Surprise at a Funeral

It’s not often you get a surprise at a funeral, and at this one I got two. On a June day in 1991 I met my parents at Mount Carmel cemetery which straddles Brooklyn and Queens, New York. We were there to bury my grandmother Harriet. Though any funeral is sad, my grandmother had lived a full life, and had enjoyed every day until her sudden death at age 91. The funeral was in the morning but I already felt wilted with my shirt stuck to my back, and my hair damp and stringy.

We arrived at the assigned section and there was my grandmother’s grave and my grandfather Joe’s headstone, which I expected to see. Beside that was the stone marking my mother’s grave. My knees nearly gave out, as the shock of seeing the headstone washed over me. Already hot, now I felt dizzy and a little sick too. There it was Ruthann Lowell, December 3, 1931—April 5, 1965. In the twenty five years since her death, no one had mentioned where she’d been buried, in fact she was rarely mentioned at all. When my mother died I guess my father felt that my brother and I were too young to attend her burial.

I needed to walk away. I went a little bit down the path, only to encounter the second shock. Just a few plots down from my mother’s grave was the grave of someone unknown to me, but with my exact birth-date, etched on his tombstone.  Despite the weather this was a real Dickensian moment; coming upon a grave with your own birth-date on it. The day felt too oppressive for all this internal drama. We didn’t talk about my mother, ever, and I didn’t think pointing out the coincidence of me sharing a birth-date with a dead stranger at my grandmother’s funeral was appropriate.

In 1991 I was 33, the same age my mother was when she died. The year I expected to die. At that time I wasn’t aware that it’s pretty common for someone whose parent has died young (especially the same gender parent) to expect to die at the same age. For most of my life I’d assumed without mentioning it to anyone, that I would die at 33, as my mother had. I wasn’t sick, but neither had she been. The cause of her death was a stroke, but why a 33 year old would have a stroke remained a mystery to me until I saw a doctor who had known my mother.

I can’t even remember how I ended up in his office, but it was not coincidental, he knew who I was, knew I was Ruthann’s daughter. What I wanted was birth control pills, and he said “Absolutely not!  That’s what killed your mother.” Oh, that might have been useful information. As a result of the subject of my mother being taboo there had been many such surprises and revelations over the years. Many of the bits of information I learned about my mother came from Julie, my stepmother, who undoubtedly heard them from my father, though he never was able to talk to me about her.

The brief service for my grandmother ended, and my parents took me to a nearby diner for lunch. I didn’t mention anything about the shock of seeing my mother’s tombstone, or even acknowledge that I had seen it; I knew the rules. I did tell them about seeing the grave of a young man born the same day as me, who had died at 23. Then we talked about other things.