Writing Thank-You Notes After the Funeral
Ninety cards in her name, my hand slowly learning her graciousness.
Nobody warns you that death comes with correspondence. Four days after my mother's funeral, my aunt set a shoebox on the kitchen table, and inside were the sympathy cards, the flower deliveries logged in her tidy hand, the names of everyone who had sent a casserole or a mass card or a memory, and on top, a box of ninety blank thank-you notes, cream with a green border, because my mother had views about stationery and my aunt knew them.
People do this still, apparently. I did not know. I am forty-four and I send my gratitude by text, usually with a picture of a raccoon in it. But my aunt looked at me across the table and said, Your mother wrote a note for every kindness she ever received, and she would haunt us both, and I understood that this was not optional. Funeral etiquette is not really about etiquette. It is a rope they hand you so the current does not take you, and you hold it because it is something to hold.
So I started writing. Dear Mrs. Okafor, thank you for the lilies and for coming so far. Dear Ted and Maureen, the lasagna fed us for three days. My first ten cards sounded like a hostage reading a statement.
I was doing gratitude the way I do burpees... counting them down, and my handwriting, which lives somewhere between doctor and toddler, was an insult to the green border.
Around card fifteen, out of boredom or longing, I started trying to write them the way she would have.
This was harder than it sounds... and it changed everything.
My mother never wrote thank you for the flowers. She wrote, The lilies opened this morning on the hall table and the whole house smells like Easter.
She thanked people for things they did not know they had given.
After my father's funeral, twenty years ago, she wrote to his old foreman: Thank you for standing at the back and leaving before the crowd; Jim always said you were a man who knew when not to make a fuss. The foreman's widow told me he kept that card in his wallet until he died.
To write like her, I had to notice like her.
That was the trap, and I fell into it the way she intended, because I promise you she intended it, she was a woman who played long games. To thank Mrs. Okafor properly I had to actually remember Mrs. Okafor at the funeral, and when I did, I remembered her arriving on two buses at eighty-one years old, and how she pressed my hand and said, Your mother taught my Chidi to read English at the kitchen table and never told a soul.
I sat there over card sixteen and cried onto the green border, and then I got a fresh card and wrote it down, and it was the first true thing I had written all week.
Gratitude was her handwriting. To sign her name I had to trace it, letter by letter, until my own hand learned the shape.
Card Sixty-Two
By the fourth evening I had a system: tea, the shoebox, twelve cards a night at the kitchen table, her radio station on low because silence and I were not on speaking terms yet. My brother called it my paper rosary, which was meant as a joke and was accurate.
Then I hit card sixty-two, and the name in the flower log meant nothing to me.
R. Halloran.
The delivery slip said one bunch of yellow freesias, no card message, just a name and an address two towns over.
Freesias were her favorite, which everyone knew. But I could not place a Halloran, and neither could my aunt, which was unheard of; my aunt can place everyone in three counties, including their grievances. So instead of a thank-you note I wrote something between a note and a question. Thank you for the freesias, they were her favorite. Forgive me, I could not find you in her stories. How did you know my mother?
The reply came nine days later, four pages, in the careful handwriting of someone who does not write often but means it. Rose Halloran had been my mother's friend in nursing school, 1961, and then for eleven years, and then they had a falling out. Over what, she did not fully say, only that it had been her own fault, said plainly, the way only old people say it.
They did not speak for forty years. Two towns apart, forty years.
And then, she wrote, six years ago, a card had arrived out of nowhere. My mother's hand. It said: I am getting too old to carry this and I suspect you are too. Thank you for 1961 to 1972. The rest we can leave. After that, Rose wrote, a card came every year at Christmas, and she sent one back, and twice they met for tea in the garden center cafe halfway between the two towns, where nobody would make a thing of it. Your mother thanked me for the years that worked, she wrote, instead of billing me for the ones that didn't. I have never known anyone else to do the accounting that way.
I read that letter three times at the kitchen table. My mother, who told me everything twice, had never mentioned Rose Halloran.
She had a whole reconciled friendship, a private repaired thing, and she never once wore it as a story. I thought I was learning her graciousness by imitation, and here was the advanced course: some kindnesses she kept secret even from her own legend.
I finished the ninety cards. It took eleven nights. Somewhere past card seventy my handwriting settled into something steadier, not hers, but influenced, the way a voice picks up an accent from someone long loved. And when the box was empty I found I did not want to stop... which is how grief gets you into things. I kept the ritual: Sunday nights, tea, two cards to people who are still alive and do not expect them. I wrote to my old English teacher. I wrote to my brother, who rang me up embarrassed and gruff and then kept the card, I happen to know, on his fridge.
I started reading about this after, the way you do, looking for company. I found essays on grief that read like letters themselves, and one on forgiveness that I sent to Rose, who wrote back that it was almost as good as a card. Some of what I scribble on those Sunday nights has started bending into lines and stanzas, and this spring, feeling brave and slightly ridiculous, I entered one of them into a monthly poetry contest, because my mother believed you should never keep a kindness or a poem in a drawer.
Rose and I meet now, once a season, at the garden center cafe halfway between the two towns. She is eighty-six and orders the same scone my mother did, which broke me the first time... and now just steadies me.
Last Christmas I sent her freesias, no message, just my name.
The thank-you note that came back is in my coat pocket. Some days, at bus stops and in waiting rooms, I take it out and read it, four lines in a careful old hand, gratitude doing what my mother always said it did.
Making the kindness last longer than the flowers.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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