Irish Death Cleaning

Or how to burden your family even more after you die.

We had to leave. It was time to hand over the keys to the apartment where we grew up and came back to since 1964. It was 2018.

There’s a book called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, an entire philosophy about getting rid of your stuff before you die so your surviving family doesn’t have to. What we did was more like Irish Death Cleaning. You burden your heirs with as much crap as possible. We’d gone through everything without finding answers. All of our mom’s angry writing, pages of rants about how unfairly she had been treated. Receipts, chairs too delicate to sit on, religious statues, enough cans of Bumble Bee tuna for end times, and I hadn’t figured out why loving her and being loved by her was a conditional transaction.

That last day at 89^th Street, I sat in my old room watching the Madison Avenue traffic lights change. Red, red, red, red, red, red. Green, green, green, green, green, green. As I had falling asleep as a child.

I never wanted to leave that room. I longed to sit there forever listening to Orleans sing “Dance with Me” on the radio, daydreaming about DD, that cute boy from the 8^th grade square dance at church, whom I can describe only by his initials lest he realize what a crush I had on him in 1976, Would he ever kiss me, I used to wonder. (He would not.)

I wanted to stay in that room until answers came, a do-over with my childhood so I could get it right. But I had to get up and walk out. I had a family, a job, obligations. I was 56, for goodness sake. I couldn’t hide forever.

My sister and I were filthy, dusty, sweaty —in flannel shirts and jeans. The last item in the apartment was our mother’s ashes. We hadn’t figured out where to bury them yet, so they’d stayed at 89^th Street for the death cleaning. Now they had to go with us. Well, to my sister’s apartment. I didn’t object.

Our chic parents in Paris with my sister. Dad’s caught off guard but our mom is so beautiful.

We put the ashes in an Yves Saint Laurent shopping bag we’d found at the bottom of our mother’s closet. Saint Laurent, the young and, by our mother’s telling, very shy up-and-coming designer our fashion editor dad brought home to dinner at their Paris apartment in the early 1960s. She not only had to figure out what to feed a couturier but also bought a flea market dining table that day. “We didn’t own one,” she said many years later. “Thank goodness I had a little black dress.”

It was time to go. We were hungry, thirsty and exhausted. “Want to get Mexican? I could use a margarita.”

“Oh, yes.”

We drove across Central Park and found a space on Columbus Avenue. My sister grabbed the shopping bag. “Really?” I asked.

“We can’t leave her in the car. She’s claustrophobic. And what if the car gets stolen?”

We were too tired to argue or make decisions. So our mom’s remains were coming to the taqueria with us.

Feet from the entrance, I heard, “Susan?”

I looked up to see my work friend Cathy with an older woman.

“Hey,” my sister and I said, suddenly cheerful, introducing ourselves. Cathy’s mother was visiting New York from South Carolina. A real live mom.

We looked like hobos, and my sister was clutching an Yves Saint Laurent shopping bag of cremains. I could see Cathy taking this in, the juxtaposition of grime and couture.

Please don’t ask, I thought.

Cathy gave me a look, like, “One day you will explain this to me.”

“Well, we gotta run. Have a wonderful visit!” we told her mother and ducked into the restaurant with ours.