Perfect Teeth

NOTE: Mention of suicide by overdose and one F-bomb used.

I stared at the crowd and told the biggest lie of my life. “She died peacefully.”

Three hundred faces tilted toward me like sunflowers following a false light. My mother’s dental colleagues, her bridge club, the neighbors who’d borrowed sugar for thirty years. All of them desperate to believe that cancer was something open to negotiation, something that understood manners.

She’d clawed at the bed rails until her fingernails split. Begged me to kill her with the same voice that once sang me to sleep. Called me a coward when I couldn’t, the word sharp as a scalpel, designed to cut deepest where she knew I already bled.

Behind the podium, my hands performed their choreography of grief—steady, controlled, professional. I’d inherited her surgeon’s hands, the ones that had extracted wisdom teeth while humming Beethoven. Now they gestured through lies smooth as Novocain.

“She spoke of all of you,” I said, each word a well-placed suture. “How grateful she was for your friendship.”

Another lie. She’d spent her last week naming everyone who’d disappointed her, a morphine-fueled inventory of human failure. Mrs. Ning had stolen her casserole recipe. Dr. Solanki had scheduled patients on purpose during her time slots. The mailman had never smiled back, not once in twenty years.

The funeral home’s air conditioning hummed its mechanical sympathy, recycling the smell of lilies and that specific institutional disinfectant—pine-scented lies trying to mask the proximity of death. Someone had arranged the flowers to spell out “BELOVED,” white roses against baby’s breath, a typographical truth that somehow felt more dishonest than any lie I told. She had been beloved. Also impossible. Both things equally true, equally useless now.

I gripped the edges of the podium, feeling the wood grain beneath my fingertips. Real. Solid. Unlike everything else in this performance.

“She was reading until the very end,” I said, watching Mrs. Patterson in the third row dab her eyes with a handkerchief that probably cost more than my mother’s last chemotherapy copay. “Jane Austen. Her beloved Pride and Prejudice.”

The truth: She’d thrown the book at me. Literally. Her aim, even diluted by metastatic cancer and enough opioids to tranquilize a horse, had been remarkably accurate. The spine had caught me just above my left eyebrow, leaving a mark I’d covered with concealer this morning.

“You’re all Wickhams,” she’d screamed at me. “Every last one of you. Charming liars.”

But Mrs. Patterson needed to believe in deathbed literature, as if culture and refinement somehow civilized the brutal machinery of dying. So, I gave her Jane Austen. I gave them all Jane Austen.

The crowd shifted, a sea of black polyester and uncomfortable shoes. These people had known my mother for decades, but they’d known a version of her. The one who brought homemade peppermint bark to office parties, who volunteered at the free dental clinic on Saturdays, who never missed a PTA meeting even after I’d graduated.

They didn’t know the woman who’d spent her last Tuesday alive explaining, in meticulous detail, why she’d always hated her sister Janet’s laugh. “Like a hyena choking on its own mediocrity,” she’d said, then made me promise to use that exact phrase at Janet’s eventual funeral.

“The nurses at St. Mary’s wanted me to tell you how much your cards meant to her,” I said, my voice a metronome. “She kept them all on her bedside table.”

Half-truth, that one. She had kept them there specifically so she could critique the handwriting. “Look at this,” she’d said, holding up a get-well card featuring a watercolor butterfly. “Barbara’s ‘g’s look like they’re having a stroke. Forty years of friendship and she still can’t manage proper penmanship.”

Dr. Mitchell stood near the back, his white hair forming a halo that made him look like a cut-rate department store Santa. He’d been her mentor, the one who’d encouraged her to specialize in oral surgery when everyone else said women should stick to cleanings and children’s dentistry. He cried, shoulders shaking with the type of grief that rearranges your skeleton.

For him, I found something almost true: “She said working with you was the greatest privilege of her professional life.”

She had said that. Twenty years ago. Before he’d promoted Dr. Solanki over her. Before the holiday party incident. Before she’d started referring to him as “that sanctimonious fossil” in casual conversation.

The lies accumulated like sediment, each one adding another layer between the crowd and the raw, ungovernable truth of how my mother died. Not peacefully. Not surrounded by loved ones murmuring platitudes. She died angry, confused, bargaining with gods she’d stopped believing in decades ago. She died counting betrayals like rosary beads.

“Would anyone else like to speak?” I asked, knowing they wouldn’t. This wasn’t that kind of funeral. This was the kind where everyone wanted their grief pre-packaged, sanitized, and suitable for framing.

Silence filled the room like water rising in a locked car, everyone aware of it, no one acknowledging the windows. But then a hand rose. Bob Ning, Mrs. Ning’s son. We’d gone to high school together. He’d been the kid who ate lunch alone, reading medical textbooks for fun.

He approached the podium with the rigid gait of someone who’d learned that sudden movements make adults ask questions. I moved aside, wondering what unique fiction he’d contribute to this anthology of comfortable lies.

“Dr. Linda,” he began, his voice cracking on her name. “She saved my life.”

The crowd leaned forward, hungry for redemption narrative.

“When I was fifteen, I tried to kill myself. Pills. A lot of them.” His hands clutched the podium like I had, seeking strength. “My mom found me, drove me to the hospital. Afterward, when I couldn’t go back to school, couldn’t face anyone, Dr. Linda showed up at our house.”

This wasn’t in the script. This was something else—dangerous, unfiltered truth crashing into our carefully constructed memorial.

“She didn’t give me any bullshit about how it gets better or how I had so much to live for. She just said, ‘Living is hard. Dying is easy. You took the coward’s way out.’”

Mrs. Ning made a sound like air escaping a punctured tire.

“Then she offered me a job. Filing charts at her practice. Minimum wage. Said if I was so eager to throw my life away, I might as well be useful first.”

My throat constricted. I remembered that summer—Mom coming home late, muttering about “that Ning boy” misfiling everything, creating more work than he completed. I’d thought she’d kept him on out of pity.

“Every day for three months, she’d find something wrong with my work. My handwriting. My organization system. The way I answered phones. Relentless criticism. Made me want to scream.” He paused, swallowed. “Made me want to live, just to prove her wrong.”

The crowd had grown still, holding its collective breath.

“She was mean. Cruel, sometimes. Impossible to please. And she saved my life by refusing to lie to me about what the world was really like.”

He looked right at me then, and I saw recognition in his eyes. He knew what I’d been doing up here. Knew and was offering me something I hadn’t expected: permission to stop.

“Thank you,” he said, though I wasn’t sure if he addressed me or the polished casket behind us. He returned to his seat, leaving the truth behind him, raw and breathing, a living thing that made the room’s careful choreography impossible.

I stepped to the podium. The prepared lies sat in my pocket, index cards filled with platitudes about peace and love and eternal rest. I could feel them there, suicide notes I’d never send.

Instead, I heard myself say: “My mother was difficult.”

The word fell into the silence like a stone into still water. Ripples of discomfort spread through the congregation.

“She was critical, demanding, unforgiving. She collected grudges like some people collect stamps.” My voice sounded strange, unused to carrying truth in public spaces. “She died angry. Furious, really. At the cancer, at God, at everyone who’d ever disappointed her. Which was everyone.”

Janet, my aunt, half-rose from her seat. I caught her eye and shook my head a little. Not the hyena comment. Some truths were too cruel even for this moment of revelation.

“But she was also brilliant. Precise. She expected excellence because she gave excellence, every day, whether she performed a root canal or parallel parking or making her signature lemon bars for the church bake sale.”

That got a few nods. They remembered the lemon bars.

“She saved lives,” I said, glancing at Bob. “Not always kindly. Not always gently. But she showed up. She did the work. She refused to let anyone, a patient, colleague, or even her son, settle for less than they were capable of.”

The words flowed easier now, truth mixing with memory like paint colors bleeding into each other.

“So yes, she died angry. But she also died having lived, fully, fiercely, without apology. She died having touched lives, changed lives, saved lives. She died human.”

I folded the index cards in my pocket, creasing them against their prepared lies.

“That’s all I have to say.”

The following silence sounded different from before. Not uncomfortable but contemplative, as if the entire room reassessed what they’d come here to mourn.

I stepped down from the podium and walked to my seat, past the spelling-bee flowers and the discount-Santa doctor and all the people who’d known only part of my mother. The funeral director, rattled by this departure from script, announced that refreshments would be served in the fellowship hall.

As people filed out, they pressed my hands, murmured thanks. But their words had changed. Instead of “She’s at peace now,” they said things like “She was one of a kind” and “There’ll never be another like her” and “She made me better.”

Bob Ning waited until the crowd had thinned. “Thank you,” he said. “For the truth.”

“She really was impossible,” I said.

“The fucking worst,” he said, and we both laughed. Inappropriate, healing laughter in a room still heavy with funeral flowers.

The funeral home door opened into August. That specific cruelty of summer that makes grief feel like drowning in honey. I stood on the funeral home steps, feeling empty. Not hollow-empty but clean-empty, like a wound that’s been well debrided.

The biggest lie of my life had lasted twelve minutes. The truth had taken less than five.

But here’s what I learned standing in that funeral home, watching three hundred people grapple with the complex reality of the woman they’d known: Sometimes the biggest lies we tell aren’t meant to deceive. They’re meant to preserve. To keep people safe, wrapped in the comfort of their illusions.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky, someone like Bob Ning shows up to remind you the truth, however jagged, however difficult to swallow, is the only thing worth telling.