A Birthday Wish
My Mother’s Underwear
And other things stuffed behind old dresser drawers
Today is my mother’s birthday. She would have been eighty-seven, but liver cancer took her on July 28, 2018. My wife, brother, our good friend Sallie, and I were with her as she lay dying in her old recliner. The passing was relatively “peaceful,” as they say. As these things go. As my mother went.
A week before she died, however, she was lucid, though “hopped up on those steroids,” as she liked to say. And in her greatest moment of clarity, she turned to all of us — my wife, our two daughters, my brother, and me — and said these words:
“Now when I die, I want y’all to promise me something!”
“Yes Grandma, what is it?” my daughters said in unison.
“I want y’all to promise that the first thing you’ll do when I die is to go into my bedroom, open my dresser drawer, get out all my old underwear, and throw it away!”
Surely, my very southern mother isn’t the first dying woman to make such a request of her family? Though maybe she is the first southern woman to ask that this action be the first thing the family does to honor a dying wish in the moment just after the passing.
