What Discipline Looks Like
Nana Rose’s funeral felt less like a goodbye to a beloved grandmother and more like another stage for my mother’s performance. A cold drizzle fell over the cemetery, turning the ground soft and muddy. I stood near the back beneath a plain black umbrella, wearing a wool coat I had bought years earlier and never replaced because I had learned not to waste money on things that worked.
From there I watched my mother, Linda, seated in the front row in a black fur coat that probably cost more than my first car. She dabbed at eyes that had nothing in them at regular intervals, glancing sideways to confirm that the important people in town were noticing her grief. My father Robert stood beside her looking irritated, checking his watch every few minutes the way men do when they are counting down to the reception and the open bar.
To them, Nana Rose had been a burden while alive and an opportunity now that she was gone. They had not visited her at the nursing home in three years, blaming business obligations or emotional strain in a way that made absence sound almost virtuous. They sent flowers twice, I knew because the nursing home staff mentioned it, a little uncertainly, as if they were not sure whether to count it.
But I had missed her for months before she died. The missing had built in layers the way it does when you watch someone you love grow slower and smaller and you understand that what is coming cannot be stopped, only accompanied. I had driven four hours every Friday night for the last two years and arrived in time for her evening medication, and we would sit in her sunroom playing chess until she got tired and sometimes after, because she slept better when someone was nearby.
I missed our chess games, the way she would study the board with total seriousness and then make a move designed to let me win that was simultaneously too obvious to be accidental and too careful to be careless. I missed her sharp humor, which she had refined over eighty-one years into something efficient and precise. I missed her stories from the war years, told without self-pity, with an emphasis on the practical and the absurd rather than the dramatic.
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