Dead Mother in a Corner of the Room
My stepfather married my mother when I was ten years old. He obviously loved her a lot to marry her and take care of her six kids, plus having two more sons with her. He used to delight in telling us that he loved her so much, that if she were to die, he’d want to keep her around, stuffed and naked, in a corner of dining room so she could watch over us each day as we ate. Naked. Really?
Now I know he was teasing, but at the vulnerable age of ten, this was the most horrid thing I could imagine. I’d have nightmares about my naked mother, at an age where I was just starting to mature. A stiff, cold, naked, dead mom, sitting in a corner of the room—what a vision! I knew about taxidermy so I assumed it could be done. I imagined her standing, like a cougar, cornered with her hands up high with hands shaped like claws and her teeth bared.
Over the years he stopped talking about having her naked but he always thought he’d still like to keep her around until he too was dead and then they could both be buried together. But I no longer have to fear that I would now find my seventy+ year old mother naked in the corner of their tiny house in northern California. Today, if she dies, I can take comfort in the fact that she would be wearing clothing.
Today, my mother is in bad health and one day while my stepfather and I were talking about things that might happen, he was saying that he hoped he outlasted her because she really needed to be cared for. I asked him then, what he would do when she died?
“I’m going to get me one of them Internet girlfriends,” he said with a smile.
“But your mom will always be near me. I still intend to keep her in the corner,” he continued on.
I laughed, but that night the images of my younger mother, naked and alone in a corner, visited me again.
By now, I have a lot of evidence that my family is totally weird. If I were still collecting evidence to support that idea, I wouldn’t have to look far. But I also know that my stepdad has spent the last 45 years devoted to my mother, still in love with her as the day they first met, and I am happy my mother found someone to accept and love her; someone as weird as she is.
