbones are. How long her eyelashes are. I touch her forehead and stroke her hair one more time, say goodbye, and leave. Both my youngest sister and my brother follow me out and we leave our other sister along with our mother.

After a while, our sister joins us, she is crying but feels better after spending time with our mother and saying her goodbyes. We stand around in the parking lot not sure what to do next. My brother and his wife have some things to do so they say goodbye and leave us. My sisters and I decide to go to the beach. We head for a funky area of San Diego called Ocean Beach and wander through the shops. At some point our wanderings turn into a search for containers for our mother's ashes. We spend the afternoon searching for the right container for each of us. I pick a Bencharong ceramic bowl. My sister finds a delicate old glass perfume bottle with a beautiful stopper, it looks like it could contain a Genie. My youngest sister picks a small daintily painted porcelain snuffbox. When we get back to our brother's home we find out he has also bought a container for our mother's ashes too, a small brass urn.

The next day I wake up early in a panic. I sit up in bed, half awake, thinking, "Mom's not dead. She's just sleeping. We've got to go get her out of the mortuary before they cremate her!" Then I am fully awake and I know that this is wishful thinking, my mother is dead, nothing I do can change that. Feeling hopeless, I lie back down and fall back to sleep.

The following in day my brother drives my youngest sister and I to the airport for our flight home. Our other sister is heading up to LA so we say goodbye at our brother's house and my brother tell my sister to follow him to the freeway, there she can continue on to LA. When we reach the freeway my youngest sister's cell phone rings, it is our sister telling us she has decided to follow us to the airport and then head for LA. When we get to the airport my brother parks in front of the terminal and we all get out. My sister, who has been following us, parks behind him and gets out too. She looks like a lost and lonely little girl trying not to cry, the little girl I talked to on the phone after she learned our mother had died.

When we were young I always tried to protect my sisters. Right now I feel torn, I don't want to leave her here to make that drive up to LA by herself. I want to protect her from the pain of our mother's death but I know I cannot, no matter how hard I try. She is not a little girl anymore but a strong woman who can take care of herself. I give her a hug, tell her I love her, and let her go.

My mother's death has made me understand how fragile families are and how quickly they can fracture. Our family, in a way, was three families. First, there was the family that consisted of our parents and us, their children. Then there was a second family that was just our mother and us, her children. Hidden in the center of these two families was a third family. The first family ended when our father left us for good when I was thirteen years old. The second family ends with our mother's death revealing the third family; my brother, my sisters, and me. This family has always been my center. This family is the one that makes me feel I'm not alone in the world. This is a good feeling.