My Mom Has Seven Stages of Grief. They Are All Anger.
On planning a funeral for the man my mother is still mad at.
It is a Friday afternoon in May, and I am at my mother’s kitchen table for the first time in years. My father has been dead for nine days. I am here to talk about the service.
She says, before I can open the laptop: Name me any Christmas after we divorced where he came to us, wished us a Merry Christmas, took us out to dinner.
I do not name one. There isn’t one.
She says: Name me any birthday.
There isn’t one of those either.
This is how my mother is grieving. If my mother has seven stages of grief, they have been rewritten with a new set of rules — anger, anger, anger, anger, anger, anger, anger. She has been in the anger room for thirty years.
To be clear: she is not wrong. He didn’t come to us at Christmas. He didn’t call on birthdays. The receipts are real. She is, in a very specific and well-organized way, telling me the truth.
She just doesn’t know that I have my own receipts.
In the second week of May, I am organizing my father’s memorial service inside a project management tool called Asana. There is a column for “guest list” and a column for “speakers” and a column for “what music.” I select-all and delete, because let’s be honest: Dad is 93. Dad’s lifelines were his naval buddies, also in their 90s. If they are not dead, they are not going to cross oceans on a day’s notice. There will be no phone calls to florists, no purchasing of hydrangeas. I have moved through grief, so far, the way I have moved through every other administrative task of my adult life — by pretending it is a project, and then completing the project.
Or at least, trying to complete the project. I literally don’t even know the church he attended post-divorce. Damn.
Somewhere in this column system is the truth that I am the one who is doing this. Not Mom. She is grieving in the way she has earned the right to grieve, which is by being right. I am grieving in the way I know how, which is by making a checklist for the hydrangea question.
When she lists what Dad did not do at Christmas, the answer she is reaching for is: and so we will not miss him. I do not give her that answer. I also do not contradict it. I just nod a little, like a man waiting for the tea to finish steeping. I have become, in middle age, very good at this nod.
There is a thing my father did, in my early forties, that I had not told anybody.
He told me he had married my mother out of obligation. His father had wanted the match. He had not. He told me this plainly, the way you tell somebody the weather. By then his senility was already underway, which means I get to wonder, for the rest of my life, whether it was true or whether it was the kind of thing a failing mind dredges up and hands to the wrong person.
I do not get to ask him. I did not get to ask him.
It was not the first time he had handed me something I was not supposed to be holding; it was the latest time.
There is a longer list. I am not going to write it here. Some of it is somebody else’s story. Some of it I am still deciding whether I have the right to tell.
What I will say is: my mother has her receipts, and I have mine, and mine are heavier. She is mad about the Christmases he did not show up to. I am holding the things he showed up to say. She got the absence. I got whatever the opposite of absence is when the presence is also a problem.
You would think that would be enough to cry about.
You would think.
I have not cried since my father died.
I mean at all. Not the heaving kind. Not even the kind that just happens to you, the way weather happens — the kind I cry at movies, at songs in the car, at the small absurd print of an unrelated invoice. I have felt… sad… at other things in the last nine days. I have not cried at this.
The last time I cried hard — the heaving, hyperventilating, can’t-catch-your-breath kind — I was nineteen years old. I will not tell you what the situation was, because it doesn’t matter. Or maybe it does. I don’t know. What matters is how it ended: me in my bed, fetal, resolved that I would not cry like that ever again.
And I haven’t.
I thought this would do it. I really did.
I thought my father has died would be the thing. The thing that finally cracked the seal I made at nineteen. There is a version of me that has been waiting thirty years to find out what could.
It turns out: not this. Not yet, anyway.
I do not know what to do with this information. I am sitting at my mother’s kitchen table watching her grieve in the only room she has — the anger room, the one she has decorated and hosted dinner parties in and is going to die in — and I can’t even do that.
I cannot find my room.
I am not sure I have one.
The seven stages of grief are a popularization anyway. People do not pass through grief in order. They live inside it, in whatever room they have built for it.
My mother has her anger room. I am still looking for the door to mine.
It is a Friday afternoon in May. We have, between us, drafted nothing about the service. Mom has named four Christmases he did not come to. I have nodded four times. I close the laptop. We sit there.
She does not say anything else.
I do not either.