After I finished helping my sister put the photos out around the room, I sat on the couch and looked at mom. She looked like she was taking a nap. She really looked great.

In the ceiling of the room there were three colored lights positioned to shine on her, in a triangle with the point farthest from the wall her casket was alongside. The short legs of the triangle were probably three feet on a side, and the long side was probably six feet or more. The two points on the long side were blue, and the other was red. I remembered this method, or a variation thereof, from my stage lighting classes as a theatre student.

The funeral home was called the Leak Memory Chapel. It was totally quiet. I don’t know if I can say that the whole place sounded hushed and reverent, but it did, somehow. After a few minutes of examining the lights and looking at anything but mom’s body, the funeral home guy came in to put mom’s jewelry on.

He and my sister talked back and forth about which wrist to put her bracelet on and whether or not she had pierced ears. I snapped the above picture of them doing this, and then I knew for sure that I needed a drink.

I grabbed the little plastic cups that they had next to a pitcher of water, slopped some water and a few ice cubes in, snatched up a peppermint, and walked quickly outside. I opened my car, splashed a healthy measure of whiskey into my glass, and greedily drank a big gulp. I felt guilty. I didn’t want anyone to see me relying on alcohol, but I was operating at the limits of my abilities.

I pretended to be checking out the graveyard adjacent to the funeral home as I drank the rest of my whiskey, then munched on the peppermint to try to hide my breath. I grabbed a coffee on the way back into the building in the coffee lounge. I wasted a few minutes in the coffee lounge snapping photos of their certifications and a painting of Mr Leak himself. I knew I needed to not hide forever, so I started to wander back out of the coffee lounge. I caught sight of a sign that said “Out of respect to the families, please do not remove coffee”, and I ignored it.

We went to the nearest department store, my sister and I, to get her something suitable to wear for the viewing and the funeral. I also needed a nicer white shirt than the one I had with me. My sister tried a few things on. She wanted something in brown with a pink top. I tried to help. Belk is kind of an old lady place, it seems like. Not too much with the modern clothes.

Eventually I gave up trying to help and just stared off into space through my sunglasses, which had by this time become my security blanket. I tended to cry if I thought about Mom too much, so I just kept them on, the better to fake it. I watched a pretty redhead walk by.

“Hey Annie!” a sales clerk called to her.

“Hey!” she said brightly back, going about her department store business.

I bought a plain white oxford shirt, and my sister settled on a muted outfit that wasn’t too old lady. Annie was our sales clerk when we paid for our clothes.

“So what are y’all doing for the rest of the day?” she smiled conversationally.

I crossed my arms. Boy, was she barking up the wrong tree. “We’re just doing family stuff,” my sister said.

We left Belk and went back to mom’s house. I got dressed and wrote a bit about Mom. This made me cry for a few minutes, but I got it together before anyone came to get me. Eventually it was time to leave.

We had an hour plus drive to Montgomery for the viewing at 5pm. I had to drive my car so my friends could take it back to Atlanta, so I drove alone. I don’t remember much about the drive, I was in a daze. So much so, in fact, that I missed my exit and had to take back roads through town. I learned to drive in Montgomery, though, so I knew where to go.

I had no idea if I was going to make it through the viewing. For probably the hundredth of ten thousand times I praised whatever gods there are that my sister has her husband Chuck to help take care of things, because I was totally useless. Normally during a crisis I pride myself on being clearheaded, but this time I wasn’t at all. I just didn’t want to think about anything. Chuck was there for my sister, and it’s a good thing because all I wanted to do was run away.

I had my sunglasses, though, and a bottle of Maker’s in the back seat for courage. I knew I was going to catch heat for wearing the sunglasses throughout the proceedings, but I also knew I wasn’t going to take them off and look people in the eye.

I pulled up to the funeral home.

I found Chuck and my sister. They pointed me where to go. I went inside, sunglasses on. A tiny old lady pointed me toward the correct room, and I went in. Suddenly I was in the room with the casket and my mom’s body, and I was overwhelmed with an “Oh shit…” feeling. I almost lost it, but I busied myself helping my sister place photos around the room and I got myself under control.

I started planning a way to get back out to the car to hit that bottle of whiskey before people started turning up and wanting me to talk to them.

This morning I ate a biscuit that was in the freezer. It was an orphan of a cellophaned pack of two. Presumably my mom ate the other one. It occurs to me that the ripples and impressions that Mom has made in life will disappear in order from the largest to the smallest, and this inexorable process has already begun.

It happens for everyone all the time, of course. When you stop talking, the echoes die away. When you leave a room, people start to forget what color your shirt was. Living people refresh those little memories all the time as they come back around, but mom’s little memories aren’t being refreshed anymore.

I took pictures around her room when I got here yesterday, so I’ll always know exactly how her things were, the way she left them, down to the wrinkles in her comforter that she threw aside to go to the hospital.

We stopped off at the bottle shop to pick me up some whiskey. The open sign was not on, but the guy was in there reading the paper. It was raining pretty heavily.

I went inside, told him that his sign wasn’t on, and started looking around the shelves. He said the power had gone off just a moment before and that must have been what turned the sign off. I eyeballed a bottle of Knob Creek briefly on the recommendation of a friend, but it was $10 more than the adjacent fifth of Maker’s and not knowing ahead of time whether it was $10 better, I played it safe.

I paid, got in the car. My brother in law and sister were in the front seat, him at the wheel, and we pulled back onto the two lane county road. We were going along well, but my sister had to pull over to throw up. She apologized between heaves, but of course there was nothing to apologize for.

Eventually we made the trip through the back woods from my sister’s house to my mom’s. My sister needed to lie down, so she did. I went in to talk to her. She said that she had always been irritated with mom for being selfish, but that toward the end of her life she had really tried to make changes. I am unfamiliar with that facet of my mom, as she always treated me like a prince.

I guess there really is a big difference in the way a mom treats a daughter and a son, at least in my case.

We’ve now been through a lot of decision making. What should we dress her in? What jewelry should she wear, and how will we get it off of her after the service? The funeral home says she needs underclothes, so we’ve sent them along via my brother in law. Are these pearls real or fake? What is involved in an Estate sale? Who will take mom’s cat, Punkin? Should my aunt take the dining room table? What will we do with all this christmas china? And on and on…

We are all issuing convictionless mandates: “We need to just get a box and put all these pictures in it.”, or “You’ve got to drive, I don’t know if I can handle it”, or “Well I have to write what I am going to say at the service.”

My aunt just called back to me that the guy running the service has cut her speaking time down to 6 minutes. She feels cramped, she has 35 years of stuff to say.

I’m trying to decide if I should shave my beard or not. It’s itchy and spring is coming. Should I play a song at the service? Will there be a piano there? We don’t know. I know mom would like that in a way, if only because Sir Elton played so famously at Princess Diana’s funeral, but I don’t know if I can or should. The only song I can think of to sing isn’t really to my mom, it’s to a girl who doesn’t love me. It doesn’t seem very appropriate.

Speaking of appropriate, how much of these proceedings will be appropriate times for me to be having a drink? No one seems to know.