Grieving with Grimace
A story of my two loves: my now-dead mom and a fuzzy purple guy
It’s been a week since my mom passed away at home. The whole ordeal was a blur, waking up to see her still sleeping but no longer breathing, calling all the right people to take care of a body, consoling my dad who just lost his wife, calling my mom’s friends and family to tell them the news, meeting with the funeral home about cremation services. It’s wild just how much work is to be done right after one of the most stressful and saddest moments of your life just happened—planning ahead of time only helps so much.
Even when someone is slowly fading away and the end could be any day now, the end is still a shock. When you’re in a routine of caring for someone who is dying, you’re trained to look at the signs, like discoloration of the knees and feet, to monitor breathing patterns. The last week of her life was mostly spent sitting at her bedside, watching White Sox games (they were winning and then they were losing badly), and crocheting a baby blanket for my cousin. I’d tell her about my day (nothing too exciting happened) and how the Sox were doing in case she couldn’t hear the TV. Her eyes were closed 90 percent of the day. I’d give her a tiny bit of morphine every three hours as instructed. Then when it was time for me to go to sleep, I would give her a kiss on her forehead and say, “Good night, see you tomorrow.” We had already spent so many days like this together, why not just one more day? One more day to do the same things and breathe the same air in the same space, to share this big house as one big family one last time.
I’ve heard somewhere that when you’re grieving the passing of a close family member, that it can help to live life regularly while you’re processing the loss. Obviously I wasn’t going to go back to work because it was my company’s big three-day summer bash and the idea of trying to party in front of my coworkers while freshly grieving makes me want to die myself so that wasn’t an option. I was still hanging out at my parents’ house in North Aurora for the time being but I needed to get out for a little bit so I called my friend Rachel, partly because Rachel is an amazing friend whose presence is pure comfort, and partly because her neighborhood has a park with swings and those swings are very fun.
We’re in her car thinking about what to get for dinner and she’s like, “I’m thinking McDonald’s.” I’m always thinking McDonald’s. Then it hit me: today, the day of my mom’s death, is also Grimace’s birthday. It’s like a sick, cruel joke. I’m a sucker for corporate fast food gimmicks (especially when they involve a fucked up furry freak of a mascot), and now I have to think about a commercial with the same brain as the one I’m using to process my mom dying this morning. We went to McDonald’s and got the Grimace meal, which includes the new Grimace shake. It’s what my mom would have wanted. (That is objectively not true, she hated fast food and would be shaking her head in disappointment from the great beyond. But she also liked to see me happy, so maybe she was nodding her head in approval? God, please confirm for me.)
So what are my thoughts about the Grimace shake? I think it’s good, but I also think most things are good and objectively have poor taste. I like things to be sweet, and man this shake is extremely sweet. Some might call it “too sweet” but those people don’t have three pre-cavities like I do, so they are weak. Besides “sweet” the taste can also be described as “berry flavor, but the fake berry kind,” which might be a problem to some but is not a problem to me at all. It’s kind of the way that Shamrock Shakes also taste fake (I’ve never had one but that’s what I’ve been told). Fake is part of the flavor that makes it good. It’s like having a treat that you know is bad for you—like a cigarette you bummed off your ex. The Grimace shake is like that.
More important than the shake, I felt an overwhelming amount of love while eating the Grimace birthday meal. Not love for this weird purple guy (whom I do love), but the love of my friends, the love of my family members who are still on this earth, and the love of my mom who will be in my heart forever. It’s still weird to think that she’s gone and that I have things like weekends again, but life really does move on. In her honor, I will try my best to stay away from fast food branding gimmicks and get more into making homemade meals that require the use of every dish in the kitchen.
I wrote my mom’s obituary too which you can read here.
ALSO: My improv team Ghost Rats is hosting another Date Night show this Friday, June 23rd at the Bughouse Theater at 10:00pm. Tickets are $10 at the door, come on by!