It’s been a minute. Life has been a bit of a blur. You see, my mom, Barbara Langloss, died of cancer at 8:15am on Tuesday, July 16. She waited for Richard Simmons and Dr. Ruth to get up there before making her fashionably late appearance at the tender age of 76. She didn’t die peacefully the way obituaries always try to sanitize death. I mean, I suppose in that final breath, yeah, “she died peacefully surrounded by family” is one side of the story. But the other is that she suffered wretchedly for three years right up until the very end. I keep flashing back to her body in pain, to her winces, to slipping morphine under her tongue, to helping her weakened body into Epsom salt baths that gave her brief relief until she wasn’t allowed them anymore because of the urine bag doctors attached to her back.
But I don’t want these flashbacks. I want to remember my mom like this: frosted, White-Rained hair flowing behind her, cigarette smoke swirling out the cracked car window, the midwestern night, our rusted-out Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme tucked between semis in a convoy going ninety down the freeway. Twelve hours from Rockville, Maryland to Chicago, Illinois. My mom had a lead foot, a slick taste for speed. My brother and I would fly with her—eating the fifty kinds of candy she’d packed, the grapes in the cooler (there were always cold grapes), the sandwiches, the Lifesavers that we now know are merciless choking hazards. But back then we were freeeeeeee, not a seatbelt fastened, not a speed limit or dietary recommendation observed, outside time and space, truck drivers honking goodbye when we finally made our dramatic exit off the highway.
With their CB radios, my mom counted on these truckers knowing exactly where the cops hid. When the whole convoy suddenly slowed down, she would look at us in the rear view and say, “See? We just avoided another ticket.” The drivers waved and smiled at this fearless lady in her station wagon who had joined them uninvited, who drove barefoot, who leaned back into her blood-red vinyl interior like the Queen of the Road. They seemed to love her. Of course they did. Our mom was Kool, and we fucking loved everything about her.
My mom had ten siblings, three of whom died before age one. When you grow up in a family that big, you need two things: a voice that carries and stories that kill. You’d do anything to get attention, which is why my Uncle Pat once used the word fuck at the dinner table when he was five years old.
“Do you even know what that word means?” my grandfather asked.
“It’s a bare man sitting on a bare woman,” my uncle replied.
I can hear my grandfather’s laugh from here, some sixty years later, across the country in the NYC apartment where I mourn my mother’s death. And his death still too. My grandfather’s laugh is the thing I remember most about him. It was loud and came easy. My mother loved her father’s laugh, and she also inherited it. Each of my aunts and uncles got a different piece of it and when they laugh together, there he is: resurrected.
I remember nothing about our visits to Chicago except the nights, after dinner, after the littlest ones and husbands were in bed, when my mom and my aunts would settle in to talk, each one smoking her brains out despite their doctor-dad’s admonitions, the room filling with menthol. Even about these nights, some of the details are blurry. Were my uncles ever there? Was there music? Wine? Did I go to bed before the talking was done? I want to ask my mom, but I can’t. It’s been six Tuesdays since she died—not that I’m counting Tuesdays (I’m totally counting Tuesdays).
I do remember that my mom and aunts had endless stories, and 99.9% of them were what you might describe as the biggest tragedies you’ve ever heard. They were stressful, and the women in my family were stressed. They had PhDs in anxiety, in armchair psychology. There were abusive husbands, people on the brink of financial ruin—so much financial ruin—second mortgages, fortunes won and lost. There were eating disorders, car crashes, cancer, asthma, heart attacks, more cancer, more heart attacks, lost loves, adult thumb-suckers, cads, assholes, husbands who did tremendously shitty things, there were dead bodies, scars, bruises, alcoholism (we are an Irish Catholic family, after all), earthquakes, fire. And somehow, every single one of these tragedies was also hilariously funny. Pee-your-pants funny. I remember my Aunt Colleen’s voice getting deeper, more urgent, more comedic as the night danced on, the laughter we inherited from my grandfather seeming to rise from the basement of my Auntie Mo’s split level, through our bellies, up into the nicotine-strewn air.
My mother never made me, the eldest grandchild, go to bed those nights. Not at midnight. Not at three am. She was a mother who kept me by her side, who fed me all the secrets. She told me a million things I was probably too young to know. I know things about her life—intimate things—that no daughter should ever know. I remember getting wild tired those nights, straining to hold my eyes open, never wanting to miss a single word. It all seemed so important. So urgent. We were solving the family’s problems, the world’s! Or maybe making them worse. It was hard to tell.
Some twenty years after I’d been her student, my fourth grade teacher Mrs. Ornstein told a friend of mine, “Oh, yes, I remember Maureen. She always used to talk about her aunts.” I talked about them because they were such great narrators of their own and each other’s lives. They might have been better narrators than life-livers, in fact. They had stories you’d want to share with your friends—the aunt who jumped out of a window because her brother convinced her she could fly, the arrow that landed in my mother’s buttocks, the explosion that sent my great grandfather and baby-me flying into the air. A lot of them were tall tales. My family is extremely talented at exaggeration. My mom especially. This is why I write fiction today. Facts are hard for us. But the stories killed.
All my aunts have cancer now. Every single one. My mom was the first to die. If we were together smoking in my Auntie Mo’s family room, we’d find a way to make this very funny. We’d laugh at cancer. Ha ha ha. Take that, you little bitch.
There was always another important dramatic twist to these nights that I’d be remiss if I didn’t share. We usually rolled into Chicago just in time for some important birthday or rehearsal dinner or event that required a long, rhyming poem in iambic pentameter in honor of someone in the family. It had to be tender and funny, it had to roast but hold dear, it had to achieve the maximum of love, to take orbit into the stratosphere of best poems ever.
1am. 2am. 3am. My mom and her sisters would keep right on talking, like there was no task at hand, because the tragicomic stories were endless and important. As the homework-do-er in the family, I remember my anxiety rising. The adults in the room were letting the wheels fly off the poem bus as I kept staring at the empty yellow legal pad on the coffee table, willing the wheels back on. Actually, this is one of those moments when memory fails me. Was it a legal pad or just the back of an envelope? But one thing I remember for real: my stress stomachache.
Somehow, the poem would get done by dawn. It would always get done. And it would rhyme. All the beats would be there. My mom was usually the one who wrote it. She was fantastic at coming up with these poems. Long on love, heavy on cheese, they did indeed blast off into the stratosphere of best poems ever. (We have no record to prove this, however, as my family lost what little they saved to a fire that destroyed my grandmother’s entire neighborhood. Because, of course.)
I got my MFA right there, in the suburbs of Chicago, sitting over wall-to-wall carpeting, watching these women who loved each other with a fierceness that makes all other fierce things like fire and cancer seem not fierce at all. My mom put the writer in me—the dark and the light, the funny and the sad, the trust and the abandon, the stress and the peace of leaning against her side, burrowing in to where every moment, every word felt seismic and true, like it meant something, like we were always on the precipice of the outrageous, the fabulous, on the brink of a love that could not die.
