I was in charge of choosing the coffin. Everybody else was too busy mourning. It was typical; they lost all sense of pragmatism in situations like that.

"Cherrywood or mahogany," the coffin saleswoman asked in this really sweet voice and with a penetrating look, as if she were talking to a toddler. She was wearing too much make-up. "I don't know," I said pensively. I hadn't bought many coffins before. None, to be precise. "How about a solid, elegant oak," she inquired and her voice got almost shrill. Man, she was getting on my nerves already. But this wasn't one of those situations you can just walk out of when the salesperson is obnoxious. I needed that coffin and I needed it now. "What difference does it make," I asked, and she pretended to be surprised. "Oh, I understand," she said, but I don't think she really did. "Well, the cherry-wood has this very exquisite reddish tone to it and the luxurious red velvet interior." She must be kidding me, I though instinctively. "And the mahogany is of course, very, very elegant," she added. "How much is it," I asked back, just to get us started on the deal. "The mahogany? It's 6000 Dollars." She seemed a little uncomfortable saying this. She had better, it was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard. "You know, I think I'll just take the cheapest one." Moma would totally have approved. But apparently the saleswoman didn't. She stared at me in disbelief. Had I insulted her profession? I mean, after all, I wasn't buying a work of art or a piece of furniture, I was buying something that I wanted to get rid of as soon as possible. "Well, that would be the lime-wood then! It comes with the blackened bronze handles!" she attempted to explain. "That'll be just perfect, thank you so very much," I stopped her, paid and hurried to get out of that depressing dead people's business.

Now that we had that vehicle to middle earth it still took us forever to get the funeral going. As I said, they were all making a point out of being so sad that they were no good for anything. It was their mom, so I suppose I understand. Dad was pretty down, and so were his two sisters apparently, although Hanna hadn't talked to Moma for at least a quarter century. I guess it's easier to love people once they can't annoy you anymore. And when you hope to inherit something from them. None of them was really religious, but when it came to the funeral service they all turned fundamentalist Christian on me. Every detail was argued about. Had this been her favorite psalm or this one, or maybe this one that she used to read to them when they were kids? Everyone wanted to have known her better. Would she have liked these or these flowers, maybe just white roses, dad asked me, and I didn't answer because personally I thought she couldn't have cared less. But since I had unanimously been appointed chief executive of our operation, I had to deal with them. When the big day finally came, I had almost given up hope that we were ever going to get her below the ground. Just to have a break, I spent the night before at Dan's house.

His girlfriend was never there during the week. When he opened the door he smiled his pretty smile, and in that moment he could have been anything; a smiling misunderstood philosopher, or a smiling loving father of three. He gave me a quick kiss. "How are you?" he asked while I went pass him into his living room. "Good thanks, how about yourself?" I gave the standard answer. He didn't inquire further; I didn't inquire further. Then we sat and listened to music, like we usually did before we slept with each other. We always listened to different stuff, and we learned the lyrics by heart and sang along, instead of having a conversation, I suppose. Today it was an old Sting CD. He was a greater music fan than me and I got bored pretty quickly. So I kissed him, which was what I had come for.

We were never disgusted by each other afterwards, like lovers sometimes are after the unconditional act is over. I don't even think that he wanted to get rid of me immediately. We always held each other for a long time, caressed each other, but never talked. It was as if we were trying to bridge the distance and emptiness between us through physical proximity. Although we wanted the distance to be there, we needed it: our relationship was essentially built on it. But maybe one gets a little sentimental in post-coital moments like these. Either way, we held each other, and he smiled, and I kissed his neck, right on the spot where the shoulder starts and where he is so ticklish. Suddenly I wondered what it felt like to him; did I just feel like her? I kissed his nipples and kept returning to his lips, which might be the softest lips of all time. We fell asleep, but I awoke early. I didn't really want to look at him, or wake him up. I was afraid he was going to confuse my name with hers in his tired morning daze, a thought which had not bothered me much before. I tried to find some private sphere in the big blanket, wrapped it around my shoulders, but it didn't help. I went home a little later and felt strangely comforted by the lightness of the night. It alleviated the whole death heaviness, and would carry me through the funeral and post-funeral drama ahead.

I organized some tranquilizers for dad the morning of. I was a little afraid he wasn't going to make it through all right. And he was afraid to get all out of control. He didn't want to break down in front of everybody. But then during the service he was so calm I was afraid he was gonna fall in a deep coma right there. Nothing worse than the son of the corpse snoring loudly on the first bench during the service. I gave him a few heavy blows with my elbow throughout. Apart from keeping dad awake there was not much to do during the service. I heard more or less silent weeping around me and tried to pinpoint my own feelings towards this whole event. I thought of Moma. Suddenly I needed to know what space she had had in my life. Not to replace her, of course. I know that dead people are supposed to be dead and not to be replaced. But I wanted to know what I was in for, whether I would miss her or not. I wanted to counter a potential emotional chaos. Not that one seemed likely, but you never know. -Moma had never seemed like a real attachment figure in my life. She seemed too much out of touch with it, too intolerant, too dogmatic, too categorical. And yet, now I know, that her pure existence had always been very reassuring to me. More than that, she had been somewhat of a counterbalance to my own life.

I once asked her who she was looking forward to meeting when she died. I was young enough to ask those sorts of questions then. She still thought my question was silly, though. "Well, your grandfather, of course," she answered in a very matter-of-fact voice without looking up and continued knitting. Of course, my grandfather. She had been waiting for him her whole life. She fell in love with him when she was fourteen and got married to him at age twenty. They lived together for two years before he went to war. When she was pregnant with her third child, which was incidentally my dad, her husband was killed in Russia. There she was; a twenty-seven year-old widow with three babies in the middle of war and desperation. She did not have another man after that. I'm sure she didn't even so much as kiss a man for the last 60 years of her life. Talk about an unexciting love life! -When I had reached the generally skeptical puberty age, I remembered that comment about her meeting my grandfather again in heaven.

"Do you actually believe in life after death? Wasn't that just something lords made their peasants believe so they wouldn't revolt and just be content with their miserable lives?" I tried to provoke her. She laughed a little, but not in a funny way, and shook her head. And she didn't respond. Apparently my statement was not worthy of an answer.

I always thought that you're only religious if you truly plainly whole-heartedly believe in something that can't be proven. I thought that it was this irrationality that made faith such a hard thing to pull off. But Moma was religious in a very objective way; She was a believer because that was the right thing to do, period. She went to church and considered herself a devoted Christian, yet she had never critically examined her faith. It was a rule in her life, the same way her other views and opinions followed a set of rules and principles, that she had taken over. Sometimes I envied her for her set of rules. The beauty of those was that they were given and did not need to be adjusted to individuals. They applied to all, and something was simply either right or wrong. Where was there still space for right and wrong in my world? So often, the two are so hard to recognize, because their borders are not only fluid but outright flooded. Maybe they are so hard to see because they are so rarely created nowadays.

I talked to Moma about this when my parents got divorced. I couldn't understand why she had to be so condescending about it. Not explicitly, of course.

"They don't get along, Moma," I said. "They will be happier by themselves." I really wanted to believe this; it was what my parents had told me. "What's wrong with that?"

"Oh, nothing at all. I suppose you just adjust your beliefs to your life, rather than the other way around, and then everything works out!" she said thoughtfully.

"But why should they make it harder on themselves?"

"They can only do what they believe is right," she answered. "But the danger in that is instead doing what is easy," she paused for an instant, "because nowadays people all just do what is easy." I didn't respond. She smiled triumphantly: "Hit a weak spot, huh? Yes, you all like it easy."

But what she'd hit didn't feel like a weak spot. After all, why should we like it hard if we could have it easy?

"Just because we haven't had a World War to be heroic in does not mean that we are weak, Moma," I replied and I knew that hit her weak spot. We never talked about the topic again.

Looking back, I'm surprised she let me get away with that. She usually didn't let people get away with anything. Whenever we went to visit her she made us watch TV shows that she knew we all hated. Once it was a program on French 18th Century Embroidery. Maggie and Dad sat and watched patiently. I suppose all of them were just grateful that the TV took away the pressure of actually talking to each other.

"How fascinating," Maggie said in regular intervals. She made me laugh.

"I don't even think you enjoy this yourself!" I turned to Moma. I knew she liked news and sports, but she hated gardening or housewife stuff. Moma didn't seem to react, but for an instant I saw some slight amusement in her face. "I'm gonna take off, this is ridiculous." When I returned after a couple of hours I headed towards the kitchen, where I found Moma.

"What are you making them watch now, Moma," I asked with my back turned to her as I investigated her fridge. It's amazing how much stuff she could pack in this fridge. It was so full that one could not pull out a single thing without having ten other things fall out. As if the War memory of food shortage had never quite let go of her.

"It's amazing how much they will take, isn't it?" She sounded almost astonished herself. I was busy trying to pull a bag of peaches out of the fridge without throwing over an open box of cereal. I caught it with my other hand just before it could fall to the floor.

"What's up with this fridge, Moma? Are you preparing for the next Russian invasion or something?" She ignored my comment.

"You know, I think my children would let me get away with anything! They'd let me get away with murder just to get their hands on my money." This time she hadn't talked to herself, I think she really wanted to hear my opinion. I turned around and smiled at her. She looked dignified with her white hair carefully arranged in a bun on the back of her head.

"Yes, they probably would. They'd let you get away with murder, or even watching embroidery shows, whichever one is worse." It was one of those rare times that we laughed with each other.

But did I feel real pain in face of these memories? I looked around the church. Dad was strangely calm again so I elbowed him once more to keep him in shape, and to keep myself in shape, too. So was there any real sorrow, and if not, what was there? First and foremost I was glad this ordeal was over. She had been in the hospital forever and she really wanted to get the process over with. I knew she did. They kept her alive artificially while all her limbs slowly degenerated, became blue and yellow, and she had wounds everywhere, from lying and non-existent blood circulation. She was a mess, in short, and past her fear of death, one that she had never admitted by the way. The last time I went to see her she couldn't even talk anymore. I entered her hospital room, which, contrary to all clichés, was really nice. It was a beautiful sunny spring day, the room was bright, there were lots of flowers and a large picture of my grandfather. He was young and smiled at us dressed in his stylish uniform, which had killed him.

Moma seemed much too small for the big bed. She was reduced to skin and bones, tiny- like a little child crawled up under the big blanket. She couldn't move anything anymore. Her head was turned to the side on the pillow and she only opened her eyes when I took her hand. It was a curious feeling because I had never held her hand before. I guess we never had this hand holding sort of relationship. I felt a little weird about it, but it was my only chance to communicate with her. So I took it, and her hand lay motionless and fragile between mine. She turned her eyes on me and I saw tears running, from her left eye over the nose to the right eye, and down on the pillow. I'd never seen her cry before, so it was hard to believe that that's what she was doing. Maybe her eyes were just as dysfunctional as every other part of her body.

"Grgglll!" she uttered after a while, apparently trying to tell me something. She breathed heavily, waited, and tried again. "Grrrrrggll! grllllll." Then she gave up. I asked her whether she wanted water or anything, but she didn't react. Then I asked her whether she was in a lot of pain, which was kind of a stupid question but what are you supposed to say. I tried to figure out all the things I could imagine that I might want to communicate before I died and tried to cover all that, hoping it would include what Moma had tried to say.

"We'll all be fine here," I said. "Really, no worries. I'll take care of dad. And I'll get married and have a functioning family at some point, too," I tried to reassure her. Not that I much believed it myself. "And you'll be fine, too! I'm sure grandpa is already all anxious for you to get up there. I mean, it wasn't exactly yesterday that you last saw each other, right?" She just continued crying, and when I was done with my discourses I cried a little, too. Just because frankly, this sort of intimacy was a little overwhelming. And because we knew this was good-bye, and I always find it hard to deal with such conclusive happenings, such finality. -Dad was waiting for me when I returned home.

"So what did Moma say?"

"Not much," I answered, which was nothing but the truth.

"Anything in particular," he inquired further.

"Yes, grrrgllll," I said, uttering a choking sound that resembled a clogged sink.

In the middle of this contemplation we stood up to sing "Great lord we praise you." It is a very festive song and it made me a little emotional. So I decided to think of something lighter. When would I see Dan again? Maybe Sunday night, after his woman left? I looked past dad at Aunt Maggie. Her husband hadn't come. Now that Moma was dead I was sure they were going to get divorced. She had been cheating on him all along. That thought carried my eyes over to dad. Was he falling asleep? No, he was fine. I'm sure he too had affairs before him and mom got divorced. Inevitably, I had to think of Dan, and for the first time I wondered whether he thought he was wrong in sleeping with me? And if he did, why did he do it?

Church services screw me up in that sense; they always get me in this thinking mode. So I was glad when it was finally over. We all seemed to feel the same way about this, too. Funerals have these great feelings of closure to them. My aunts especially seemed delighted at that. Aunt Maggie gave me a huge hug and said with a large smile: "What a beautiful funeral, wasn't it, Amy Darling?" And had it not been such a sad day, I would say she sounded almost cheerful when she added: "So we'll see you on Sunday?" I sure hope not, I thought to myself. I had seen enough of my family for the next century. Why would I see her Sunday? I must have looked rather clueless. "For the opening of the will?" she added. Of course, The Will. Dad had told me Maggie had started making debt when Moma got sick. I guess she had told the bank people she had a rich sick mother. No wonder she was excited at the prospect of getting her hands on Moma's cash. "Yeah, see you," I replied, hurried to put dad in the car and was the most grateful person when we finally left. Only then did I notice how exhausted I was. Exhausted by the intensity of life and death, love and the resulting devastation. Exhausted by all the emotions around me; especially the artificial ones were hard to bare.

By Sunday I had chilled considerably. Dad was doing a lot better as well.

The sisters were dressed appropriately in black and in an upbeat mode. The atmosphere was gay and jolly. Until the testament was read, that is. And then it promptly turned considerably less so. Silence. For at least five minutes, nobody spoke.

"Could you read that last part again?" Aunt Hanna suddenly instructed the notary, who did like he was told.

"My niece Vanessa Evans will!" but Hanna didn't want to hear the part of Vanessa's new fortune.

"No, just the last sentence!" Her voice was restrained. The notary now read with more confidence than he had the first time around, when he had visibly been uncomfortable:

"Only those who live by the moral and ethical standards and traditions that my parents taught me, and I tried to teach my children, should benefit from my family's money. Only those can treat it with the respect I wish."

It was so Moma! In her disinheritance, she gave us one last glimpse of her character; it was a little bit as if she were there. I would have smiled, but the general mood seemed highly unreceptive of smiles, so I suppressed it. It was typical that they would plain freak in situations like that. The theatrical outbursts ranged from "she never loved me" to "I never loved her." Moma's denying them her cash was attributed to her cold heart, bitterness, revenge, even treason and outright evilness. As if she had owed them just because they had waited for it, and paid their dues in their visits. The reasons Moma stated herself were Hanna's turning atheist, Maggie's adultery and Dad's divorce. Maybe I was just lucky that I was young enough; I simply hadn't yet had the time to mess up a marriage or do anything majorly wrong. So I didn't win the big jackpot, but a decent one nonetheless. It naturally really excited me, even more so since it was the last thing I'd expected. Excitement, however, was not something appropriate to show considering Hanna's and Maggie's inevitable envy.

But when they pushed it too far, I couldn't help but react. It annoyed me that they completely lost their perspective along the way.

"After all that we've done for her," Maggie cried hysterically. I wondered what that was but still controlled myself and kept quiet. "I can't believe she felt the need to punish us for our way of life. As if she was the all-enlightened mind to know right from wrong." That was too much.

"She simply didn't want you to have her cash," I burst out. Silence suddenly. All three of them looked at me incredulously.

"Oh, isn't that easy for you to say, Miss I-don't-care-about-anything-or-anyone. You're the last person who should have gotten any of that money!" Maggie was really at it now.

"Yes, maybe," I countered, "but it just so happened that she wanted me to have some and she didn't want YOU to have any." My calm manner put her over the edge even more. "That's fair enough. It's hers, right? She can do with it whatever she wants." I don't know why I still spoke of Moma in the present. It's hard to get used to speaking of someone in the past tense.

"But don't you understand?" Now Hanna was on my case. "It's not about the money." Yeah, right. I wanted to smile again.

"No?" I asked and I couldn't hide my amusement. It made them even more furious.

"No! It is about her judging us. It is about our mother not understanding us!"

I looked at the three of them, one after the other. Only dad looked me straight in the eyes. There was a long pause and I wasn't even sure whether it was worth it, but I had to say it anyway:

"But what is there to understand about you? I don't even think she would have wanted to change you. But she for sure did not want to change herself. And her values were simply a part of her." It was true, too. I would even go so far as to say that they were her basis, if you think about her as a geometrical body. That's what they couldn't understand, because in this age of the full understanding for stretches of values in favor of self-realization of any kind, it was a completely foreign concept. Her disinheritance was not treason. In it Moma remained true to herself throughout her death.

I knew it was useless to try to explain, so I just left. Like I usually do when things get that irritating. Only I didn't quite know where to go initially. Dan's house? On my way there I thought about what was going to happen with Maggie's debt now. And what I was going to do with my new wealth! I felt something like pride over Moma's trust. And, strangely, something else came along with it that was completely new to me; what they call responsibility, I suppose.  Dan opened the door immediately when I rang the bell. He was less calm than usual.

"Amy! You really can't come this early. She only just left five minutes ago!" His tone was not unfriendly; it sounded more like he was scared, actually. Of course, I had completely lost track of time; it was far too early for me to be there. I went past him into his kitchen to get a glass of water. They hadn't cleaned up after breakfast; the sink was full of plates, pots, mugs and utensils in pairs. When I walked over to the living room I saw Dan trying to let the traces of her disappear; her black high-heeled shoes, a pink top thrown over the futon and a black shawl in front of the stereo.

"What a mess!" he mumbled when he noticed he was being watched.

"As if I don't know about her!"

His attempt to hide her stuff seemed so ridiculous. Like the disappearance of her things would make her disappear in our minds, so we could continue pretending our time of pretension. Maybe it was really too late for me to be there.

"I know about her!" I said once again, this time in a defensive way that surprised me. But it surprised Dan even more, he paused and looked up at me. The whole picture suddenly struck me as so absurd; him crouching there on the floor, like a child gathering up his toys that he wanted to forget about for now. And me in the picture.