Celeste Christina Tommasi

The day I deleted my mother’s contact

It wasn’t any special time of day

It was in no way memorable except for that erasure

That digital acceptance of a grim truth

When denial finally fell to reality

You’re not going to call her anymore

She doesn’t remember how to work a phone

She won’t be calling. She won’t be writing. She’s actually forgotten how to write. Was it better when she wrote on the walls in pencil all over her apartment, trying desperately to hold onto details that she had already forgotten by the time she’d finished writing?

They called from the nursing home. Asked me so many questions about what was important to her. No, books and magazines aren’t at all important. She’s forgotten how to read. A later version of this call would have me similarly relegating the idea of choosing her clothing to “not at all important” and finally what foods she might like as she could no longer eat solid food. The final call was because she’d forgotten how to swallow and so, no, medications aside from pain relief are also no longer necessary.

It’s the end stage, that’s what the kind voiced nurse had said. We’re just putting out fires at this point. Do we have your permission to give her a little morphine when we change the dressing for wounds that will never heal? Yes you do. Whatever she needs to be comfortable.

The nonchalance of death. It does not make a fanfare. It comes when it will, delivered by whomever happens to be in the area of the loved one you’ve lost. How could you be surprised? She’s passed is all you get, sir.

But she was so alive, long ago. She was so many things, she was my whole world once upon a time. She gave me life, she taught me love. How can “she passed” be the coda to all that?

Her eyes were open. She was in a large white plastic bag. Her head wrapped in gauze as if in some old fashioned cure for a toothache. I touched her face, her hair, her frail little hand beneath the plastic and the sheets.

Behind me the nurses were working to pack away what remained of her life for disposal. So many photos of people who were now lost to all memory. Drawn pictures, happy colorful pictures, faded old pictures, black and white photos of groups of smiling people, sepia toned memories of weddings and family gatherings of the forgotten. I wanted a small doll, my mother’s favorite. Sissy. She was pink with a hard plastic face. She had aviator goggles on from some other lost figure from my youth and she had a little piece of scotch tape on her to show how tough she was (my mother’s take on spikes being just another way to fasten a document to a wall so tape must be just as intimidating). I didn’t find her. I did find the hand drawn sketches my father did of her. As well as a hand carved wooden altars and Angel book ends made by her father. I kept the sketches.

Her clothes will be worn by the living. Her blankets as well, to the living who are chilly.

I deleted her number months ago, but the disease that took her kept taking her. Now that there’s finally nothing left to take, and nothing left to delete, how shall I mark her passing?

Nothing left to do now but say some kind words. No, not what I might say off the top of my head. To those who loved her and are hurting. I have a responsibility to tell them things that will let them feel their pain is shared. I’m not sure I can share mine. I can’t tell them who she was to me because it’s too big for words.

She wore a red, green and yellow coat, long, long ago. When I was in kindergarten. She would wear it to come pick me up. It had large cylindrical plastic blue buttons that fit into loops made of navy fabric. She was round and soft to my tiny hands. Seeing her after a day in class was like being rescued from a desert island every day. Every day being so grateful and happy and safe. It was one of the only things my mother lost, hoarder that she was.

I miss her. I have for a very long time.

I imagine I always will.

I guess that’s all that’s left to do.

A funeral mass for Celeste will be held Tuesday, September 12, 2023 from 9:30 AM to 10:30 AM at Resurrection Roman Catholic Church, 2331 Gerritsen Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11229.

Fond memories and expressions of sympathy may be shared at www.cusimanoandrussofuneralhome.com for the Tommasi family.