That happened, I knew you, we were there.

My mom's memorial was five days ago. She's in a purple flower patterned porcelain urn and I touched the top of it to make it feel more concrete to me, the whole concept in general. Relatives that I haven't seen in years came and it turned out to be more welcome than nerve wracking. I read, and then her siblings said some stuff, and then a Kenyan priest from my uncle's church in New Rochelle arrived to say some prayers. After he asked who everyone was, he asked if I had any brothers or sisters. I don't have any from my mom, so he said in his South African accent, "Jesus was an only child. You should be the female Jesus." During his prayers and wandering strange homily (my friend Jeff: "You know, I didn't know where he was going for a while but he totally brought it back around, kind of!") I stared at the flowers and checked out. We couldn't bury Mom with her mother that day because the cemetery was closed from the blizzard, so we all drove to an Italian restaurant in a small strip mall and ate a lot. People brought a lot of great photos from family parties decades ago in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and the Bronx.

Standing in front of the podium next to my mother's ashes, with everybody staring at me while I got ready to read my eulogy, was one of the strangest experiences I have ever had. Definite life milestone. Anyway, I wrote it the day before but I think it turned out pretty well, and so I'm posting it for my own posterity:

This is the strangest thing I have ever had to write, because reflecting on someone I have known since I was born feels a little like trying to objectively describe my own hands. For a significant part of my life it was just me and Mom, and we spent so much time together — at home or driving somewhere in the car or sitting in a diner or at Friendly’s eating Reeses sundaes — that when I look back it’s hard to remember what we talked about, and fought about, and laughed about.

But here are some things I do remember: The thunk sound of the microwave door closing and the beeps that would get her coffee reheating when she’d been called in to the hospital to log more of the countless hours she worked there to support us. I know that being a nurse wasn’t her dream, and she would say she had really wanted to be a doctor, but she was proud when she got to help a patient or comfort their family members and I could hear it in stories she would tell sometimes.

I have a lot of things she made, like a patchwork quilt and of course drawings and paintings. There was a period in the eighties where I think she stenciled geese and teddy bears on every available surface. She would sew Halloween costumes for me, including an amazing dress for when I was Sally from “Nightmare Before Christmas.” One year she even made matching fairy princess costumes for me and my Cabbage Patch Kid.

I remember her phone calls to me when I was away at college where she’d ask, “What is this?” and hold the phone up to the radio. She was constantly seeking out new music and even today I will sometimes hear a song and think that Mom would have liked it. In the last few years, after we’d lost every mode of communication, when I would visit her I would make a playlist on my iPod and put my giant headphones on her head, holding her hand as I played her Neko Case and Bjork, and other things I thought she would enjoy. She loved dancing too, and I am thankful that she raised me to have her inclination to start dancing anywhere at any time when (and only when) the song playing moves me to, whether it’s in a bar or a grocery store.

I remember she way she would shake her finger in time to the beat when she was dancing, like she was reprimanding some invisible person who wasn’t sold on the message of the song. And how every Christmas she would insist on getting a tree so large that maneuvering it into the apartment was a feat and getting it out was even funnier — one year we just rolled it down a hill behind our building and ran away like we’d never seen the thing in our life.

What sticks out the most is something I found out when I was in college. Every Easter growing up Mom would give me Cadbury eggs, which were my favorite. I don’t remember how it came up, but one day she told me that every Easter she’d take time to pick out Cadbury eggs with as many different colored foil wrappings as possible because she thought the amount of red, blue, or yellow on the foil meant they were different flavors. Picturing her fishing through the tub of candy eggs in CVS, for some reason there is nothing else that makes me know she loved me more than that. 

Van Morrison - Sweet Thing