The woman in the footage was wearing my mother’s old brown coat, the one I had packed away after the funeral because I couldn’t bring myself to throw it out. She walked into the funeral home alone, carrying a small black handbag, and sat across from the same director who was now sitting beside me. She knew exactly what she wanted, down to the flowers my mother had chosen for my father’s funeral years earlier. Then she opened the handbag and placed something on the desk that made the director stop the video.
It was my mother’s driver’s license. The director paused the footage and zoomed in, and I could see the date clearly. The license had been canceled after her death, but the photograph was unmistakably hers. I asked how the woman could possibly have had it, and he said she had presented it along with a handwritten note explaining that she was handling the arrangements on behalf of the family. The note contained my name, my phone number, and details about my mother’s wishes that weren’t written anywhere in the funeral home’s current file.
I asked the director whether the woman had said where she got the information, and he told me she had simply said, “Her daughter will understand when the time comes.” I watched the rest of the footage and noticed that before leaving, the woman had taken a small envelope from her bag and asked the director to keep it with the arrangements. He handed it to me, and my mother’s handwriting was on the front. Inside was a photograph of my mother standing beside the woman from the video, both of them much younger, outside a house I had never seen before.
I turned the photograph over and found a date from 2009, two years before my mother died, and a message written underneath: “If she comes back after I’m gone, don’t stop her. She knows where I put everything.”
