By the time my grandmother Betty was sixty-five she had buried enough family to develop a quick-and-easy user’s guide to making funeral arrangements. Her comprehensive checklist was tested and revised during the burial of both of her parents, her stepmother, two husbands, two daughters, and her first three grandchildren.
When her eldest son, Wayne, died suddenly of a heart attack she decided she needed to get out of the funeral arranging business; she needed to grieve without all of the paperwork. In a sort of passing of the pyre at the end of 2002, my grandmother asked me, eldest daughter to eldest daughter, to come over and help with my uncle’s funeral arrangements.
I walked up the few steps to her senior living apartment and grabbed the key to the front door from under the tongue of a faux-stone frog that was loitering in a bed of pansies. It was the sort of “discreet outdoor key holder” found in school fundraising catalogs. When I entered, she was in the kitchen preoccupied with casserole ranking and scheduling.
“This one’ll be good for breakfast for tomorrow;” she said to herself after lifting the foil covering to inspect her bereavement offering, a Quiche Lorraine.
“This one can be for dessert tonight after everyone gets into town”, she said of a bread pudding. At the next casserole she paused and stared through the clear saran wrap at a cheesy spam and potato concoction, “This can be more of an afternoon-snack casserole, for the kids.”
The latter had been given to her by that “cheap skate down the street”.
“She only remembered pieces of Nancy’s funeral; she told me that the natural order of things had been disturbed. ”
This was my grandmother. It wasn’t enough that friends and sympathizers delivered food after the death of her son; they had to sacrifice something more meaningful to show that they were really sitting with her in grief. Since most of the well-wishers were also seniors on a fixed income, she knew exactly what it would mean if someone sent over a casserole with pricier ingredients.
Once the food had been sufficiently ranked and notes made on the foil covers, she sat down at her kitchen table and patted a folder that contained her notes on the day’s errands I would be running. I noticed that her pink fine-toothed comb and a bottle of aqua-net hairspray were on the table next to her coffee; this was grief indicator. When my grandmother was depressed, she broke rules; hair could be styled in the kitchen, dinners could be eaten while standing, people could be told outright exactly what she thought about them- even if it was catty.
She lit a cigarette. I helped her with backcombing her hair as she gave me a brief rundown of why I should not get a wreath made of yellow roses, “They were at Marcia’s funeral, and no one wants to be reminded of that; we’re sad enough!” She relayed to me how important it is to meet the makeup artist in person, not “over the damn phone”, but in person, otherwise “Wayne could end up looking terrible! Like they did to Nancy, she looked like a hussy”. She also needed me to run a few personal errands. I nodded, taking in the burial history of my withering family tree.
Soon, I was placing orders with the florist, painfully selecting "elegant but not too flashy" thank you cards, dropping a check off for an urn, and my last errand was to pay her gas bill. The office was about fifteen minutes away in nearby Bridgeport, Texas. Wise County had grown significantly in the few years since I had graduated high school. As I headed out of town through the main Town Square where a great pink marble courthouse sat, I noticed that the once very literal square commercial district had sprouted arms. New mini strips of shops spiraled out and into what once had been a cluster of one-story apartments that rented by the week - no credit check or license required. It seemed even Decatur was not immune to gentrification. I left the not-so-square anymore Square and turned West onto Highway 380 towards Bridgeport.
The eleven-mile strip of four lane highway had remained relatively undeveloped despite all the signs offering land for sale. There were miles of barren crop fields. Rows and rows of plowed and unplanted dirt broken occasionally by a forgotten round bale of hay. The former tenants, hay and corn, had been evicted and sold at market during the last harvest. These fields would rest for a year so as to relieve the soil from the burden of producing, the burden of bearing.
I arrived at the administrative offices of the Natural Gas and Petroleum Company of Wise County and parked in the gravel driveway. When I entered, I could hear the receptionists, but not see them. I followed their cooing voices down a hallway and into an adjacent room. The room had no furnishings; there were blankets on the floor and piles of pungent soft dog food in makeshift bowls of conical paper cups. By my quick count there were seven or eight puppies whimpering and yipping around the feet of the receptionists. The workmen who read and recorded the gas meters had rescued the puppies. They had been abandoned along their route and brought back to the office in hopes of finding them homes. I watched the puppies play and wrestle with each other. They were happy to be inside away from the winter, warm and dry in a place with food. I allowed their gratitude to wash over me.
I took notice of a puppy in a far corner; he was alone and howling. His tiny black and white face scrunched up with each call. His pack ignored him; he had a slice underneath his left eye which seemed infected. I sat down on the cool floor and called to him. He walked toward me slowly, stopping every few steps to cry out, as if he was not in control of his misery.
“She had on a pink gingham pearl snap button up shirt. I imagined her as a fearless predecessor; playing a boy’s game and doing it glamorously.”
I thought about the mother of these puppies. Was she alive somewhere with an owner who preferred not to care for her bastard offspring? Maybe she was killed in some accident or had succumbed to the birthing process. How long could these dogs have been in that box; what decisions had been made while they grew cold and hungry?
I sat with the outcast for some time. Hearing his pain but never trying to soothe him. I thought about my grandmother, burying child after child, family member after family member. The first child she buried was my Aunt Nancy, who was killed by a drunk driver on Father’s Day. Nancy had been a champion in bull riding and bronco busting. She was beautiful; she had golden hair and my grandmother’s piercing blue eyes. She passed these traits on to her son, Robbie, who died with her that morning. I had spent most of my childhood staring at a photograph of Nancy atop a brown bronc. Her hair in perfect flying curls fanned out to the sides of her Stetson as the horse reared both back legs off the ground. The dirt the bronco kicked up created a beautiful soft focus on the bottom third of the photograph. She had on a pink gingham pearl snap button up shirt. I imagined her as a fearless predecessor; playing a boy’s game and doing it glamorously. When I worked up the nerve, I asked my grandmother what Nancy’s funeral had been like; how many people had attended, what did Nancy wear, was the bronco there?
I remember my grandmother taking a long draw on her cigarette and saying that she only remembered pieces of Nancy’s funeral. She remembered being angry. She remembered the terrible makeup job. And she told me that the natural order of things had been disturbed. “I didn’t want to have the service at a church. God had not kept up his end”. And they didn’t. Nancy’s funeral started our family tradition of memorial services held in civic centers, far away from any church.
The second child she buried was Marcia. I adored my Aunt Marcia; she was a child of the 60’s and had been determined to do all of her living quickly. She was full of fantastic stories about her adventures, and she loved telling me about how she fell in love with my Uncle Don. They met at Woodstock ’69 and when it ended, they rode his Harley Davidson all the way to Long Beach, California together. They married in ’71 and remained married until she died in ‘98. She loved to tell me stories about babysitting me during her shifts at a local adult movie theater. I would play with the theater keys as she sold tickets to the men. My uncle kept the theater clean and ran the projector. After their shifts we would ride home together on my uncle’s motorcycle, my toddler body squished safely between them.
Marcia was the sort of woman who was consumed by whatever she loved. If she had learned and experienced all there was about a subject, or a friend, she considered that love story complete. She and my uncle consumed all Long Beach had to offer and after they had their first child, they decided to take life slower and move closer to family. My Aunt had a difficult time adjusting to small town Texas living. She tried to cope by revisiting the brief interest she’d had with drugs and explored all she could get her hands on. She stopped just before she developed an all-consuming habit, but like many in the early 90’s, she’d shared a needle with the wrong person. She contracted HIV when she was thirty-eight and died of AIDS-related complications after her forty-eighth birthday. I was old enough to remember her ten-year death quite vividly.
I had been on the floor of that makeshift puppy shelter for quite some time reflecting on my grandmother and our losses. I don’t know how long I had been crying when I noticed the receptionist patting my shoulder. I apologized to her and asked if I could have the dog. I paid the gas bill and collected the puppy and headed straight to a veterinarian friend in town to get his cut checked out.
Dr. Ramona told me that the puppy was very ill; and cautioned me it would be very expensive and laborious to nurse him to good health. My commitment to the dog was not shaken. I pulled out my checkbook; I rationalized that I would eat ramen noodles for a year if I had to. Dr. Ramona set me up with deworming supplies, antibiotics, administered first rounds of vaccines and a few print outs about safely removing tapeworms. I returned to my grandmother’s house, puppy in tow. She surveyed the dog and then started laughing.
“That dog’s gonna die Elizabeth. Look at him. Don’t waste your time on creatures that are doomed.”
She’d put enough people in the ground to know.
A few months after Uncle Wayne’s funeral, I sent her a photograph of me and the puppy, who I had named Bruce. Although she always pretended to dislike the dog, she asked about him every time I spoke to her. When she knew she was finally dying of the cancer she had been fighting, she called me to come over so we could talk through her funeral plans. When our call was over, she added, “Bring Bruce please”.