People Die. Life Goes On.

Or: Why I was crying at Home Depot.

Hi, it’s me.

Three years ago next week, my mom died after a long decline from dementia and stroke complications. We were close. I made her laugh. I was a hard kid growing up, but as an adult, we had a delightful relationship.

Here I am in high school, showing mom my gratitude for the Peanut Butter Crunch Blizzard she purchased for me on the way to our cabin in Aitkin County, MN. I must have been a joy to parent.

Because of her nearly ten year health decline, I missed her for a long time before she actually died, which is why I was surprised by how hard I took it when she actually did die. I sort of had in my head that I had done all my grieving and would be mostly focused on the logistics of it all. I was certain I had no more tears to shed. I even sent a note to my team at work saying I’d be out for a couple days but back on Wednesday. I know, right? I can feel your collective “Duh” as you read this, but in my mind I had a mental task list for dealing with her death, and that list did not include being sad. That box was already checked, the task crossed off. I mean, what even is the point of a long, slow goodbye if not to get it all out of my system ahead of time?

I found out she died on a Monday morning when I woke up to a message from my sister. I was still processing the loss when there was a knock at our front door - our general contractor had arrived to begin tearing out our bathroom. This was not a fun bathroom renovation where I would get the tile and deep soaking tub I wanted. Nope. This was a leaky shower reveals mold everywhere we have to gut the whole thing right now renovation. And there was an urgency to the remodel because the final approval of our mortgage refinance depended on this problem being fixed.

Also, we only have one bathroom. For several weeks we utilized our camping gear to shower in the back yard and poop in the garage. The situation was not ideal.

Water damage from our bathroom extended into the hallway, so the floor had to come out.

I spent the first day making phone calls in the back yard because the bathroom demolition inside was too loud. Of the workload shared between myself and my two siblings, my job was to write the obituary. I was also tasked with finding some way to memorialize our mom with any financial gifts we were given. She was the heart of the preschool program at church for at least two decades — first as a teacher, then as the director. She would play the piano and sing with the kids about the weather or their little talk with Jesus. I desperately wanted to buy an outdoor musical instrument made for playgrounds, like a set of chimes, or a keyboard, or glockenspiel, but these were far out of our budget. Instead, we decided on a Buddy Bench for the playground, where children who needed a friend could sit and wait for a buddy to join them.

The next evening, I was at Home Depot picking out shower tile with Bryan and the kids, who were both teenagers at the time. I have no idea why they came with us  – they certainly didn’t have to. Sometimes during COVID we did weird things together just to get out of the house. Anyway, I hated all the shower tile at Home Depot. The bathroom demo had destroyed a beautiful horizontal streak of green and blue glass polka dot tiles that made me smile, and I was mad about losing it. But we didn’t have the luxury of special ordering a trendy tile or the time to shop around at different design stores.

I literally sat down on the floor in the tile aisle of the Bitter Lake Home Depot and started crying because the Universe would not deliver my dream bathroom — a grief I could access with more clarity and anger than being left without a mom in this world. Ruthie scuttled away, embarrassed. Thomas picked me up and started pointing out tile options on the wall. Bryan was stressed and sweating at the forehead, coping in his own way with grief and surprise design decisions. The experience probably ruined Home Depot for my kids and their kids for generations to come. There will never be another Zug who steps foot inside a Home Depot because that is where adults go to fall apart.

I fucking hate how life goes on when people die.

I use my journal for both writing and managing my life. This entry from the day my mom died is bananas. “To do this week: Finish obit(uary) and pick up tile at Home Depot.”

When my step-dad, Gordy, died on January 3rd in 2005, it was also a regular Monday morning. I woke up, took a shower, and fed Ruthie breakfast (she was almost two). We were inside the arrival window for someone to come and fix our broken furnace when the phone rang. 

I had recently read Carole Radziwill’s memoir, What Remains, in which she describes what happens between the moment a death occurs and the moment you find out about it, how she was sipping a glass of wine and reading Pride and Prejudice as her friend’s airplane spiraled downward into the ocean. I think about that a lot, how we will all at some point experience a catastrophic loss without even realizing it. We’ll get a phone call or see something on the news, and the thing will have happened hours or maybe even days before. Inevitably, we’ll think back to what we were doing the moment it happened, or the last time we spoke. Could we have stopped it had we known? Would it change our last interaction with them had we known it was the last time we’d see them?

I was sleeping when my mom died, and also when Gordy died. In neither instance did I suddenly wake up at 2am feeling like my world had been rocked.

I slept soundly. I woke up and had a normal day. I was mad about the broken furnace because of course it broke on the coldest weekend of the winter. I was also seven months pregnant with our second kid, which is in the get-this-thing-out-of-me trimester. It was business as usual in the Zug house, having no idea what I’d already lost.

Gordy came into my life when I was eight years old, and we were close. He had cancer and we knew he was dying, but even so, you’re never prepared to receive that call. I answered the phone in the laundry room where I had been loading the washing machine. It was my mom and she was crying. I instantly knew he was gone. I started crying and we talked for a few minutes. 

And then the doorbell rang. I hung up the phone and opened the front door. It was the furnace repair guy arriving on time within his designated window. I greeted him, walked him downstairs to the furnace, and answered his questions. Then I thanked him and walked him to the door again. 

People die. Life goes on. 

One of my favorite photos of me and Gordy.

I still think about that morning and how absurd it was for me to flip that switch in my brain from grieving daughter to household manager. I couldn’t stop the earth from rotating or the tide from going out or a stranger from ringing my doorbell. The furnace didn’t care about my loss.

From the perspective of nineteen years later, I can see how it might have been the best thing to happen in that moment. It can be difficult to snap out of a shocking moment — time feels stuck when you’re trying to make sense of catastrophic news. Talking shop with the furnace guy gave me something to do in that moment. I had a task, an objective, something to focus on that didn’t require complicated reasoning skills. I could float through the rest of my day by fussing over my two-year-old and the furnace situation.

But now, all these years later in almost the exact situation of dealing with a home repair project in the midst of my grief, I could not hold my shit together. Why do I experience the deaths of important people like I’m in some kind of dark comedy improve nightmare? Rule number one is “Say death, and…” I didn’t want death and furnace guy. I didn’t want death and gutted bathroom. I didn’t want to be in the Home Depot tile aisle or have strangers in my house. I wanted to cry in my pajamas while watching The Bourne Identity in a dark room… period… no and… and I was one hundred percent not being an adult about it. 

But we can’t always have nice things, can we? After my Breakdown At Home Depot, I gave up trying to power through. I took the week off of work, played in my garden, and wrote an obituary. And I did it all without an indoor shower or toilet.

Thanks for reading.

Until next time,

Jen

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