12:40 am | 22 April 2003 | for Stella

She was eighty-two. She was hardly here at all anymore. The last time I saw her was six months ago and I left it that way consciously. Having to say to my parents "No, I haven�t got time to visit her" while thinking I don�t want to remember her as someone who doesn�t even know me. Just another one of those shitty moments where you realize you�re an adult.

I got the message Saturday morning, at the mall with my mother and my sister. My stepmother�s voice snuck out of the receiver sounding pinched and tinny. "Hi, sweetie. Give us a call as soon as you get this. Everyone�s okay�well, Daddy and Matt and I are okay, don�t panic. Just call us as soon as you get this." My mother watched me as I called my stepmother back, her brow clouded over (she has a hound�s nose for tragedy). I am too old and hard to cry publicly. We stepped into TGI Friday's, of all horrible places, so that I could smoke and make plans.

Later that day, my stepmother lowered her voice in the kitchen to her we are sharing a special girl moment tone.
"He hasn't really said anything or let anything out. I don't know what he is feeling. You know, your dad was really angry with her sometimes," she said.
"I know," I said. He had loved his mother because that was what one did. But she wore her suffering like armor and never tried to hide it, and there was nothing my dad hated more than weakness. I felt a bottomless pity open up in my chest cavity.
Something must have passed across my face because my stepmother laid a reassuring hand on my arm and said, "she liked it in the nursing home, you know. She was really scared of being alone."

This is how i understand my grandma's beginning. Clara had done her best but she couldn't do it any longer. Her mother, Mildred, had left in a hurry with a pasteboard suitcase dangling at the end of one reddened hand. "Watch your sister," she said, the old screen door snapping like a mousetrap at the hem of her dress. Her angry steps jabbed little puffs of dust out of the gravel road as she walked away. That had been five days earlier. Now three-year-old Stella wouldn't stop crying and Clara was out of things to feed her. She grabbed her little sister and started down the road the way that Mildred had gone. Towards town. They were picked up by whatever passed for Social Services in 1924 and declared abandoned. So maybe that was why Stella was so afraid to be alone, why she stayed in her marriage, in that house, in that town. Or maybe she was just afraid to be happy. Nothing is more comforting than the embrace of sadness, the limitation of victimhood. It feels good to be stuck. It feels blameless.

Driving to the funeral home I looked out the window and traced patterns in my breath's steam, thinking about how stereotypical that must look (how overtly cinematic). The sky was a passive-aggressive grey, spitting rain from time to time, and I tried to search out the dark shapes of cows among the stumps and trees along the roads. We were listening to the radio and singing along. A too-bright Subway sign rent the dull landscape, interrupting the fields like a slap. The oldies radio DJ was cheerful and I wanted to pinch him hard. Everything was inappropriate.

"When you hold me
in your arms so tight
keep it up girl
yeah I feel all right
IIIIIIIIIII
I�m hooked on a feeeeeeling
High on belieeeeeviiiing
That you�re in love with meeeeeee�"

Dad whistled foundation tone and I sang the harmony, like always. My brother came in on the choruses.

We passed a car wash, a five-theatre cinema, a Taco Bell whose sign read:

MILITARY PERSONNEL IN
UNIFORM WITH I.D.
� OFF.

It seemed like a lot of work to save two dollars. The car wash, not to be outdone, had a sign that said:

SEMPER FIDELIS
OORAH NAVY CORPS!

I wish I knew what OORAH meant. Was it some kind of military version of hooray? It occurred to me that I don�t understand a lot of things in this place. Dad cleared his throat.
"She was happy," he said. "She really liked it there. They had singalongs and she remembered how to play piano." I tried to imagine the root-gnarled claws moving effectively over the keys and could not. There had been a piano at the old house but it was rotting, the ivory peeled away from nearly every key, the ear-curling dissonance of the wildly untuned strings planging through the slant-floored living room like a cartoon disaster. My brother stuck his head into the backseat.
"She was so funny," he said. "She liked this one old song (I imagined My Blue Heaven) best and always sang that one. She was supposed to play Jingle Bells at the Christmas singalong and she started playing it" (his hands mimicking a piano in midair) "but she slowly merged it into her favourite song instead" (hands climbing over each other on the invisible keyboard) "and everyone thought it was funny." I remembered, then, that she was always laughing; even the last time i saw her, she cracked up at something or other and cackled for five minutes. I couldn't think, for the life of me, at what.

The funeral home is on Elm and Hudson. I have been there too many times. The director knows me, but I am not sure whether it is from my family or because he has seen me at least once for every year I�ve lived. The aunts and uncles were there, smelling of old smoke the way I hope I don�t. Their hugs had a desperation to them, a childlike need for acceptance--my immediate family is, after all, the only branch of the family that truly made it out, that succeeded. A man named Dan that I do not know stared at me and then said that he thought he was looking at Margaret, my mother, and I smiled and thanked him while hoping fervently that my stepmother did not overhear him because the last thing I needed was some kind of ridiculous scene.

My brother slid closer to me on the fragile little funeral-home settee.
"Did you know that Grandma was a catcher?" he said, his blue-green eyes wide, unable to reconcile the shrunken waxen figurine in the grey, aster-heaped coffin with anything more vital.
"Yeah," I said. "In fact, she was asked to be on the first women�s baseball team. Do you remember that movie A League of Their Own? If she had gone, she would have been the catcher on that team. But instead she married Grandpa and stayed in Lowell."
"Really?" he said, incredulous. The sorrow of his disbelief, of the missed chances, of a penned-in life that amounted to this, seemed unbearable for a minute. I felt an opportunity to make a point.
"That�s why you should always do what you want to do, and not what anyone else tells you," I said to him, meaning it, hoping that it didn�t sound too much like the heavy-handed moral of A Very Special Episode of Dawson�s Creek or something. He nodded perfunctorily, like Duh, and turned away.

My cousin chattered incessantly and vapidly as we drove home. I stared out the window again, looking at the edges of the river snaking like spilled mercury through the swampy lowlands.
"Sargent Road is named after our family," my dad said to me.
"I know," I replied, not taking my eyes off the tall weeds that blurred past.
"Really?" my brother said, and Dad explained it to him while i stuck my hand in my pocket and fingered the tarnished little heart medal that an aunt had slipped me. Stella, it said. From Gary. 1960 on the back. My dad had given it to her when he was thirteen.
The Byrds came on the radio. I wondered whether my dad took comfort in it, the familiarity, the one-size-fits-all comfort of faith. To everything turn turn turn; there is a season turn turn turn. Their guitars jangled innocuously and I wondered whether they, The Byrds, really believed in what they were singing, or whether they were just looking for easy catchy lyrics. A time to be born, a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap. They never mentioned there being a time to do what you needed to do and damn the torpedoes. There was no mention of a time to run. Maybe that was all included under a time to cast away stones.

The Together we stand united American flag sticker was peeling off the Blazer�s window with the muggy air. Crying seemed so pointless. I looked out the window again and asked Dad what kind of cows the black-and-white ones were. "I don�t know, sweetie," he said absently, then met my eyes in the rearview mirror and smiled his sad smile, the one he had started sending out when he realized how much about sorrow i understood. "A time when you may embrace," we all sang. The sky had lightened a little and I thought about how i could still feel my dad's hug, like once he started he never really let go.

In memoriam: Stella (n�e Ritsema) Sherman, 1921-2003