Chapter 71
I fold and unfold the paper from my dress pocket. A sheet of kitchen notebook paper scrawled with words I’d thought I might say when my life and I were back in New York. I scan them and feel that none of them resonate anymore. There’s a bitterness that I just don’t feel now.
I look back at the casket, where the wren has been set on top. And then I speak from the heart.
“Before this weekend, I wasn’t sure what I was going to say about my mother. It’s easy to say what we all know, which is that she was funny, the life of the party, kind of a stoner by the end.”
People laugh and a few people make sounds of enthusiastic agreement.
“She was smart and beautiful and there when anyone needed her. But everyone here knows all that. Everyone’s going to spend the rest of the day, and beyond, talking about all her nuggets of advice, her one-liners, her … eccentricities.”
I look out at the faces and realize how many of them I know.
Gladys and Taylor Rae’s family, of course, but also Eva.
Mabel. Mr. Kelly. Dusty. JJ. And so many more faces I haven’t thought about in years.
More babies thrown out with the bathwater.
People who had played gotcher-nose with me when I was little and who came over and sat with my mom until the wee hours of the morning.
People who had known my father. My grandparents.
What the hell had I been doing, cutting myself off at the root like that? No wonder I’d so thoroughly convinced myself I was alone. I’d done everything I could to make sure I was.
“Instead of saying all that, I’d rather just say thank you, to all of you.
For knowing her and loving her and being there for us, for me, my sister, Austin, Matt—when we were kids.
For Babe. Always.” I waver before going on.
“The thing is, I don’t think my mother was very happy.
Not in a big, fulfilled dreams kind of way.
Looking back now, I can see that in our childhood, she was going through the motions.
And we all know how special she was, she probably should have been …
I don’t know, a movie star or a singer or, well, not a singer.
She couldn’t carry a tune to save her life. ”
A round of quiet laughter.
“When she moved here, it was all of you, this place, the magic of this island. That’s how she found happiness.
She wasn’t some mystical being. She was just a woman who had something special, and I’m so glad all of you could see it too.
Because”—tears catch in my throat—“I don’t think she did.
I don’t think she knew how we all saw her.
She was the center of our lives for so long and I know all of us here saw her as something larger than life.
Now she’s larger than death. Because in so many ways, she’s not going anywhere. She’s here, and she always will be.”
I have said most of these words to a spot in the sand and staring off into the distance at Birdsong. Its sturdy pink walls and happy open windows, stretching ivy. Sammie was right all along. Birdsong is our mother.
I look into the faces of the congregation now and see that almost all of them are tearful. This makes me say, “Sorry,” with a self-conscious laugh. “Can someone come up and share a funny story or something?”
I step down, tears just streaming down my face unbidden. In my seat, Austin, Matt, and Sammie put arms around me, Sammie the closest, hugging the hardest, crying against me.
“I’ll go,” comes a voice.
Mr. Ennis, Taylor Rae and Harrison’s father.
I’d forgotten about him. He was always hilarious.
And he still is, as he gets up and manages to get us all laughing again within just a few words.
He tells a story about a day out on a boat with Babe and a few other unlikely folks, and by the end of the story we are all laughing so hard we can’t even hear what he is saying.
This energy is contagious, and for the next hour, people trade off telling more stories about her. Things we’ve never heard. Eventually people stop going up to the front, then they start standing individually, and then eventually the whole crowd is in a loud, cheerful, woeful conversation.
“That wasn’t Easter, that was Memorial Day! I remember because—”
And, “She put him in his place, my god, I’ve never seen a boy shake in his boots like that!”
And: “I thought it was a fox, I almost sent the dogs out to run it off, but then I saw it was her!”
The stories go back to when Babe herself was a child here. When the oldest folks here were our age now. When she was a feisty kid with a cross little face, running naked through the neighbors’ yards, or a wild teenager “borrowing” cars and getting caught smoking weed behind the church.
It settles Babe into a different place in my mind, just as the letter had. A reframing of her as a complete person in a way I’d never been able to truly grasp before.
I wish so much that I could have her back, now that I feel I know her. But sometimes we only get lucky enough to understand people once they’re gone.
The service disintegrates into a party organically, even the woman in robes tearing them off in the warmth of the afternoon, sitting with her feet up on a chair, drinking rosé from a plastic cup.
People, of course, keep coming up to Sammie and me to pay their respects and tell us how sorry they are that she’s gone. It’s actually nice. Not like my father’s funeral, when I’d had to field hundreds of dry hands and perfunctory words from people I didn’t remotely know—alone.
“Another One Bites the Dust” is playing when Matt gets our attention and says, “Sorry to interrupt—you guys want to come inside for a sec?”
Sammie and I excuse ourselves from our conversation and follow him.
“I finally turned on my computer, which”—he makes a face—“fuck all of that. But amidst the six thousand emails, I had one from Babe’s financial advisor.”
He grins. “I think you’re going to be able to pay off your student loans, Didion.”