Be Mine

by Richard Ford

When my mother died, in 1965 in Skokie, the evening before her burial, I visited the funeral home—Kresge’s—to pay her a final call. Her casket was open in one of the smaller boudoirs. It had not been long since I’d seen her alive. When I stepped into the softly lit room and pulled up a folding chair to sit beside her, I felt suddenly and unexpectedly more alive than I’d felt in months. I was in despair that she was gone and I was alone forever (it seemed). I was in all likelihood headed to the jungles of Vietnam in a few months. I had nothing to be happy about. But sitting beside her empty presence I felt invigorated, my spirits gathered. It was no Jimmy Cagney moment in which I “talked” to my mother, promised her I’d do better, told her how beautiful she was (she wasn’t, she was dead), committed myself to a life of kinder acts and selflessness. I don’t know if I thought anything, profound or otherwise. But if I said I tingled all over that wouldn’t be wrong. I didn’t “see” anything new. I didn’t decide to skip the next day’s sad duties, drive to Grand Marais and hire out on an oar boat. Nothing was different. I wasn’t different. I stood and looked down onto my mother’s lifeless, rouged face. I noticed a small, pale scar in front of her left ear. I noticed that her strong nose made her look, in death, slightly like an eagle. Her mouth, closed tight by the embalmer’s stitchery, had at its corners the shadow of a faint, naughty smile—which I guess had always been there but w...