The day my mother passed

 I remember being three years old and standing in the big window of my grandmother's living room watching long parades of cars that people called weddings and funerals. To me they were just words that meant lots of people getting together. I still interchange those words to this day.

Since the road to the cemetery was just past our block, every funeral passed us. People in small towns pull over for funerals, or peer out windows paying their last thoughts to someone they might not even know.

The day of my mother's funeral I found  myself in a surreal dream. I watched as we passed my grandmother's house and the window I had looked out of when I was barely a toddler. I told myself that today I was in one of those funerals, that people were looking out their windows and seeing us pass by, but today the streets were lined with the living, all coming out to stand on their porches and steps and even the curbs to watch my mother's final moments above ground. I recognized these people. I knew them. Yet it all seemed unreal.

We passed the childhood homes of her best friends, the lady who did our ironing, the women who worked for her and my grandmother and I felt like a ghost. I wondered if they could see my mother sitting beside me watching them as we drove her out past the graves of her father and uncle and grandmother.

And then I don't remember anything else until that night when my sister and I sat at my father's dining room table eating Tombstone pizza and writing thank you notes for the flowers and plants and food that filled three houses around us. I was giddy with the stress of the last three days. It seemed hysterically funny to be eating a pizza called Tombstone and writing thank you notes, but I kept breaking into tears at the oddest moments.

That was the day my mother passed away. The day she could no longer sit beside us telling us who this person or that person was. The day she could not tell us what to write or how to say thank you for so much more than ham salad and chocolate cake. The day I cherished the smell of her closet when I went to find a sweater.

Now my grandmother's house is no longer in our family. Sold to a man who tore out the fireplaces and wood work to sell as piece work. The windows stand empty and dark, sad eyes peering out at the street where the family all passed by to say their final good-byes.