Lilac perfume. The grey cane with the hard black handle. The walker. The tennis balls. Riding up and down corridors. The wrinkles, like fossils in progress. Her voice was water pouring into a tall glass. Bird houses. The porch. The bubbles. Orthopedic shoes. Ankles like pillows. Hair like cirrus clouds. The sun-room. Rummy-cube. Play-doh. Life-alert. Button-downs. Flowers. Soft skin like the tiny yellow baby chicks in her backyard. The farm. The neighborhood in Cadillac, Michigan with houses that looked like they belonged to a set. The chipped organ with the rainbow keys and pre-set melodies. The Windows 98 computer. Chicken pot pies in the freezer.

How she howled at the hospital, but if she had known how loud she was, if she could have heard herself, she would’ve stopped. The orange juice. The hearing aids. How my mom cried enough to fill all of Lake Michigan. My dad always told her, “If I didn’t marry you, I would have married your mother.” The nursing home therapy dogs, Max and Drooby, who visited residents and knew how to press elevator buttons. My Grandma believed God to be a child- to her, nothing could be more holy.

When she died on my sisters seventeenth birthday, my mother stopped humming while she made breakfast. In fact, she stopped making breakfast altogether. My outfits stopped matching. The dogs always looked like they were just about to lie down, but never did. My dad removed the bible from his nightstand. The forget-me-nots we planted in the front yard did not make it through the winter. The whole fourth grade moved on to shoes that laced, but I didn’t. Butterflies hovered around my mother in the garden like messages. We saw her face in a slab of the new granite countertop. Lightning struck our house that year, twice.

The word funeral was too sharp, too blunt, not temporary enough. That night, we flipped our pillows to the cold side and pretended it was her breath. My little cousin asked if God is a burglar. We all swore it was not a funeral, but a “Celebration of Life.