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Funeral Pants

 



Moira fingered the fabric in her closet: a winter wool designer suit purchased at an outlet store. Her mother had been with her then. Mom’s the first spur-of-the-moment trip outside the house in years. The suit was fine, her mother said, but a little snug. Perhaps one size up. Moira complied. Two days later her mother patted her hand. “The eulogy was lovely, dear. But all I could think about was what a great job you’d done in hemming those pants.”

Moira laughed bleakly at the memory of her father’s funeral. Her family wasn’t one for feeling their feelings. She’d been pleased to give her mother something else to think about that sad day. A decade had passed; the hem held.

Moira knew she’d been lucky. At 49 her dad was the first funeral for which she’d chosen her own outfit, her grandparents and other family friends having died when she was a child.  At 59, there were too many funerals. She’d worn these the original pants to mourn her business partner in January, then bought a new, lighter weight pair of flared black Capris to wear for her neighbour in May. Too bad, she thought, that Mom hadn’t been with her for the purchase. The capris were snug at her brother-in-law’s “celebration of life” in June, and downright bladder-constricting by the time her best friend succumbed to cancer in September. Condolence carbs had taken a toll on her waistline.

2019 was a horrible year. Moira’s funeral pants saw far too much action. She welcomed 2020. It had to be better. 

In February, she ignored a niggling feeling that she should fly home to visit her mother and went to Maui instead, celebrating her 60th birthday sipping Mai Tai’s from an outrageously fruit-festooned pineapple. By March it was too late. The nursing home wasn’t allowing visitors.

As the months wore on, Moira thought of her mother daily, while also bearing the existential toll of the pandemic. No after work cocktails. No visits. No family feasts. No hugs. Mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters, all loved and mourned through iPad screens, funerals cruelly curtailed and live-streamed. That, eventually, was how she said goodbye to her mother, the woman who taught her to sew, to sing and to laugh. A blurry image on a smudged screen of a woman stabbing with weakening fingers at a call button for help that never came.

There is something far worse than too-tight funeral pants, Moira realized, tears dampening the fabric in her hand. 2020 brought too many funerals and no need for pants at all.

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