In his “Funeral Blues” W. H. Auden wrote,
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
The funeral begins the moment he dies. Even for those, like us, who relinquished control of time, who prayed, I wait for the Lord, and who begged for nothing more than one more dawn—even for the likes of us, death introduces its own brand of motion rather than stillness. For the momentum that propels you forward is not fueled by his absence, but by his presence. He is still a part of your life-world. Your love for him will not rest.
Someone has to help him decide on the relative merits of Taxol versus Avastin. Someone has to shadow him like a bodyguard from clinic to clinic. Someone has to write love letters to him and kiss the top of his head. Someone has to set the table on family occasions. Someone has to iron his shirts. Someone has to find a new place for him to live. Someone has to keep watch with him for the morning. Your responsibilities to him have not ended.
It takes awhile to realize that you have been demoted to a lesser intensity of time and to a less urgent order of duties. Everything still matters, of course, but not as much as it did yesterday. Each hour no longer swells with the fullness of meaning as it did when he was struggling to remain alive. How much better it would have been to set aside one of the days between his death and the funeral to pray and keep silence.
By two p.m. on Sunday we were meeting with the priest and the funeral director in Jenny’s living room. Later in the afternoon, Jenny, her mother Alice, Tracy, and I were walking the graves at St. Matthew’s Cemetery, trying to decide between an open view of the sky or a place beside some trees but a bit nearer the lane than we would have liked. Jenny chose the trees.
When we returned from the cemetery, our old friends Dennis and Leesa Campbell were waiting for us in our kitchen, having hurried down from Charlottesville when they heard the news.
When we drove up our driveway, we didn’t recognize their car even with its Virginia plates. Tracy said, “I hope these are friends.”
Shortly after they left, I went upstairs to my study to write Adam’s obituary.
“Richard Adam Ewers Lischer, of Durham, died Sunday morning, July 17, after a brief struggle with cancer. He was 33.
“He was the husband of Jennifer Lischer, to whom he was married in 1999 and who sustained him throughout his illness, and the father of a baby girl whose birth is soon expected.”
In the obituary, I mentioned his faithfulness at daily Mass; I should have added the more declarative “He died believing in God.”
From the day of his second diagnosis Adam lived exactly thirteen and a half weeks. That is the equivalent of an astronomic quarter. On earth it is a spring or an autumn complete; in a woman’s womb, a trimester; in school, one academic semester. In the church’s reckoning of time, it is the precise distance from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost, from the day of dust to the day of fire. It was Adam’s final season. Today he completed it.
When I finished the obituary, I deleted his name and number from my cell phone.
That night, when Tracy and I couldn’t sleep, we made our first joined response to Adam’s passing. Our reaction was bedrock Bach: Come, Sweet Death. We felt we had been given secret knowledge of the sort that is available to everyone but grasped by only the few. We had been initiated into an open secret. And what is that special knowledge? Everyone must die.
We saw a vast company of spirits joined in a common dance, but it was not horrible or frightening, only natural. Every person in that enormous hospital, everyone at the malls and on TV, all our friends, including Dennis and Leesa, Tom and Father David, our young Jenny and Sarah, and—oh, my God, even Lukey and Calvin—all of them will die. Sitting on top of the covers at one in the morning, we suspended the hierarchical view of the generations and saw ourselves and those we love as a vast field of lights, every single one of which must go out. They may not go out in the expected order or in the same manner, but they will go out. We live only in the flicker created by their random dying. What we had known of death intellectually, we now possessed as a triumphant certainty. In the wee hours of July 17–18 it was the only absolute truth available to us.
Now that we understood the mystery of death, we were welling with admiration for our son. He had finished his job and accomplished his mission, the necessity of which was now clear to us. Everything he had striven for in his life was not canceled by death but fulfilled in our presence this very morning. And so cleanly, with such an absence of desperation. An added mercy, to be sure. The cancer in the brain took him quickly before it ravaged his body. He was gorgeous, wasn’t he?
Such thoughts would evaporate by Monday morning’s light. They were nothing more than the first cheap tricks grief plays on the bereaved. It sends its victims good and reasonable consolations in the form of universal truths and congratulatory telegrams. It encourages survivors to ponder the immensity of time and to think on a geologic scale and not the human one in which the loss of years or even a few days has the power to rip your heart in two.
What you don’t get on that very first night is true bereavement, which is the chill of absence that goes to the bone, like the shock of walking into a meat locker on a summer’s afternoon. What you don’t get is the one-two punch of It cannot be / It is, whose order of blows alternates with surprising playfulness. What you cannot experience on the first night are the never-ending waves of longing. It will be a day or two before it all begins to set in. When it does, nothing will be good, and nothing will make sense, and nothing will help. C. S. Lewis wrote of his own grief, “If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it.”
Adam’s oak casket was brought to the church on Tuesday afternoon. Several employees of Immaculate Conception told me that the light streaming through the south and west windows created a spectacular, prismatic effect above him as he was placed before the altar in the main sanctuary. They said they had never seen anything like it. I understand the springs of such testimonies, but for me it was too late for a God-wink of the miraculous.
On Tuesday night hundreds of people stood in line to greet Jenny, who was seated in an armchair in the narthex of Immaculate Conception. Sarah stood by her side the whole evening and greeted visitors. Tracy spoke with friends in another corner of the large gathering space just beneath the large, Protestant-style stewardship banner: Tiempo, Talento, Tesoro.
I had asked Adam’s friend Jason Harrod to play some of his own blues and bluegrass compositions as people waited patiently to pay their respects. He sat in the gathering space near the entrance to the main sanctuary, strumming his guitar and humming some of Adam’s favorites.
When I fly away, I will be unbound.
When I fly away, I’m nowhere to be found.…
When I fly away through the heat and cold,
When I fly away, I will not grow old.…
When I fly away, I won’t be afraid.
When I fly away, I will be remade.
I stood in the sanctuary a few feet up the aisle from the casket. There was a candle burning at each side of it. Many who came knelt at the base of the catafalque and used the coffin as an altar for prayer.
When you stand in the mourner’s line, your whole life reanimates itself; its characters return to say hello, hold your hand, or touch your face. It was as if they had come out of the scrapbooks and albums in our storage room to be with us once again. All the playmates from the old neighborhood reappeared, along with their parents. How did they get so gray?
Young men and women introduced themselves as if they were ground troops come to honor the fallen drum major, as if they had gone into battle with him only yesterday, and not fifteen years before.
“I was a trumpet in the marching band.”
“Flute, Mr. Lischer.”
“Baton.”
“Snare.”
On Wednesday morning at ten o’clock Adam’s casket was moved from the Daily Mass Chapel, where he and Jenny had knelt every morning beneath the San Damiano Cross, and placed at the rear of the main sanctuary. With the prelude finished, the congregation stood and turned to face the processional cross. The funeral Mass was about to begin. You could have heard a pin drop in the enormous sanctuary.
At that moment we symbolically reversed the laborious plot of Adam’s ninety-five days. Tracy, Jenny, Sarah, and I each held a corner of the cream-colored linen pall with a purple cross emblazoned at its center. The cross was trimmed in rose, for joy. We unfolded it and covered the bare casket with it, as if we were making a bed or tucking a child in for the night. What had been stripped and exposed like the altar on Maundy Thursday, we dressed again. We carefully placed the pall over his coffin with the cross above his chest. Once again he was arrayed in fine cloth as he had been at his baptism.
Then the congregation began to sing “Lift High the Cross,” and the funeral procession was under way.
In his homily, Father David beautifully captured Adam’s personality and faith. The priest’s eyes crinkled under white eyebrows when he spoke of his “easy, natural, wry humor. It was one of his many human touches that put you at ease,” he continued, “and endeared you to the man, and him to you.”
He testified to Adam’s devotion to the daily sacrament at Immaculate Conception and then added, “The jewel that was his Lutheran faith simply had another setting in God’s providential plan.”
To Jenny he had this to say: “Loving him with strength and courage, dignity and grace, you gave him life. You helped to make his living and his dying a song. It was plaintive, classical, romantic, and soul-searing. Only you know the depth of it.”
You gave him life. I remembered how he promised to help her breathe during labor, and how, thirty-eight weeks into her pregnancy, she responded by breathing into his face on the last night of his life.
Then I thought of the baby waiting to be born.
There are those who say the sermon is a relic of a bygone era. It is passé and largely irrelevant to the contemporary life of faith. I can only reply that by the end of the day, when we finally had a moment to talk, Tracy and I had, independent of one another, memorized several passages from Father David’s lyrical homily.
“Because of Adam’s great love—his love of Jenny and his family, his love of friends and colleagues, and yes, his great love of those he served through the law, especially those sentenced to death—all the love that characterized his life threw him into the arms of love itself forever.
“We have not lost this good Christian man, Adam Lischer. Nor do we consign him merely to the faulty memory of human history. We join together in our hope that God is ever faithful to God’s promises. God always promises life. Adam now lives with God, never to die again. May he rest in peace.”
Then the congregation sang “On Eagle’s Wings.”
Before the commendation, David solemnly walked around the casket and censed it with burning spices and gums. Their bittersweet aroma filled the chancel. The incense did not purify Adam, but it was an outward sign of the purity he had achieved at great cost. I did not know the incense was coming, but as we watched the smoke rise toward the cross and dissipate into the space above it, it seemed the truest gesture of the day. Once again, amidst the last lingering wisps of his purification, I was very proud of Adam.
The funeral cortege took us through the familiar neighborhoods of northern Durham and Orange County. To view the old schoolyards and practice fields through the tinted windows of a black Fleetwood Brougham creates another perceptual disruption.
We took the very road (heading north instead of south) on which Adam and I had hitched a ride after our ill-fated canoe trip twenty-three years earlier. We passed the ruins of the country store where the pair of loopy Good Samaritans had dropped us off. The remains of the lean-to porch are still there too, where we waited for Tracy to come and get us. We even crossed a few of the streets on our old paper route—the one we got fired from on January 28, 1986, the day Adam had pneumonia and the Challenger blew up.
He and Sarah learned to drive on these roads. There, near that intersection—it could have been that very culvert—he skidded in the snow and put a permanent crease in my new Subaru, and Tracy said to him (and me), “Oh, honey, it’s only a car.”
The more familiar the places, the more displaced I felt on our journey to his final resting place.
Nine-year-old Adam would have enjoyed the ride in the big black car. That’s how old he was when we buried my father. I remember Adam rode shotgun next to the driver and nearly wore him out kibitzing about the “Caddie” with the two-way radio. “How does it work? Do you say ‘Over and out’ or ‘Ten-four’?”
This time it would have been the motorcycles. Because he had been a prosecutor, he got a police escort on motorcycles. They darted in and out of the procession like bumblebees. He got along exceedingly well with policemen; a day spent with his investigator was, as far as he was concerned, a day of high adventure.
As we turned into the cemetery, the policemen lined up their cycles and stood beside them to form an honor guard for the hearse. He would have thought that was funny. But he would have loved it.
For me, however, the service had already ended in the clouds of incense.
In the noontime heat Tom and Father David read through the committal quickly. “Into your hands, Father of mercies, we commend our brother Adam in the sure and certain hope that, together with all who have died in Christ, he will rise with him on the last day.”
Then the mortuary distributed a long-stemmed rose to each member of the family to lay across Adam’s coffin. Tracy and I weren’t prepared for this gesture of sentimentality; for us the pall with its purple cross had been enough.
The incense in the church seemed right because it signifies immolation with a remainder distilled from it. Something, or someone, is sacrificed, but its substance has been transformed and remains. The roses seemed out of place because roses only camouflage the smell of rotting flesh. With the incense you get purification. The roses are a cover-up.
Except for a stray image or two, the rest of the day has disappeared from memory, like the smoke from the incense or the last ringing chords of the final hymn. At the gathering at our house afterward, Tracy picked up little Calvin, born six months earlier on Adam’s birthday, and kept him in her grip for the entire afternoon, as if he were her personal flotation device. He held on to his grandmother for dear life and kept his face buried in her neck. The child was no longer Baby Calvin but Baby Adam, and my wife had mastered our new truth: everybody at this party dies.
Nine days after the funeral, we got a call from an exhausted but jubilant widow. Jenny was on the line, phoning from a more cheerful wing of Duke Medical Center. In a voice that reminded me of Adam’s way of delivering good news, she said,” Hey, Rick. I just [just!] wanted to let you know that you have a new granddaughter.
“Her name is [pause, beat—Adam would have been proud of her timing]—Elizabeth Adam.”
With Adam’s wedding ring on her thumb, his picture by her bed, and his St. Andrew’s Cross around her neck, she had delivered their baby girl. As per Adam’s request, Sarah had stood in for him and coached her through a long and difficult labor.
Just before Jenny called us, she laid the child across her own body, peered into her bunched face and searching eyes, and solemnly named her. “You are Elizabeth Adam,” she said.
Elizabeth followed hard upon her father’s death in the same hot July and the same summer of our shattered dreams. The little troupe reassembled on the old stage, the taste of ashes still in our mouths, and the same weary actors traded their laments for tears of joy. Duke Medical Center, of all places, once a scene of suffering and death, had become a place of resurrection.
Who could have imagined Jenny’s resiliency? Her ability to smile? And our Sarah—a grieving labor coach? Who would have thought anything resembling joy could follow our night of weeping?
Who would have guessed a baby with hair like Bon Jovi?
It’s as if we all needed a learner’s permit in order to live one more day on the planet.
Elizabeth Adam emerged from the womb with dark, spiked hair and an attitude. “Deal with it,” she seemed to say. She will be no one’s consolation prize for a dead father. She will be her own weeping, sleeping, sucking, and pooping little person.
The child has most of her mother’s features and, now that her spiked hair has lightened up and settled down, she looks even more like Jenny, the strawberry blond. When she laughs her nose crinkles as her mother’s still does, and her blue eyes dance like her father’s. She has her father’s broad mouth and his clean-clefted upper lip. If you are quick enough with the camera, you may catch the vulnerability of her father too, that of a little boy trying to be good but not always succeeding. In Elizabeth Adam, her mother’s sweet reserve coexists with her father’s open-throttled lack of it, all in one sturdy package.
Elizabeth is powerful testimony to our dogged belief in Platonic Ideas. We were so preoccupied with the child’s preexistence that when she was finally born it was as if we had known her in another life. She was the context of everything that happened during her father’s ninety-five days. After his death “How’s that baby?” became the shorthand expression for all the sorrows and joys that had visited our family. Most of our fantasies—Adam’s coaching Jenny through the delivery, Adam proudly holding her at her baptism—had to be discarded, as did Jenny’s more desperate scenario: her mother would live upstairs with the baby while Jenny camped out on the lower level and cared for her dying husband. None of these outcomes materialized on July 29, 2005, except one: Elizabeth Adam.
On the day Adam was hospitalized for the last time, Tom Colley said that birth and death belong together as transitions to very different orders of life. Under the circumstances, these sentiments sounded a little smooth to me. We assumed that Adam’s funeral would conclude one dispensation and his daughter’s birth would begin another, as if they belonged to entirely different narratives. But Tom was right; at some primal level the two events could not be separated, and Jenny didn’t try. The St. Andrew’s Cross that ushered Adam into the next world welcomed Elizabeth into this one. His departure and her arrival were marked by fearful pangs and cries and a leap into the unknown.