Finery for a Funeral

Published in The Journal

When my mother turned fifty, she celebrated with a crone ceremony, a New Age ritual of restoring older women’s rightful status as wise, respected elders. Mom’s friends—mostly lesbians with a penchant for dream-catchers and flannel shirts—embraced the croning. On any other night, they were bitter about older women’s invisibility, dejected by their own sagging skin and glacial metabolism. But on that evening in 1994, as the sun set on Asheville, North Carolina, and my mother drew a shawl around her shoulders to ward off the cool November air, they all raised their wineglasses to toast her hard-won wisdom.

“We’ve got a lot of Scorpios here tonight!” she said, as she settled into her easy chair and admired her guests. Mom reveled in sharing the astrology sign with several of her friends. But the Scorpio traits she took pride in—passion, intensity, fierce independence—seemed to make her romantic relationships rocky; not long after the croning, for example, she divorced her second husband, whom I adored.

“Here’s to Farrell,” said a woman wearing a leather vest and a pair of Wranglers. “You always tell it like it is!”

“Farrell makes a great black bean soup!” another offered.

I refrained from making a public tribute, although an anecdote did spring to mind. A few months earlier, my mother and I had been driving to a customer’s house when she imparted one of her conclusions about the meaning of life.

“Security is death,” she had proclaimed. “Security is an illusion. These people who give a shit about their fancy houses and big garages and piles of money—they’re going to die just like the rest of us, and none of us have any idea when. You and I could get in a car accident driving to this cleaning job.”

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M., Age Eight