Living Longer: Letting go takes practice — and as it turns out, practice doesn’t help

FOR AS LONG as I can remember, my mother has instructed me on how to plan her funeral. She wants me to read a eulogy. She wants my brother to play the cello. She shows me where to find her password document, the spot she keeps the keys to the filing cabinet. 

She wants to be buried with the stuffed duck her parents bought her when she was about to undergo surgery as a child. It’s deep brown and still soft, with an evergreen head and beady eyes. And she wants to be buried with her parents, in the same memorial lawn with grass wet and crisp enough to make my legs itch and short iron fences separating the different gravestones, different lives. 

My mother is in her 50s, still the loudest voice at every dinner party as she tells stories about my brother and me that make us roll our eyes, still swimming an hour each day before arriving home for dinner soggy, hair dripping, wearing old leggings and a sagging swimsuit she keeps because she refuses to spend money on a new one. She sleeps too little and wakes up with more energy than anyone else in our family. She eats vegetables like she enjoys them. On family hikes, she’s always the one urging us to go just around the bend up there, just across the river. Just a little farther.