Look, there goes Crow again, causing a scene. Making some big dog and pony show out of me dying.

It’s still jarring to have Mama’s voice be the first thing I hear every morning when I wake up. Over the sound of Willy snoring beside me, over the racket of caws and screeches from the birds in the trees out back, over the symptomatic song of the Tumourific Trio that still pounds in my ears before my head leaves the pillow.

G’wan, Mama. There won’t be any dogs or ponies there. No cat-piss lilies or drunken family brawls either. Just tea and squares and stories from all the people who love you and miss you. There’s also a big bowl of rum punch, two pans of broc-o-glop, and a chance of an old country song sing-along before the evening’s out. After the punch is gone.

The girls from the Greeting Gale went and Javexed the bejesus out of the whole fire hall, and every old scratch on the road is hauling out their potluck best. The ladies’ auxiliary pulled together some raffle baskets featuring a weekend at the Gale, snow clearing from the Alwards, an oil change from Willy’s garage, and a hat and mitt set from Mama’s friend, Betty Who Knits. The money raised from the tickets will be donated to the various people and places Mama always made time to help out.

On the morning of Mama’s Mother’s Day Memorial Celebration, I drink my tea and watch the sun chase away every remnant of lazy fog, giving way to an endless umbrella of azure and light, and I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry. Because I realize that I’m not alone. In my grief. In my home. Even in my body. And my family isn’t the pack of cursed pariahs I’d always assumed. The Fortunes use what they’ve got to do what they can, even if all they’ve got is a sizable mess or a dose of madness.

Then, looking out into my yard at the plant life that seems to have gone into overdrive overnight, I am struck by perhaps the most humbling, profound realization of all. The bag of shrivelled old mystery bulbs I rescued from beneath Mama’s paper pile and planted back in the fall? The ones that I imagined would dapple the grass with bright beauty and provide a source of free Mother’s Day flowers that I would childishly pluck and present to Mama today? I didn’t know if the things I planted would grow, but lo and behold, they did. Onions. They are all goddamn onions.

There are too many people piled into the ramshackle rural fire hall to count, but I make a point of trying to shake the hand of every last one of them. Between sips of tea and rum punch and nibbles of squares and broc-o-glop, each has a story to tell about Mama. Stories I’d never heard. Like the time a Halfway Road stray cat named Dan Richard got its head stuck in a mayonnaise jar after little Effie Fortune gave it a whisker trim at her stray cat salon. Or the time that fifteen-year-old Effie clocked the pervy old priest who felt up her friend Wanda’s arse after midnight Mass. Or the time she spent five hours straight at the bedside of a woman who’d been in a bad car wreck, absorbing her pain until the surgeon and anesthesiologist got there, even though it meant missing her own daughter’s graduation. Wendy, God love her, trails behind me as I work the room, taking notes so that there’ll be a written record of the stories people tell. For posterity. For celebration. For her grandchild, someday. Effie Fortune was full of surprises, even after she died.