Mangia! Mangia!
How am I supposed to keep going?
ANTOINETTE JACKSON

The drive back to Texas from California was no easier than the drive to Orange County my mother's funeral was two weeks earlier.

It was now the middle of January. Christmas was long over so I didn't have to listen to the carols playing on the radio that reminded me of happier times.

But there was another song being played. Every time Michael Bolton crooned "How am I supposed to live without you?" tears came to my eyes

Here I was 57 years old and I was crying like a big baby because I didn't have my mother.

"First Daddy, now Mom; I'm an orphan. How am I supposed to live without the two of them," I lamented.

The question sounded silly even to me, especially since my husband, the most important person in my life, was sitting right next to me.

But he's a man, and I knew Bob wouldn't understand if I kept talking about how empty I felt, especially since his parents were still alive.

So I sat quietly, listening to the radio, counting the familiar mile markers along the side of the road.

The flat terrain between Phoenix and Fort Worth is the most boring 1,000 miles in the country.

Forest Lawn Mausoleum

All that open space was fertile ground to replay in my head, like mini-movies, the events of last two weeks.

"Bring a dress for your mother," Leonard Ferrera our friend of the family and funeral director told me over the telephone before we left.

Since moving to California in 1960, Mom exchanged her drab Midwestern housedresses for brightly colored Hawaiian muumuus.

While muumuus and housecoats were appropriate for daily wear at the nursing home, they were inappropriate for her final dress up.

Mom and I wore the same size.

I was a couple inches taller, but in this case, length wouldn't be a problem.

I searched through my closet for Mom's colors.

I had no bright fuchsia, turquoise, orange or anything vivid she would wear.

So, I grabbed the next best thing: a nice basic ivory and navy dress.

Aunt Evelyn would have loved it, but Mom would have hated it.

"She's gonna get me for this," I thought, "but I'll deal with that later."

At the funeral home in California, when Leonard showed Johnny and me our mother dressed in that classic dress, I knew I was going to have to pay big time for that someday.

"I don't like that dress on her. And why isn't my mother smiling?" I asked. "I never saw my mother when she wasn't smiling."

"It's just not done that way, Antoinette," Leonard answered. "The dead are supposed to look like they are sleeping."

"Mom had pretty eyes," Johnny said. "I had forgotten how nice her eyes looked without those glasses. Yeah, Mom had pretty eyes . . ." his voice drifted off.

The next day at the viewing, our friends and family filed in and out of the funeral home. They saw her in that classic ivory and navy dress.

No one seemed to notice and no one said anything, but I kept wishing I had run out and bought her a dressy fuchsia muumuu.

Johnny, his wife Kathy, Bob and I sat to the left of the casket, a couple of rows down from Mom.

"Aunt Mary looks good," Cousin Sammy Pugliese said, dragging his oxygen tank behind him and sitting down next to us.

Years of smoking a couple of packs of unfiltered Pall Malls a day rewarded him with emphysema.

"Did you ever notice, people always say that at wakes. What are they going to say? `The deceased looks like death warmed over?'"

While the disease slowed his body down, it could never dampen Sammy's quick wit.

Soon after, my cousin John and his wife Clare came in. "Aunt Mary looks good." John said. "Ma looked nice too when she died. The two sisters were beautiful even in death," he added as they sat down next to his brother Sam.

In the next hour, cousins and spouses sat around visiting and swapping stories about our family. First quietly, then a little louder, and then even louder.

"All we need now is for Sammy to play his mandolin, and cousin John to play the guitar, " I was thinking as I looked over to my husband.

Bob was probably thinking along the same lines. "Your mother would have liked this," he said with a smile on his face.

"Yes, she would." I said, feeling her presence all around us.

Thankfully, the next day during the closed coffin service at Forest Lawn in Cypress, I didn 't have to look at that dress.

I stared straight ahead at the cold marble mausoleum walls in an attempt to control my tears.

"They're like file cabinets," I thought, as I squinted to read some of the names on the brass identification plates. "She's being filed under `C' for `Chiarenza."

I would have preferred the warm soil of Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Chicago, but California had been my parents' home for over four decades and this was their choice.

"Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints," Pastor Mike Foell preached. His words broke through the cold ambience with comforting warmth.

Afterwards, while we were sitting around my brother's kitchen table, Johnny said. "You know, Sis, Mom wouldn't want us to lose touch with each other. I'll call you one Sunday and you call me the next Sunday, okay?"

"Works for me, John," I answered, marveling at the wisdom my little brother had gained in the last few years.

Like the tires on our vehicle, that song, the dress, the wonderful chatter at the visitation, Mike's precious words and the red poinsettias kept turning over and over in my mind. Finally we were pulling into our driveway of home where I would begin a new year and another phase of my life.

Eleven years later, a company is using the Michael Bolton song in their commercial.

It took some time, but tear by tear, day by day and memory by memory, the sadness left my heart.

And at "How am I supposed to live without you," what do I answer now? It turns out I didn't have to.

Mom left a big piece of her with me to walk with me daily.

!

Antoinette Jackson is a Bullard-area resident. You may reach her at Antojxn@aol.com.