"Crying in Minnie Mouse Underwear"

“Unrecognizable,” my dad’s colleagues whispered at his shiva; their heads bowed and awkwardly fixed on our den floor.



How so? Did you get to see him? Did he smile one last time through his swollen face? Was he aware? Did he speak any last words…about me? Questions torpedoed through my whizzing head. They were questions that my mother didn’t want me having answers to.


But Sam was too busy in the kitchen with relatives, too occupied with the company of Shock to notice that I was making friends with the wainscoted wall of our den. Colleagues were too engrossed in their hunger to understand the inexplicable to notice the teenager at the opposite end of the room.


So I listened.


“A shame,” one woman said.


“She did the right thing,” an older man with spectacles practically hanging off his nose rallied.


I stared at a patch of sunlight on our worn flowered rug—a sunny day for my father’s entrance into the ground.


“I don’t know,” the woman sighed. “I don’t think I could ever make that kind of decision.”


“Well of course not,” the spectacled man huffed. “You’re much too young to even consider such things.”


“I’m not much younger than his wife. And pulling the plug like that, well, that’s just playing G-d if you ask me.” The woman’s voice was suddenly thick as if she were getting a cold.


My mother pulled the plug...my mother pulled the plug…my mother pulled the plug…the words were a sick mantra in my spinning head as I ran from the room. As I fled up the stairs I could hear a flurry of self-conscious whispers in my wake: “Poor thing,”


“It’s hardest on the young ones,” “That was one of his kids, right?”


Without thinking, I raced into my parents’ bedroom and headed straight for my father’s closet. Immediately, I was hit with the familiar smell of peppermint and soap. An old t-shirt was hanging up, a juice stain just below its neck. He’ll never drink juice again, I thought. I threw off my black dress and threw the old t-shirt on with the urgency of a scuba diver and his oxygen tank.


My mother pulled the plug…my mother pulled the plug…


I snagged an armful of my father’s shirts and plunged my nose into them. A volcano emerged from the deepest part of me as I rocked back and forth.


“Amelia Bedilia, what on earth are you doing?” My mother was standing at the door to dad’s closet, an expression of fear and offense on her face. “For G-d’s sake, are you in your underwear?”


“You tell me,” I said with a ball of mucus in the back of my throat. I lifted the stained shirt past my braless breasts so she could see my Minnie Mouse underwear in all its glory.


“Get dressed this instant, young lady,” she said threw clenched teeth. If it weren’t for the thirty or so guests downstairs she’d be screaming. “Put yourself together, and help Grandma Ruth and Grandpa Frank.”


“Put myself together??? Is that what you did after you killed my father?” I shook the pile of dad’s shirts with all my life force.


My mother stared at me like there was a gun to her head. She was shaking, a bird trapped in its own cage. “Amelia, I only did what I thought was…right.” She kneeled down on the floor beside me, suspended tears in her eyes.


“Tell me you didn’t do it, mom. Tell me he went to Heaven because he wanted to.” I wanted my mother more than ever. There was a desperate hunger inside of me to hug her and never let go.


“Oh Amelia, he went to Heaven because…yes, because he wanted to.” She nodded her head a little too much for me to believe her.


“How can you say that when you, you were the one who pulled the plug? You’re a liar and a cold-blooded murderer!” I shoved away her extended arms, and one of her hands hit the closet’s frame with a thud. She winced and it was with great effort that I didn’t go to comfort her.


“It’s not that simple. Your father was in terrible shape when I—”


“Dad was so terrible that you wouldn’t even let us say goodbye to him?!” I squeaked out between racking sobs. “Justify however you want to, but you are evil, pure evil!” I screamed and stepped around her with my father’s shirts clenched in my fists.


“Mom is not evil, Amelia! You must never say such bad, bad, bad things about mom.” My brother ran into the room and threw himself into my mother’s tiny lap. “She doesn’t mean it, mom. She is just sad, that’s all, just sad, that…” Jack gasped. “She’s just really sad.”


“I know, sweetheart, I know.”


They remained huddled on the floor. I grabbed my father’s pillow and shirts and made a beeline for my bedroom. And neither one tried to stop me.