Lost Days and Funeral Dresses

I can’t keep wearing this 1991 Mardi Gras t-shirt.

Tuesday

Tuesday is a lost day. Funeral planning all day Monday has worn me out. I had originally planned on attending my mother’s weekly Bible class with her friends at church who’ve been so helpful and attentive, but it’s pouring when I wake up and the idea of getting dressed seems as realistic as suddenly deciding to run the Houston Marathon.

I stay in my pajamas all day. My pajamas are a 1991 Mardi Gras t-shirt my mother brought back for me when I was 10 and some soft grey sweatpants she bought for me years ago, now worn fine and thin. I leave my hair in its pineapple on my head all day long. I eat an entire box of peanut butter Girl Scout cookies and watch the entire Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy from the couch. Waffles and Steve sit on either side of me. None of us want to go out in the rain.

Marvel movies have become my comfort viewing now that Culinary Class Wars is over. I don’t normally feel a strong affection for them but there’s something about the heart-on-its-sleeve sappiness of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies that is suddenly irresistible. These people are just looking for their lost family members. They just want to go home again, but they can’t.

Just a ship full of people and aliens and raccoons and trees and androids trying to find family where they can.

In between movies, I take phone call after phone call from various parties. “Did your mother have a pacemaker?” “Do you need the church to make programs for the funeral?” “Did you sign the cremation forms we sent over?” “Are you making posters for the funeral?” “Where are the photos we picked out for the slideshow?” “Did you get a chance to send over the obituary yet?” “How old was your mother?” “How old was your mother?” “How old was your mother?”

After the third phone call from Ralph asking about mom’s age, I asked him why he wanted to know.

“The people are asking.”

“What people?”

“The people who are posting.”

“Who is posting what now?”

“The people!”

“Which people? What are they posting?”

“The family assistance people.”

“Which family assistance people? From church or…? I’m sorry but I just don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“The family assistance people. They’re posting.”

“Who are the family assistance people?”

“From the…police…from…the union.” Ah, finally!

“From the retired police officers’ union?”

“Yes! They’re posting something on the website.”

“Ok. Mom was 68.”

“Thank you.”

The funeral home emails me. Mom’s obituary is finally online. A flower arrangement arrives from my coworkers at Rice. It’s tall and stately and gorgeous. I take a photo of it and start to text my mother. I will do this all week, forgetting, a disconnect that I can’t quite seem to overcome.

If we have dinner that night I can’t recall what it is.

Wednesday

Wednesday morning I plan to meet my cousin Jennifer and her nephew Aaron to go shopping for a funeral dress. I don’t own anything that’s really appropriate for a funeral. I can’t keep wearing the 1991 Mardi Gras t-shirt. My mother has always been my number-one shopping companion, and I don’t feel like I can pick out a funeral dress alone.

Mom loved a bargain, so our favorite haunts were places like thrift stores, flea markets, antique malls and TJ Maxx, as well as places that — like her — have passed into memory: the Sand Dollar and Retropolis in the Heights, where we could follow up our thrifting with sandwiches at Carter & Cooley down the block; the once-legendary fourth floor of Neiman Marcus at the Town & Country Mall, where all the discounted merchandise was relegated to a cavernous room whose racks seemed to have no rhyme or reason to them; the back room of Loehmann’s, where Mom helped me buy my first suits for my first adult job, at a time when suits were still required attire in offices, and where the giant communal changing room exposed me to all of the different kinds of bodies that move through our world.

I arrive early to Nordstrom Rack and start pawing through all the clothes just like Mom and I used to. We’re like raccoons, she used to joke, we have to touch everything. I take fabric between my fingers and feel it like she taught me: Is this cotton or a cotton blend? Is this mostly polyester? Will this pill up after the first time it’s worn? When Jennifer arrives, I’ve already loaded my cart with things that are not funeral dresses.

“I’m really struggling in the dress section,” I tell her. “Not a lot of appropriate stuff, and most of it’s black.”

“What’s wrong with black? It’s a funeral,” she says.

“Mom hated me in black. She always fussed at me when I wore it; said it washed me out.”

Jennifer laughs. “That sounds like Aunt Jo.”

“Right? So…after all this time, I don’t own a single piece of black clothing. Not even a black pair of pants. And I’m not going to start wearing it again now. She would be so mad if she saw me wearing black to her funeral.”

Jennifer helps me pick a couple of blue dresses instead. One that’s more cobalt and, while not quite right, goes home with me anyway as a work dress, and one that’s a navy blue sheath with ruffles around the neck and arms that Mom would have loved. I look at myself in the full-length mirror of the dressing room and tug at the ruffles, which are not typically my style, and think, Mom would just die over these ruffles. I walk out and show Jennifer.

“That’s the one,” she says.

Jennifer and Aaron stay a little while longer to buy him some clothes for the funeral too. I head to the checkout stand and grab more things I don’t need along the way: some of the C.O. Bigelow rose balm my mother used, a bunch of Clinique products merely because she loved Clinique and I have so many childhood memories of waiting for her at the Clinique counter in Dillards. Mom always went shopping for Clinique when Dillards was offering a free assortment of mini products with purchase, and she’d always give me the little bag they came in. I have a tendency to over-shop when I’m stressed and I make a mental note not to come back to Nordstrom Rack for at least six months. Thrift stores, too, should probably be off-limits.

I can still smell this soap. I can still feel the little silver knobs of the “Clinique computer” beneath my tiny fingers.

I call Ralph on my way to the house to check in and tell him that Jennifer and I were shopping for funeral dresses, but that I’m heading over now. The stress and grief have been compounding his cognitive issues and although I say this several times, all Ralph repeats back to me is: “You’re putting on a dress to come over?”

“Yes,” I finally say. “I’ll see you soon.”

I arrive and Ralph is panicking. We picked out photos for Mom’s slideshow on Monday evening and he can’t remember that we did. I show them to him again. He’s relieved for a moment.

“Can we check my bank account?”

“Yes,” I tell him.

We check it several times that afternoon.

Eric, his middle son, has been staying with him this week. He explains that the power went out yesterday and they couldn’t figure out why. Turns out that in the process of converting all their bills to auto-pay, I hadn’t realized there was an outstanding electric bill. (One would think that setting the electric bill to auto-pay would also resolve any outstanding bills but one would be wrong.)

Eric tried asking Ralph who his electricity provider was — in a deregulated state like Texas, it could be any one of 143 — and Ralph had no idea. Mom took care of absolutely everything in their lives. Ralph has been cratering under the weight of this realization. Their whole-house generator kicked on while Eric sorted through the bills looking for clues, which then led Ralph to realize he couldn’t find the key to the generator. It’s all become a sort of final straw situation, and he’s been panic-stricken ever since.

Eric eventually figured it all out and got the power turned on again, but today we’re realizing that the power surge of electricity coming back to the house fried the microwave.

“Mira, pinche güey!” Jennifer says, showing a disbelieving Eric that the microwave has shorted out. These little failures just seem like one domino falling after another. But we laugh, we muddle through somehow. Jennifer uses Mom’s old toaster oven to warm up lunch for all of us and we settle into our by-now-familiar nooks in the living room with our plates. Aaron has changed the channel to an old Thor movie, which I’m excited to watch, but this is Ralph’s house — Ralph’s routine. He changes the channel back to his own comfort viewing: Gunsmoke, which he has watched all day every day since Mom’s diagnosis. I understand.