Mom's Last Manicure and the World's Largest Rusa

I always thought of grief as acute, but I was wrong.

I walked into the nail salon yesterday morning to make an appointment, next door to my regular coffee shop, a two-in-one stop to grab some caffeine and plan my afternoon before heading to H-E-B for our weekly grocery haul. Tina’s face lit up when she saw me.

“Sweet girl! Where have you been?” Her first question. Then her second, as expected: “How’s your mom?”

The last time I was at the salon was October, with Mom. I’m typically there every two weeks like clockwork. The owner, Tina, knows everyone by name, but she mostly uses nicknames, “bonita” being her favorite. Mom often came with me. She never got pedicures — she had a bum toe she didn’t like anyone messing with — and never got the gel manicures I used to get, just a regular French manicure. We’d sit next to each other and catch up while Tina’s crew cleaned away our cuticles and buffed our nails back into shape.

Mom’s last manicure

The last time I was at the salon, I grabbed a sugarcane juice from the banh mi shop around the corner before we got started. I tried to get one for Mom, but she said her stomach was bothering her. “It’ll make you feel better!” I told her. “It’s good for your stomach — and your urinary tract,” I said, knowing that both had been bothering her lately. But she waved me off. It felt weird, knowing how typically she’d always want one of whatever I was getting too.

Halfway through our manicure, Tina came over and started whispering to her nail tech in Vietnamese. Then she turned to us. “I’m so sorry!” she said. “She accidentally do gel on your mom’s nails too!” Mom just laughed.

“It’s ok!” Mom said. “They’ll just last longer now.” She looked down and admired what would be her final manicure. It lasted nearly through December.

By the end of our salon visit, she’d come around to the idea of getting a sugarcane juice too, and I excitedly drove us back to the banh mi shop. As we stood in line, we heard the bell of the front door ding open and then a familiar voice: “What are you doing here?” It was our same nail techs from the salon, laughing.

“She wanted a sugarcane juice!” I explained, pointing to Mom.

“Us too! We were all looking at yours saying, ‘That sounds good, let’s go get one’ after you left.” The group of us stood around talking and joking while we waited for Sam, the banh mi shop owner, to grind one bulky stalk of sugarcane after another for our juices.

“These must be good if everyone is here for one,” Mom said. And she was sold after trying her first sip; the last few weeks before her diagnosis were spent attempting to find a place near her that made fresh sugarcane juice, but she never found one. Once she was diagnosed, I tried to bring her some from my little neighborhood shop, knowing how much she’d enjoyed the first one, but she’d mostly stopped eating and drinking anything but green tea and sips of Gatorade by that point.

Yesterday morning, I found myself having to explain to Tina that Mom had died.

“But we just saw her!” Tina said. “What happened?”

This has been the most common refrain, even at the funeral. We just saw her. It went so fast. I think I’m still shell-shocked by it myself.

Tina wrapped me in a long hug and rubbed my back. “It’s ok, sweet girl. She’s in a better place. Your mom so sweet, she’s in a better place.” Later that afternoon when I came back for my appointment, I had to tell the other nail techs who kept asking about Mom. Eventually I got so tired of explaining she’d died that I just started saying, “She’s been sick; I’ve been taking care of her,” because that’s sort of true too, and less emotionally exhausting to explain.

All week at work it’s been like this too. I instantly regretted going back to work so soon after the funeral, but my PTO was dwindling and projects were piling up. People I hadn’t seen in a while — especially students — who don’t know what’s happened have been asking normally benign questions like, “How have you been? I haven’t seen you in a while!” And I don’t know how to respond. Especially to the students. I’m not trying to trauma-dump all over 19 year olds. I don’t want to keep having the “my Mom died” conversation with every person I see on campus. Rice is like a small town, where it’s easy to know everyone, and I could easily have this conversation a dozen times in a day. I don’t have the bandwidth for it yet.

Work itself has been hard to reengage with, too. I thought that — given the fact I actually like what I do — this would be the easy part. I was wrong. I’m such a creature of habit and I thought returning to some of my structure would give me the support that I need to keep moving forward: the same meetings at the same time on the same days of the week, the same routines, the same friendly faces. I was wrong. It all feels like time out of place. It feels a little bit like Mom’s looking glass: I can see all of the normalcy but I’m on the other side of it. I don’t know how to get back yet.

I called in sick on Friday because I was exhausted from trying to get back to it all too soon. I never call in sick, because I’m never actually sick. Am I soul sick? Is that what this is? I keep taking pictures of the dogs, of meals I’ve cooked, of the beautifully congealed chicken stock I made that Mom would have been so proud of and trying to text her. I don’t feel sad when I remember she’s dead. I feel an absence of any emotion other than bone-tired.

I texted Mom every dumb picture I took of the dogs. “You can still text her,” Michael said. “The photos will still go through.”

“I always thought of grief as this acute thing,” I told Hala the last time we talked. “Like, you’re in these moments of being just deeply sad or deeply upset and then the moments pass. And you live a normal life in between the moments. But it’s not like that. It’s like this background noise just eating away at you and wearing you down, and you’re not even aware of it most of the time.”

Hala just nodded.

“I didn’t realize how much it would exhaust me,” I said.

“That’s normal,” she said.

People keep telling me I’m handling this well, but I don’t know what that means. I feel like it implies that there’s a right and a wrong way to handle grief. And even though I realize, intellectually, there is no right or wrong way to handle grief I still wonder if I’m doing it all wrong anyway. As my therapist often says, I have a tendency to intellectualize things instead of feeling them. Am I feeling things the right way? The wrong way? Am I feeling things at all right now?

“Am I grieving the right way? I haven’t even been crying. I haven’t cried all week. I’m not cratering or anything, I’m just sort of there,” I told my friend Ben over breakfast this morning.

“There’s no right or wrong way to do this,” he said. It helps to hear it said out loud, said outside of somewhere other than my head, where the idea has been rolling around and around like a heavy ball bearing thrumming from one lobe to the other.

“Mom and I had so many things we were going to do together,” I said, telling him about the Diana Singing and the Amtrak trip on the Sunset Limited from Houston to L.A. that we never got around to planning — always talking about our big train trip through the desert, never actually managing to do it. “I have this impulse to do them all right now. Like, I want to do all the things we were going to do together as fast as I can, because you just always think you’re going to have more time, and then you don’t…”

It was the closest I’d come to feeling like crying all week, but I didn’t want to cry in the middle of a crowded Birrieria y Micheladas #1 on a hectic Sunday morning surrounded by papel picado and fake wisteria hanging from the ceiling, so I stopped. There was a comically oversized rusa on the table and its presence — filled with sweet juice and hot sauce and chunks of fruit, speared with a fat chamoy straw topped by an orange slice and, curiously, a single green gummy bear — seemed to prohibit any display of despair. I took out the chamoy straw and nibbled at its candy coating instead.

The world’s largest rusa

“You know, you keep saying how fast this all went. And then you went back to work so fast. And now you’re trying to do all of this…stuff…just as fast. I think you need to just give yourself time,” Ben said. “Don’t try to get through all of this so fast too.”

I chewed on my straw some more and let it sink in.

“Or I’ll just look around when I’m done with all of it and say, ‘Wow, it’s over and it all went so fast…’”

“Right.”

Later that afternoon I went to Ralph’s house. After being with my mother nearly every day for the last few weeks of her life, it feels strange that I’ve barely been here all week since the funeral. The house feels both bigger and smaller without Mom there, like being inside a giant dollhouse version of the house I grew up in. It feels the opposite of haunted. In the abstract it feels like Mom is just out, running errands or grocery shopping, but I know, intellectually, she is not coming home again. I can’t make the two pieces connect. I don’t like being here now. I can’t imagine how Ralph feels.

“After my mom died, I couldn’t even be at her house anymore,” Hala told me earlier this week. “I couldn’t bear to look at her stuff. It took me months to be okay with being around her things again.” I don’t mind looking at Mom’s stuff — I have an old bandana of hers that I brought home with me and take deep whiffs of at night so I can still smell her — but it evokes a deep sense of distance that I have a hard time conceptualizing, like when someone tries to explain the scale of the universe to me.

Michael is back in town and the three of us went to a late lunch. I was relieved to be out of the house at first, but we ended up at a diner where I used to get breakfast with Mom and Ralph all the time. The diner has changed owners and the decor inside is completely different now, all overly cheerful reds and yellows. It was the same dissonant feeling all over again. Ralph cried over his chicken sandwich and I stared at him, wishing I could have let myself cry earlier amid all the happy papel picado and gummy bear garnishes.

I looked down at my freshly painted nails and wished I’d waited longer to get them done. I felt the same sort of empty exhaustion at the nail salon when Tina was finished that I’ve felt all week. I normally feel relaxed after a mani-pedi. Today I feel silly and indulgent. But how long was I supposed to wait before I went back? There are no good answers, no right way to do any of this.

After our late lunch, I dropped Michael and Ralph off at home. I hugged them in the driveway. I couldn’t go back in the house again.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Ralph said.

“I’ll try,” I said.

I cried all the way home. Finally.