Frost

Monument

By Alison Frost

Attn: Service Coordinator, Mount Pleasant Cemetery Group

Re: Plot 4B, Section 30.

Please consider the following official letter of instructions.

1.

It is important to spell it out in full: Name. Day. Month. Year.

It is important that she is born on the 29th of December, 1946. It is important to conjure—all of a sudden—the wild snowstorm Sunday at dawn as she roars into the world. To imagine also her open lips, toothless milky mouth. A bundle perched on my grandmother’s sturdy lap, the two of them chauffeured carefully home from the hospital on the back bench of my grandfather’s overheated Chevrolet. To watch the car glide like a boat, well below the speed limit, the blinkers like fireworks along a bleached-out Bathurst St. Icy snow and fallen twigs on the ill-lit downtown. Her tiny open mouth, her father’s thin wind-blown hair and white knuckles. The first dusk of a family’s life.

2.

It is important that she is always the youngest in her classes. That she is the smallest and the brightest, quiet and brave, filling notebooks with long new words to remember. My mother’s books are piled now beside my bed in a precious tower, inscribed in impeccable cursive: Jeannette Marianne Owens, 1956. Runnymede Public School. Great Classics Primer; Jeannette Owens, Pre-Med, 1968, The U of T. Wuthering Heights; Dr. Jeannette Owens, Year 4. Human Embryology; Crossings by Danielle Steele; A Woman of Substance by Barbara Taylor Bradford. Hidden Valley Cottage. No specific date. No fancy inscription. Soft covers and cracked spines and folded pages. The brown splotches from wet towels. A strand of orange yarn still marks a page.

3.

It is important that my mother tilts her head slightly to the right in photographs. She touches her collarbone when she talks, or the tips of her hair. She is girlish in the eyes and the laugh, twisting her thin body effortlessly when she sits. When she is 19 and when she is 32, her skin is so smooth. How could we know she could get old or sick? When at 73 ½ she is smooth-skinned and freckled like a child.

In a last photo of our mother, she cranes her face proudly up to the camera from a lawn chair. She has a fleece blanket pulled up to her chin and her swollen feet are covered. Her eyeglasses are a cheerful red, fashionable and professional. She is grinning, the blue sky reflected in her glasses, distorting her rheumy eyes. She has been laughing at the state she is in. Nothing indicates that this will be the last pair of stylish eyeglasses she’ll buy and the last photo at home.

4.

She must be just shy of 36 years old in the framed photograph we take off the piano to place beside her hospital bed. The photo was taken at the Sunnybrook Stables, down the road from this very room, past the parking garages and garish signage. Out of sight of the brick towers and jaundiced lights of the main complex. The stables belong to a different world, green, unfettered and bold. In the photograph our mother is surrounded by her children, directing us with her whole body—her arms, her hips, her smile and voice—towards the lens. She seems happily caught off guard, on the verge of laughing out loud maybe. My youngest brother is a toddler, slung precariously on her hip, low, awkward and heavy. She tilts her head slightly, urging us all to look, keep looking. Everyone at once, quick! Look! The sun, the sky, the camera, posterity. The fence, the horse, its huge mouth in action and its giant teeth.

5.

It is important that it’s a Friday morning when my brothers and sisters and I walk together where the stables used to be. Milling around on the grass of an old paddock. Already Friday again, after so many unanchored days and nights looking up from the parking lot to our mother’s room, waiting on picnic benches clutching phones. This day has the air of a Friday, an air of anticipation, that edge between the end of something and the unknown. Picking up sticks and knocking them on broken pickets, making nervous jokes and kicking at grass too green for October. Our movements, our inane chatter, checking our phones. It is all for lack of knowhow. We can’t decide which corner of white picket fence was ours from that childhood photo, which bit of road and grass it might have been. My youngest brother can’t remember seeing the horses at all. My older brother has been afraid of horses ever since. We are children and we are grown. None of us can tell you how we were going to do this next part.

We walk loop upon loop as if some deliberateness could rearrange the clouds or reroute a plane or alter the course of this day. And then, when the phone rings, we run. We run together as if we’ve always known the way. As if there are no other people, no stairs upon stairs. No doors, no hallways, no beeping machines or squeaky shoes.

Her hands are pinned down on the side of the bed by tubes, heavy with the weight of time and the end of air. Here we gather, winded, gently holding our mother’s cool foot and her flank and her wrist. She can’t tell us anything anymore. We’ll never know what she is seeing or remembering.

How does it feel? my grandparents used to ask us on our birthdays over bundt cake and ice cream. How does it feel to be 6 and 10, 18 and 25?

Fine. We humoured them. It feels fine!

How does it feel? I think, holding her porcelain foot as the clock above her head ticks on. How does it feel to stop turning old? Humour me, Mummy! Tell me you feel fine.

The sunlight from the tiny dirty hospital window spreads over her body, resting momentarily on our father’s wedding ring, his one hand covering her hand, the other on her bare chest as if to warm her up. It seems impossible that we should all just turn around and go, while the sun still winks like that on a single ring. That we should take the plastic baggy with her own wedding rings and her red glasses and her pink phone and a tube of moisturizer and just leave, just leave her behind. That’s impossible: to leave our mother in this 5th floor room alone with nothing but a giant Styrofoam cup, still half full. The clock already passing 3.

6.

It is important that the first Friday afterwards is her burial. The grass is an unseasonable technicolour green and there is the sound of riding mowers in the distance. There are new roses in the iron railing and the cosmos remain on ruddy stalks: tall and silky and oblivious. We are a small, disoriented group, as of yet unfamiliar with the curve of the cemetery road on which we park, the slope of lawn up to the plot, the pattern of ancient roots under foot. It is important that the minister’s words are interrupted by a bright blond coyote waltzing through our story along the quiet backs of graves, out of nowhere and as if she has lived here for all time.

I remember that on that late autumn day my throat and hands are bare but that after that, every Friday is winter.

7.

Christmas slides down the railing, spreading tinsel blindly in the dark. The ornaments and the garlands don’t matter anymore, and they matter too much. There are the children’s presents she had stashed away, like a last treasure. How to handle those. I look for her face in the flickering bulbs and in the pulpy winter sky. I look for instruction. But only her grandchildren can claim to have seen her. She was standing in the room with the piano, they say, the dim lamplight reflected back to them as flame. It was her eyeglasses they saw for certain as they were walking together up the front hall stairs.

It is important to remember that her birthday falls in the papery time warp between Christmas and a new year. That shimmering blur of timelessness, carelessness. It would be false to say she hadn’t been overlooked some years, in the glut of toys and wrapping and the bloat of Christmas feasts. It would be false to say we aren’t trying now to salvage, to make it up to her. That we aren’t scrounging through videos and strips of negatives, amongst the decades of badly lit dining room photos. We do find her with the cakes and candles, leftover Christmas trifle and half-drunk wine, giant funny cards and tiny blue boxes that genuinely catch her by surprise. I zoom in on her hand by her face, the half-read card and open mouth, her slender fingers talking in the air. I frame old photos and wrap them up so that those of us left behind will have something to open.

How does it feel? Dec 29th ? The gift of stone, dark gray granite, silent and unliftable.

8.

It is important that his name appear directly under hers. Full name. 1945—Yes, he says, the em dash as well. It fulfills a promise. Rest assured, it says.

9.

It is important to all of us that our mother’s monument be installed as soon as possible. That the script be deep enough for an index finger to trace with closed eyes. So deep that as the seasons move ahead, year after year, we can conjure her up from these giant trees and the windblown lawn. It is important that the details be inscribed in full, a safeguard against the squalls of time. It is important that we take advantage of this premature thaw. That here under the canopy of this mossy yew tree with a view of the white shed and the roses, we may be secured to this earth forever.

Alison Frost writes in an old Toronto house with lovely windows, many children and a handful of pets. Her work has appeared in Room, Joyland, Prairie Fire, The Capilano Review and The Fieldstone Review. She once won Room’s Creative Non-Fiction Contest.