only the good die young

and other things billy joel may be lying about

Mom could be your toughest critic, highest bar and also front-line cheerleader—pom poms shaking for you fiercely at every finish line.

Doing your best in our home was unspoken and expected. We were latchkey kids and often met with after school “love notes” from our working mom that might read, “Start the Stove Top Stuffing.  Move the laundry to the dryer and fold while it is still warm.  Clean your fucking room, it is a pigsty.  Love, Mommy.”

She had uncertain moods and days.  She was fun and free spirited, and then could suddenly yell, loudly; in disgust, frustration at something seemingly small (like ignoring the pile at the bottom of the stairs) or in utter disappointment. Disappointing our mother was your own worst punishment. You never need to be grounded, because you have already beat yourself up black eyed and bruised on the insides. Pleasing her was winning the top shelf prize at the carnival. You can barely carry that kind of pride, but its weight and enormity the scale and measure for everything we ever did or would do.

Her husband Peter summons my sister and to lunch in Manhattan. I recall it is somewhere in the 70s, East side and a stunningly unremarkable choice. It is Christmas-ish as the decorations hang in my memory. I guess he has something financial to share. I am uneasy about this fake holiday meet up and my insides figity. He’s always stern and serious in his lawyerly way, even when I try to see his love. His hefty baritone makes conversations unfold like rehearsed opening arguments. I imagine he may be selling our family home on Hubbard Avenue or settling Mom’s will. He told us she had a small life insurance policy, a box accidentally checked on a real estate association membership, that covered her funeral costs.

I am 27 and this is six months after our healthy, vivacious, fifty-year-old mother has dropped dead. She was taken from us on a fine beach day in July by the lightning stroke of a brain aneurysm. Suddenly and without warning and zero good byes.

I am carrying boulders on my back, arms moving through molasses, legs somehow moving from here to there. This may be grief, but I am too young to know. Nobody helped us in that department, or talked to us about healing. ”You are strong like her” we heard over and over after the funeral. Daughters who will always be ok, like her. Over it and onward seem to be the expected way forward through this fun house of horrors.

I keep flipping one mystery over and over in my mind, as sense digs its nails in. Where is G-d? Where was he or she or whoever is in charge up there? All of those Hebrew school years and be a good girl and Mom and her amazingly big heart. She spearheaded transformative fundraising efforts at The Women’s House and Count Basie Theater. I once walked back a stolen stuffed to The Royal Box gift shop. No points for any of it?

I used to believe there was one great being, pulling strings and making merry for the well-mannered and benevolent. Peter tells us, “only the good die young.”  Neither he nor Billy Joel are correct. My insides are coursing with this obsessive questioning.

Yet, I tell nobody.

“I struggled with whether or not to tell you girls” Peter starts, over lunch.

Mommy had wanted her organs donated and we were part of the final decision on this.  All but her eyes were ok with us—Danna and I agree. I have no idea what sister and I thought she may need to see where she was going. They are her most “her” body part. We also decide she does not require hose or heels for being buried, but insist that all of her own make-up be used by the funeral home. We have this conversation over her body writhing up and down in the hospital, chest cavity rising and falling, falsely alive and dead all at once with the beeping aid of a life support machine. Tubes and air. My sister pulls the blanket slipping to reveal her breast, and rests it over her shoulder.

“The hospital called to tell me, they found early stage liver cancer and had to donate her organs to cancer research,” he finishes.

A reason. Is this the reason? This is what he almost did not tell us? This was not his to keep. Mom would have suffered from liver cancer; a hideous disease that would have broken a spirit so grand. I contemplate the long farewell of this insidious end and know that it would have made her an awful, angry and reclusive patient. Losing her hair. Fighting. This ending has her going out as an awful wretch. It is an end I do not wish to trade for the one we got.

He almost did not share this colossal detail. It hangs the picture in an entirely new light. It reframes six months of why. He had no right to keep this from us for even a day. I don’t recall any of us eating or how we left that day.

But now I think, there may be a G-d.