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Shortly before my mother went in for a surgery to correct an issue with her bowels, I drove up to her rural northern California home to help her prepare. I sat on the piano bench and waited for her to retrieve something she just had to show me. She returned from her office with a set of x-rays looking like the proverbial cat who just swallowed the canary.
She holds up the x-ray of her stomach and says, "Can you see that?"
I could not see, or at least I wasn't sure what I was supposed to be seeing.
"It's poop!" She says, before laughing like a ten-year-old.
I was grateful then, although I would later change my mind that my own eight-year-old son was not with me. Two children laughing at poop on an x-ray would have been a little too much to bear.
My mother, who been raised strict Catholic, and married my father when she was 18, couldn't get enough of inappropriate toilet humor. After her divorce, she went through a dark period in her life. She had been left single with six children, but the split was amicable. But her entire life was still turned upside down.
She created a cocoon out of her love of music. My early memories include waking to her playing her piano in the middle of the night. When she finally emerged, she had transformed herself into a musician and lover of off-color jokes. Having been denied the freedom to practice either one.
She went on to be a successful self-employed musician, with five albums under her belt. Having only two years of professional music training when she was eight, she taught herself to play a total of eleven different instruments.
Most people get the fart, poop and butt jokes out of their system by the time that puberty passes. The sting of the Nun's ruler had effectively stunted her fart joke phase, and so she was still working through it when she passed at seventy-one.
The surgery didn't go as planned. My five siblings, stepfather, father and stepmother all stayed by her side at the hospital until she finally let go. Stubborn as she was, she held on for a whole week.
Mom didn't go to heaven.
But I listened quietly as my siblings imagined her there. Each time they would talk about her looking down at us, or playing her heavenly harp, I wanted to scream. I was already an open atheist and had no belief in heaven. But I saw the comfort in their imaginings and so I kept my mouth shut.
I was very close to my mother. The pain of losing her has not abated. Almost ten years later and when I think about the last moments with her, my heart seizes. It knocks the wind out of me. But in those first few days and weeks without her, I was horribly jealous of my siblings. I was even angry with them.
They had this fairy tale to cling to. A source of comfort that was not attainable for me. I tried to believe, I desperately wanted to believe that she was up there playing her music. Setting off her remote-control fart machine and blaming the angels. But it didn't work. I knew that she was just gone. I didn't know just how to cope with the crippling loss. I spent days, weeks, and months crying at the thought of her.
Humor not heaven.
One day, I found myself stuck in a dress in a fitting room. All alone, I had tried on a dress that was just a little too snug. It caught around my waist and I was unable to move it pass my rear end or get it over my newly augmented boobs. I struggled and started to get frustrated, when I caught myself in the mirror, I started to laugh. In my head, I could hear my mother laughing with me. Or more accurately, at me.
She always said how lucky I was to have inherited her tiny waist and ample derriere. And here I was, reaping the benefits of my genetics. My mother was perhaps the only person in my family who didn't question my decision to become a stripper. She confessed once that she was even envious of it. Especially given all the sin and guilt she had been fed growing up.
In that moment, stuck in a dress, I finally saw a path through my grief. It's still there, and I don't think it has gotten any easier. But when the tears come now, they often come with laughter.
Rather than remember what I've lost, I remember what I had. I remember when I had my first apartment and had thought my mom was using the little bathroom. But she had really gone into my bedroom and found a pair of stripper shoes. She tottered out on clear plastic eight-inch platform stilettos that lit up as she walked into my tiny living room, asking how she looked.
I miss her every day. And I suspect I will miss her every day for the rest of my life. But I don't need her to be in heaven. I have her here with me.
She's in my butt.
And my eyes.
And my son's nose.
Her humor and her music bring her back each time. And they're real and not imagined. I don't need heaven or angels. I only need to remember what she gave to me and the rest of the world. Her talent and her terrible fart jokes brought smiles and happiness to everyone that crossed her path.
Whenever I get roses from my husband, they are immediately placed on her piano that graces my dining room.
And we say in unison, "What's better than roses on your piano?"
Tears come, but so do smiles as we repeat the punchline.
"Tulips on your organ."
Originally published by Only Sky Media
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