The Battle for Spike (or, arm-wrestling across mom’s coffin.)

Wrestling across my mother’s body for a stuffed animal wasn’t my Plan A.

Spike is a stuffed animal. My mother used to nestle him in the crook of her arm for comfort while she slept. Because of this, Spike earned a place of honor in my mom’s coffin when she passed away some years ago, along with a photo of her family and a small bottle of Gilbey’s gin. This was my first time dealing with formal death rituals like this. My sister and myself, along with our spouses, comprises the “family”: It was our job to approve of the way mom looked lying in state (“Her hair just isn’t right. Can you get her jacket to lie properly?”) and add what accoutrements we thought appropriate for her body’s next journey. I nestled Spike up against her arm (I couldn’t put it under her arm because her hands wouldn’t curl properly around him. The dead: go figure).

Enter The Housekeeper. Someone who’s been caring for mom off and on for 27 years, who’s taken to calling mom “mom”, much to mom’s offense. We’ll call her “Flo”. Flo entered the viewing room with her husband, saw the casket, and three things happened: first, Flo spontaneously started sobbing and wailing. Then she glided across the room like she was on roller skates (remember the old Dracula movies where the dude seemed to slide across the floor? Yeah, like that). Lastly, Flo reached into the casket and started rearranging things to her liking while we watched in horror, all of us glancing at each other like something out of a scene from a Sergio Leone film.

At some point, I decided a line had been crossed, that Flo’s presumptuousness could not go unchecked, and that line was where Flo decided to rearrange Spike. Stepping in, I said quietly “I prefer Spike nestled like this” and replaced him in his original position. Much to everyone’s amazement, Flo decided she couldn’t accept that grabbed for the dog, and a literal tug-of-war ensued across the casket (and my mom), me keeping Spike in place and saying things like “Flo, I want things to stay this way” and Flo, with a monomaniacal focus on that stuffed animal, determined to change things to suit herself. For a long moment, the husband and I locked eyes, and I said “Get.Her.Out.Of.Here”. Her husband started to pull her away from the casket — even then, she remained focused on Spike, reaching with clawed hands for that dog, determined to have her way. For myself, I’d never felt such a powerful combination of righteous, outright rage at what I perceived was a deeply inconsiderate behavior toward my family and my mom, and irony that we would, quite literally, be in combat over a stuffed animal, over my mother’s body.

This conjures up all sorts of cultural imagery: the competing lovers jumping into a grave of a lost one; the Egyptian ritual of entombing a pharoah’s entire entourage along with the ruler. “Climbers” a la “Six Feet Under”. We manipulate our dead to make ourselves, the living, feel more comfortable about their passing.

Spike ultimately stayed where I and my sister thought he should. I made damn sure of it.