Laughing and Crying at the Same Time

On the morning of my daughter Lauren’s wedding, I was in the Frank E. Campbell funeral home haggling over the price of caskets for my mother who had died the night before. It was Saturday, March 21^st, 2020, and New York City had been shutting down in stages all week. My mother’s body too had shut down in stages.

I’d gone with my mother one week earlier to New York Hospital to keep her company for a routine procedure to puncture a cyst in her abdomen. She had dressed as usual in dark, elegant colors––skirts and jackets of black or shades of the darkest blue. Her closet held dozens upon dozens of these outfits so alike that only she could distinguish one from the other. She was buoyant that day, eager to be done with the procedure so she could return to work.

She was 81, tiny in stature but buzzing with energy, her eyes bright with intensity, the way people look when they are fully committed to a mission they love. She had found her calling in life at age 65, a “late bloomer.”

At Weill Cornell Medical, she had created a Clinical Center dedicated to treating patients with Crohn’s and Colitis, the two “IBD” diseases.  A few years later, she created a Research Center to find new cures for IBD. My mother oversaw the two Centers as philanthropist, volunteer, and patient advocate. She’d had her own history of chronic GI and inflammatory issues, and she understood exactly how to talk to patients to give them the moral support they needed.

My mother always had the obsessive and restless energy of an entrepreneur, combined with great guilt over the money she’d been given and hadn’t earned. She’d searched her whole life for some purpose that would allow her to deploy her energies and give away her money to help people. She called it paying rent for being alive. After a long and unhappy search, she’d found her dream in her Centers.

My mother’s cyst procedure was quick, and the doctor told us the needle had done its work. Already fully dressed, my mother wanted to leave, but the doctor halted her. She had to stay for an hour in recovery. She protested that she felt fine, the hour wait unnecessary. But hospital rules.

So she and I had an opportunity to talk. We spoke through our masks about how the day before, my wife and I had made the difficult but necessary decision to downsize my daughter’s wedding celebration.

Originally, the wedding was to have been a 200 person celebration at the Metropolitan Club. It had been over a year in the planning, my wife and daughter collaborating on every aesthetic aspect and detail. It had been a wonderful bonding experience for them. The wedding had taken place in their minds dozens of times, each time a little different as a new idea came to them.

But now the wedding next Saturday would take place in our living room with some fraction of the 200 people, a fraction that would get progressively smaller as the wedding got closer and the reality sunk in that any gathering carried the risk of a super spreader event. The fewer the people the better.

I told my mother about the telephone conversation I’d had with Lauren when I’d delivered the final kibosh on the Metropolitan Club celebration. In a vain effort to soften the blow, I’d pointed out to Lauren that the celebration had been only postponed, not permanently cancelled. All the vendors had agreed to roll forward our payments, except for the florist. All the flowers had already been cut, and most of them would find their way as donations into hospital rooms that were rapidly filling up.

My postponement vs. cancellation tactic failed to make a positive impression. So I tried this. “You’ll have two weddings, so you’ll be able to wear two different wedding dresses.”

At that, Lauren shrieked at me that I was clueless. I could picture her face, always expressive, usually radiant with a smile, but now clouded, her lip quivering to hold back tears.  

I gave out a heavy sigh. I hated to disappoint my daughter and wife. Then Lauren said in her icy, disciplinarian teacher’s voice, “Don’t you sigh at me!”

I laughed.

In moments of great stress, I will find any excuse to laugh, and “don’t you sigh at me!” struck me as funny. Laughing is a release for me, but it often lands as the worst possible reaction, which was true this time.

My mother acknowledged the humor, but she was upset for Lauren and my wife Debbie. We all knew that the marriage is what mattered, not the celebration. And while true, it gave little comfort to Lauren who’d been dreaming of this day since she’d been a little girl.

We spoke about Lauren’s soon to be husband. All of us, including my mother, had fallen in love with him, and my mother said it made her happy to think about her granddaughter’s future as a happy wife and someday a loving mother.

---

The next day and over that weekend, my mother started to feel unwell. She and I spoke almost every day, and her voice on the phone had a wooden, hollow quality, the voice she used when heavily medicated against pain. By Wednesday she had developed a fever.

She called that day to ask me to promise her one thing. To make sure my brother would not attend the wedding, because he was immunocompromised, having been diagnosed earlier that year with stage four Lymphoma. My brother is a Public Defender, loyal and brave and quick witted, with the same bright intensity in his eyes for his clients that my mother had for her patients.  

I promised my mother I’d keep him away.  

That night, late, I got a call from my father. He was in an ambulance headed to the hospital with my mother. Her fever had worsened, her doctor had visited her at home, and called for the ambulance. My father told me my mother wanted me to meet them at the hospital so I could be with her. She always wanted me there because my presence calmed her.

But I was scared of going to the hospital and getting infected. The numbers of infections in New York City had been skyrocketing and the sounds of sirens in the streets were constant. My daughter’s wedding was three days away. I didn’t want to miss it. I told my father I didn’t think I should go this time.

I heard him tell my mother “He won’t come.”

I’ll carry around that guilt forever.

When my parents arrived at the hospital, my father was told he couldn’t go upstairs with my mother. Hospital pandemic rules. My father is the opposite of a curmudgeon, a kind gentleman who doesn’t like to make trouble or call attention to himself. He didn’t protest.

But I think I’d have found a way to go upstairs to squeeze my mother’s hand. I’d have been a bully or a charmer with the staff as necessary, called whoever I needed to in order to greenlight my way upstairs. I’d have shamelessly pulled every string at our family’s disposal, all strings and all pull having been created by my mother. I’d have tried.

Later that same night, past midnight but before morning, I got a call from the hospital. They needed my permission to operate on my mother. My father was listed first as her healthcare proxy, but had either been unavailable or had deferred the decision to me as second in line.

My mother weighed 80 pounds and despite her energy she was frail and vulnerable, so any operation was a risk. But the doctor told me the urgent necessity of the operation outweighed any risks. They needed to try to relieve her rapidly worsening stomach pains and find the fever-inducing infection. Without an operation, they didn’t know if she would make it through the night.

I heard my mother in the background plead “yes.” She sounded desperate. She sounded like she wanted more than anything to be put under so that her ordeal would end one way or another. Her greatest fear was a long illness before death. She had a particular horror of feeding tubes. I said yes to the operation.

The operation in the early morning hours was followed by another the next day. My mother’s condition wavered back and forth between a slight chance and no chance.

At 11 pm on Friday night, I got a call from a nurse to come to the hospital for a chance to say goodbye. That call reinforced my belief that I could have gone upstairs to see her on Wednesday evening.

I called an Uber and waited on Fifth Avenue across from the Metropolitan Museum, glowing in the night just as it always does. Before my car arrived the same nurse called back and said not to come. My mother had died.

---

Within minutes, the whole family knew. Lauren felt great guilt at having been so upset when the wedding had been downsized. Guilt runs deep and freely in our family.

I told Lauren that the two events were only connected by time, and that she could allow herself to be upset about the downsized wedding without taking anything away from her grief about her Grandma Jill’s sudden passing. My children have been lucky to know all four grandparents for decades; my mother was the only one who had died.

Lauren asked me if I wanted to call off the wedding in our living room the next day.

We still felt my mother’s presence keenly, and we all knew she would have been furious had we called off the wedding. She had become a recent adherent to Stoicism as a way of handling her chronic pain. She liked to say, “You play the hand you’re dealt,” her way of interpreting the essence of Stoicism.

We had been dealt a hand that included her death. “Why on earth,” my mother would have said, “should my death stop the marriage ceremony? Why should I matter? I’m no longer here.”

My daughter and wife were concerned I’d be too emotional to handle it. But I wanted the wedding, just as much as my mother would have wanted it. In fact I felt I needed it.

---

On Saturday morning I walked down 81^st Street to the funeral home.

I’d woken up angry at the world and wanted nothing to do with any person who hadn’t known and loved my mother.

The Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel has been called the “funeral home of the stars,” the last stop for those who are always at the right place to be seen. It’s a large house, the size of a gilded age mansion, bending around the corner of 81^st Street and Madison Avenue.

The public spaces inside the funeral home are large and on this day, they were silent and appropriately tomb-like. They would be quiet for many months, during a time when their business could have been as brisk as ever.

My mother’s body would arrive at the funeral home that day or the next. She had selected her gravesite on the New Jersey shore, next to my father’s parents and the stillborn twins of my brother, the Public Defender with Lymphoma. My brother would make the trek to New Jersey the next week to see her buried and to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish.

My mother had left us instructions to bury her according to Jewish tradition in a plain pine box. Decades ago, she had tried to satisfy her energies by becoming Orthodox. It didn’t last, but she retained a respect for what she had learned.

After a few twists and turns inside the funeral home, I found myself face to face with James who would help me make arrangements.

James was a round man with a round face who may have suffered from a permanent five o’clock shadow or hadn’t shaved that day. He made every effort to speak to me in a soothing voice and a sympathetic manner consistent with his role. But I found him unnatural, out of place, a high school athlete gone to pot. I would have expected to encounter him working as a gym teacher or as an usher at a stadium. He wasn’t chewing gum, but chewing gum would have suited him.

“Now what arrangements shall we make for Mom?” said James as his opening gambit. “Mom,” not “your Mom,” not “your Mother.” With that bit of overfamiliar clumsiness, James ceased to become a source of irritation and instead became a potential source of amusement for me to share with my brothers.

I told James “Mom” wanted a plain pine box. I learned two things immediately. There was no such thing as a plain pine box at Frank E. Campbell, at least not on the spur of the moment. And there were separate lines of caskets for Jewish corpses and for Christian corpses.

James suggested the top of the line Jewish casket called The Moses. Perhaps, I thought, so that Mom and Moses could travel together to finally see the Promised Land. I expressed shock at the price. James picked up on my resistance to The Moses. “The Hezikiah is a wonderful choice.”

Not the star power of an A-Lister like Moses, savior of the Jewish people, but Hezikiah was a famous and important Jewish king, a solid B-lister with a fourteen thousand dollar price tag.

There are many studies proving that given three prices, most customers will pick the middle one.

“What else is there,” I asked. James made the motion but not the noise of clucking his tongue. Then reluctantly, “There’s always the Tohar.” A last refuge of penny pinchers at five thousand bucks.

I’d never heard of Tohar. Our Rabbi who gallantly came later that day to perform the marriage ceremony also had never heard of Tohar. He needed to use Google to find some mention of this Tohar character in the Torah.

Tohar, famous for exactly nothing, except to upsell the Hezikiah.

My mother had an unusual relationship to money. Seven figure sums meant little to her, because they were abstract, untranslatable to everyday things. The wastefulness of a $5,000 casket, though, would have outraged her. But she wasn’t there. I chose it and left James and that place of mourning with no mourners.

My two brothers and I have always had a shared humor for the bizarre and hopeless. When I told my brothers about my James experience, I shook with laughter. I could barely get the words out and every time I said Hezikiah, another great gale of wild laughter hit me.

There have been phases when my brothers and I had seen each other less frequently, different life paths diverging. But our mother would always act as a hub of information, making sure we all knew what was going on in each other’s lives. In this way, she had kept us bound closely together.

Now that our mother had died, we had already become closer. It’s what we needed and it’s what our mother would want.

I was back in our apartment, dressing for the wedding. Ahead of me, the ten person wedding ceremony would provide an intensity of joyful emotion I didn’t expect and had never experienced before.

But as I struggled with my cufflinks, I kept saying “Hezikiah.” It had not yet lost its power to shake me with laughter and tears. All of life and death was in me.

If you received this as a forwarded email or want to subscribe or check out my site, visit robertsdavidn.substack.com/about

King Hezikiah