It’s a wonderful life

My mother knew what she wanted for her funeral. She could name the priest, the undertakers, the chapel and the crematorium, and she had very clear ideas on what we should do with her ashes. Two things she didn’t know: The date and who should deliver the eulogy. “I can’t think of anyone who would say something nice about me,” she said.

We were talking about my mother’s funeral because my mother liked talking about her funeral. It was a long-time hobby of hers; she seemed to dream of her funeral the way some girls dream of their weddings. She had even thoughtfully been putting away money in a designated bank account as “the funeral fund”, which, presciently, turned out to be just the right amount. Never mind that she was generally in excellent physical health, except for periods during the decade she “battled” cancer and in the final painful months of her life.

By the time I was in the fourth grade, I knew she wanted the hymn “On Eagle’s Wings” sung during the service, and that she recommended my fourth-grade teacher as an ideal second wife for my widowed father, as he would be.

At the age of 9, I didn’t understand why my mother talked about her funeral, or about throwing herself under a bus (which she never did), or about walking out on her marriage and children (also which she never did), or about who should marry my father when she was gone (in the end he went first). As I matured, I did come to understand (although if there was a specific cause for her attitude I never knew it), yet understanding never helped me, or anyone, change her view of life. She was fiercely independent and strong willed; none of us could help her or even persuade her she needed help. She was not depressed, she insisted — “after all, I get out of bed every day don’t I?” — and what some might call “self-medicating” (a two-bottles-a-night habit), she called “a lifestyle choice”.

So by the time we calmly and sensibly took our final instructions, to the horror of my sister-in-law who knew nothing of the previous decades’ conversations, it was nothing new, with one exception: This time it was imminent and we all knew it.

Apart from humoring a dying old woman, I wasn’t interested in thinking about the funeral before it was necessary, but the eulogy niggled at me. The dynamics among my siblings are such that I could reasonably expect it would fall to me and, to my shame, I wasn’t sure I could do it.

So I took the opportunity to ask my mother her thoughts on the matter. She just shrugged and gave her forlorn reply.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum: Do not speak ill of the dead. Perhaps because they can no longer defend themselves; perhaps out of respect for the bereaved; perhaps because it diminishes all the good in a person’s life whatever their human failings; perhaps because they, unlike the rest of us, no longer have a chance at redemption, in this life on earth anyway.

Nevertheless, my mother believed no one could speak well of her.

Her deep unhappiness colored her dealings with herself, other people and the world. Her thoughts and words were characterized by negativity toward pretty much everything, by criticism, complaint, even downright spitefulness. But she could not get as she gave: With her ingrained self-loathing, anything that could be construed as a personal criticism, even the mere expression of a different opinion, led to curses and tears or even threats to throw herself under that bus. “I hate being me” was a frequent refrain.

It only intensified as she grew older. During the years after my father died, my mother alienated many of her friends. She picked fights with her bewildered brothers, and two of her children had very little contact with her. In her final weeks, she was in fine form, reducing nurses to tears and insulting anyone who came near, often with cruel accuracy. At the time we could forgive her all that: In those final weeks, she was wracked by pain, barely able to concentrate on the shallowest of TV programs, dependent on others to get her out of bed, toilet and wash her and settle her in the chair where she spent the day waiting to die, before reversing the procedure and going to bed to spend the night likewise. I wonder that anyone could stay upbeat in those conditions, let alone someone who has thrived on hating life.

Loving her was hard. I don’t mean to say she was a dreadful person — she wasn’t. Or that I didn’t love her — I did. But I doubt any mother–daughter relationship is a simple one.

Losing her hurt. During the final 14 hours of her life, from when she called out for me at 3 in the morning, whimpering with pain, to inform me she was really dying and could I sit with her (with the light on; “I don’t want to die in the dark!” she cried, fearing the death she had so cavalierly welcomed until now it was finally upon her), I left her only long enough to fetch extra-strong painkillers from the doctor and stayed with her as she drifted in and out of morphine dreams (“Casablanca!” she muttered at one point. “For God’s sake you fool it’s only a man!”). Knowing it was coming didn’t help: Watching her die was as painful as having surgery without anesthetic.

A few days after her death, when the issue of the eulogy arose, still I feared it. The brother who had always been the most adored and adoring said shyly, “I wouldn’t mind saying a few words.” I was both envious, of his relationship with her, and relieved. Then he added: “So if you could put something together for me …”

The next day, alone in the big house my mother had lived in for a quarter of a century, juggling phone calls from friends, relatives, funeral directors, priest, singer and caterers, I began to write.

I expected that, before I could begin, I would need to write out a lifetime of mixed emotions. But as I pictured her in my mind — as her life as I knew it flashed before my eyes — I could not think of a single negative thing to say. It was a surprisingly calm and even celebratory moment. Perhaps this was simply the temporary idealization that is a normal part of grieving, come at an opportune time.

Without even having to try, I remembered all the good things. I remembered her strengths, her passions, her proud achievements, her decisive actions, her idiosyncratic take on life, her wisdom, her humor. I saw my mother not as a woman who lived in a kind of emotional pain, but as a woman who could find pleasure in small things, who cared about others, who could raise a rare type of passion and make things happen, who was adventurous and spirited and tough and generous and kind.

I remembered also something she had said to me in tears one night, some months before she died. “You know,” she said, “I’ve had a wonderful life.”

How, I thought at the time, could you say life is wonderful when you’ve resisted it every step of the way? When you’ve spent it bitching and moaning?

And yet I do too — I bitch and moan and complain. In a struggle against my natural inherited tendencies, I strive to keep a positive outlook, find joy and look for the good. But while my life has been mercifully tragedy-free, like everyone I’ve had some rough times. I’ve had fallings out and break ups and losses; great hopes dashed and marvelous dreams shattered. I’ve lost friends to drugs and car accidents. I’ve watched both my parents die in pain and disappointment. I’ve suffered abuse and bullying and betrayal, boredom and bad luck and bad hair days. And I’ve bitched and moaned with the best of them.

Yet when I look back on it all, on each hurt and hurrah, passing pleasure and mortifying mistake, I find myself also thinking, “But it has been wonderful.” And when I look at the now, often with a gamut of emotions mixed in the same moment, I understand that yes, this too, right here right now, is wonderful. And as for the future, I look forward to what’s going to happen in the next round.

We don’t have to be “happy” — whatever that means — every minute or every day for life to be pretty special. And life doesn’t have to be perfect to be wonderful — just as well, because it is unlikely ever to come close, although it will have perfect moments. But all the little bits come together to create something indeed wonderful. It’s very Louis Armstrong, with his “bright blessed days” and “dark sacred nights”. It’s very John Keats, with his ode to “Veil’d Melancholy”. Perhaps, were I more serene, it would be very Zen.

I still can’t say my mother was happy, whatever her final assessment. She was never Miss Cheerful or Miss Optimistic. She was Miss Fed Up, Miss Cynical, Miss Bloody-Hell-I-Wish-It-Was-All-Over. I still feel sorrow that she lived with some deep nameless misery — “something dark and ugly lurking at the bottom of the pond”, as she wrote once of her cancer. I feel sorrow for the inexplicable hurt and the bitterness that left an intelligent, creative, courageous woman railing at the world.

But in writing that eulogy I recognized that hers was not a life wasted. During those miraculous hours when the pain was gone and there was just admiration and love, when I couldn’t have spoken ill of the dead if I had tried, I learned to rejoice in her life too. Our lives can only be what our characters allow, but life is as special as each character that lives it. This was the last blessed lesson my first-ever teacher gave me.

Life is, as she said, wonderful. Why? Just because it is. And I hope the story I told of her life portrayed that.

My brother delivered the eulogy with touching tenderness and her friends said it captured her spirit perfectly. They called afterward to say the service was lovely and suited her, right down to the flowers and the music.

The Italian singer gave a poignant rendition of “On Eagle’s Wings”, and of another hymn I’d selected, thinking of my mother’s cry in the night, of the emotional turmoil in which she had spent her life: “You shall walk across the desert but you shall not die of thirst, You shall wander far in safety though you do not know the way. … Be Not Afraid, I go before you always. Come follow me and I shall give you rest.”

+ Madeleine Niquet

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