“I have to get you your inheritance,” my mother joked. “It’s in the dead box.”
“Mom: I don’t want to talk about the dead box.”
“You need to know what to do when I’m dead,” my mother grumbled. She handed me my inheritance: a Booker T. Washington commemorative half-dollar. Until that moment, I had not known that there had been Booker-bucks.
Not having ever been one, I have to imagine that mothering is a complex and involved business. When my stomach exploded and sent me sprawling onto the floor of my bosses’ office (and from there, by gurney into a ambulance and on to the hospital) my mother booked a ticket on Greyhound, from Pittsburgh to St. Louis. (Years later, I would learn what a long and arduous bus ride that was.)
I whined to my sister from my hospital bed: “Tell mom she doesn’t have to come babysit her 50 year-old son!”
“You try to stop her,” Jaci told me.
My mother bore five children and at the time of my stomach disruption, two of her boys had been taken from her life. I guess she thought that she could yank the third son — the firstborn at that — from the slobbering jaws of death. She stayed with me for two weeks; I recovered, and just recently found her handwritten notes of questions to ask my doctor at my first check-up. She gave me, a grown man, a list. Then again, she was a nurse. And a mother.
My mother’s dead box was the spindle around which was wound the details of her life. When I would visit her she would unfailingly remind me of its presence: “You know where the dead box is, don’t you?”
The year 2013 is the third without the possibility of my seeing my mother. I moved from Pittsburgh — my hometown — in 1970, and lived in California, Indiana and Missouri. I saw my mother in all of those states. No matter what state, what city, I always had the possibility of seeing my mother. For years, every December, I packed my two youngest into a car and drove from Mooresville, Indiana to Pittsburgh to see my mother, to let her see those two grandchildren. My mother remembered those visits until she died, and I hope that my two youngest remember having spent quality time with “Granny.” Now that I can no longer see her, the memories of those times are weightier, more precious. Even the ice-slick memory of putting my car into the wall in West Virginia, with a screaming daughter in the front seat and a sleeping son in the back.
I spent a lot of time at my mother’s bedside as she worked her way into another place, but I was not there when she died. I was on the road to her, and when my sister called to tell me that I would not see her when I got to Maryland, my son cradled me in his arms as I howled.
In the dead box were my mother’s important papers and all the instructions that her surviving children would need: insurance policies, pre-paid burial plot, funeral home choice, hymns, friends and contacts. I don’t know the entire contents of the dead box because my sister handled everything. She is the warrior and I — poor I — am the weak. But in the middle of the boilerplate instructions on the end of my mother’s life she wrote this for her children:
“Be good to each other.”
She was that for us, even with the dead box.