FREE CHURRO

So I stopped at a Jack in the Box on the way here, and the girl behind
the counter said, “Hiya! Are you having an awesome day?” Not, “How
are you doing today?” No. “Are you having an awesome day?” Which is
pretty… shitty, because it puts the onus on me to disagree with her, like
if I’m not having an “awesome day,” suddenly I’m the negative one.

Usually when people ask how I’m doing, the real answer is I’m doing
shitty, but I can’t say I’m doing shitty because I don’t even have a good
reason to be doing shitty. So if I say, “I’m doing shitty,” then they say,
“Why? What’s wrong?” And I have to be like, “I don’t know, all of it?” So
instead, when people ask how I’m doing, I usually say, “I am doing so
great.”

But when this girl at the Jack in the Box asked me if I was having an
awesome day, I thought, “Well, today I’m actually allowed to feel shitty.”
Today I have a good reason, so I said to her, “Well, my mom died,” and
she immediately burst into tears. So now I have to comfort her, which is
annoying, and meanwhile, there’s a line of people forming behind me
who are all giving me these real judgy looks because I made the Jack in
the Box girl cry. And she’s bawling, and she’s saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so
sorry,” and I’m like, “It’s fine. It’s fine.” I mean, it’s not fine but, you
know, it’s… fine. And I would like to order a Double Jack Meal, and I’ve
kinda got somewhere to be, so maybe less with the crying and more
with the frying, huh? [inhales] And the girl apologizes again and she
offers me a free churro with my meal. And as I’m leaving, I think, “I just
got a free churro because my mom died.” No one ever tells you that
when your mom dies, you get a free churro.

[clears throat]

Anyway, I’m sorry, that’s not part of the… [clears throat] All right. Okay,
here we go. Let’s do this. Here I am, BoJack Horseman, doing a eulogy,
let’s go. Beatrice Horseman, who was she? What was her deal? Well,
she was a horse. Uh, she was born in 1938. She died in 2018. One time,
she went to a parade, and one time, she smoked an entire cigarette in
one long inhale. I watched her do it. Truly a remarkable woman.
Lived a full life, that lady. Just, all the way to the end, which is, uh, now I
guess. Really makes you think, though, huh? Life, right? Goes by, stuff
happens. Then you die. Okay, well that’s my time, you’ve been great! Tip
your waitress! No, I’m just kidding around, there’s no waitress. But
seriously, that’s all I have to say about my mother. No point beating a
dead horse, right? So…

[inhales] Now what? I don’t know. Mom, you got any ideas? Anything?
Mom? No? Nothing to contribute? Knock once if you’re proud of me.

Can I just say how amazing it is to be in a room with my mother, and I

can just talk and talk without her telling me to shut up and make her a
drink? Hey, Mom, knock once if you think I should shut up. No? You
sure? I mean, I don’t want to embarrass you by making this eulogy into a
me-logy, so, seriously, if you wanted me to sit down and let someone
else talk, just knock. I will not be offended. No? Your funeral.

Sorry about the closed casket, by the way. She wanted an open casket,
but uh, you know, she’s dead now, so who cares what she wanted? No,
that sounds bad. I’m sorry. I-I think that if she could’ve seen what she
looked like dead, she’d agree it’s better this way.

[clears throat]

Here’s a story. When I was a teenager, I performed a comedy routine for

my high school talent show. There was this, uh, cool jacket that I wanted
to wear because I thought it would make me look like Albert Brooks. For
months, I saved up for this jacket. But when I finally had enough, I went
to the store and it was gone. They had just sold it to someone else. So, I
went home and I told my mother, and she said, “Let that be a lesson.
That’s the good that comes from wanting things.” She was really good
at dispensing life lessons that always seemed to circle back to
everything being my fault.

But then, on the day of the talent show, my mother had a surprise for
me. She had bought me the jacket. Even though she didn’t know how to
say it, I know this meant that she loved me.

Now that’s a good story about my mother. It’s not true, but it’s a good
story, right? I stole it from an episode of Maude I saw when I was a kid,
where she talks about her father. I remember when I saw it, thinking,
“That’s the kind of story I want to tell about my parents when they die.”
But I don’t have any stories like that. All I know about being good, I
learned from TV. And in TV, flawed characters are constantly showing
people they care with these surprising grand gestures. And I think that
part of me still believes that’s what love is. But in real life, the big
gesture isn’t enough. You need to be consistent, you need to be
dependably good. You can’t just screw everything up and then take a
boat out into the ocean to save your best friend, or solve a mystery, and
fly to Kansas. You need to do it every day, which is so… hard.

When you’re a kid, you convince yourself that maybe the grand gesture
could be enough, that even though your parents aren’t what you need
them to be over and over and over again, at any moment, they might
surprise you with something… wonderful. I kept waiting for that, the
proof that even though my mother was a hard woman, deep down, she
loved me and cared about me and wanted me to know that I made her
life a little bit brighter. Even now, I find myself waiting.

Hey, Mom, knock once if you love me and care about me and want me to
know I made your life a little bit brighter.

I was in the hospital with her those last moments, and they were truly
horrifying, full of nonsencial screams and cries, but there was this
moment, this one instant of strange calm, where she looked in my
direction and said, “I see you.” That’s the last thing she said to me. “I
see you.” Not a statement of judgment or disappointment, just
acceptance and the simple recognition of another person in a
room. “Hello there. You are a person. And I see you.”

Let me tell you, it’s a weird thing to feel at 54 years old, that for the first
time in your life your mother sees you. It’s an odd realization that that’s
the thing you’ve been missing, the only thing you wanted all along, to be
seen. And it doesn’t feel like a relief, to finally be seen. It feels mean,
like, “Oh, it turns out that you knew what I wanted, and you waited until
the very last moment to give it to me.” I was prepared for more cruelty. I
was sure that she would get in one final zinger about how I let her down,
and about how I was fat and stupid and too tall to be an effective Lindy-
hopper. How I was needy and a burden and an embarrassment—all that I
was ready for. I was not ready for “I see you.” Only my mother would be
lousy enough to swipe me with a moment of connection on her way out.
But maybe I’m giving her too much credit. Maybe it wasn’t about
connection. Maybe it was a… maybe it was an “I see you,” like, uh, “I
see you.” Like, “You might have the rest of the world fooled, but I know
exactly who you are.” That’s more my mom’s speed.

Or maybe she just literally meant “I see you. You are an object that has
entered my field of vision.” She was pretty out of it at the end, so maybe
it’s dumb to try to attribute it to anything.

Maybe when someone says, “I see you,” it just means, “I see

you.” Then again, it’s possible she wasn’t even talking to me because, if
I’m being honest, she wasn’t really looking at me. She was looking just
past me. There was nobody else in the room, so I want to think she was
talking to me, but, honestly, she was so far gone at that point, who
knows what she was seeing? Who were you talking to, Mom? [sighs]
Not saying, huh.

Maybe she saw my dad. My dad died about ten years ago. I wish I’d
known to go to Jack in the Box then. Maybe I could have gotten a free
churro. It would’ve been nice to have something to show for being the
son of Butterscotch Horseman. My darling mother gave the eulogy. My
entire life I never heard her say a kind word to or about my father, but at
his funeral she said, “My husband is dead, and everything is worse
now.”

“My husband is dead, and everything is worse now.” I don’t know why
she said that. Maybe she felt like that’s the kind of thing you’re
supposed to say at a funeral. Maybe she hoped one day someone would
say that about her. “My mother is dead, and everything is worse
now.” Or maybe she knew that he had frittered away all her inheritance,
and replaced it with crippling debt, which is a pretty shitty thing to leave
your widow with. “Bad news, you lost a husband, but don’t worry, you
also lost the house!” Maybe Mom knew she’d have to sell all her fancy
jewelry and move into a home. Maybe that’s what she meant by
“everything is worse now.” Is that what you meant, Mom?

My mom, even before she died, could barely remember who I was. And
of course, my dad’s dead. The last conversation I ever had with him was
about his novel. He was so certain this book was his legacy. Maybe he
thought it would vindicate him for all the shitty things he ever did in his
stupid worthless life. Maybe it did, I don’t know. I never read it, because
why would I give him that?

I used to be on this TV show called Horsin’ Around. It was written by my

friend Herb Kazzaz, who’s also dead now, and it starred this little girl
named Sarah Lynn. And it was about these orphans. And early on, the
network had a note, “Maybe don’t mention they’re orphans so much,
because audiences tend to find orphans sad and not relatable.” But I
never thought that the orphans were sad. I-I always thought they were
lucky, because they could imagine their parents to be anything they
wanted. They had something to long for.

My mom would hate it if she knew that I spent time at her funeral talking
about my old TV show. Or maybe she’d think it was funny that her idiot
son couldn’t even do this right. Who knows? She left no instructions for
what she wanted me to say. I’m not gonna stand up here and pretend I
ever understood how to please that woman, even though so much of my
life has been wasted in vain attempts to figure it out. But I keep going
back to that moment in the ICU when she looked at me, and… “I-C-U.”

“I… see… you.” Jesus Christ, we were in the intensive care unit. She
was just reading a sign. My mom died and all I got was this free churro.

You know the shittiest thing about all of this? Is when that stranger
behind the counter gave me that free churro, that small act of kindness
showed more compassion than my mother gave me her entire goddamn
life. Like, how hard is it to do something nice for a person? This woman
at the Jack in the Box didn’t even know me. I’m your son! All I had was
you! [inhales]

I have this friend. And right around when I first met her, her dad died,
and I actually went with her to the funeral. And months later, she told me
that she didn’t understand why she was still upset, because she never
even liked her father. It made sense to me, because I went through the
same thing when my dad died. And I’m going through the same thing
now. You know what it’s like? It’s like that show Becker, you know, with
Ted Danson? I watched the entire run of that show, hoping that it would
get better, and it never did. It had all the right pieces, but it just—it
couldn’t put them together. And when it got canceled, I was really
bummed out, not because I liked the show, but because I knew it could
be so much better, and now it never would be. And that’s what losing a
parent is like. It’s like Becker.
Suddenly, you realize you’ll never have the good relationship you
wanted, and as long as they were alive, even though you’d never admit
it, part of you, the stupidest goddamn part of you, was still holding on to
that chance. And you didn’t even realize it until that chance went away.

My mother is dead, and everything is worse now, because now I know I

will never have a mother who looks at me from across a room and says,
“BoJack Horseman, I see you.” But I guess it’s good to know. It’s good
to know that there is nobody looking out for me, that there never was,
and there never will be. No, it’s good to know that I am the only one that
I can depend on. And I know that now and it’s good. It’s good that I know
that. So… it’s good my mother is dead.

[gulps, sighs]

Well. No point beating a dead horse. Beatrice Horseman was born in

1938, and she died in 2018, and I have no idea… what she wanted.
Unless she just wanted what we all want… to be seen.

Is this Funeral Parlor B?