Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [0]
Elizabeth Noble
For my own daughters,
Tallulah Ellen Young and Ottilie Florence Young
With my love
Contents
June
August
October
Mid-December
Christmas Day
New Year’s Eve
January
February
March
April
May
June
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Elizabeth Noble
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
June
Dear All of You,
Despite my controlling streak, there aren’t too many rules, so far as the funeral goes. Do it as soon as you can, won’t you? Good to get it over with. Lisa knows about the music, if you can bear to go with what I’ve chosen. We’ve talked about the committal—you know I only want you lot there, and you know which coffin, and which fabulous outfit. I’d like this poem—which, by the way, I love. Thank God for insomnia and the Internet—I’d never have found it otherwise, and you’d be stuck reading something yucky. It should be read by whoever thinks they can do it without crying, because that is my biggest rule. No crying, please. If you can manage it. Oh, and no black. Wear the brightest thing you can find in your wardrobes. Both are clichés, I know, but better the colorful one than the somber. And try and make the sun shine (although I recognize that this last one might be outside of your control). I’m not saying anything mushy in this letter—strictly business—but I daresay there will be other letters. I have other things to say—she says ominously—if I last long enough to write them…(don’t you just love terminal illness humor?).
I’m sorry you all have to do this. I really am.
So, never-ever-ending love, as always…
Mum
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there, I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond light on snow
I am the sunlight on the ripened grain
I am the gently falling autumn rain
When you wake in the morning hush
I am the swift uplighting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight
I am the soft starlight at night
Do not stand at my grave and cry
I am not there, I do not die.
(Isn’t that perfect for a funeral in a field?!)
August
Lisa
Lisa lay back gingerly in her deep aromatherapy bubble bath and looked at the eight-by-ten-inch picture she had taken from the top of the piano. She’d propped it behind the taps so that she could see it clearly from where she lay in the steamy water, and now she was trying not to splash it. It was a black-and-white shot of her mother, Barbara, taken on her sister Jennifer’s wedding day, eight years earlier. Mum looked desperately glamorous, with her salon-fresh hair and artfully artless outfit. No mother-of-the-bride peach suit with matching hat for her. Lisa remembered the hat—three-feet-wide, floppy-brimmed, espresso-colored straw. No one sitting in the four pews behind her saw a thing of the ceremony. You couldn’t see why, and she no longer remembered, but Mum was laughing her big, loud laugh. Her head was thrown back, the ungainly hat long abandoned, the auburn waves of her hair blown messily across her face by the summer breeze. Her large, expressive mouth was open wide, so that you could see a filling on the top row of her teeth, and her hazel eyes had almost disappeared into the crinkles of her face. It was an especially great picture of her mother, although Barbara had always been photogenic. Lisa could almost hear it when she looked at the picture, deep and throaty, and so, so alive. It was Mum’s raucous laugh she would miss the most. That and the smell of Fracas.
She thought about the last big belly laugh they had shared. It was the day Lisa had helped her mother plan her own funeral. She couldn’t bear to do it with Mark, she had said. He would keep crying, and she so badly didn’t want to cry. She was almost obsessed by not crying, toward the end. Hannah was too young, obviously. Amanda wasn’t around—off doing…whatever Amanda was doing right now. And Jennifer…well, Jenny Wren wasn’t exactly the person who sprang to mind for the task, she said, making a stupid grimacing face