My mother-in-law, whom my son called Nia, was buried eleven years ago today, on Labor Day, in the family plot in Queens, one I used in the novel I just finished. It’s an older Jewish graveyard, impossible now to get into, one with a fancy wrought iron gate. The best plots are at the top of the hill with the views—why should the real estate of the dead be any different than the real estate of the living? As you ascend the hill, the burial plots have the names of the big department stores in New York: Macy’s, Gimbels, Saks, and indeed the neoclassical grave markers, look like little department stores. Something I noticed when the limo was going up the hill. I used this too in the novel I just finished.
Nia died the day the levee burst in New Orleans. While we were making funeral arrangements in Santa Monica before flying to New York, then Secretary Rice was seen buying shoes at Saks in New York, and New Orleans was sinking into the water.
It happened very quickly and unexpectedly. Both the drowning of New Orleans and the drowning of my mother-in-law in East Hampton. Nia had houseguests for the long weekend. She had spoken to my husband on a Thursday morning about some business matter, and mentioned she was going to the beach with her guests. Thirty minutes later she swam out, and the coroner guesses had a heart attack, and minutes later, her body was seen floating in the grey green waters of Louse Point: her favorite place to swim. Someone fished her out, someone else called my son who had just graduated from University of Chicago and was bartending at a local restaurant. He called my husband, my husband called me. And then he said, “I guess I’m coming home from work.”
I said, “That might be a good idea.” Then he said, “Would you get me something to eat, I haven’t had lunch.” I said, “Of course!” hung up and walked over to the nearby Whole Foods and bought all sorts of things to eat.
An hour or so later, my very pale husband came in the door, sat down, at the little table by the kitchen window.
“Have you cried?” I asked.
“I can’t tell.” He replied. “I pulled over and sort of did something. But nothing much came out.”
I had experienced much the same reaction. I had stopped in my walk to the Whole Foods. Leaned against a telephone pole, but nothing much came out.
My husband didn’t eat his lunch. In fact, my husband didn’t eat anything for the next month. Not the lunch I packed for the plane, not any of the funeral food we had at his parent’s apartment on West 77th Street. My husband is a big eater. All of us are, but he’s the one who thinks it’s a sin to think about scrimping on a meal.
Someone called us and said, we had to send a paid obit to the New York Times.
Someone else called and said, she was trying to get a real obit in the New York Times.
I sat down and wrote out a few paragraphs. I found the obit number and began reciting, and somewhere in there, my husband roused himself from his stupor at the end of the little table by the windows with the full plate of food in front of him and gave me the hand signal he gives to a waiter when he wants the check.
I paused. Then asked the man I was talking to on the obit line, “By the way, how much is this costing me?”
He replied, “If you want an obit in the New York Times, you don’t ask price.”
“So how much per word?” I insisted. I was a copywriter for years, and have a pretty good nose for word count. I knew I had just written several hundred words. Several hundred words that translated into between five and ten grand. God knows what it is now. Years later I was talking to a woman whose husband writes obits for the New York Times and she told me, the paid obits are the most profitable division at the paper. I’m not surprised.
I said, “Excuse me,” to the obit man, put the phone down, and held up five fingers, then ten. And whispered thousands.
My husband roused himself and yelled, “Cut! Cut!”
I hung up, cut the obit down to four sentences and we found a friend to stay with the cat and the next day flew to New York.
By now, New Orleans was under water, we weren’t watching TV, but the paper was delivered, the one with the four sentence obit and we saw the pictures of the residents of the ninth ward sitting on the rooftops of their houses, awaiting rescue.
My mother-in-law was literate, idiosyncratic, whimsical and always said she refused to do what her own mother had done: which was to languish for years in bed with paid attendants. She was true to her word.
I’m staying in her little house now fixing it up for rental. I finished my novel here this summer. And I’ve come to love this house very much.
One of my fondest memories of Nia is on the day she saw me after I’d dyed my hair bright red. I’d just gone back to work at an advertising agency, a year or so after my son was born. She took one look at my bright dyed tresses, disappeared into the back of her apartment, and brought back a lock of her own real red hair, one she had presumably been saving for just such an occasion. I’ve forgotten to mention, when she was young, Nia was a raving beauty.
“This is what real red hair looks like, Mary! Mine was Titian colored!” My hair was quite long then and as always very curly. She pulled out one of my curls, and laid her authentic one against my fake one.
I smiled. She smiled. Then she, the baby (my son) and my father-in-law had dinner. As usual, my husband was on the coast working on a project.
Indeed, he’s on the coast working on a project as I write this. I missed him then. And I miss him now.
by 
