Chapter Three

Death of Mom

I was in my early 20s in the turbulent 60s. After graduating from U.C. Berkeley, I stayed on to work as a secretary in the Life Sciences Building. Across the hall was the gross-anatomy lab, and fumes of formaldehyde and embalming fluid sometimes drifted my way. In my tiny, one-person office, I could hear bullhorns and shrieks and sirens from outside, where students were forever demonstrating and protesting. Inside, there was the erratic click-click-clang of my IBM Selectric and the gentle snoring of my dog, who slept peacefully under my desk. When the campanile struck 10, we on the fourth floor gathered next door to my office to drink instant coffee, eat donuts and discuss the campus unrest.

There was another sound, too, as Bill, the lab technician, rolled his trolley slowly up and down the hall from the elevator, which was directly across from Dr. D’s rat lab, with its own pungent and organic scent, to the anatomy lab and back, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Sometimes there would be a fresh cadaver on the trolley, beneath a tarp. Whenever he passed, a thrill of morbid curiosity ran through me. I longed to lift the tarp and take a peek.

During my eight years working in the Life Sciences Building, there were deaths among my relatives, but they were remote. Grandpa died—but in New York, the faraway land of my childhood. He was no longer quite real to me, just a benign memory: a gruff and beloved dispenser of Chiclets, of Yiddish endearments and of cheek-pinches, smelling of cigars. It never occurred to me or anyone in my family that I should go back East for the funeral.

Grandma died, too, during that period, and although she lived locally and I went to her funeral, that death barely registered either. I only remember how embarrassed I was at my mother’s loud sobs during the hush of the religious service, and the disapproving glances from the other relatives. I edged uncomfortably away from her on the wooden pew. In those days, I was forever edging uncomfortably away from my mother.

Semester after semester I listened to the rattle of Bill’s trolley. Then one day, as I heard it approach the anatomy lab and later retreat back to the elevator, I finally gave in to an impulse and slipped quietly across the hall. In the empty lab, I tiptoed to the table and lifted a corner of the covering. A naked woman lay there, toothless, gray-haired, surprisingly solid-looking. Homeless, I thought; didn’t ordinary people have funerals and burials, like Grandma and Grandpa had? I put a finger on the arm. The parchment-white flesh was alarmingly clammy, heavy, with no resilience, like the cold raw pork chops my mother used to bring home from the supermarket. This was the way I might have imagined dead flesh to feel if I’d ever thought about it--yet somehow it also seemed deeply, instinctively wrong. How can something so natural and inevitable feel so alien? For the first time, I perceived, dimly, that someday I too would be nothing more than a cold slab of meat.

Scuttling furtively back across the hall, I returned to my typing. The undergraduates, chatting and laughing, filed into the anatomy lab. Across from the elevator, the department’s most popular professor studied the effects of aging on the brain. Whole colonies of rats were born, suffered through endless experiments, died, and were dissected. Human cadaver after cadaver continued to trundle past. As for my own brain: I was thinking about books, movies, my future as a famous actress. I did not cross the hall again.

One day 40 years later, at daybreak, two quiet and polite morticians came to my parents’ house. My mother had died in the middle of the night. The mortuary was contracted by Stanford University to collect and deliver cadavers for students to dissect in anatomy lab. My mother, whose main purpose in life had always been to help others, had registered her body for donation long ago.

We had set up a Japanese screen to protect my father, in his adjacent hospital bed, from seeing what he knew was happening. My sister sat with him, holding his hand. I heard his nervous chatter, and my parents’ caregiver tiptoeing about. I was the silent, solitary witness as the gloved morticians slowly, carefully wrapped her up in the winding sheet. The room gradually suffused with morning light, just as if it were an ordinary day. They put her on a stretcher, carried the impossibly tiny body out the door and into the hearse that was parked so incongruously on this leafy suburban street. She was on her way to be embalmed. Then at some point she would be laid out on a stainless steel table under a sheet while students in jeans and T-shirts, laughing and chattering, gathered for their first day of anatomy lab. Over the course of two semesters, she would be dissected, bit by bit. Then she would be cremated and returned to us in a jar.

She hadn’t always planned it this way. She’d first signed up with the Neptune Society for cremation, “a green burial alternative to a traditional funeral,” a sensible approach, she thought. Then she’d changed her mind, decided that my sister and I might need an actual body and burial for therapeutic grieving. At some point she must have realized that we’d grieve in any case, with or without a body and a ritual, because finally her choice was to serve science. She informed me of her different decisions along the way, but I didn’t want to discuss the topic. Peeking at a nameless cadaver in a sterile lab was one thing; discussing my mother’s eventual demise in a matter-of-fact way—which was the way she always discussed death--felt creepy.

I wondered what those students would see when they uncovered what had once been my dynamic, chatterbox mother? For some it might be their first up-close corpse. Would Mom, on the dissecting table, appear slightly larger than life to them, the way the homeless woman did to me those many years ago? Or would she look as tiny to these pre-med students as she appeared to me that last week when she lay in bed, burning with end-of-life fever, on morphine, eyes closed, silent, clutching my hand with a surprisingly tight grip?

When those students first touched my mother’s papery, shriveled arm, would the thought flit through their minds, as it did through mine that day in the anatomy lab, that we are warm and animate so very briefly?

The morning my mother died, as the sun rose, I was taken by surprise. I’d assumed I’d run out of tears more than a decade ago, when my mother first began her descent into Alzheimer’s. This was not really my mother. Yet, at the sight of that tiny body disappearing into folds of white linen, I cried just as uncontrollably as she did at her own mother’s funeral, and just exactly for the length of time it took the morticians to finish wrapping her and place her on the stretcher. This was the cathartic grieving that my mother had said she wanted for me, back when she cancelled her contract with the Neptune Society. How could such a complex woman—compassionate, neurotic, driven--be reduced to this carcass of bone and crepe-paper-thin skin? I felt the sudden, uncanny absence of her in the world as though it were something physical, an empty space carved into the universe where once there’d been—someone singularly important.

I wished those pre-med students could have known these things: that beneath the eyelids were pale, milky blue eyes that were once a startling cat-green. That she’d had curly brown hair like mine, not those few pitiful gray strands of her final years. Her breasts, now flat as deflated balloons--and, by some indifferent force of gravity, having slid down to her waist--were once exactly the same shape as mine, small and round. Those size-five feet, so gnarled and deformed by bunions, once fit into the black high heels she wore to go dancing. She’d have hated that bitter scent of formaldehyde; she loved, oddly, the smell of gasoline, and Dixieland jazz and Elvis Presley and Mozart. If her gaunt head was slightly tilted back, it was because that’s the way she always held it, chin up, trying so hard to be taller. A compulsive dieter all her adult life, she would actually have been pleased to see how thin she’d finally become. She’d have laughed about it: “Nu, I had to drop dead to look good!?”

I wanted the students to know that she had a huge personality, which held us all in thrall. That she would never have wanted to live to 92 if she’d known she had to suffer a long, slow mental decline. That her brain—do they dissect the brain too, with all its plaques and tangles?—was once intact, and brilliant.

Of course they won’t care about all that. I didn’t care either, back then.

My mother’s body was refrigerated for a year, awaiting its turn in the classroom. I could have seen her one more time if I wanted to. A tiny part of me, the morbidly curious part, was tempted to take a peek. My mother, so down-to-earth about death, would have understood.