YOUR BOYFRIEND MEETS YOUR MOTHER IN THE FUNERAL HOME Claudia Baskind The first time your boyfriend meets your mother, she is dead. You're in the basement of the funeral home. The director leads you to her white-sheeted body in the hallway and excuses himself around the corner. Her body is cold; he has wheeled her body out from the refrigerated morgue, perhaps the door right behind you. She is large, as she was in life, but somehow the mound of her belly and chest are less high than you expected or than you remember from the many times in recent years you have seen her lying on a hospital bed. Her hands are thick, cold; her fingers show that someone, not too long before her death, trimmed the nails but did not file them smoothly. You know your mom didn't do it; she wouldn't have had the strength, focus, or care. Someone has gone through the effort to remove some dirt from under the fingernails; some remains. You slide your palm into hers, crossing thumbs. You are a realist, yet you are minisculely surprised that her hand does not grip yours in return, as it has done, even reflexively, during periods of unconsciousness during her hospital stays. Putting your hand in hers is merely like sliding a similarly shaped leaf (still attached to a tree) into the crooks of an unpaired puzzle piece. Your hand is the leaf, hers is the puzzle. You want them to match, but they don't. Some people say that the dead look nothing like how they looked in real life; but you disagree. You've seen her on chairs, beds, and gurneys so often that you don't know if you'd recognize her if she was standing. You think about how the myth of ghosts evolved. Sometimes bodies, releasing air after death, spontaneously contract, and the body seems to sit up. This will not happen with your mother's body, as her middle is too thick to be a folding point. You say you don't want to look (but of course you want to, otherwise you wouldn't) at the parts of her body below her chest. She still has surgical tape and needles, and her legs, always in various incarnations of flaming pink from the skin ulcers, are no different. The toenails are still desperately in need of a podiatrist's specialized trimming. What did you expect? You've seen most of her body naked before, but here it is whole and she is too dead to be ashamed. You don't stare, but you do glance at her groin—not close enough to see if there's hair, or how much. I came from there, you think. I passed from this body. I was held in this body. I once lived inside this body.     "That's my mother," you tell your boyfriend. In life, you would have felt shame, a severe shame so deep that you were ashamed to feel it. You would have felt embarrassed at her size, the way she didn't get her hair cut or styled, her facial hair, her dirty nails, her clothing with cigarette burns, the dentures she wore and didn't clean with Efferdent despite the number of packages you bought and the number of times you showed her how, the way her bottom teeth were few and far between and she revealed gaps when she spoke despite the fact that she had dental coverage, the way her eyes got drifty and you could tell she either wasn't listening or didn't understand what was being said because her memory was going from lack of stimulation, the way her brain cells were dropping two by two, the way she smelled of smoke, the way she referenced television in nearly every conversation, the way she denigrated her sister for being overly involved in her grandchildren's lives, the way she thusly, inadvertently revealed her own jealousy (At least she never asked you, When are you going to give me grandkids? At least she jokingly called your puppy her grand-dog), the way she would say, Huh, when it was clear the conversation was careening over her head, the way her purse was littered with the cellophane from cigarette wrappers and shreds of tobacco and stray M&Ms and creased Pall Mall coupons and (often expired) grocery store coupons and cheap perfume bottles with detached lids and keys on a keychain that you'd bought her ten years ago (when you left the country for a year and lived it up in Australia, when you lived vicariously for her) and irregularly folded newspaper articles and half-finished crosswords and random horoscopes with your and your brother's signs circled and battered business envelopes with untitled lists leaving you to construe their purpose (What do coffee, Rita, and broken glasses have in common?), the handwriting progressively more illegible over the past few years, the way she fell asleep during conversations (Undiagnosed, untreated apnea? Why not add another illness to the list?), the way she lined plastic deli containers with aluminum foil to use as ashtrays, the way there was nowhere to sit in her apartment without moving a stack (of magazines, of clothing marked for return to Roaman's, of bags of sugar-free candy—My aide got them on sale at CVS. Would you like one? And you wishing she didn't eat NutraSweet because it created brain plaques and wishing you did eat it so you could at least accept her offer), the way you could completely understand why people might not want to kiss or hug her hello, the way she accidentally and repeatedly called your previous boyfriend by the name of the boyfriend who had preceded him. In life, you would have felt deep shame at your boyfriend meeting your mother (and you nearly got the opportunity during the non-crisis visit one month hence you and your boyfriend had planned). Couldn't wait one month? you want to ask her. Couldn't wait one month to meet the man I want to marry? To meet your potential son-in-law? Couldn't wait one month to meet this amazing man, who is not only willing, but wants, to meet my dead mother? Now she is dead, and what's to be ashamed of? At last, for once in your life, for ostensibly the one and only time in your life, you are introducing someone to your mother and you are not feeling shame.	"Your hand is the leaf, hers is the puzzle."
	Your boyfriend says,     (a) "Hi, Harriet. I wish I got to meet you."     (b) "I will take good care of your daughter."     (c) "You should be very proud of your daughter."     (d) "It's going to be a great funeral. Just you wait and see."     (e) "Well."     See, the problem is that your mother never gets to see how witty and caring and wonderful your boyfriend is. She never gets to go to the wedding. She never gets to have grandchildren of her own. (Just you wait and see, once you have grandchildren, you'll feel different.) And your boyfriend, he never gets to decide for himself, as he inevitably would, that your mother is a perfectly fine human being with her faults and her losses and her griefs and the burdens she's passed on, but, really, that she is a fine human being, like any human being, who deserves respect and love.     Girl, you need a shame adjustment. Shame is just a misplaced sense of responsibility and identity. If you have anything to be ashamed of, you know what that is. Your boyfriend never gets a chance to hear stories out of your mother's mouth about what you were like as a girl, as a baby. He wanted to hear them. He was planning on asking, one month hence, when you and he would be here, meeting your live mother, talking, drinking Lipton tea (nothing like the fancy herbals you and your boyfriend drink), and refusing artificially sweetened sucking candies.     Someday you may have a little girl yourself and she will never get to meet your mother except through whatever stories you share. And what are you going to tell her?     If you ever have a baby with your boyfriend-turned-husband, how will he contribute to the about-your-maternal-grandma conversations? "I met your Grandma once," he might say. "She was dead, but seemed like an awfully pleasant person."