Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral

The House on North Stevens

77 The House on North Stevens The brochures on your mother’s table read Cherrywood, Lilac Plaza, Riverview. She’s going to Independent Living, the first euphemism, and we’re here to pack 48 years into boxes. We find Ovaltine in the kitchen, a tub of Vaseline in the bathroom older than me. She could never eat all the Miracle Whip she kept in the basement, those jars she stopped to buy one night on the way home because her coupon was expiring. I’m glad she doesn’t remember what she didn’t use, glad she sits at the table, her eyes vacant like her house will be when we move her purple couch, her bed with its pink spread of roses, her jewelry box of silver brooches into her small room with its connotations of cherry blossoms, lilacs, or our river, which will be high and loud this spring, exploding with the snow that’s been stored in the mountains this record-breaking winter. ...