seemed to fit in, which didn't bother me, nor them - they liked it that way, Europeans, stay away. Anyway, Jeanette broke down when she saw the sign late at night after the long trip. We drove through the little part of Creighton Nebraska, with all sorts of exhibits - elves working, Santa riding through the snow, happy sights for children, but death made it all appear mechanical and hollow.

Oh, but it is not this death that I am writing about, deserving although it is as my mother's death of particular attention. I wondered, why should I take my mother's death more stoically than Jeanette her father's? What is it? Was I trained like that? I knew that Mother would want me to take it stoically, that is how she took her husband's death - even though for years she kept visiting his grave and leaving flowers there. I suppose I was trained - tragedy was the norm, and when I was a kid, after my father died, two of his brothers did, and many other relatives, and I quit going to funerals. There were wars, there were all sorts of repressive governments, there was inevitable misery, that was the family ethos, and to top that, we were Baptists, so death was a challenge to be overcome, Death where is thy sting, was the motto. We would transcend death through faith. Anyhow, she is dead, so how I react makes no difference to her. It won't get her to heaven, it won't bring her back to life. It's only for me, how I would feel now. I feel terrible, and I don't need to feel better at the moment. Well, I don't need to deceive myself. For years I was getting used to the idea of the entropy of her life - she could do less and less, her valves were gone more and more, after several heart attacks, her muscles could do less and less, and finally I couldn't even call her. She would be there but she had no strength to pick up the phone.

          Once the phone fell from her hands and she didn't pick it up again.

          On her 88^th birthday, as most of us tried to call her, she didn't answer the phone. After the first attempt to get to the phone, she fell on the floor, and later she fell again, and had to go to the hospital, with a concussion.

          And yet somehow she still stayed alive, and the family enjoyed the idea that everything else was failing but her brain was lucid and intact.

          But while I was in Russia after her birthday, Vlado reported that her brain in cat-scan showed signs of shrinking.

          I was stuck with a strange visa, so I couldn't leave Russia for a month, and then she was better, but not well enough to take a longer visit, and my brother Vlado was not encouraging it. It would stress her out. She needs calm.

          But what does she need it for?

          To get better.

          Does she want to get better?

          I work on the assumption that she does; I can't work on another assumption. I can only help her live, not help her die. I am not Dutch. They believe in euthanasia. For my part, I believe there is no good death. No matter how it takes place, it is miserable. I want to help her live as long as possible.

          That is admirable, but still, perhaps she would like to see everybody and then die?

          I imagined if she saw everybody, she would die from exhaustion. But you've been here several times to see her, I don't think you need to come again.

          And so I didn't. I did think she couldn't last, so I bought a ticket to see her in December, after my classes. I thought she could hang in, she had hung in for so long.

Later, when Ivo and I talked about her life, we rationalized a little, not necessarily excusing our not visiting more. She was not into celebration. If you came there, she would wonder how much money you spent, and she would regret such unreasonable living. Could you save that money? Don't you think you should buy some property? How will you live in old age if you have nothing? Why keep traveling? What's the point?

          Well, I came to see you.

          That sounds fine, but we can talk on the phone and you can send me pictures.

          True enough, she had pictures of the whole family, on the cupboard, and she loved getting those, and she spent a lot of time looking at them, and if she had a visitor, when she was still hale, she'd show the pictures and explain who was who. And she could keep the extended family tree all intact in her head, better than anybody, without ever writing anything down.

          But she seemed to treasure visits indirectly, and to talk about them years later; however, at the moment of the visit, she expressed only skepticism, and then, criticism, why are you so thin (or fat), why don't you exercise more, why don't you take better care of yourself, do you need to drink at all, and why don't you go to church, it's a shame, all your ancestors were such believers, and you are going to quit that tradition? What gives you the right. And so on. I found it hard to take the criticism, although I should have taken it in stride as a way of talking, not ill meant. And maybe there was some wisdom in the remarks. Not that I would change, but yes, that was the point, somehow she always wanted the change, for the better to her mind.

          She never wanted to praise. She didn't praise my son, and she never praised me for publishing my books. In fact, she didn't read them. They were in English, after all, and when they were translated, she could no longer see well enough, but she also didn't want to have them read to her as she didn't have much faith in what I'd say. It would have been far better if he hadn't dropped out med school, she said. It looked like he would become a reasonable and productive person, and then he dropped out and went into this fantasy world, which does nobody any good. Nobody reads any more and nobody needs to, so why are you writing? You can only disgrace the family like that, with some psine. In Croatian, that literally meant nasty dog play.

          One theory I heard in the family, why she never wanted to praise is this. She had two daughters, after having a son and daughter who lived, and before having the younger set, three of us, my sister Nela, Ivo, and me. These two daughters died, one at the age of one, and the other at the age of four. They were supposedly both beautiful, especially so the four year old, Ljerka. One day, Mother had visitors, and she said to them, Look how beautiful and how smart she is. She can already add numbers.

          And people looked at her, and said, You are right, she is beautiful and smart, an extraordinary child. She will have a great future.

          But soon after the guests left, Ljerka turned blue from meningitis, and died.

          That was a big blow. Out of four children, two died.

          My father's brother, Pero, named his daughter Ljerka, to comfort his brother, and to say, life goes on. There's a beautiful and smart daughter.

So, when we were born, Mom didn't praise us, and she made it a scrupulous principle, not to boast of her children. She would be proud, but would keep it to herself. Sometimes her eyes would flicker knowingly, but perhaps she was afraid to acknowledge it.

          Instead, especially so with me, because she actually had a good reason to be critical, she would scrutinize me skeptically ever since I had TB at the age of six. I suppose to her mind I was a gonner then. I was thin, tall for my age, and I spent a year in fevers and coughs. I pulled through it, and became a strong kid, jumping from trees, wrestling with boys my age and winning. But she didn't like that, I was wild. And then every winter I had bronchitis, sort of a bad habit of my lungs, and coughed mercilessly for months at a time, trying to suppress the cough in the down pillows, and when I slept, I sweated and drooled. If I coughed at night, she would turn the lights on and look at me with displeasure and sorrow. Why don't you cover yourself better? Why did you walk barefoot? Why don't you take more syrup? Why won't you drink chamomile? Somehow she could impart it to me that it was my fault, a moral failing, that I was afflicted with various childhood diseases. I was a good student, but she didn't expect that to last, and it didn't. This skepticism was also the way she treated my father, who, when partisan officers came over to her place when she lived in a miserable basement, and said, Your husband is now a communist fighter, you deserve better quarters, she replied, Oh, is he now? He left his old army? You know, it may not last. Knowing him, I think he'll give up your army too. And she refused to get a three bedroom apartment from them as she couldn't trust the change of fortunes.

She didn't want much, and she didn't expect much. It was maddening for me that she expected so little and that she worked so hard.

When my father died, she took over the business of making wooden clogs, and worked day in and day out, and she also gardened, raising all sorts of produce, and she cleaned the Baptist church, took care of several old and sick women for free, cooked for us, woke up early to put wood in the stoves, and so on.

The strange thing is that she died in the same room in which her husband had died thirty-nine years before. She did not remarry and she stayed faithful to his memory. I don't know why, whether she was tempted to remarry or not, whether she thought it would be a disgrace to do it, but she stayed alone from the age of 49, which is very young. After all, I am fifty when writing this.

From my childhood, I considered the bedroom of our parents a secret chamber I wasn't allowed to visit without knocking, a terrifying chamber. And it became even more terrifying after my witnessing Father's death there. I never wanted to sleep in the room where he died. She had a choice of that room or another, brighter and bigger, but she chose that one, and that is where she slept for all those years, and where she was bedridden for the last two, and where she died. To my mind, that is amazing, to die in the same room. I mean, I am now in a plane going to Budapest, and then, on to Daruvar by car or train, for the funeral, but anyhow, I am on the go. I have no idea where I will die, where I will live. I may be buried, and probably will be, in the same cemetery, where most of my ancestors are buried, in Daruvar, if there's enough money and time and refrigeration to transport me back there, but I am not going to speculate on that, and I could end up elsewhere, which would be just fine with me. I am not that faithful to one location. There's clearly pressure to be location faithful. In my stories, I have written too much about Croatia and Yugoslavia . . . Maybe it's enough to have a mental faithfulness to the place. But there are other places now, where I have lived, where I have experienced, where I want to live.

The plane is not all that full. I asked for the exit row for the leg space on Delta, and I got two seats all to myself. The stewardesses are polite and my neighbors are tired. It reminds me of my traveling to Europe after nine eleven, when there was plenty of space on the planes but also an aura of suspicion and depression. I don't now what it will be like to see my aging siblings. I am the youngest one. You can get to be the youngest one at the age of fifty. In some countries, it's over the average life expectancy. My father died at the age of fifty three. In Russia, the average death age for men is fifty seven. Maybe it's up to fifty nine, now that nearly all the severe alcoholics who were tempted to die from too much drinking already did so. My oldest sister Nada is an old woman at the age of seventy. She has all sorts of twitches and she never recovered fully from the recent wars.

          It is easy to canonize one's parents, especially mothers. Fathers, it's easy to demonize them. But I was not the only one doing that. I remember a cousin of mine, who gave me a sermon about what a saint my mother was. She had taken care of his blind mother for years, taken her out for walks, visiting her for conversation. That old woman, Marica, is dead by now. Most everybody among Ruth's friends, is dead. That happens when you are eighty eight.

Nearly the entire family gathered at my brother's house, which, for his wife was stressful. She has gone through chemotherapy and radiation, and now is undergoing another round of chemotherapy, very weak, so, no wonder, for half an hour she hid in her bedroom. She had taken care of my mother as much as anybody else. When I sat with her alone before the party, while Vlado still worked, helping the nearly blind, she wept. I said the worst was over, no more suffering.

          I don't see it that way, she said.

          It's a relief for Vlado and you not to have to toil for her.

          That is not much of a consolation. The house will be frightfully empty, she said.

          You could have renters.

          No, it's not the same.

          I took a whole week off from work, and I wasn't taking care of the funeral details, unlike Vlado, who worked even on the day of the funeral, a couple of severe cases. He said he didn't know all the details that had to be taken care of, such as smrtovnica, the black-edged paper announcing her death to townspeople and listing all the grieving relatives, the closest ones, such as siblings, and direct descendents and their spouses, but not cousins and the extended family. There were 38 listed, and he worried that he would misspell some foreign names, which he did. Casket to order, corpse to be taken to the morgue. Now that is a big change from the way it was done in my childhood. Then, the corpse would be laid out in state, usually in the living room and sometimes in the bedroom. A black flag was posted on the house, and friends and relatives came and visited and paid homage at home, and the relatives sometimes slept even in the same room as the corpse. When my father died, he stayed in the living room, to my horror, and I felt a terrible relief when he was taken out and put in the ground&of course, more horror. Now, she wasn't there in the house. Her smell in the room where she lived for the last 20 years stayed there. It was on the second floor, which may have speeded up her demise. If she had stayed on the ground floor, she would have been able to move, to walk, to keep her body functioning a little longer. It is hard to say what got her, but from food poisoning, she also had a heart attack, and so on, an entire list of illnesses.

          It was great to see some 30 relatives gathered there. Some of them were young, and looked good, dressed formally in black, and it seemed a shame we had never gathered like that while Ruth was alive, other than for my father's funeral, but that was way too long ago, when half of these people weren't born yet. It would have cheered her up, no doubt, to see them all gathered. And it was a shame we couldn't take a picture to show her. She enjoyed looking at the pictures of relatives.

          Suddenly we all had reason to think about health. A neighbor across the road from us, it turned out, was dying just during that time.

          It was a sunny and blue day. Vlado was the only one who did not have a black suit but a dark blue one. I said, don't worry, blue counts as a color of grief, that's what blues is called after. Nine eleven was a blue day.

          OK, I'll take that, he said.

          Unlike in the old style burials with horse drawn carriages, after which we walked through the entire town, stopping traffic, this one was localized to the cemetery. We parked the cars outside it, some of us walked to it, and then gathered around the morgue, and formed a procession which went around the cemetery. Not much time to walk and think. Funeral as a peripatetic activity seems to be the most thought provoking time.

          We the siblings, five of us, gathered before and went in to the morgue to examine the wreaths with our names inscribed. I haven't even read what mine said, I couldn't find it, but I trusted Vlado it was there and that the appropriate words were on it.

          In the coffin, she looked like a classic grandmother, with a shawl around her head, her cheeks sunken, nose prominent, thin, hooked, and her hands large and knotty, almost larger than her head, which had somewhat shrunken with age. Her hands were pale, almost white, off white. Her eyes, also sunken, were much smaller than when she was younger. There was no spasm on her face, which my brother claimed indicated that she did not die in pain. She had fallen asleep. Her nerves failing before her death might have helped obliterate the pain of dying.

          I touched her forehead. The skin and the underlying flesh was cold and spongy, thicker than I had expected. Vlado said when he had found her dead she had already lost two degrees Celsius, which indicated she had been dead for two hours as one loses one degree per hour. I am not sure what temperature she was at now, but she was very cold.

          Yes, peaceful was good, but peaceful and warm are synonymous, when it comes to life, not peaceful and cold.

          Relatives came and shook hands, kissed cheeks, expressed condolences. Glassy and shiny eyed we kept our composure, and perhaps it would have been more difficult if the death had been sudden and if there had not been the consolation of the end of the suffering; postponing the death would have led nowhere as she definitely couldn't get out of bed again.

          The two women who took care of her when she couldn't get out of bed, feeding her, changing her, washing her, and massaging, they both wept, and talked to her. I saw that before, people trying to talk to the dead in the casket - and it was touching. It was good to know that the people who had known Ruth best in her last days loved her. Often it happens that the old become unbearable and outright nasty and their caretakers grow to resent them, but the attachment and love which these women obviously had for her was good, at least for me, to contemplate. Therefore, I was surprised when I found out that Vlado did not invite them to the dinner memorial party afterward at a restaurant near the park.

          After a sermon which didn't do much for me a choir sang and even though the singing was amateurish, it was painful to hear it. I had heard it at other funerals in my youth. Zbogom. Literally, With God, which is used as a greeting when someone leaves for a long time. I couldn't control my chin when I listened to the song. It twitched.

          The morticians, four of them, pushed the cart with rubber wheels, along the cemetery and up the hill.

          The grave was dug shallow, to place her casket above my father's. It was about five feet, less. The soil dug out was clay, mostly greenish brown, without many stones. After another sermon and singing, I looked at the gravepit. Yes, dust to dust. There were many flowers all around, and bees landed on them and collected pollen. Death where is thy sting? Bees, yes, there should be bees at this funeral. My father had been a bee-keeper, one of my sisters, Nada, is a bee-keeper, my father's smrtovnica had the motto, of Death, where is thy sting? The bees liked this death. They would sting if I tried to touch them.

          The minister, who had spent ten years in Australia and had been a baker before, turned the eulogy into a sermon, as could be expected, inviting people to accept Jesus as their personal savior in order to die well, rather, to live eternally. I remembered how when my father died, another minister took it as an opportunity for a sale's pitch - a perfect death, such as everybody should desire, thanks to God. But, let him do his thing. My mother, who was a firm believer all her life, would have understood this, would have perhaps even liked this invitation to faith. She had been a shy woman all her life, she wouldn't have liked this much attention anyway, and the speech turning away from her to divine matters would please her. Attention to her would have embarrassed her. She had a terrible stage-fright all her life.

          Vlado thanked the people for coming to the funeral, while holding on to the gravestone with the names of his father, mother, sisters. Maybe he needed to hold on, maybe he was unsteady, but merging with the stone, he was steady, the backbone of the funeral. Mother had her name inscribed a month after Father's funeral, with her birthyear, 1918, and then, the year of death uncut. It still had to be cut into the stone, 2006.

Vlado was the first to throw in a fistful of soil, and it thudded on the wood softly. Ivo picked up a fistful from the same heap and a soft thud followed. I suppose I wanted to be a bit less imitative, so I picked up a chunk of soil as large as my fist from the far left and dropped it after looking down into the pit. The sound that came out surprised me. It was sharp, loud - I had thrown a stone coated in soil. This was an aggressive sound of stone-throwing. I recoiled from that. That is not what I had intended. The other siblings threw in the soil and some grandchildren did. Her brother was absent, bedridden in a similar fashion to hers, in Medjuric, a village about 40 kilometers south. So I threw a stone at her casket, unknowingly. Does that symbolize what kind of son I was? I wondered.

          There was no sensation of relief once it was all done. It's all done, the suffering is over, she is in a better world, I felt none of that. Death where is thy sting - it would be good to know where exactly, but this sting is diffuse, in the veins, arteries, general blue tone of the day. Perfect day. We all got a sun tan at the funeral. I also caught a terrible cold which is still lingering. I wondered whether I had got it the moment I touched my mother's chilly forehead. I reverted to my old-style coughing, such as I had in childhood.

          I gazed at the stones with family names. There were already two Josip Novakovic's buried here. This was the place where I would end up. My mother should have, by her matrilineal heritage, been buried at the Calvary cemetery in Cleveland where her mother and grandmother are buried or in Medjuric, where her father is, by train tracks, and where her brother would be buried.

          I walked back with my half-aunt, Djurdjica, who talked about Rutica (Ruthie). Her teacher says she was the smartest pupil he had at the school in thirty years, by far. You never know what she could have become if she had been allowed to continue school after the fourth grade. She could remember everything, she spoke three languages fluently, she could do long multiplications and divisions in her head, and she could think clearly. And then I heard your father was like that in his school and he couldn't go on after the fourth grade. You are so lucky to get such genes. You and your siblings should all be geniuses.

          I suppose we should be, I said, but you never know what environment and spite can do to your head. I didn't say that but in my case with lung afflictions and oxygen deficiencies and sleep disorders, I am sure I got my brain damaged somewhere along the way, not to live up to the genetic code potential.

          Djurdjica continued, But the odd thing is that Mother was so shy that when her teacher invited a government official from Zagreb to show how well his pupils were learning, Ruthie wouldn't answer any questions. She turned red and practically mute. The teacher was embarrassed.

          Later, after a dinner during which no alcohol was drunk, I talked with my brother and had two glasses of red wine. For a long time my mother had one drink a day and then she lost the taste for it. Djurdjica's mother lived to be 96, and she started every day with a shot of plum brandy. My mother had me taste beer when I was twelve. It was a terribly hot day, and she sweat in the garden, and said, There is only one thing that will quench thirst in this dog heat, and that is beer. Go out and buy us a large bottle of cold beer.

          I did that, and she drank half of it, and wanted me to drink the rest, and I found beer bitter and heavy. I don't like it, I said.

          During the evening after the funeral, Ivo brought up his theory why our Mother didn't believe in praising her children, Ljerka's early death.

          Do you know the whole story of her death? Vlado said. I was 14 then, old enough to follow what was going on. Ljerka got the German measles inoculation. The medicine arrived form the United States. Tito had usually declined donations from the States, and it would have been good if he had declined this one. The inoculation was at the experimental stage, and Americans experimented in the countries where there was no system of law-suits for health damages, and Yugoslavia was one of them. 80 children in Yugoslavia developed meningitis and died as a result of this overly strong inoculation. (The inoculation would be modified and approved only 30 years later.)  Ljerka was one of the victims. Our father went insane over that. When she got sick, he took her to the hospital, and gave a huge some of money to the doctor, and said, Do all you can to keep her alive for me, will you? The doctor promised he would.

          She died the next morning, there was no helping her.

          He was struck with grief as was our mother. Only months later did it cross his mind that he had given the doctor a fortune to keep Ljerka alive. The doctor should have had enough conscience to return the money but he didn't.

          Father sometimes said, Here I toil for the money I used to have, but those doctor crooks kept it.

          So, that's America for you. An American preacher later when he heard the story told our father that he should sue the American government for sending faulty medication to Yugoslavia, but Father declined to do that. He always stayed insanely pro-American.

          I wondered if I had known this story earlier, whether I would have been so eager to go to the States, which I considered my Motherland, since my mother came from there. She actually came from a borderland family between Slovenia and Croatia.

          When I talked about Mother's shyness, Ljubica said, Oh, she wasn't always shy. I remember how you threw a truck tire in front of an oncoming car. You rolled it and timed it so it smashed the front of the car. The driver ran after you through the streets and couldn't catch you but you ran out of breath and ran home. She protected you and yelled at him what kind of man he was that he wanted to beat a child. You were bad.

          That is true, I remember. I had some delinquent tendencies.

          When I mentioned that Mother had a terrific healthy habit of fasting one day a week, every Saturday, Vlado said, She didn't do it for herself. She never did anything for herself. It was for you and Ivo, she prayed and fasted one day a week, so God would protect you and so you'd keep the faith of your fathers.

          That is strange.