They sat me on a cold toilet, as scraps of morning sunlight sifted through the bathroom window. They stooped and leaned forward, their faces contorted and unsettled, their eyes pinched narrow, staring. I could feel the wetness in their breath. I was eight, and I was terrified.

“Mommy’s not coming home. Mommy’s in heaven,” two of them said.

They just blurted it out, like I would somehow understand the notion of death. But how could they expect an eight-year-old to understand, especially when their words were so clouded in ambiguity and religiosity? And who were these people? Where was my mother? What did it mean when they said she’s never coming home? My world was suddenly confused and unknown; I felt vulnerable and alone.

As I sat there, I wondered why I never heard anything during the night, even though I slept in her room. How was that possible, that I heard nothing, that my mother left without my knowing, that she left without saying goodbye? Her room was on the second floor at the front of the house facing the street; why didn’t I hear cars arriving at the house, for there had to be cars arriving, or people running up and down the narrowed stairs, or voices speaking, even if whispered, or the celestial clatter of angels coming to get her?

Back then, we didn’t have paramedics, or emergency services, or 9-1-1. I’m not even sure our small town had an ambulance. So, there would have been no siren to awaken me. But still, there had to be hurried activity and rushed commotion, and that, in and of itself, often causes a notable disturbance, if not outright noise. So why didn’t I hear anything? Why didn’t I awaken?

My mother laid in a casket, like she was asleep, but she wasn’t. She wasn’t even there. The only thing there was her chemically infused remains. She looked like a doll my neighbor Cheryl had. But now, Cheryl’s doll was more real, and more alive, than my mother.

Still I wondered, “How can she be in heaven if she’s here?”

I don’t remember the service, my mind vacant and unsettled, but I do remember being handed a glass-encased red rose and placing it on my mother’s chest before the casket was closed. I don’t think I understood why, or if someone told me to do it, but it seemed, even at my young age, an offering of love.

After the service, I was ushered to a car, and watched as they placed her casket in a hearse. For a moment, I panicked; I wondered how she could breathe with the lid closed.

Then, with several cars lined up in a straight line, I rode to the cemetery, directly behind the hearse, in the fumes of death. The cemetery was in a rural part of the county, miles from our house, on a small spit of land called Pasco, Ohio. It was a long, slow, winding drive, one of those tortuous, two-lane country roads with “No Passing” yellow lines. She was to be buried there because her father was buried there, and it was where her mother, my grandmother, would also be buried. I wondered if I too would be buried there, when whatever happened to my mother happened to me. The thought frightened me.

I remember little of the graveside service, other than cries filling the air, and murmured words from a priest. Then, as if on cue, everyone stood to leave. I took one last look at the casket, and returned to the car. We weren’t permitted to watch as the casket was lowered into the ground and covered. I wondered why. Perhaps the messy emotions of the thud from clumps of dirt.

I looked at my grandmother as we headed home. Time, and loss, had cut lines in her face. Her eyes, red from crying, reflected the loss of my mother. She was widowed, and now, her only child was dead. She was alone, and burdened with raising two young boys: me, and my two-year-old stepbrother.

When we arrived home, the house was silent, as the last hint of a September sun slipped below the horizon. My grandmother retired to bed, weakened from the day’s events. I sat there, thinking, not sure what to do. It was like I was in a land of hiatus, not moving forward and not moving backwards, stuck like a candy bar jammed in a vending machine.

Then, as dusk turned to darkness, and with my grandmother resting in bed, I became anxious and afraid. In a house absent my mother’s presence and rich in the sound of the aged timbers creaking with the blowing of the wind, I couldn’t sleep—but even worse, I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t want to be swept away in the middle of the night, like my mother, even if it was to heaven. So, I became a nocturnal creature, like an owl, guarded, staying awake in the night, for weeks if not months, sleeping fitful sleeps after school, in the lighted comfort of day.

Now, in the latter years of my life, I think of my mother’s death, and wonder what her grave looks like, and wonder why I wonder, for a grave is nothing more than the landscape of a life once lived. I also wonder what’s left in the measured confines six feet under, an admittedly dark, yet innocent thought. Perhaps there’s the metal shell of the casket, or a few shards of her dress, or the tattered lining of the casket, or the splintered remnants of her bones, or the worms and grubs that cleanse the earth and return things to a homeostatic rightness. Or perhaps a little of all.

But what I wonder most is tethered to the final moments before her casket was closed: is the glass-encased rose still there—the rose that touched my hand and laid on her chest—for it was the last, and only gift I ever gave to my mother.

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