We Just Can't Afford It

"We Just Can't Afford It"
Matthew 25:14-18


My sister came and stood beside me, taking my arm as we watched our mother’s casket being lowered into the vault.  I took some weight off the crutch that served as my right leg.  I leaned into her, and held on.  We didn’t say anything for a long time.  The men worked around us, as if we weren’t there, pulling the straps up once the coffin was in place, lowering the lid of the vault, clanging it in place.  They did all this without speaking a word to each other, having done it so many times before.  For my sister and me, it was the first time we had witnessed such a thing.

When we heard the engine of the front end loader start up and then make its way over to push the dirt into the grave hole, my sister gave me a look and a closed lip half smile that was wordlessly asking me if I was ready to go.

The others had long since gone.  There weren’t many--about a dozen or so old ladies who knew our mom.  My sister’s two girls (who were now playing hide and seek amongst the headstones).  The funeral director.  And a minister he had arranged to do mom’s service.

It all seemed so surreal.  Kind of like mom’s life.  I can’t remember a word the minister said.  My sister’s girls were poking each other and making each other giggle during the simple graveside service.  The funeral director was looking like, well, like a funeral director.  A painted on expression that undoubtedly had been perfected to mask his real thoughts.  Like he’d rather be golfing or sailing or being anywhere than where he was at that moment.

And those other women.  They all looked like bag ladies like my mother had become.  They had on layers of clothes in no particular progression.  One lady wore a navy blue skirt (backwards, with the zipper in the front), a short-sleeved and a dingy white blouse that looked like it had caught more food than got to her mouth.  On top of that was an unbuttoned red plaid flannel shirt.  And over all that mess, a black, front buttoning sweater with only two buttons left, and half a leather patch dangling at one elbow.  The other leather patch was totally MIA.

They all looked the same.  Like some secret society that wore similar Goodwill outfits, and disheveled, finger-combed greasy hair.  Maybe being a bag lady was being part of a secret society.  The looks on their faces were hiding truths that would probably never be told to anyone outside their tight confederacy.  My mother went to the grave carrying their secrets.  They would probably go to theirs carrying hers.  I stared at them all during the service, realizing there was so much about my mother’s later years I would never know.  Their smug and icy expressions back at me verified that thought.

There was something else about the looks they were giving me that I couldn’t analyze.  They knew something.  It was like they wanted to say something, to tell me something, but it wasn’t their place, or it wasn’t the right time.  After the brief service was over the women all flitted in every direction, each one blending with others on the street that adjoined the cemetery, becoming needles in a very large haystack.

“Are you going to miss her?” my sister asked as we walked towards her car.  An odd question I thought.  Not because the question itself was odd, but because of the mixture of emotions any of my answers evoked.  How do you miss someone who lived a bag lady existence who happened to be your mother?

To say that we grew up poor would be a gross understatement.  My father died, or left--I’m still not sure which--soon after my sister was born.  My mother never talked about him.  She wouldn’t allow us to ask questions about him.  At some point we gave up caring to know anything about him.  Whatever happened, I don’t remember my mother being happy about anything.  She gave up on life.  She raised my sister and me mostly because she had to, not because there was any particular joy in it.

“Am I going to miss my mother?”  I wondered at my sister’s question.  I remembered all that life was, or wasn’t, for she and I growing up with our mother.  I thought about what it was like living in a tenement building with no heat.  The only warmth we enjoyed in the winter was that from the apartments below and beside us that leached through the floor and the walls.  I remember having to sit on wooden crates for chairs that my mother pulled out of the trash behind the grocery stores.  I remembered the big cardboard box we used for a table to eat our meals and do our homework.  I remembered that was the only “furniture” we had.  I remember us all sleeping on the floor in sleeping bags that had been donated to us by the Salvation Army.

I remembered always wearing Goodwill bought clothes.  Mom always got my sister and me clothes that were at least two sizes too large so we could “grow into them.”  And nothing ever matched.  After a while we got over the embarrassment of looking like we did at school.  My sister and I finally stopped complaining to mom because she always said, “We just can’t afford it.”  And we knew we couldn’t.

As I pegged alongside my sister toward her car, our childhood poverty was most painfully symbolized by the loss of my right leg.  When I was 12 years old I was playing with some friends.  We were jumping off the loading dock platforms at the industrial park near our tenement building.  On one particular jump, I landed wrong and broke one of the bones in my thigh.  I was sure it was broken.

But like my mother always said, we couldn’t afford a doctor, let alone hospital costs.  She told me to just lie still for a week or so until the bone could start mending itself.  But I couldn’t stay down.  I couldn’t miss that much school.  Yet the more I was on the leg, the worse it felt.  She finally broke down and took me to one of those charity hospitals.  When the doctors saw what color my leg was, they knew they were going to have to amputate it.  Gangrene had already set in.  It smelled as bad as it looked.

My mom couldn’t afford the rooming-in-fee at the hospital, so the day after the operation she took me home to take care of me there.  The doctor showed her how to change the dressing and watch the draining tubes.  We’d ride the bus back to the hospital a couple of times a month until the doctors decided it was healed.  We couldn’t afford any artificial leg, so I just learned to walk with crutches.

From then on, I vowed to myself that I would get myself and my sister out of that place.  I was going to make something of myself so that neither I nor my sister would have to live like that again.  We would wear store bought clothes.  We would have real furniture made of wood and upholstery.  We would sleep on beds.  We would eat fresh food--not stuff that had been scraped off people’s plates and thrown out the back door of downtown restaurants.

“Am I going to miss her?” I finally replied to my sister at the car, coming out of my thoughts and memories.  “I don’t know.  Do you remember how we’d find her, still living in that flat we grew up in?” I asked as I flopped backwards into the front passenger seat.  My sister took my crutches and threw them in the back with the kids.  They promptly began using them as imaginary machine guns, blasting everything in sight out the back window of the minivan.

“Yeah, I remember,” my sister nodded as she got in and started up the car.  “She’d be wearing newspapers for underwear, even after I had bought her some.  I’d ask her where the undies were that I had bought her, and she’d tell me she gave them all to her friends.”

“Why wouldn’t she move in with you or I?” I asked, not expecting an answer.  Both my sister and I had pleaded with her to move out of that place and stay with one of us.  But she couldn’t bear leaving her friends--other women who had given up on life and resigned themselves to living on other people’s throwaways.

Then she dropped off the radar.  She had moved out of the flat, unable to pay her bills and blended into the street people.  Once in a while she would turn up at a mission or flop house, and my sister (who looked for her more than I did) would discover her.  But the last few years were a painful mystery of wondering.  Wondering where she was.  Wondering how she was.  Wondering if she was still alive.  When we got the call from the police that they had found our mother dead in a cardboard box, our wondering stopped.  Luckily she had some ID in her few putrid belongings.

“Hey,” my sister interrupted my blank staring, and patted me on the shoulder with a free hand as she drove with the other.  “You have nothing to feel guilty or ashamed about.  You’ve worked hard, putting yourself through school, getting us both out of a terrible life.”  She paused, giving me a reassuring smile, still rubbing my shoulder.  Then she said, “The way I feel about it, her death has brought a climax to a wretched time of our lives.  It brings to an end having to search for her and, when finding her, having to witness the continuing terrible choices she made in living.  We had no control over those choices--never could, no matter how much we wished it otherwise.”

“You’re right,” I exhaled, shaking my head.  “I guess we keep building on what we’ve made of ourselves despite her, and the poverty of our past.”  She gave me a nod and we drove on in silence, except the rat-a-tat-tatting coming from the imaginary machine gunners in the back seat.


A week later, my sister and I had an appointment with a lawyer who had contacted us after our mother died.  He had called to tell us that our mother had a will and wanted to go over it with us.  We had no idea she had a will, or how it was this lawyer was in charge of it.  We joked our way to his office about who was going to inherit the wooden crate chairs and cardboard table; or, who would get her sleeping bag.

The lawyer was all business, and seemed anxious to get on with his duty.  We listened to him explain some details from notes that were attached to the will.  “Evidently,” he said with a nasal drone, “your mother’s father left her a sum of money when he died.  Let’s see,” he said shuffling papers about.  “That was in 1951.  The notes are not clear, but it looks to have been around $100,000.  She invested the entire sum, and evidently got some good advice about that investment.”

I shot a quick glance at my sister and began to feel the room spin and I had the sensation of falling.  “Today,” the lawyer continued, “your mother’s assets are worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 million.”

What I had just heard hit me in the chest like the blast from both barrels of a shot gun.  My thoughts were a mass of bewilderment and anger as I stared open-mouthed at my sister.  She was wearing the same expression, tears of confusion beginning to stream down her cheeks.  I slowly looked down at where my right leg should have been and then up at the lawyer.  All I could hear, echoing down through my mind as if they were coming from a distant tunnel, were those oft spoken words in my mother’s voice, “We just can’t afford it.”