The Pearl 2020

My mom’s eyes met mine, “You can say the word dead.”
I smiled at her, exhausted.
For the rest of that weekend all the family began to filter back to their
own cities. Our house, which had been crammed full only a few days ago, was
suddenly empty. Even when we had the house completely to ourselves, I
asked my mom to sleep in my room for one more night. Though we separated
to our own bedrooms within a few days, we remained tethered to each
other.
Death comes with a lot of details. Mom spent hours on the phone trying
to fill my dad’s desire to donate his body to science. These are apparently
the kinds of things we’re meant to plan while we are still alive. Universities
wanted Dad’s signature in order to accept his body for their research, which
was a problem considering he had died. I wondered if people in the Death
Industry realized that most of us don’t think about our end of life plans until
it’s too late to sign papers. Luckily the University of Utah, where Dad had received
his heart and kidney transplant, were willing to take Mom’s word.
We wrote a long obituary and then discovered that newspapers make a
lot of money off of grieving families, and we trimmed it down a bit. We both
shared the obituary on our own Facebooks, letting the outside world into
what our lives had become. We started to plan a wake which Dad wanted,
and a Catholic memorial service which my grandparents wanted.
It was only the second funeral I’d ever attended. I wore a black dress
that now sits untouched in the back of my closet. I sat between Grandma,
fighting tears, and Mom, who couldn’t stop crying. I held my grandmother’s
hand, she squeezed particularly hard when the priest said Dad’s name. Her
rings would indent my skin, bringing me back into reality. I leaned into my
mom mindlessly throughout the service and she would stroke my hair until I
decided to sit back up. My grandfather sat stoically through most of the
mass, but he did glance at me and carefully hand me a tissue. I patted my
eyes, but it seemed futile.
My junior year of high school I had spontaneously decided to graduate
a semester early. I just wanted to be done. It turned out to be the best random
decision I had ever made. After my dad died, I only had a few weeks
63