Un texte particulièrement émouvant " Removing George Clooney "

I knew heading back to my mother’s apartment would be the hardest part of all this. The most painful and gut-wrenching part of this whole ordeal of cleaning up after my mother’s death, harder even then the funeral itself.

As soon as I walked into her apartment, not even 30 hours since her aide found her lying dead on her couch, I did not walk over to the couch, not right away, and imagine her lying there, eyes closed, brow finally unfurled, relieved of pain, at peace at last. I did not go over to her bed and imagine my mother lying there where she slept for the last night of her life, nor the sink whose faucets were still running when her aide found her, nor the toilet or shower or photos of earlier, happier times, of her high school graduation, of the beautiful blonde girl sprawled on the grass who my father must have looked at every day of his life in disbelief he had married this girl, that such a girl had agreed to marry him, and the one of this girl and my father, he looking young and handsome in his army uniform and of my mother and dad years later in front of their condo not ten miles from here or her granddaughter Anna—no the first thing I looked at the moment the front door closed behind me was the poster of George Clooney still taped to the door and I imagined putting that poster, standing it up, on its own chair at her funeral service-just like at my mother’s 90th birthday party-and me thanking him during my little eulogy for making my mother happy these last several months or perhaps I would slip it into her coffin along with some other photos of my mother and father or my mother and her boyfriend Harold or her latest boyfriend, Eli-just roll up George and slip him inside her coffin with everyone else.

But I would not do either. Yes, George Clooney’s poster was the first thing I looked at because it reminded me of the things I liked best about my mother, her wonderful relentless, irreverent shameless, infectious, sense of humor; her wild and crazy and infuriatingly endearing and enduring fantasy life; her feistiness and her unique kind of wisdom, not the wisdom of a saint or a philosopher perhaps, but of a woman who despite fearing life, always fearful of what it might bring, yet who at the same time tried to squeeze as much pleasure out of it that she could and when I looked at George Clooney, there was something in his eyes that seemed to know this and I thought to myself as I gently removed him from her door, perhaps the hardest thing I ever had to do, that he would definitely have liked my mother.

By Mitch Levenberg

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