I KINDLY STOPPED BY FOR HER

She met me at the door.

“I told you never to come back,” she said. “In fact, I think the last time you were here I told you to go to hell.” She had told me a lot of other places to go as well, but that was the one that everyone always used.

She was angry. And I understood why.

“I didn’t really have a choice,” I said, because I hadn’t had one at the time. I’ve never really had one, not that I was complaining. “And I’ve been to hell and back too many times already. I didn’t come to cause any trouble,” I promised. “I swear.”

She gave me a look that told me what she thought of my vow. Apparently, she had forgotten the choice words she had flung my direction, but those were easily shrugged away.

Like I said, she was angry. They were always angry. And I always forgave the anger. I think sometimes Dylan Thomas was watching each of them when he wrote of old age burning and raving at the close of the day. A pretty turn of phrase, sure, but it was just that.

It was a poetic message for a prosaic passing.

Besides, it wasn’t as if I had wanted to darken anyone’s door. But a visit from me was just something that happened. Like the rain, or taxes, or losing that last puzzle piece.

“May I come in, please?” I asked. It was a formality, asking. I could have gone in if I had wanted to, and there was no way she could have stopped me, even if she had gone kicking and screaming.

But it was inappropriate to invite myself in, even if I had a right to be there.

And I get it. Perhaps that was a little old-fashioned of me. Even as times changed it was always important to cleave to a certain standard. Always kindly stop by a host’s home, even if they would never stop by for me.

I thought she would hurl another insult my way – it wouldn’t land any more than the others, of course, and I think she realized that eventually. Weary, sighing, she nodded, shambling out of the way in her worn slippers to collapse in a sagging rocking chair.

I took off my shoes, setting them carefully by the door to avoid even a whisper of dust from following me in. It had been a decade or more since I had last come, but it still wore the same scars of the home I remembered. The same wallpaper peeled from the corners, the same television set gasped in static from its place atop a misappropriated nightstand, the same well loved tea set sat in silent contemplation from its place by the stove. “Is the tea in the same place?” I asked. “It should be right about time for your last cup.”

She grunted something that sounded almost like agreement. I went to the cupboard, the same slightly slanted one that Willard swore up and down he was going to fix next week and never would. I caught myself smiling as his name came to me without effort. Willard. Willard and Wilma. A matched set in a place where opposites attracted more often than two birds of a feather.

The tea was, as I expected, the same earl grey that she had preferred all her life. There was only a handful of tea leaves left, just barely enough to brew a pot, but enough for the purpose. I let the sink drool into the kettle, let the gas stove click three times before flame ignited with a sigh, and I left the kettle to boil while I retrieved two cups.

“I’m happy to see these,” I said. And despite what she might think – and she rarely had an opinion the world wouldn’t hear immediately and firsthand – there was something soothing about holding the ceramic in my hands again. It was more cracked than before. More faded, too, but that was true of all things in life. Memories. Old tattoos. Even love, though we always lie and tell ourselves that, once known between two souls, love is eternal.

It wasn’t. At least, it wasn’t for most people. I knew it was true here, between Wilma and Willard. I had watched them live it out every day for half a lifetime before coming back first day on the job and taking Willard with me.

It was probably why I didn’t think of them as Mom and Dad anymore. I couldn’t. Politic distance was best, especially after Wilma’s love for me cracked the day I came to take Dad away.

The tea kettle started a low whistle for my attention, but I was already reaching for it before the whistle even flirted with a scream. I poured hers first, leaving just the right amount of room for lemon and milk she always liked. It wasn’t the right color, a faint gold where it should have been amber but appropriate to see that nothing gold stayed.

I gave myself four swallows worth of tea more out of ritual than intent. Frankly, I hated tea. It tasted like muddy water, but I had grown in a house proud of an English heritage that I later discovered was assumed. Wilma had her tea, and Dad drank it with her despite hating it as much as I did.

He had shared that, the last day.

She accepted the tea from me with a stodgy reluctance, her own daily ritual playing out as the tv buzzed through some program that I had watched with rote acceptance as a child. Raising my cup to absent loved ones the world over – my own ritual – I took a swallow, trying and failing to savor the citrus notes that felt like someone had added perfume to water.

She muted the tv, and for a moment I thought she would say something. Instead, she let the silence bloom into a sepulchral weight heavy enough that I was surprised she could still breathe.

Eventually, it did break under the whisper of a single syllable. “Why?”

I wanted to respond that Dad wasn’t happy with the life he was living at that point. I wanted to respond that it was a job and that it didn’t matter that it was my own flesh and blood that was taken. I wanted to respond that it was the only peace and closure that I could give a man who had stayed up nights with me when I was sick or heartbroken or in pain.

I wanted to, but I settled for two syllables instead. “Because.”

She looked at me then, with a look that screamed of broken trust and betrayal and all the words that I see on any face when I arrive. Cliché feelings for a cliché moment maybe, but knowing that it was the same reaction through all of human history meant that perhaps there was a reason for those feelings being the nearest to hand. “He was your father.”

“And he was your husband, though he felt it less and less at the end.”

“Are you saying that I was the reason –“

I cut her off. “No. Of course not, and he told me that the whole drive away before I dropped him off. He knew you loved him the same way that he knew that you would keep this house a shrine to his memory.”

Moisture might have gathered at the corner of blue eyes gone gray, but I knew it was a trick of the light. Wilma never cried, even in her deepest pain. She pointed at the appropriated nightstand. “We got that before any of you were born. We had spent nearly every last cent on rent –“

“- and he came back one day with a rickety piece of furniture that he had found on the side of the road. Wasn’t even marked free. Just a piece of garbage that had fallen off a scrapyard truck but he picked it up, brought it back and worked on it. Stripped it, finished it, and stained it just in time for you to get your first tv.” I knew the story well. I knew all the stories, in this house. I know all the stories in every house I visited. It was the least I could do when I showed up.

I was told that it was comforting to those left behind. Perhaps it was a lie, meant to comfort those of us who were the reason someone was left behind. I’ve never felt anything beyond compassion for those I visited and took, but perhaps that was why some said that when He retired that I would take over.

I took another swallow of tea while Wilma pointed out another artefact and shared a story she had told me a dozen times before. She had shrieked some of them at my back the day I had taken Dad: he had apologized for her temper as he always did, the fog in his mind clearing enough for a last attempt to heal the chasm created by his departure. He was always like that. Eternally patient, forever understanding. He was a northern star that I had measured my own path by, a beacon beyond my reach no matter how far I stretched my hand. He had always sworn that all I needed to do to make him proud was to work hard, be a man of my word, and to live well.

I hope that I’ve done all three, even if the last one is only in a passing sense because of what work has demanded of me.

I’d like to think that he checks in on me when he can.

Wilma finished another soliloquy that I endured with stoic determination, taking a drink before asking me again, “Why?” I had thought she was talking about Dad, but for the first time in years I thought maybe she was asking about something else.  I asked her for the longer version of the question. “Why do this? Where’s the benefit?”

I smiled, saving the last swallow. It was a question that I enjoyed answering. “Because sometimes we need help leaving, and sometimes a friendly face is what we need to leave well.”

A measure of bitterness returned to her face. “So that’s why you left us alone? Left me alone with your father for years as his mind left? And then you came back, on that last day to take him away just when he was getting better?”

She had it backwards. He was better that day because I came back for him, a final kindness before I took him with me. I had thought it would have been a pleasant memory, but perhaps that was emotion speaking. “I ‘left’ you because I thought you might try and build up a store of memories before he lost his own forever. I ‘left’ you because ‘for better and for worse’ are deeper words than some trite expression offered on a wedding day that passes by in an instant.” I took a deep breath, exhaling out the anger that I didn’t know remained within me. I tried to soften my tone. “I ‘left’ you because I thought it was the most compassionate road I could take.”

She gave a harrumph, draining the last of her tea and heaving herself wearily to her feet. She trudged to the stove, trying to refill the kettle from a faucet that had finally stopped dripping, trying to light the stove that clicked without a hiss of gas. She muttered to herself, angry, wounded, weary.

It was easy to forget that she wasn’t always that way. The years of Dad’s disease had hardened her. She had learned to have a sharp tongue over a thousand games of the same repeated question and answer. She had let her heart slowly harden since the day he told her that he could remember where he had gone to high school better than the day they had welcomed me.

She was different, broken now in the same way the world breaks us all.

Some of us never heal from the break.

Some of us think we heal and break again.

Some of us know that something, once broken, can only be made into something new.

That last was why I left. I could not watch as Dad rotted from the inside. And as long as I stayed, I would remain broken or break again, and she would have had two men to prop up.

But how do you say that as you’re walking out the door?

She was still muttering, tired hands fidgeting with the knobs as if she could will the spent stove back into life. An impossible task, but perhaps she would understand why I was here.

I realized she wouldn’t without my help. “It won’t light,” I said eventually. “It’s over, Mom.”

Hearing the old title jolted her from her puttering. She looked at me, her eyes faded in a pale shadow of brown, but her gaze finally took me all in. The midnight suit, the obsidian tie, the bone white button-down. “You were dressed the same way when you took your father from me.”

I nodded.

“You hate looking like an undertaker. You’ve always hated it.” Realization slowly dawned. “You said you wouldn’t be caught dead in a suit.”

“Turns out that it’s part of the uniform for the job,” I said. “I’ve learned to accept it. Sometimes appearances matter.”

“It’s my turn, isn’t it?” she asked. “That really was my final cup of tea.”

I nodded.

She sighed. “What will happen to the house?”

I shrugged. “Whatever you and Dad decided.”

“Can I at least tidy up the place before we go?”

“Sure,” I said. “You can even have the last of my tea if you like.” She took it from me with cold hands, savoring the final pale dregs with something approaching true enjoyment.

I waited as she tried to beat life into crumpled pillows and failed, waited as she folded the blankets that had kept her warm long after Dad’s heat had faded. I would have offered to help but letting her put her last mark on the world before leaving was the final kindness I gave every pick-up.

It wasn’t much, perhaps. A final ripple in the ocean, a final whisper in the dark, but for some it was all they had and all they wanted.

For Mom, it was a final reminder of the woman she had once been. I even saw a measure of life return to her – not enough to keep her here, of course, but enough to remind her of the imprint her life had made on the world.

Soon she was done, the living room put back in order one final time. “What now?” she asked.

I pointed to my car outside. “We take a ride,” I said.

She followed me towards the door, though she stopped before we crossed the threshold one last time. “Will I see him again?” she asked. “Not as he became… but as we were?”

I wanted to lie to her and promise that they would be reunited, but sometimes ‘til death do us part’ means more than ‘for better or for worse.’ Instead, I settled for the best answer I had, the best answer that I gave every pick-up.

“I hope so.”