Random Grateful Dead concert:  I wasn’t there.

You can mourn only so long.

During my mother’s funeral, when the relatives on my mother’s side glowered at our “banned relative, i.e., the family outcast, I realized this would be our last get-together. I do not believe in the afterlife.  I will not meet them in the afterlife.  If there is an afterlife, the gods will be merciful to the “banned relative.”  If there is an afterlife, I will boycott their heaven-country club.

I thought of Michael Tolkin’s movie, The Rapture, in which the heroine refuses to join God on Judgment Day because God is cruel. “No, I don’t want to go.”

This weekend my cousin the librarian found me listlessly staring at my mother’s belongings when I was supposed to be at the Big Muddy Blues Festival in St. Louis.

She brought pierogi (her mother was Polish) and Vodka.  “Have a shot.  I don’t want to hear about your f—ing pills!”  Then she looked at my mother’s things. “Nobody will want this, or that, or that.  In fact, throw it all out.”

It is true:  nobody will want my mother’s Size Zero clothes (nobody is Size Zero), her framed photos of dogs (I’m keeping the photo albums, though), nor her collection of Bill and Hillary Clinton books and magazines.  (Yes, we like the Clintons–but not THAT much.)

We threw everything in boxes and went to Good Will.

It was obvious that I was exhausted. She looked in my medicine cabinet.  “I’d double the dose of this one at night.”

She told me we needed to spend Labor Day weekend as though we were at a concert.  Mellow, mellow, mellow.  We don’t have many blues CDs, so she chose a Grateful Dead theme.

There was a lot of “Sugar Magnolia” and “Walkin’ Blues.”

As usual, I realized how much I would like to play guitar.

She was (briefly) a Deadhead.  For a few months in her twenties, she and a boyfriend traveled from concert to concert in a van.  “It was too much sex and drugs,” she recalls.  “I couldn’t stand it after a while.”

So she went to library school.

“No reading,” she said when I opened a book.

By the end of Day One I was desperate to read and translated some Greek because she had not forbidden it.  She wasn’t happy about it.

On Day Two she allowed me to read a mystery by Sara Paretsky.

“I don’t want to spend a day with an unemotional female P.I.,” I told her.

“That’s exactly what you need,” she said.

I didn’t finish it.  I was finally allowed to read Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d, a Jane Marple mystery.

By Monday I was defiantly reading Doris Lessing.

I still have bags under my eyes, but she agreed I had mellowed. I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea how to be a Deadhead without her. She makes me laugh.