My mother’s memorial service was held last Sunday. The thing that struck me most strongly was that it was not really very sad. The only time I came close to crying was when they started singing A Mighty Fortress is Our God. My mother told me long ago that she wanted that song at her funeral, and it was the first song in the service. So it was a close thing for me. But for the most part it was not sad, or solemn or melancholy. The best I can come up with is fond remembrance.

There was a little quiet laughter during the service when the minister retold some stories my brother and I had told him a few days earlier. In fact, we laughed quite a few times during the last three weeks of my mother’s life. When she arrived at the emergency room, she was responsive, if a little sleepy. Soon after they admitted her, however, she went into a sleep-like state. Her eyes were closed but she talked constantly. One afternoon she was mad at my late father, who died almost exactly 13 years ago. My father could walk up to a total stranger and talk for an hour, and he often did. In my mother’s dream, or whatever it was, she was complaining because my father was talking to his friend and didn’t he know she had a headache and needed to go home?

This dream probably did not unfairly represent my father, so we laughed about that.

After a few days she woke up. Then, after the doctor told her she was going to die, she went home. She was alert at first but soon began a slow decline. One day when she was in a semi-responsive state but very clearly on a downhill trend, my brother was talking to her and encouraging her to be open to the ending of her life. He told her that our father was waiting for her. She said, “Well, I’m not ready to go. He can just wait.”

We laughed again.

I think there were three times that the hospice nurse expected her to die within a short period, a day or even a few hours. But she held on. Everyone said she was going to do things her way. She wasn’t going to leave until she was ready. She was stubborn, and she didn’t bluff. We talked by phone to her sister in Arizona, and she told us that once when they were little girls, their grandfather scolded them for something and told them that the devil was right around the corner and was going to get them. My mother looked at her sister and said, “Let’s go see him.”

She had grit, and we laughed at that.

Her ashes were taken to the cemetery before the memorial service to be interred beside my father’s ashes. The family gathered around the gravesite, there was a prayer, and then the family was to leave and let a cemetery employee put the ash container into the receptacle. I guess that act is considered too disturbing for the family to witness. So Leah and I left. After the memorial service, someone from the funeral home apologized to us. Apparently they couldn’t get the ash container to fit into the receptacle. It was just a little bit too large. I pictured my mother sticking her elbows out as the cemetery worker tried to slip her container down into the receptacle, and saying one more time, “I’m not ready to go.”

And we laughed again.