Kathleen Harris

Word Count 1,057

I brushed past racks of linen blazers and sequined gowns at Lord & Taylor, feeling rudderless. I wasn’t exactly browsing. I was there to shop for a dead woman. 

I’ll bring a suit for her, I had said. Will she need shoes?

Yes, the funeral director answered. 

What about undergarments? I asked. A bra? Underwear? He paused for a moment.

Yes. Bring them. Treat this like it was any other ordinary day.

At the department store, I absentmindedly felt gabardine hems and three-button cuffs. What was I shopping for? Eternal comfort? A good first impression for Dolores in the afterlife?

We had never been close, my mother-in-law and I. We first met  when I was driving my future husband home for the Thanksgiving break from college in upstate New York. We had been dating for nearly a year, but I knew she wouldn't approve of me because I wasn't Jewish. Even so, I brought her a pumpkin pie from a revered local bakery. She took the box from my hands, and refused to acknowledge me. Such was her default about most difficult circumstances in life: simply pretend it wasn’t so. 

Throughout our courtship, Dolores held out hope that her youngest son would come to his senses and date a Jewish girl. This was her modus operandi with her three older children as well, all of whom married outside of their faith. When she relented, I remained wary of both her assessment and acceptance.

 Now, feeling penance for failing to be a Jewish daughter-in-law, I wanted to do right by her. But what exactly did one purchase for their dead mother-in-law to wear to her own funeral? It seemed such an act of intimacy, something which she and I had never shared in life. I sifted through pinstripes and plaids. In Judaic tradition, the dead wear white muslin shrouds. How, then, could I possibly outfit her in a three-season navy suit.

As a fifth-generation native New Yorker, and an Irish Catholic—albeit a lapsed one—I understood funerary rituals. My family pre-planned funerals, sometimes as a group activity, and often had their “traveling clothes” dry-cleaned and hanging in the hall closet, awaiting their day of reckoning. Younger male relatives were reminded of their eventual duties as funeral bagpipers, or as solemn pallbearers charged with safe transport for brass-handled coffins. Plots were purchased in Queens cemeteries as wedding gifts. Feuding relatives ensured that their visions of eternity would not be encumbered by proximity to each others’ remains, and often chose different rows—or boroughs—in which to rest in peace.

 Although Dolores had been ill for a decade and her condition was progressive and incurable, my father-in-law was not one to consider the finality of life. He simply could not accept the awful fact of losing her.

My husband, then, had to take the funeral reins. I gently whispered questions to ask his father, who was adamant about one detail: he wanted Dolores to be embalmed and viewed, as her mother had been. This practice was uncommon in Judaism, as the body was ritually washed, dressed in a plain burial shroud and placed in a simple pine coffin which remained closed. My husband’s siblings didn’t want to go against tradition. My father-in-law disagreed. His decision was final: there would be a viewing.

In his grief, however, he had neglected to pack the black suit that he had chosen for her, which meant that someone would have to go shopping. 

As I made my way through Lord & Taylor that day, I thought of the childhood she had endured in 1940s-era New Jersey, and the cruelty that had been inflicted upon her and her younger brother, merely because they were Jews. She once told me that the Nazi Party marched down the main street of her hometown, just prior to the start of World War II, and that her brother had been pelted with rocks because his family kept him home from school to celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Eventually, her parents moved to a more diverse town in New Jersey, and but began putting up a Christmas tree in their front window each year, just to be safe. Of course she feared my presence. Of course she worried about her son. She was a mother. She was a human being. She was fallible. She was scarred by the ignorance of others.

 I finally settled on a solid, plum-colored blazer and skirt, a silk blouse in a matching hue, and a contrasting scarf from the accessories department. Dolores was always impeccably coordinated. I wanted her family to see her as she was, and to find some guise of comfort during one of the rawest moments in their lives. Somewhere amidst the gleaming chrome department store racks that afternoon, my mother-in-law and I made our peace.

 All that was needed now were shoes. I decided on black pumps for her. The thought that they’d “go with everything” strangely amused me.

Would you like to try them on? the salesman asked.

No, thanks. I’m buying them for a friend.

Later that afternoon, I drove to the funeral home with Dolores’ carefully chosen traveling clothes in a shopping bag—along with a box containing one of her cameos, which I instructed the funeral director to pin to her scarf, just as she did in life.

 At the funeral, I waited outside while my father-in-law and his children viewed their wife and mother for the last time. The other mourners had not yet arrived. This was their final, private goodbye.

My husband emerged from the chapel and asked if I wanted to say goodbye. I nodded. We walked back into the chapel together, just as the funeral director closed Dolores’ casket. My husband made a brief motion for him to reopen it, but I shook my head no. Leave it closed, I said. Let her rest, I thought to myself.

 My upbringing, once viewed as a blemish on her legacy, would now offer her safe and comfortable passage into eternity. But in my last act of kindness for her, I wouldn’t acknowledge it. I wouldn’t ask to see the handiwork of my heritage. I would honor her by simply pretending it wasn’t so.

Kathleen is a fifth-generation native New Yorker whose work has appeared in Longreads, Craft, Creative Nonfiction, Sonora Review, McSweeney's, and The Rumpus, among others.