The Choice

seemed to find injustice and inconvenience everywhere in her life. The
hour was wasting away, and she was so caught up in the small
disasters that we hadn’t touched on what I knew to be her larger grief.
“Where is your mother buried?” I asked suddenly.
Margaret pulled away as though I was a dragon breathing on her
face with flame. “In the cemetery,” she finally said, recomposed.
“Where is the cemetery? Nearby?”
“In this very town,” she said.
“Your mother needs you right now.”
I didn’t give her a chance to object. We hailed a taxi. We sat and
watched the wet, busy streets through the windows. She kept up a
running criticism of other drivers, the speed of the traffic signals, the
quality of the shops and businesses we passed, even the color of
someone’s umbrella. We drove through the iron gates of the cemetery.
e trees were mature and towering. A narrow cobblestone road led
from the gate into the field of the dead. Rain fell.
“ere,” Margaret said at last, pointing up the muddy hill to a
crowd of headstones. “Now tell me what in God’s name we’re doing
here.”
“Do you know,” I said, “mothers can’t rest in peace unless they
know the people they have le behind are fully embracing life?” Take
off your shoes, I told her. Take off your stockings. Stand barefoot on
your mother’s grave. Make direct contact so she can ĕnally rest in
peace.
Margaret got out of the taxi. She stood on the rain-slick grass. I gave
her privacy. I looked back only once, when I saw Margaret crouched
on the ground, holding her mother’s headstone in her hands. I don’t
know what she said to her mother, if she said anything at all. I only
know she stood barefoot on her mother’s grave, that she connected
her bare skin to this site of loss and grief. at when she got back in
the taxi she was barefoot still. She cried a little, then fell silent.