Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople. Another two or three dozen I take to the crematory to be burned. I sell caskets, burial vaults, and urns for the ashes. I have a sideline in headstones and monuments. I do flowers on commission.
Apart from the tangibles, I sell the use of my building: eleven thousand square feet, furnished and fixtured with an abundance of pastel and chair rail and crown moldings. The whole lash-up is mortgaged and remortgaged well into the next century. My rolling stock includes a hearse, two Fleetwoods, and a minivan with darkened windows our pricelist calls a service vehicle and everyone in town calls the Dead Wagon.
I used to use the unit pricing method—the old package deal. It meant that you had only one number to look at. It was a large number. Now everything is itemized. It’s the law. So now there is a long list of items and numbers and italicized disclaimers, something like a menu or the Sears Roebuck Wish Book, and sometimes the federally-mandated options begin to look like cruise control or rear-window defrost. I wear black most of the time, to keep folks in mind of the fact we’re not talking Buicks here. At the bottom of the list there is still a large number.
In a good year the gross is close to a million, five percent of which we hope to call profit. I am the only undertaker in this town. I have a corner on the market.
The market, such as it is, is figured on what is called the crude death rate—the number of deaths every year out of every thousand persons.
Here is how it works.
Imagine a large room into which you coax one thousand people. You slam the doors in January, leaving them plenty of food and drink, color TVs, magazines, and condoms. Your sample should have an age distribution heavy on baby boomers and their children—1.2 children per boomer. Every seventh adult is an old-timer, who, if he or she wasn’t in this big room, would probably be in Florida or Arizona or a nursing home. You get the idea. The group will include fifteen lawyers, one faith healer, three dozen real-estate agents, a video technician, several licensed counselors, and a Tupperware distributor. The rest will be between jobs, middle managers, ne’er-do-wells, or retired.
Now for the magic part—come late December when you throw open the doors, only 991.6, give or take, will shuffle out upright. Two hundred and sixty will now be selling Tupperware. The other 8.4 have become the crude death rate.
Here’s another stat.
Of the 8.4 corpses, two-thirds will have been old-timers, five percent will be children, and the rest (slightly less than 2.5 corpses) will be boomers—realtors and attorneys likely—one of whom was, no doubt, elected to public office during the year. What’s more, three will have died of cerebral-vascular or coronary difficulties, two of cancer, one each of vehicular mayhem, diabetes, and domestic violence. The spare change will be by act of God or suicide—most likely the faith healer.
The figure most often and most conspicuously missing from the insurance charts and demographics is the one I call The Big One, which refers to the number of people out of every hundred born who will die. Over the long haul, The Big One hovers right around . . . well, dead nuts on one hundred percent. If this were on the charts, they’d call it death expectancy and no one would buy futures of any kind. But it is a useful number and has its lessons. Maybe you will want to figure out what to do with your life. Maybe it will make you feel a certain kinship with the rest of us. Maybe it will make you hysterical. Whatever the implications of a one hundred percent death expectancy, you can calculate how big a town this is and why it produces for me a steady if unpredictable labor.
THEY DIE AROUND the clock here, without apparent preference for a day of the week, month of the year; there is no clear favorite in the way of season. Nor does the alignment of the stars, fullness of moon, or liturgical calendar have very much to do with it. The whereabouts are neither here nor there. They go off upright or horizontally in Chevrolets and nursing homes, in bathtubs, on the interstates, in ERs, ORs, BMWs. And while it may be that we assign more equipment or more importance to deaths that create themselves in places marked by initials—ICU being somehow better than Greenbriar Convalescent Home—it is also true that the dead don’t care. In this way, the dead I bury and burn are like the dead before them, for whom time and space have become mortally unimportant. This loss of interest is, in fact, one of the first sure signs that something serious is about to happen. The next thing is they quit breathing. At this point, to be sure, a gunshot wound to the chest or shock and trauma will get more ink than a CVA or ASHD, but no cause of death is any less permanent than the other. Any one will do. The dead don’t care.
Nor does who much matter, either. To say, “I’m OK, you’re OK, and by the way, he’s dead!” is, for the living, a kind of comfort.
It is why we drag rivers and comb plane wrecks and bomb sites.
It is why MIA is more painful than DOA.
It is why we have open caskets and all read the obits.
Knowing is better than not knowing, and knowing it is you is terrifically better than knowing it is me. Because once I’m the dead guy, whether you’re OK or he’s OK won’t much interest me. You can all go bag your asses, because the dead don’t care.
Of course, the living, bound by their adverbs and their actuarials, still do. Now, there is the difference and why I’m in business. The living are careful and oftentimes caring. The dead are careless, or maybe it’s care-less. Either way, they don’t care. These are unremarkable and verifiable truths.
MY FORMER MOTHER-IN-LAW, herself an unremarkable and verifiable truth, was always fond of holding forth with Cagneyesque bravado—to wit: “When I’m dead, just throw me in a box and throw me in a hole.” But whenever I would remind her that we did substantially that with everyone, the woman would grow sullen and a little cranky.
Later, over meatloaf and green beans, she would invariably give out with: “When I’m dead just cremate me and scatter the ashes.”
My former mother-in-law was trying to make carelessness sound like fearlessness. The kids would stop eating and look at each other. The kids’ mother would plead, “Oh Mom, don’t talk like that.” I’d take out my lighter and begin to play with it.
In the same way, the priest that married me to this woman’s daughter—a man who loved golf and gold ciboria and vestments made of Irish linen; a man who drove a great black sedan with a wine-red interior and who always had his eye on the cardinal’s job—this same fellow, leaving the cemetery one day, felt called upon to instruct me thus: “No bronze coffin for me. No sir! No orchids or roses or limousines. The plain pine box is the one I want, a quiet Low Mass and the pauper’s grave. No pomp and circumstance.”
He wanted, he explained, to be an example of simplicity, of prudence, of piety and austerity—all priestly and, apparently, Christian virtues. When I told him that he needn’t wait, that he could begin his ministry of good example even today, that he could quit the country club and do his hacking at the public links and trade his brougham for a used Chevette; that free of his Florsheims and cashmeres and prime ribs, free of his bingo nights and building funds, he could become, for Christ’s sake, the very incarnation of Francis himself, or Anthony of Padua; when I said, in fact, that I would be willing to assist him in this, that I would gladly distribute his savings and credit cards among the worthy poor of the parish, and that I would, when the sad duty called, bury him for free in the manner he would have, by then, become accustomed to; when I told your man these things, he said nothing at all, but turned his wild eye on me in the way that the cleric must have looked on Sweeney years ago, before he cursed him, irreversibly, into a bird.
What I was trying to tell the fellow was, of course, that being a dead saint is no more worthwhile than being a dead philodendron or a dead angelfish. Living is the rub, and always has been. Living saints still feel the flames and stigmata of this vale of tears, the ache of chastity and the pangs of conscience. Once dead, they let their relics do the legwork, because, as I was trying to tell this priest, the dead don’t care.
Only the living care.
And I am sorry to be repeating myself, but this is the central fact of my business—that there is nothing, once you are dead, that can be done to you or for you or with you or about you that will do you any good or any harm; that any damage or decency we do accrues to the living, to whom your death happens, if it really happens to anyone. The living have to live with it. You don’t. Theirs is the grief or gladness your death brings. Theirs is the loss or gain of it. Theirs is the pain and the pleasure of memory. Theirs is the invoice for services rendered and theirs is the check in the mail for its payment.
And there is the truth, abundantly self-evident, that seems, now that I think of it, the one most elusive to the old in-laws, the parish priest, and to perfect strangers who are forever accosting me in barber-shops and cocktail parties and parent-teacher conferences, hell-bent or duty-bound to let me in on what it is they want done with them when they are dead.
Give it a rest is the thing I say.
Once you are dead, put your feet up, call it a day, and let the husband or the missus or the kids or a sibling decide whether you are to be buried or burned or blown out of a cannon or left to dry out in a ditch somewhere. It’s not your day to watch it, because the dead don’t care.
ANOTHER REASON PEOPLE are always rehearsing their obsequies with me has to do with the fear of death that anyone in their right mind has. It is healthy. It keeps us from playing in traffic. I say it’s a thing we should pass on to the kids.
There is a belief—widespread among the women I’ve dated, local Rotarians, and friends of my children—that I, being the undertaker here, have some irregular fascination with, special interest in, inside information about, even attachment to, the dead. They assume, these people, some perhaps for defensible reasons, that I want their bodies.
It is an interesting concept.
But here is the truth.
Being dead is one—the worst, the last—but only one in a series of calamities that afflicts our own and several other species. The list may include, but is not limited to, gingivitis, bowel obstruction, contested divorce, tax audit, spiritual vexation, cash flow problems, political upheaval, and on and on and on some more. There is no shortage of misery. And I am no more attracted to the dead than the dentist is to your bad gums, the doctor to your rotten innards, or the accountant to your sloppy expense records. I have no more stomach for misery that the banker or the lawyer, the pastor or the politico—because misery is careless and is everywhere. Misery is the bad check, the ex-spouse, the mob in the street, and the IRS—who, like the dead, feel nothing and, like the dead, don’t care.
WHICH IS NOT to say that the dead do not matter.
They do. They do. Of course they do.
Last Monday morning Milo Hornsby died. Mrs. Hornsby called at 2 A.M. to say that Milo had expired and would I take care of it, as if his condition were like any other that could be renewed or somehow improved upon. At 2 A.M., yanked from my REM sleep, I am thinking, put a quarter into Milo and call me in the morning. But Milo is dead. In a moment, in a twinkling, Milo has slipped irretrievably out of our reach, beyond Mrs. Hornsby and the children, beyond the women at the laundromat he owned, beyond his comrades at the Legion Hall, the Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge, his pastor at First Baptist, beyond the mailman, zoning board, town council, and Chamber of Commerce; beyond us all, and any treachery or any kindness we had in mind for him.
Milo is dead.
X’s on his eyes, lights out, curtains.
Helpless, harmless.
Milo’s dead.
Which is why I do not haul to my senses, coffee and quick shave, Homburg and great coat, warm up the Dead Wagon, and make for the freeway in the early o’clock for Milo’s sake. Milo doesn’t have any sake anymore. I go for her—for she who has become, in the same moment and the same twinkling, like water to ice, the Widow Hornsby. I go for her—because she still can cry and care and pray and pay my bill.
THE HOSPITAL THAT Milo died in is state-of-the-art. There are signs on every door declaring a part or a process or bodily function. I like to think that, taken together, the words would add up to The Human Condition, but they never do. What’s left of Milo, the remains, are in the basement, between SHIPPING & RECEIVING and LAUNDRY ROOM. Milo would like that if he were still liking things. Milo’s room is called PATHOLOGY.
The medical-technical parlance of death emphasizes disorder.
We are forever dying of failures, of anomalies, of insufficiencies, of dysfunctions, arrests, accidents. These are either chronic or acute. The language of death certificates—Milo’s says “Cardiopulmonary Failure”—is like the language of weakness. Likewise, Mrs. Hornsby, in her grief, will be said to be breaking down or falling apart or going to pieces, as if there were something structurally awry with her. It is as if death and grief were not part of The Order of Things, as if Milo’s failure and his widow’s weeping were, or ought to be, sources of embarrassment. “Doing well” for Mrs. Hornsby would mean that she is bearing up, weathering the storm, or being strong for the children. We have willing pharmacists to help her with this. Of course, for Milo, doing well would mean he was back upstairs, holding his own, keeping the meters and monitors bleeping.
But Milo is downstairs, between SHIPPING & RECEIVING and LAUNDRY ROOM, in a stainless-steel drawer, wrapped in white plastic top to toe, and—because of his small head, wide shoulders, ponderous belly, and skinny legs, and the trailing white binding cord from his ankles and toe tag—he looks, for all the world, like a larger than life-size sperm.
I sign for him and get him out of there. At some level, I am still thinking Milo gives a shit, which by now, of course, we all know he doesn’t—because the dead don’t care.
Back at the funeral home, upstairs in the embalming room, behind a door marked PRIVATE, Milo Hornsby is floating on a porcelain table under florescent lights. Unwrapped, outstretched, Milo is beginning to look a little more like himself—eyes wide open, mouth agape, returning to our gravity. I shave him, close his eyes, his mouth. We call this setting the features. These are the features—eyes and mouth—that will never look the way they would have looked in life when they were always opening, closing, focusing, signaling, telling us something. In death, what they tell us is that they will not be doing anything anymore. The last detail to be managed is Milo’s hands—one folded over the other, over the umbilicus, in an attitude of ease, of repose, of retirement.
They will not be doing anything anymore, either.
I wash his hands before positioning them.
When my wife moved out some years ago, the children stayed here, as did the dirty laundry. It was big news in a small town. There was the gossip and the goodwill that places like this are famous for. And while there was plenty of talk, no one knew exactly what to say to me. They felt helpless, I suppose. So they brought casseroles and beef stews, took the kids out to the movies or canoeing, brought their younger sisters around to visit me. What Milo did was send his laundry van around twice a week for two months, until I found a housekeeper. Milo would pick up five loads in the morning and return them by lunchtime, fresh and folded. I never asked him to do this. I hardly knew him. I had never been in his home or his laundromat. His wife had never known my wife. His children were too old to play with my children.
After my housekeeper was installed, I went to thank Milo and pay the bill. The invoices detailed the number of loads, the washers and the dryers, detergent, bleaches, fabric softeners. I think the total came to sixty dollars. When I asked Milo what the charges were for pick-up and delivery, for stacking and folding and sorting by size, for saving my life and the lives of my children, for keeping us in clean clothes and towels and bed linen, “Never mind that” is what Milo said. “One hand washes the other.”
I place Milo’s right hand over his left hand, then try the other way. Then back again. Then I decide that it doesn’t matter. One hand washes the other either way.
The embalming takes me about two hours.
It is daylight by the time I am done.
Every Monday morning, Ernest Fuller comes to my office. He was damaged in some profound way in Korea. The details of his damage are unknown to the locals. Ernest Fuller has no limp or anything missing so everyone thinks it was something he saw in Korea that left him a little simple, occasionally perplexed, the type to draw rein abruptly in his day-long walks, to consider the meaning of litter, pausing over bottle caps and gum wrappers. Ernest Fuller has a nervous smile and a dead-fish handshake. He wears a baseball cap and thick eyeglasses. Every Sunday night Ernest goes to the supermarket and buys up the tabloids at the checkout stands with headlines that usually involve Siamese twins or movie stars or UFOs. Ernest is a speed reader and a math whiz but because of his damage, he has never held a job and never applied for one. Every Monday morning, Ernest brings me clippings of stories under headlines like: 601 LB MAN FALLS THRU COFFIN—A GRAVE SITUATION or EMBALMER FOR THE STARS SAYS ELVIS IS FOREVER. The Monday morning Milo Hornsby died, Ernest’s clipping had to do with an urn full of ashes, somewhere in East Anglia, that made grunting and groaning noises, that whistled sometimes, and that was expected to begin talking. Certain scientists in England could make no sense of it. They had run several tests. The ashes’ widow, however, left with nine children and no estate, is convinced that her dearly beloved and greatly reduced husband is trying to give her winning numbers for the lottery. “Jacky would never leave us without good prospects,” she says. “He loved his family more than anything.” There is a picture of the two of them, the widow and the urn, the living and the dead, flesh and bronze, the Victrola and the Victrola’s dog. She has her ear cocked, waiting.
We are always waiting. Waiting for some good word or the winning numbers. Waiting for a sign or wonder, some signal from our dear dead that the dead still care. We are gladdened when they do outstanding things, when they arise from their graves or fall through their caskets or speak to us in our waking dreams. It pleases us no end, as if the dead still cared, had agendas, were yet alive.
But the sad and well-known fact of the matter is that most of us will stay in our caskets and be dead a long time, and that our urns and graves will never make a sound. Our reason and requiems, our headstones or High Masses, will neither get us in nor keep us out of heaven. The meaning of our lives, and the memories of them, belong to the living, just as our funerals do. Whatever being the dead have now, they have by the living’s faith alone.
We heat graves here for winter burials, as a kind of foreplay before digging in, to loosen the frost’s hold on the ground before the sexton and his backhoe do the opening. We buried Milo in the ground on Wednesday. The mercy is that what we buried there, in an oak casket, just under the frost line, had ceased to be Milo. Milo had become the idea of himself, a permanent fixture of the third person and past tense, his widow’s loss of appetite and trouble sleeping, the absence in places where we look for him, our habits of him breaking, our phantom limb, our one hand washing the other.
The undertakers are over on the other island. They are there for what is called their Midwinter Conference: the name they give to the week in February every year when funeral directors from Michigan find some warm place in the Lesser Antilles to discuss the pressing issues of their trade. The names for the workshops and seminars are borderline: “The Future of Funeral Service,” “What Folks Want in a Casket,” “Coping with the Cremation Crowd”—things like that. The resorts must have room service, hot tubs, good beaches, and shopping on site or nearby. No doubt it is the same for orthodontists and trial lawyers.
And I’m here on the neighboring island—a smaller place with a harbor too shallow for cruise ships and no airport. I’m a ferryboat ride from the undertakers from my home state. But I’ve timed my relief from the Michigan winter with theirs in case I want to register for a meeting and write off my travel. It is legal and sensible and would reduce the ultimate cost of funerals in my town where I am the funeral director and have been for nearly twenty-five years now.
But I just can’t work up any enthusiasm for spending any portion of the fortnight discussing business. It’s not that they aren’t a great bunch, chatty and amiable as stockbrokers or insurance types; and, out of their hometowns, incognito, hell-bent on a good time, they can be downright fun, if a little bingy. It’s just that it seems I’ve been on a Midwinter Conference of my own for a long time. Enough is enough. I need to walk on the beach now and contemplate my next move.
My father was a funeral director and three of my five brothers are funeral directors; two of my three sisters work pre-need and bookkeeping in one of the four funeral homes around the metro area that bear our name, our father’s name. It is an odd arithmetic—a kind of family farm, working the back forty of the emotional register, our livelihood depending on the deaths of others in the way that medicos depend on sickness, lawyers on crime, the clergy on the fear of God.
I can remember my mother and father going off on these Midwinter Conferences and coming back all sunburned and full of ideas and gossip about what my father insisted we call our “colleagues” rather than the “competition.” He said it made us sound like doctors and lawyers, you know, professionals—people you could call in the middle of the night if there was trouble, people whose being had begun to meld with their doing, who were what they did.
Our thing—who we are, what we do—has always been about death and dying and grief and bereavement: the vulnerable underbelly of the hardier nouns: life, liberty, the pursuit of . . . well, you know. We traffic in leavetakings, goodbyes, final respects. “The last ones to let you down,” my father would joke with the friends he most trusted. “Dignified Service” is what he put on the giveaway matchbooks and plastic combs and rain bonnets. And he loved to quote Gladstone, the great Victorian Liberal who sounded like a New Age Republican when he wrote that he could measure with mathematical precision a people’s respect for the laws of the land by the way they cared for their dead. Of course, Gladstone inhabited a century and an England in which funerals were public and sex was private and, though the British were robbing the graves of infidels all over the world for the British Museum, they did so, by all accounts, in a mannerly fashion. I think my father first heard about Gladstone at one of these Midwinter Conferences and lately I’ve been thinking how right they were—Gladstone, my father.
MY FATHER DIED three years ago tomorrow on an island off the Gulf Coast of Florida. He wasn’t exactly on a Midwinter Conference. He’d quit going to those years before, after my mother had died. But he was sharing a condo with a woman friend who always overestimated the remedial powers of sexual aerobics. Or maybe she only underestimated the progress of his heart disease. We all knew it was coming. In the first year of his widowhood, he sat in his chair, heartsore, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Then he started going out with women. The brothers were glad for him. The sisters rolled their eyes a lot. I think they call these “gender issues.” In the two years of consortium that followed, he’d had a major—which is to say a chest ripping, down for the count—heart attack every six months like clockwork. He survived all but one. “Three out of four” I can hear him saying. “You’re still dead when its over.” He’d had enough. Even now I think of that final scene in David Lean’s old film when Zhivago’s heart is described as “paper thin.” He thinks he sees Lara turning a corner in Moscow. He struggles to get off the bus, loosens his tie, finally makes it to the sidewalk where, after two steps, he drops dead. Dead chasing love, the thing we would die for. That was my father—stepping not off a bus but out of a shower in his time-share condo, not in Moscow but on Boca Grande, but chasing, just as certainly, love. Chasing it to death.
When we got the call from his woman friend, we knew what to do. My brother and I had done the drill in our heads before. We had a travelling kit of embalming supplies: gloves, fluids, needles, odds and ends. We had to explain to the security people at the airlines who scrutinized the contents of the bag, wondering how we might make a bomb out of Dodge Permaglo or overtake the cabin crew with a box marked “Slaughter Surgical Supplies” full of stainless steel oddities they’d never seen before. When we got to the funeral home they had taken him to, taken his body to, the undertaker there asked if we were sure we wanted to do this—our own father, after all?—he’d be happy to call in one of his own embalmers. We assured him it would be OK. He showed us into the prep room, that familiar decor of porcelain and tile and florescent light—a tidy scientific venue for the witless horror of mortality, for how easily we slip from is to isn’t.
It was something we had always promised him, though I can’t now, for the life of me, remember the context in which it was made—the promise that when he died his sons would embalm him, dress him, pick out a casket, lay him out, prepare the obits, contact the priests, manage the flowers, the casseroles, the wake and procession, the Mass and burial. Maybe it was just understood. His was a funeral he would not have to direct. It was ours to do; and though he’d directed thousands of them, he had never made mention of his own preferences. Whenever he was pressed on the matter he would only say, “You’ll know what to do.” We did.
There’s this “just a shell” theory of how we ought to relate to dead bodies. You hear a lot of it from young clergy, old family friends, well-intentioned in-laws—folks who are unsettled by the fresh grief of others. You hear it when you bring a mother and a father in for the first sight of their dead daughter, killed in a car wreck or left out to rot by some mannish violence. It is proffered as comfort in the teeth of what is a comfortless situation, consolation to the inconsolable. Right between the inhale and exhale of the bonewracking sob such hurts produce, some frightened and well-meaning ignoramus is bound to give out with “It’s OK, that’s not her, it’s just a shell.” I once saw an Episcopalian deacon nearly decked by the swift slap of the mother of a teenager, dead of leukemia, to whom he’d tendered this counsel. “I’ll tell you when it’s ‘just a shell,’ ” the woman said. “For now and until I tell you otherwise, she’s my daughter.” She was asserting the longstanding right of the living to declare the dead dead. Just as we declare the living alive through baptisms, lovers in love by nuptials, funerals are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters. It’s how we assign meaning to our little remarkable histories.
And the rituals we devise to conduct the living and beloved and the dead from one status to another have less to do with performance than with meaning. In a world where “dysfunctional” has become the operative adjective, a body that has ceased to work has, it would seem, few useful applications—its dysfunction more manifest than the sexual and familial forms that fill our tabloids and talk shows. But a body that doesn’t work is, in the early going, the evidence we have of a person who has ceased to be. And a person who has ceased to be is as compelling a prospect as it was when the Neanderthal first dug holes for his dead, shaping the questions we still shape in the face of death: “Is that all there is?” “What does it mean?” “Why is it cold?” “Can it happen to me?”
So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is “just” anything rings as tinny in its attempt to minimalize as it would if we were to say it was “just” a bad hair day when the girl went bald from her chemotherapy. Or that our hope for heaven on her behalf was based on the belief that Christ raised “just” a body from dead. What if, rather than crucifixion, he’d opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than “just a shell,” he’d raised his personality, say, or The Idea of Himself? Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that? Done the Crusades? Burned witches? Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures. If he’d raised anything less, of course, as Paul points out, the deacon and several others of us would be out of business or back to Saturday sabbaths, a sensible diet, and no more Christmases.
The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor.
I HAD SEEN my father horizontal before. At the end it had been ICUs mostly, after his coronaries and bypasses. He’d been helpless, done unto. But before that there had been the man stretched out on the living room floor tossing one or the other of my younger siblings in the air; or napping in his office at the first funeral home in full uniform, black three-piece suit, striped tie, wingtips, clean shave; or in the bathtub singing “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” He had outbreaks of the malaria he’d gotten in the South Pacific. In my childhood he was, like every father on the block, invincible. That he would die had been a fiction in my teens, a fear in my twenties, a specter in my thirties and, in my forties, a fact.
But seeing him, outstretched on the embalming table of the Anderson Mortuary in Ft. Myers with the cardiac blue in his ears and fingertips and along his distal regions, shoulders and lower ribs and buttocks and heels, I thought, this is what my father will look like when he’s dead. And then, like a door slammed shut behind you, the tense of it all shifted into the inescapable present of this is my father, dead. My brother and I hugged each other, wept with each other and for each other and for our sisters and brothers home in Michigan. Then I kissed my father’s forehead, not yet a shell. Then we went to work in the way our father had trained us.
He was a cooperative body. Despite the arteriosclerosis, his circulatory system made the embalming easy. And having just stepped from the shower into his doom, he was clean and cleanly shaven. He hadn’t been sick, in the hospice or intensive care sense of the word. So there were none of the bruises on him or tubes in him that medical science can inflict and install. He’d gotten the death he wanted, caught in full stride, quick and cleanly after a day strolling the beach picking sea shells for the grandchildren and maybe after a little bone bouncing with his condo-mate, though she never said and we never asked and can only hope. And massaging his legs, his hands, his arms, to effect the proper distribution of fluid and drainage, watching the blue clear from his fingertips and heels as the fluid that would preserve him long enough for us to take our leave of him worked its way around his body, I had the sense that I was doing something for him even though, now dead, he was beyond my kindnesses or anyone’s. Likewise, his body bore a kind of history: the tattoo with my mother’s name on it he’d had done as an eighteen-year-old marine during World War II, the perfectly trimmed mustache I used to watch him darken with my mother’s mascara when he was younger than I am and I was younger than my children are. The scars from his quintuple bypass surgery, the A.A. medallion he never removed, and the signet ring my mother gave him for his fortieth birthday, all of us saving money in a jar until fifty dollars was accumulated. Also there were the graying chest hairs, the hairless ankles, the male pattern baldness I see on the heads of men in the first-class section of airplanes and in the double mirrors in the barber’s shop. Embalming my father I was reminded of how we bury our dead and then become them. In the end I had to say that maybe this is what I’m going to look like dead.
Maybe it was at a Midwinter Conference my father first thought about what he did and why he did it. He always told us that embalming got to be, forgive me, de rigueur during the Civil War when, for the first time in our history, lots of people—mostly men, mostly soldiers—were dying far from home and the families that grieved them. Dismal traders worked in tents on the edge of the battlefields charging, one reckons, what the traffic would bear to disinfect, preserve, and “restore” dead bodies—which is to say they closed mouths, sutured bullet holes, stitched limbs or parts of limbs back on, and sent the dead back home to wives and mothers, fathers and sons. All of this bother and expense was predicated on the notion that the dead need to be at their obsequies, or, more correctly, that the living need the dead to be there, so that the living can consign them to the field or fire after commending them to God or the gods or Whatever Is Out There. The presence and participation of the dead human body at its funeral is, as my father told it, every bit as important as the bride’s being at her wedding, the baby at its baptism.
And so we brought our dead man home. Flew his body back, faxed the obits to the local papers, called the priests, the sexton, the florists and stonecutter. We act out things we cannot put in words.
Back in ’63, I can remember my father saying that the reason we have funerals and open caskets was so that we might confront what he called “the reality of death.” I think he’d heard that at one of these conferences. Jessica Mitford had just sold a million copies of The American Way of Death, Evelyn Waugh had already weighed in with The Loved One, and talk had turned at cocktail parties to “barbaric rituals” and “morbid curiosities.” The mortuary associations were scrambling for some cover. Clergy and educators and psychologists—the new clergy—were assembled to say it served some purpose, after all, was emotionally efficient, psychologically correct, to do what we’d been doing all along. The track record was pretty good on this. We’d been doing—the species, not the undertakers—more or less the same thing for millennia: looking up while digging down, trying to make some sense of all of it, disposing of our dead with sufficient pause to say they’d lived in ways different from rocks and rhododendrons and even orangutans and that those lives were worth mentioning and remembering.
Then Kennedy was shot dead and then Lee Harvey Oswald and we spent the end of November that year burying them—the first deaths in our lives that took for most of us boomers. All the other TV types got shot on Gunsmoke on a Friday and turned up on Bonanza, looking fit by Sunday night. But Kennedy was one of those realities of death my father must have been talking about and though we saw his casket and cortege and little John John saluting and the widow in her sunglasses, we never saw Kennedy dead, most of us, until years later when pictures of the autopsy were released and we all went off to the movies to see what really happened. In the interim, rumors circulated about Kennedy not being dead at all but hooked to some secret and expensive hardware, brainless but breathing. And when the Zapruder film convinced us that he must have died, still we lionized the man beyond belief. Of course, once we saw him dead in the pictures, his face, his body, he became human again: lovable and imperfect, memorable and dead.
AND AS I watch my generation labor to give their teenagers and young adults some “family values” between courses of pizza and Big Macs, I think maybe Gladstone had it right. I think my father did. They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions—only those who do it well and those who don’t. And if death is regarded as an embarrassment or an inconvenience, if the dead are regarded as a nuisance from whom we seek a hurried riddance, then life and the living are in for like treatment. McFunerals, McFamilies, McMarriage, McValues. This is the mathematical precision the old Britisher was talking about and what my father was talking about when he said we’d know what to do.
Thus tending to his death, his dead body, had for me the same importance as being present for the births of my sons, my daughter. Some expert on Oprah might call this “healing.” Another on Donahue might say “cathartic.” Over on Geraldo it might have “scarred him for life.” And Sally Jesse Whatshername might mention “making good choices.” As if they were talking about men who cut umbilical cords and change diapers or women who confront their self-esteem issues or their date rapists.
It is not about choices or functions or psychological correctness. A dead body has had its options limited, its choices narrowed. It is an old thing in the teeth of which we do what has been done because it is the thing to do. We needn’t reinvent the wheel or make the case for it, though my generation always seems determined to.
And they are at it over on the other island. Trying to reinvent the funeral as “a vehicle for the healthy expression of grief,” which, of course, it is; or as “a brief therapy for the acutely bereaved,” which, of course, it is. There will be talk of “stages,” “steps,” “recovery.” Someone will mention “aftercare,” “post-funeral service follow-up,” Widow to Widow programs, Mourners Anonymous? And in the afternoons they’ll play nine holes, or go snorkeling or start cocktails too early and after dinner they’ll go dancing then call home to check in with their offices just before they go to bed, to check on the gross sales, to see who among their townspeople has died.
Maybe I’ll take the boat over tomorrow. Maybe some of the old timers are there—men of my father’s generation, men you could call in the middle of the night if there was trouble. They remind me of my father and of Gladstone. Maybe they’ll say I remind them of him.
Death and the sun are not to be looked at in the face.
—La Rochefoucauld, MAXIMS
Don Paterson and I were crossing the Wolfe Tone Bridge in Galway contemplating Thomas Crapper. This was at early o’clock in the morning on our way back from an awful curry at the only Indian restaurant open in Galway in the wee hours. The night was mild, and our thoughts drifted toward talk of Crapper as the air behind us burned with the elemental fire of flatulence. It was an awful curry.
Why else would two internationally unknown poets, in Galway to recite our internationally unheard of poems, the guests of the Cuirt Festival of Literature, be talking about the implications of the invention of the flush toilet and about its inventor, that dismal man whose name shall forever be associated with shit? Why else?
Here, after all, was an opportunity to tender vengeance toward the man who’d damned, by faint praise, my most recent book of poems—in the TLS for chrissakes! Indeed, given Don’s fairly damaged condition—a night of drink, the aforementioned curry—I could have pitched him headlong into the Corrib and watched him bob up and down out to Galway Bay humming like Bing Crosby, an odd and gaseous swan gone belly-up from bad food and good riddance. But really the review wasn’t as bad as it was, well, “fair” and any ink is better than no ink, after all. And I like Don. He’s an amiable Scot, a Dundonian, and a crackerjack poet if, like myself, not exactly a household name. It could be worse, I tell myself. We could be Crappers. And he still drinks well, in a way I never did, allowing excess to be its own reward—a little change from the teetotal life I live back in Michigan, where I haven’t had a drink in years, suffering as I do from all of the “F” words: I’m fortyish, a father of four, a funeral director, and full of fear for what might happen if I go back on the Black Bush. So I don’t.
The first time I was ever in Ireland was twenty-seven years ago. Driven by curiosity about my family and my affection for the poetry of William Butler Yeats—an internationally known poet—I saved up a hundred dollars beyond the cost of a one-way ticket and lit out, twenty and cocksure, for Ireland. Several of my generation were going off to Vietnam at the time but I’d drawn high numbers in the Nixon lotto so I was free to go. What made me so cocksure was the faith that my parents would bail me out if I got too deep into trouble. So I wasn’t exactly like Kerouac or Woody Guthrie but I was, nonetheless, on the road. Or more precisely, flying the friendly skies.
When I located my cousins Tommy and Nora Lynch—brother and sister, bachelor and spinster—they lived in a thatched house on the west coast of Clare, in the townland of Moveen, with flagstone floors, two light sockets, a hot plate and open hearth, and no plumbing. Water existed five fields down the land, bubbling up in a miracle of springwater, clear and cold and clean. I soon learned to grab the bucket and a bit of the Clare Champion and on my way down for the precious water, I’d squat to my duties and wipe my ass with the obits or want ads or the local news. It was my first taste of Liberty—to crap out in the open air on the acreage of my ancestors, whilst listening to the sounds of morning: an aubade of birdwhistle and windsong.
Tommy and Nora kept cows, saved hay, went to the creamery and, as any farmer knows, dung is a large part of that bargain. It greens the grass that feeds the cow that makes the milk and shits again: a paradigm for the internal combustion engine, a closed system, efficient as an old Ford. And so the addition of my little bits of excrement to the vast dung-covered acreage was hardly noticeable, like personal grief among paid wailers, it gets lost in the shuffle and becomes anonymous and safe. This is the model for the food chain: the elements of feed, cowshit and what-have-ye, get lost in the shuffle by the time we sit down to the Delmonico or t-bone, likewise we are blind to the copulation of chickens and the habits of pigs when we sit down to the bacon and the eggs. The process blurs—dead fish make onions grow, manure turns into hamburger and tossed salad.
It was a good life. After nights of song and stories and poetry, common in the country in those years before televisions replaced the fire on the floor as the thing stared at and into, I would step out the back door of the cottage and take my stance amid the whitethorn trees my great-great-grandfather had planted years ago as saplings brought home from a horse fair in Kilrush. And looking up into the bright firmament I’d piss the porter out—I was young, I drank too much—and in the midst of this deliverance I’d look up into the vast firmament, as bright in its heaven as the dark was black, and think thoughts of Liberty and be thankful to be alive.
YEARS AFTER, I would try to replicate these reveries when I found myself living in a large old house on Liberty Boulevard in a small town in Michigan. I lived next door to my funeral home and, returning in the early mornings from embalming one of my townspeople, I’d stop near the mock-orange tree by the back door of my home and look up into the heavens and relieve myself. Some nights I would espy Orion or the Pleiades and think of mythologies blurred in my remembrance of them and be thankful for the life of the body and the mind.
Such was the firmament this night in Galway. Don and I had stood shoulder to shoulder before the famous green storefront of Kenny’s Bookshop in High Street, swooning and stuporous to see our books, our faces, and bold notice of our readings there in the window among the stars. And despite the flatus, harbinger of impending disaster, Don and I were glad to be alive. Glad for the soft air of springtime, somehow sweeter in Galway than Dundee or Michigan. And glad to be paid for giving out with poems when so few can say they were ever paid for the inner workings of their souls. And glad, I daresay, for the rooms provided for us at the Atlanta Hotel in Dominick Street by the Festival Committee—rooms with solid beds and flush toilets toward which we made our gaseous ways that mild Marchy night in the City of the Tribes.
I still have the house in West Clare. Tommy died and Nora outlived him by twenty-one years, living alone by the fire. Then Nora died, just shy of her ninetieth birthday, a tidy jaundiced corpse, made little and green by pancreatic cancer. She left the house to me. I was her family. I kept coming back to West Clare after that first time, year after year, though the visits were shortened by the building of my business and the making of babies.
When her brother Tommy died, in 1971, she rode the bike into town and called from the post office. I flew over in time for the wake and funeral. I think that was when she began to count me as her next of kin—the one she could call and be sure I’d come. I think that’s when she began to trust me with her own obsequies, mention of which was never made until the week before she died.
Of course, first among the several changes I made was the addition of a toilet and shower. I added on a room out the back door and put in a bathroom like a French bordello, all tile and glowing fixtures. I had a septic tank sunk in the back haggard and declared the place all the more habitable for the trouble. I let it to writers when I’m not there.
But for every luxury there is a loss. Just as the installation of a phone when Nora was eighty cost her the excitement of letters coming up the road with John Willie McGrath, the postman on his bike, and the installation of a television when she was eighty-five meant that her friends gave up their twisting relations in favor of Dallas reruns, so the introduction of modern toiletry removed from Moveen forever the liberty of walking out into the night air or the morning mist with a full bowel or bladder and having at the landscape in ways that can only be called “close to nature.”
THE THING ABOUT the new toilet is that it removes the evidence in such a hurry. The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has “civilized” us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish. No more the morning office of the chamber pot or outhouse, where sights and sounds and odors reminded us of the corruptibility of flesh. Since Crapper’s marvelous invention, we need only pull the lever behind us and the evidence disappears, a kind of rapture that removes the nuisance. This dynamic is what the sociologist, Phillip Slater, called “The Toilet Assumption,” back in the seventies in a book called The Pursuit of Loneliness. He was right: having lost the regular necessity of dealing with unpleasantries, we have lost the ability to do so when the need arises. And we have lost the community well versed in these calamities. In short, when shit happens, we feel alone.
It is the same with our dead. We are embarrassed by them in the way that we are embarrassed by a toilet that overflows the night that company comes. It is an emergency. We call the plumber.
I SOMETIMES THINK the only firms that put their names on what they do anymore are firms that make toilets and direct funerals. In both cases there seems to be an effort to sound trustworthy, stable, established, honest. Twyford’s Adamant, Armitage Shanks, Moen & Moen, Kohler come to mind. Most other enterprises seem hidden behind some “assumed name” someone is “Doing Business As.” Drugstores and real estate agents have given up the surnames of their owners for the more dodgy corporate identities of BuyRite or PayLess or Real Estate One. Doctors and lawyers have followed, taking in their shingles and putting out neon with murky identities and corporate cover. Drygoods and greengrocers, furniture merchants, saloons and restaurants—all gone now to malls and marts and supermarkets with meaningless or fictional monikers. But funeral homes and water-closets still stubbornly proclaim the name of the ones you’ll be doing business with. Lynch & Sons is the name of ours. Is it ego or identity crisis? I sometimes ask myself.
The house I live in here on Liberty was built in 1880. It had no plumbing at first. It had a cistern in the cellar to collect rainwater and likely had a pump in the kitchen and an outhouse in the backyard surrounded by lilacs. Next to the kitchen was a birthing room where agreeable women of that age had their babies. It was next to the kitchen because, as everyone knows, the having of babies and the boiling of water were gerundives forever linked in the common wisdom of the day. And after the babies were born and showed good signs of living (no sure thing then—more than half of the deaths in 1900 were children under twelve), they were christened, often in a room up front, the priest or parson standing between the aunts and uncles and grandparents that populated the households of that era, where everybody looked liked the Waltons with their John-Boys and Susans and goodnight Grampaws. These were big families, made large by the lovemaking of parents before the mercy of birth control turned families into Mommy and Daddy and 2.34 Johnnies and Sues and the modern welfare state turned households into Mommy and babies and a phantom man—like the “bull brought in a suitcase” to dairy cows in West Clare.
The homes were large to house multiple births and generations. These were households in which, just as babies were being birthed, grandparents were aging upstairs with chicken soup and doctors’ home visits until, alas, they died and were taken downstairs to the same room the babies were christened in to get what was called then, “laid out.” Between the births and deaths were the courtships—sparkings and spoonings between boys and girls just barely out of their teens, overseen by a maiden aunt who traded her talents for childcare and housekeeping for her place in the household. The smitten young people would sit on a “love seat”—large enough to look into each other’s eyes and hold hands, small enough to prevent them getting horizontal. The aunt would appear at strategic intervals to ask about lemonade, teas, room temperatures, the young man’s family. Decorum was maintained. The children married, often in the same room—the room with large pocket doors drawn for privacy and access. The room in which grandparents were waked and new babies were baptized and love was proffered and contracted—the parlor.
Half a century, two world wars, and the New Deal later, homes got smaller and garages got bigger as we moved these big events out of the house. The emphasis shifted from stability to mobility. The architecture of the family and the homes they lived in changed forever by invention and intervention and by the niggling sense that such things didn’t belong in the house. At the same time, the birthing room became the downstairs “bath”—emphasis upon the cleanly function of indoor plumbing. Births were managed in the sparkling wards of hospitals, or for real romance, on the way, in cars. A common fiction had some hapless civil servant or taxi man birthing a baby in the backseat of a squad car or Buick. The same backseat, it was often assumed, where the baby was invented—sparking and spooning under the supervision of Aunt Cecilia having given way to “parking” under the patrol of Officer Mahoney. Like most important things, courtship was done en route, in transit, on the lam, in a car. Retirees were deported to Sun City. Elders grew aged and sickly not upstairs in their own beds, but in a series of institutional venues: rest homes, nursing homes, hospital wards, sanitoria. Which is where they died: the chance, in 1960, of dying in your own bed: less than one in ten.
And having lived their lives and died their deaths outside the home, they were taken to be laid out, not in the family parlor but to the funeral parlor, where the building was outfitted to look like the family parlors gone forever, busy with overstuffed furniture, fern stands, knickknacks, draperies, and the dead.
This is how my business came to be.
Just about the time we were bringing the making of water and the movement of bowels into the house, we were pushing the birthing and marriage and sickness and dying out. And if the family that prayed together stayed together in accordance with the churchy bromide, the one that shits together rarely sticks together.
We have no parlors anymore, no hearthsides. We have, rather, our family rooms in which light flickers from the widescreen multichannel TV on which we watch reruns of a life we are not familiar with. Kitchens are not cooked in, dining rooms go dusty. Living rooms are a kind of mausolea reserved for “company” that seldom comes. Lovemaking is done on those “getaway” weekends at the Hyatt or the Holidome. New homes are built with fewer bedrooms and more full baths. (Note how a half bath is not called a whole crapper.) And everyone has their “personal space,” their privacy. The babies are in daycare, the elders are in Arizona or Florida or a nursing home with people their own age, and mom and dad are busting ass to pay for their “dream house” or the remodeled “master suite” where nothing much happens anymore of any consequence.
THIS IS ALSO why the funerals held in my funeral parlor lack an essential manifest—the connection of the baby born to the marriage made to the deaths we grieve in the life of a family. I have no weddings or baptisms in the funeral home and the folks that pay me have maybe lost sight of the obvious connections between the life and the death of us. And how the rituals by which we mark the things that only happen to us once, birth and death, or maybe twice in the case of marriage, carry the same emotional mail—a message of loss and gain, love and grief, things changed utterly.
And just as bringing the crapper indoors has made feces an embarrassment, pushing the dead and dying out has made death one. Often I am asked to deal with the late uncle in the same way that Don Paterson and I were about to ask Armitage Shanks to deal with the bad curry—out of sight out of mind. Make it go away, disappear. Push the button, pull the chain, get on with life. The trouble is, of course, that life, as any fifteen-year-old can tell you, is full of shit and has but one death. And to ignore our excrement might be good form, while to ignore our mortality creates an “imbalance,” a kind of spiritual irregularity, psychic impaction, a bunging up of our humanity, a denial of our very nature.
WHEN NORA LYNCH got sick they called. The doctor at the hospital in Ennis mentioned weeks, a month at most, there might be pain. I landed in Shannon on Ash Wednesday morning and on the way to the hospital stopped at the Cathedral in Ennis where school children and townies were getting their ashes before going off to their duties. The nurses at the hospital said I was holier than any one of them—to have flown over and gotten the smudge on my forehead and it not 9 A.M. yet in West Clare. Nora was happy to see me. I asked her what she thought we ought to do. She said she wanted to go home to Moveen. I told her the doctors all thought she was dying. “What harm . . . ,” says she. “Aren’t we all?” She fixed her bright eyes on the spot in my forehead. I asked the doctors for a day to make arrangements for her homecoming—a visiting nurse from the county health office would make daily calls, the local medico would manage pain with morphine, I laid in some soups and porridges and ice creams, some adult diapers, a portable commode.
The next day I drove back to Ennis to get her, buckled her into the front seat of the rental car, and made for the west along the same road I’d been driving toward her all those years since my first landing in Shannon—an hour from Ennis to Kilrush to Kilkee then five miles out the coast road to Moveen, the townland narrowing between the River Shannon’s mouth and North Atlantic, on the westernmost peninsula of County Clare. It was the second day of Lent in Ireland, the green returning to the fields wracked by winter, the morning teetering between showers and sunlight. And all the way home on the road she sang, “The Cliffs of Moveen,” “The Rose of Tralee,” “The Boys of Kilmichael,” “Amazing Grace.”
“Nora,” I said to her between verses, “no one would know you are dying to hear you singing now.”
“Whatever happens,” she said, “I’m going home.”
SHE WAS DEAD before Easter. Those last days spent by the fire in ever shortening audiences with neighbors and priests and Ann Murray, a neighbor woman I hired to “attend” her when I wasn’t there. Two powerful unmarried women, sixty years between them, talking farming and missed chances, unwilling to have their lives defined for them by men. Or deaths.
And I noticed how she stopped eating at all and wondered what the reason for that was.
WHEN I FIRST was in Ireland, that winter and spring a quarter century ago, Nora and I bicycled down to the Regan’s farm in Donoughby. Mrs. Regan had had a heart attack. We were vaguely related. We’d have to go. The body was laid out in her bedroom, mass cards strewn at the foot of the bed. Candles were lit. Holy water shook. Women knelt in the room saying rosaries. Men stood out in the yard talking prices, weather, smoking cigarettes. A young Yank, I was consigned to the women. In the room where Mrs. Regan’s body was, despite the candles and the flowers and the February chill—a good thing in townlands where no embalming is done—there was the terrible odor of gastrointestinal distress. Beneath the fine linens, Mrs. Regan’s belly seemed bulbous, almost pregnant, almost growing. Between decades of the rosary, neighbor women shot anxious glances among one another. Later I heard, in the hushed din of gossip, that Mrs. Regan, a lighthearted woman unopposed to parties, had made her dinner the day before on boiled cabbage and onions and ham and later followed with several half-pints of lager at Hickie’s in Kilkee. And these forgivable excesses, while they may not have caused her death, were directly responsible for the heavy air inside the room she was waked in and the “bad form” Nora called it when the requiems had to be moved up a day and a perfectly enjoyable wake foreshortened by the misbehavior of Mrs. Regan’s body.
AT NIGHT NORA would crawl into bed, take the medicine for pain, and sleep. “Collins is our man,” she told me toward the end, meaning the undertaker in Carrigaholt who could be counted on for coffins and hearses and grave openings at Moyarta where all our people were, back to our common man, Patrick Lynch. She turned over the bankbook with my name on it, added, she said, after her brother had died all those years ago. “Be sure there’s plenty of sandwiches and porter and wine, sherry wine, something sweet. And whiskey for the ones that dig the grave.”
Nora Lynch was a tidy corpse, quiet and continent, only a little jaundiced, which never showed in the half light of the room she died in, the room she was born in, the room she was waked in. She never stirred. And we waked her for three full days and nights in late March before taking her to church in Carrigaholt. Then buried her on a Monday in the same vaulted grave as her father and her father’s father and her twin brother, dead in infancy, near ninety years before. We gave whiskey to the gravediggers and had a stone cut with her name and dates on it to overlook her grave and the River Shannon.
There was money enough for all of that. She’d saved. Enough for the priests and the best coffin Collins had and for pipers and tinwhistlers and something for the choir; and to take the entourage to the Long Dock afterward and fill them with food and stout and trade memories and tunes. It was a grand wake and funeral. We wept and laughed and sang and wept some more.
And afterward there was enough left over to build the room that housed the toilet and the shower and haul that ancient cottage—a wedding gift to my great-great-grandfather, my inheritance—into the twentieth century in the nick of time.
Still, there are nights now in West Clare and nights in Michigan when I eschew the porcelain and plumbing in favor of the dark comforts of the yard, the whitethorn or lilac or the mock-orange, the stars in their heaven, the liberty of it; and the drift my thoughts invariably take toward the dead and the living and the ones I love whenever I am at the duties of my toilet.
I think of Nora Lynch and of Mrs. Regan and of the blessings of their lives among us. And lately I’ve been thinking thoughts of Don Paterson who made it back to the Atlanta Hotel—he to his room and me to mine. And maybe it was the drink or curry or the talk of toilets, or all of it together that made him kneel and hug the bowl and look into the maelstrom as we all have once or more than once, adding to the list of things not to be looked at in the face, the godawful name of Crapper.
I had an uneventful childhood. Added to my mother’s conviction that her children were precious was my father’s terrible wariness. He saw peril in everything, disaster was ever at hand. Some mayhem with our name on it lurked around the edges of our neighborhood waiting for a lapse of parental oversight to spirit us away. In the most innocent of enterprises, he saw danger. In every football game he saw the ruptured spleen, the death by drowning in every backyard pool, leukemia in every bruise, broken necks on trampolines, the deadly pox or fever in every rash or bug bite.
It was, of course, the undertaking.
As a funeral director, he was accustomed to random and unreasonable damage. He had learned to fear.
My mother left big things to God. Of her nine children, she was fond of informing us, she had only “planned” one. The rest of us, though not entirely a surprise—she knew what caused it—were gifts from God to be treated accordingly. Likewise, she figured on God’s protection and, I firmly believe, she believed in the assignment of guardian angels whose job it was to keep us all out of harm’s way.
But my father had seen, in the dead bodies of infants and children and young men and women, evidence that God lived by the Laws of Nature, and obeyed its statutes, however brutal. Kids died of gravity and physics and biology and natural selection. Car wrecks and measles and knives stuck in toasters, household poisons, guns left loaded, kidnappers, serial killers, burst appendices, bee stings, hard-candy chokings, croups untreated—he’d seen too many instances of His unwillingness to overrule the natural order, which included, along with hurricanes and meteorites and other Acts of God, the aberrant disasters of childhood.
So whenever I or one of my siblings would ask to go here or there or do this or that, my father’s first response was almost always “No!” He had just buried someone doing that very thing.
He had just buried some boy who had toyed with matches, or played baseball without a helmet on, or went fishing without a life preserver, or ate the candy that a stranger gave him. And what the boys did that led to their fatalities matured as my brothers and sisters and I matured, the causes of their death becoming subtly interpersonal rather than cataclysmic as we aged. The stories of children struck by lightning were replaced by narratives of unrequited love gone suicidal, teenagers killed by speed and drink or overdosed on drugs, and hordes of the careless but otherwise blameless dead who’d found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
My mother, who had more faith in the power of prayer and her own careful parenting, would often override his prohibitions. “Oh, Ed,” she would argue over dinner, “Leave them be! They’ve got to learn some things for themselves.” Once she told him “Don’t be ridiculous, Ed,” when he’d refused me permission to spend the night at a friend’s house across the street. “What!” she scolded him, “Did you just bury someone who died of a night spent at Jimmy Shryock’s house?”
He regarded my mother’s interventions not as contrarieties, but as the voice of reason in a world gone mad. It was simply the occasional triumph of her faith over his fear. And when she stepped into the fray with her powerful testimony, he reacted as the drunken man does to the cold water and hot coffee, as if to say, Thanks, I needed that.
But his fear was genuine and not unfounded. Even for suburban children who were loved, wanted, protected, doted over, there were no guarantees. The neighborhood was infested with rabid dogs, malarial mosquitoes, weirdoes disguised as mailmen and teachers. The worst seemed always on the brink of happening, as his daily rounds informed him. For my father, even the butterflies were suspect.
So while my mother said her prayers and slept the sound sleep of a child of God; my father was ever wakeful, ever vigilant, ever in earshot of a phone—in case the funeral home should call in the middle of the night—and a radio that monitored police and fire calls. In my childhood I can recall no day he was not up and waiting for me and my siblings to awaken. Nor can I remember any night I lived at home, until I was nineteen, when he was not awake and waiting for our arrival home.
Every morning brought fresh news of overnight catastrophes he’d heard on the radio. And every night brought stories of the obsequies, sad and deliberate, which he directed. Our breakfasts and dinners were populated by the widowed and heartsore, the wretched and bereft, among them the parents permanently damaged by the death of a child. My mother would roll her eyes a little bit and dole out liberties against his worry. Eventually we were allowed to play hardball, go camping, fish alone, drive cars, date, ski, open checking accounts, and run the other ordinary developmental risks—her faith moving mountains his fear created.
“Let go,” she would say. “Let God.”
Once she even successfully argued on behalf of my older brother, Dan, getting a BBGun, a weapon which he promptly turned against his younger siblings, outfitting us in helmet and leather jacket and instructing us to run across Eaton Park while he practiced his marksmanship. Today he is a colonel in the army and the rest of us are gun-shy.
Far from indifferent, my mother left the business of Life and Death to God in His heaven. This freed her to tend to the day-to-day concerns of making sure we lived up to our potential. She was concerned with “character,” “integrity,” “our contribution to society,” and “the salvation of our souls.” She made no secret of her belief that God would hold her personally accountable for the souls of her children—a radical notion today—so that her heaven depended on our good conduct.
For my father, what we did, who we became, were incidental to the tenuous fact of our being: That We Were seemed sufficient for the poor worried man. The rest, he would say, was gravy.
There were, of course, near misses. After the usual flues, poxes, and measles, we entered our teen years in the sixties and seventies. Pat was sucker-punched in a bar fight by a man who broke a beer bottle over his head. Eddie drove off a bridge, crashed his car into the riverbank, and walked away unscathed. He told our parents that another car, apparently driven by an intoxicant, had run him off the road. We called it “Eddie’s Chappaquiddick” privy as only siblings are to our brother’s taste for beer and cocaine. Julie Ann went through the windshield of a friend’s car when the friend drove into a tree and, except for some scalpline lacerations and scars, lived to tell about it. Brigid took too many pills one night in combination with strong drink and what her motivation was remained a mystery for years, known only to my mother. For my part, I fell off a third-story fire-escape in my third year of college, broke several Latin-sounding bones, fractured my pelvis, and compressed three vertebrae but never lost consciousness. My English professor and mentor, the poet Michael Heffernan, was first downstairs and out the door to where I had landed. I must have appeared somewhat dazed and breathless. “Did you hit your head?” he kept asking once he had determined I was alive. “What day is it?” “Who is the president of the United States?” To assure him I had not suffered brain damage, I gave out with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—a moving rendition I was later told, marred only by my belching through the couplet where your man says, “I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Then I puked, not from the fall but from the J.W. Dant Bourbon that was credited with saving my life. I had been sufficiently limbered up, it was reasoned, by generous doses of Kentucky sour mash, to have avoided permanent damage.
In the hospital I woke to a look on my father’s face I shall always remember—a visage distorted by rage and relief, at war with itself. And by amazement at the menagerie of friends and fellow revelers who accompanied me to hospital. While Professor Heffernan could affect the upright citizen in tweeds and buttondowns, not so Walt Houston, who studied physics and comparative religion and lived most of the school year in a tree somewhere on the edge of the campus and scavenged for food scraps in the student union. Nor Myles Lorentzen, who successfully failed his draft physical after the ingestion of massive doses of caffeine—pot after pot of black coffee followed by the eating whole of a carton of cigarettes. Later, Myles would do hard time in prison for the illegal possession of marijuana. A month after his release they made possession a misdemeanor, punishable by a twenty dollar fine. Worse still, Glenn Wilson, whose only utterance after a six pack of beer was always “Far out, man!” which he would say, for no apparent reason, at the most inappropriate of times. Harmless drunks and ne’er-do-wells, my father looked suspicious of my choice of friends.
My mother thanked God I had not been killed, then fixed her eyes on me in a way it seemed she’d had some practice at—casting the cold eye of the long suffering in the face of a boozy loved one. My father had quit drinking the year before, joined AA, began going to meetings. My brothers and I had been a little surprised by this as we had never seen him drunk before. I had overheard my mother’s sister once, complaining aloud about my father’s drinking. I must have been six or eight years old. I marched down to Aunt Pat’s on the next block and told her outright that my father wasn’t a drunk. And once, the Christmas after his father had died, I heard him and my mother come home late. He was raving a little. I thought it must be grief. He insisted the doctor be called. He said he was having a heart attack. The doctor, I think, tried to cover for him, behaved as if there was something wrong other than drink. In any case, by the time I’d taken my dive off the balcony, my father had a year’s sobriety under his belt and should have been able to recognize an inebriate when he saw one. But instead of a curse, he saw blessing: his son, somewhat broken but reparable and alive.
Now they are both dead and I reckon a fixture in my father’s heaven is the absence of any of his children there, and a fixture in my mother’s is the intuition that we will all follow, sooner or later but certainly.
WE PARENT THE way we were parented. The year they began to make real sense to me was 1974. In February the first of my children was born. In June we purchased the funeral home in Milford. I was a new parent and the new undertaker in a town where births and deaths are noticed. And one of the things I noticed was the number of stillbirths and fetal deaths we were called upon to handle. There was no nearby hospital twenty years ago; no medical office buildings around town. The prenatal care was not what it should be, and in addition to the hundred adult funerals we handled every year in those days, we would be called upon to take care of the burial of maybe a dozen infants—babies born dead, or born living but soon dead from some anomaly, and several every year from what used to be called crib death and is now called Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
I WOULD SIT with the moms and dads of these babies—dead of no discernible cause—they simply forgot to breathe, trying to make some sense of all of it. The fathers, used to protecting and paying, felt helpless. The mothers seemed to carry a pain in their innards that made them appear breakable. The overwhelming message on their faces was that nothing mattered anymore, nothing. We would arrange little wakes and graveside services, order in the tiny caskets with the reversible interiors of pink and blue, dust off the “baby bier” on which the casket would rest during the visitation, and shrink all the customs and accouterments to fit this hurt.
When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.
But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams.
And I remember in those first years as a father and a funeral director, new at making babies and at burying them, I would often wake in the middle of the night, sneak into the rooms where my sons and daughter slept, and bend to their cribsides to hear them breathe. It was enough. I did not need astronauts or presidents or doctors or lawyers. I only wanted them to breathe. Like my father, I had learned to fear.
And, as my children grew, so too the bodies of dead boys and girls I was called upon to bury—infants becoming toddlers, toddlers becoming school children, children becoming adolescents, then teens, then young adults, whose parents I would know from the Little League or Brownies or PTA or Rotary or Chamber of Commerce. Because I would not keep in stock an inventory of children’s caskets, I’d order them, as the need arose, in sizes and half sizes from two foot to five foot six, often estimating the size of a dead child, not yet released from the county morgue, by the sizes of my own children, safe and thriving and alive. And the caskets I ordered were invariably “purity and gold” with angels on the corners and shirred crepe interiors of powdery pink or baby blue. And I would never charge more than the wholesale cost of the casket and throw in our services free of charge with the hope in my heart that God would, in turn, spare me the hollowing grief of these parents.
There were exceptions to the “purity and gold.” Once a man whose name I remember shot his two children, ages eight and four, while their mother waited tables up in town. Then he shot himself. We laid him out in an 18-gauge steel with the Last Supper on the handles and his daughter and his son in a matching casket together. The bill was never paid. She sold the house, skipped town. I never pursued it.
And one Christmastide twin six-year-olds fell through the ice on the river that divides this town. It ran through their backyard and no one knows if they went in together or one tried to save the other. But the first of the brothers was found the same day and the next one was found two days later, bobbed up downstream after the firemen broke up the ice by the dam. We put them in the one casket with two pillows, foot to foot—identical in their new OshKosh B’Gosh jeans and plaid shirts their mother had mail-ordered from Sears for Christmas. Their father, a young man then, aged overnight and died within five years of nothing so much as sorrow. Their mother got cancer and died after that of grief metastasized. The only one left, the twins’ older brother, who must be nearing thirty now, is long gone from this place.
And I remember the poor man with the look of damage on him whose wife strangled their eight-year-old son with a belt. Then she wrote a fourteen-page suicide note, explaining why she felt her son, who had been slow to read, faced a lifetime of ridicule and failure she felt she was freeing him from. Then she took three dozen pills, lay down beside the boy, and died herself. First he selected a cherry casket and laid them out together in it, the boy at rest under his mother’s arm. But before the burial, he asked to have the boy removed from the mother’s casket and placed in one of his own and buried in his own grave. I did as he instructed and thought it was sensible.
So early on I learned my father’s fear. I saw in every move my children made the potentially lethal outcome. We lived in an old house next door to the funeral home. The children grew up playing football in the side yard, roller skating in the parking lot, then skateboarding, riding bikes, then driving cars. When they were ten, nine, six, and four, their mother and I divorced. She moved away. I was “awarded” custody—four badly saddened kids I felt a failure towards. And though I was generally pleased with the riddance that divorce provides—the marriage had become a painful case—I was suddenly aware that single parenting meant, among other things, one pair of eyes to watch out for one’s children with. Not two. One pair of ears to keep to the ground. One body to place between them and peril; one mind. There was less conflict and more worry. The house itself was dangerous: poison under every sink, electrocution in every appliance, radon in the basement, contagion in the kitty litter. Having been proclaimed by the courts the more “fit” parent, I was determined to be one.
I would rise early, make the sack lunches while they ate cereal, then drive them to school. I had a housekeeper who came at noon to do the laundry and clean and be there when the youngest came home from kindergarten. I’d be at the office from nine-thirty until four o’clock, then come home to get dinner ready—stews mostly, pastas, chicken and rice. They never ate as much as I prepared. Then there was homework and dance classes and baseball, then bed. And when it was done, when they were in bed and the house was ahum with its appliances, washer and dryer and dishwasher and stereo, I’d pour myself a tumbler of Irish whiskey, sit in a wingback chair and smoke and drink and listen—on guard for whatever it was that would happen next.
Most nights I passed out in the chair, from fatigue or whiskey or from both. I’d crawl up to bed, sleep fitfully, and rise early again.
THE POOR COUSIN of fear is anger.
It is the rage that rises in us when our children do not look both ways before running into busy streets. Or take to heart the free advice we’re always serving up to keep them from pitfalls and problems. It is the spanking or tongue lashing, the door slammed, the kicked dog, the clenched fist—the love, Godhelpus, that hurts: the grief. It is the war we wage against those facts of life over which we have no power, none at all. It makes for heroics and histrionics but it is no way to raise children.
And there were mornings I’d awaken heroic and angry, hungover and enraged at the uncontrollable facts of my life: the constant demands of my business, the loneliness of my bed, the damaged goods my children seemed. And though it was anything but them I was really angry at, it was the kids who’d get it three mornings out of every five. I never hit, thank God, or screamed. The words were measured out, meticulous. I seethed. After which I would apologize, pad their allowances, and curry forgiveness the way any drunk does with the ones he loves. Then I stopped drinking, and while the fear did not leave entirely, the anger subsided. I was not “in recovery” so much as I was a drunk who didn’t drink and eventually came to understand that I was more grateful than resentful for the deliverance.
BUT FAITH IS, so far as I know it, the only known cure for fear—the sense that someone is in charge here, is checking the ID’s and watching the borders. Faith is what my mother said: letting go and letting God—a leap into the unknown where we are not in control but always welcome. Some days it seems like stating the obvious. Some days it feels like we are entirely alone.
Here is a thing that happened. I just buried a young girl whose name was Stephanie, named for St. Stephen; the patron of stonemasons, the first martyr. She died when she was struck by a cemetery marker as she slept in the back seat of her parents’ van as the family was driving down the interstate on their way to Georgia. It was the middle of the night. The family had left Michigan that evening to drive to a farm in Georgia where the Blessed Mother was said to appear and speak to the faithful on the thirteenth of every month. As they motored down the highway in the dark through mid-Kentucky, some local boys, half an hour south, were tipping headstones in the local cemetery for something to do. They picked one up that weighed about fourteen pounds—a stone. What they wanted with it is anyone’s guess. And as they walked across the overpass of the interstate, they grew tired of carrying their trophy. With not so much malice as mischief, they tossed it over the rail as the lights of southbound traffic blurred below them. It was at this moment that the van that Stephanie’s father was driving intersected with the stolen marker from the local cemetery. The stone was falling earthward at thirty-two feet per second, per second. The van was heading south at seventy miles per hour. The stone shattered the windshield, glanced off Stephanie’s father’s right shoulder, woke her mother riding in the passenger seat and, parting the space between the two front seats, struck Stephanie in the chest as she lay sleeping in the back seat. She had just traded places with her younger brother who cuddled with his two other sisters in the rear seat of the van. It did not kill Stephanie instantly. Her sternum was broken, her heart bruised beyond repair. A trucker stopped to radio for help but at two A.M. in Nowhere, Kentucky, on a Friday morning, such things take time. The family waited by the roadside reciting the rosary as Stephanie gasped for air and moaned. They declared her dead at the hospital two hours later. Stephanie’s mother found the stone in the back seat and gave it to the authorities. It said RESERVED FOSTER and was reckoned to be a corner marker from the Foster Lot in Resurrection Cemetery.
SOMETIMES IT SEEMS like multiple choice.
A: It was the Hand of God. God woke up one Friday the 13th and said, “I want Stephanie!” How else to explain the fatal intersection of bizarre events. Say the facts slowly, they sound like God’s handiwork. If the outcome were different, we’d call it a miracle.
Or B: It wasn’t the Hand of God. God knew it, got word of it sooner or later, but didn’t lift a hand because He knows how much we’ve come to count on the Laws of Nature—gravity and objects in motion and at rest—so He doesn’t fiddle with the random or deliberate outcomes. He regrets to inform us of this, but surely we must understand His position.
Or C: The Devil did it. If faith supports the existence of Goodness, then it supports the probability of Evil. And sometimes, Evil gets the jump on us.
Or D: None of the above. Shit happens. That’s Life, get over it, get on with it.
Or maybe E: All of the above. Mysteries—like decades of the rosary—glorious and sorrowful mysteries.
EACH OF THE answers leaves my inheritance intact—my father’s fear, my mother’s faith. If God’s will, shame on God is what I say. If not, then shame on God. It sounds the same. I keep shaking a fist at the Almighty asking Where were you on the morning of the thirteenth? The alibi changes every day.
Of course the answers, the ones that faith does not require, and are not forthcoming, would belong to Stephanie’s parents and the hundreds I’ve known like them over the years.
I’VE PROMISED STEPHANIE’S headstone by Christmas—actually for St. Stephen’s Day, December 26th. The day we all remember singing Good King Wenceslaus. Stephen was accused of blasphemy and stoned in 35 A.D.
When I first took Stephanie’s parents to the cemetery, to buy a grave for their daughter, her mother stood in the road and pointed to a statue of The Risen Christ. “I want her over there,” she said, “at the right hand of Jesus.” We walked across the section to an empty, unmarked space underneath the outstretched granite right arm of Christ. “Here,” Stephanie’s mother said, her wet eyes cast upward into the gray eyes of Christ. Stephanie’s father, his eyes growing narrow, was reading the name on the neighboring grave. FOSTER is what it read. It was cut in stone.
Write, read, sing, sigh, keep silence, pray,bear thy crosses manfully; eternal life is worthy of all these, and greater combats.
—Thomas à Kempis
It came to me high over California. I was flying across the country to read poems in L.A. I had gigs at the Huntington Library, UCLA, San Bernardino, and Pomona College. And between engagements, four days free to wander at will in Southern California. It was a beautiful blue end of September, the year I quit drinking and my mother died. Crisp and cloudless, from my window seat the nation’s geography lay below me. The spacious skies, the fruited plane, the purple mountains’ majesty.
I was counting my blessings.
To have such a day for my first transcontinental flight, to have someone else paying for the ticket and the expenses and to be proffering stipends I’d gladly pay taxes on, to say that I was the poet and I had the poems that people in California were paying to hear—these were good gifts. My mother was dying back in Michigan, of cancer. She had told the oncologists, “Enough, enough.” They had discontinued the chemotherapy. I was running from the implications.
I was scared to death.
From Detroit we first flew over Lake Michigan then the grainy Midwest and Plains states, then the mountains and valleys of the Great West, and finally the desert west of Vegas and Reno until, in the distance, I could make out the western edges of the San Bernardino Mountains. The Mojave was all dry brown below until, just before the topography began to change from desert to mountain, I saw an irregular rectangle of verdant green. It was the unspeakable green of Co. Kerry or Virgin Gorda purposely transposed to the desert and foothills. I could only hazard a guess at its size—a couple hundred acres I reckoned, though I had no idea what altitude we were flying at. Had we already begun our final descent? The captain had turned on the seat belt sign. All of our seat backs and tray tables were forward.
“MUST BE A golf course,” is what I said to myself. I could see geometrically calculated plantings of trees and irregular winding pathways. “Or a cemetery. Hell!” I remember thinking, “This is California, it could be both!”
In the Midwest we think of California as not just another state and time zone but as another state of mind, another zone entirely, having more in common with the Constellation Orion than with Detroit or Cleveland or Illinois.
And then it came to me, the vision. It could be both!
I’ve been working in secret ever since.
It is no especial genius that leads me to the truth that folks in their right minds don’t like funerals. I don’t think we need a special election or one of those CNN polls on this. Most folks would rather shop dry goods or foodstuffs than caskets and burial vaults. Given the choice, most would choose root canal work over the funeral home. Even that portion of the executive physical where the doctor says, “This may be a little uncomfortable,” beats embalming ninety-nine times out of every hundred in the public races. Random samplings of consumer preference almost never turn up “weeping and mourning” as things we want to do on our vacations. Do you think a funeral director could be elected president? Mine was and is and, godhelpus, ever will be The Dismal Trade. We might be trusted (the last ones to let you down my father used to say) or admired (I don’t know how you do it!) or tolerated (well, somebody has to do it) and even loved, though our lovers are often a little suspect (how can you stand to have him touch you after . . . ?). But rare is that man or woman who looks forward to funerals with anything even approaching gladness, save perhaps those infrequent but cheerful obsequies for IRS agents or telemarketers or a former spouse’s bumptious attorney.
What’s worse, all the advertising in the world won’t ever make it an expandable market. Mention of our ample parking, clearance prices on bronze and copper, easy credit terms, readiness to serve twenty-four hours a day does little to quicken in any consumer an appetite for funerals in the way that, say, our taste for fast food can be incited to riot by talk of “two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onion on a sesame seed bun.” How many of us don’t salivate, Pavlovian, when someone hums the tune that says, “You deserve a break today”? A drop in the prime rate will send shoppers out in search of the “big ticket” items—homes, cars, and pleasure craft—but never funerals. Chesty teenagers with good muscle tone dressed in their underwear and come-hither looks can sell us more Chevys than we need, more perfume than we need, more Marlboros than we need, more cruises, more computers, more exercise equipment; more and better, and fewer and better and new and improved and faster and cheaper and sexier and bigger and smaller; but the one funeral per customer rule has held for millennia, and we don’t really need a study to show us that for most folks even the one and only is the one too many.
Thus we regard funerals and the ones who direct them with the same grim ambivalence as those who deliver us of hemorrhoids and boils and bowel impactions—Thanks, we wince or grin at the offer, but no thanks!
THERE ARE SOME exceptions to this quite ponderable truth.
As always, the anomalies prove the rule.
Poets, for example, will almost always regard any opportunity to dress up and hold forth in elegiac style as permissible improvement on their usual solitude. If free drink and a buffet featuring Swedish meatballs are figured in the bargain, so much the better. A reviewer of mine quite rightly calls poets the taxidermists of literature, wanting to freeze things in time, always inventing dead aunts and uncles to eulogize in verse. He is right about this. A good laugh, a good cry, a good bowel movement are all the same fellow to those who otherwise spend their days rummaging in the word horde for something to say, or raiding the warehouses of experience for something worth saying something about. And memorable speech like memorable verse calls out for its inscription into stone. Poets know that funerals and gravesides put them in the neighborhood of the memorable. The ears are cocked for answers to the eternal adverbs, the overwhelming questions. “And may these characters remain,” we plead with Yeats, in his permanent phrase, “when all is ruin once again.”
And there are elements of the reverend clergy who have come to the enlightenment that, better than baptisms or marriages, funerals press the noses of the faithful against the windows of their faith. Vision and insight are often coincidental with demise. Death is the moment when the chips are down. That moment of truth when the truth that we die makes relevant the claims of our prophets and apostles. Faith is not required to sing in the choir, for bake sales or building drives; to usher or deacon or elder or priest. Faith is for the time of our dying and the time of the dying of the ones we love. Those parsons and pastors who are most successful—those who have learned to “minister”—are those who allow their faithful flocks to grieve like humans while believing like Jews or Christians or Muslims or Buddhists or variants of these compatible themes. They affirm the need to weep and dance, to blaspheme and embrace the tenets of our faiths, to upbraid our gods and to thank them.
Uncles find nickels behind our ears. Magicians pulls rabbits from out of hats. Any good talker can preach pie in the sky or break out the warm fuzzies when the time is right. But only by faith do the dead arise and walk among us or speak to us in our soul’s dark nights.
So rabbi and preacher, pooh-bah and high priest do well to understand the deadly pretext of their vocation. But for our mortality there’d be no need for churches, mosques, temples, or synagogues. Those clerics who regard funerals as so much fuss and bother, a waste of time better spent in prayer, a waste of money better spent on stained glass or bell towers, should not wonder for whom the bell tolls. They may have heard the call but they’ve missed the point. The afterlife begins to make the most sense after life—when someone we love is dead on the premises. The bon vivant abob in his hot tub needs heaven like another belly button. Faith is for the heartbroken, the embittered, the doubting, and the dead. And funerals are the venues at which such folks gather. Some among the clergy have learned to like it. Thus they present themselves at funerals with a good cheer and an unambiguous sympathy that would seem like duplicity in anyone other than a person of faith. I count among the great blessings of my calling that I have known men and women of such bold faith, such powerful witness, that they stand upright between the dead and the living and say, “Behold I tell you a mystery. . . .”
THERE ARE THOSE, too, who are ethnically predisposed in favor of funerals, who recognize among the black drapes and dirges an emotionally potent and spiritually stimulating intersection of the living and the dead. In death and its rituals, they see the leveled playing field so elusive in life. Whether we bury our dead in Wilbert Vaults, leave them in trees to be eaten by birds, burn them or beam them into space; whether choir or cantor, piper or jazz band, casket or coffin or winding sheet, ours is the species that keeps track of our dead and knows that we are always outnumbered by them. Thus immigrant Irish, Jews of the diaspora, Black North Americans, refugees and exiles and prisoners of all persuasions, demonstrate, under the scrutiny of demographers and sociologists, a high tolerance, almost an appetite, for the rites and ceremonies connected to death.
Furthermore, this approval seems predicated on one or more of the following variables: the food, the drink, the music, the shame and guilt, the kisses of aunts and distant cousins, the exultation, the outfits, the heart’s hunger for all homecomings.
THE OTHER EXCEPTION to the general abhorrence of funerals is, of course, types of my own stripe whose lives and livelihoods depend on them. What sounds downright oxymoronic to most of the subspecies—a good funeral—is, among undertakers, a typical idiom. And though I’ll grant some are pulled into the undertaking by big cars and black suits and rumors of riches, the attrition rate is high among those who do not like what they are doing. Unless the novice mortician finds satisfaction in helping others at a time of need, or “serving the living by caring for the dead” as one of our slogans goes, he or she will never stick it. Unless, of course, they make a pile of money early on. But most of us who can afford to send our kids to the orthodontist but not to boarding school, who are tied to our brick and mortar and cash-flow worries, who live with the business phone next to our beds, whose dinners and intimacies are always being interrupted by the needs of others, would not do so unless there were satisfactions beyond the fee schedule. Most of the known world could not be paid enough to embalm a neighbor on Christmas or stand with an old widower at his wife’s open casket or talk with a leukemic mother about her fears for her children about to be motherless. The ones who last in this work are the ones who believe what they do is not only good for the business and the bottom line, but good, after everything, for the species.
A man that I work with named Wesley Rice once spent all of one day and all night carefully piecing together the parts of a girl’s cranium. She’d been murdered by a madman with a baseball bat after he’d abducted and raped her. The morning of the day it all happened she’d left for school dressed for picture day—a schoolgirl dressed to the nines, waving at her mother, ready for the photographer. The picture was never taken. She was abducted from the bus stop and found a day later in a stand of trees just off the road a township south of here. After he’d raped her and strangled her and stabbed her, he beat her head with a baseball bat, which was found beside the child’s body. The details were reported dispassionately in the local media along with the speculations as to which of the wounds was the fatal one—the choking, the knife, or the baseball bat. No doubt these speculations were the focus of the double postmortem the medical examiner performed on her body before signing the death certificate Multiple Injuries. Most embalmers, faced with what Wesley Rice was faced with after he’d opened the pouch from the morgue, would have simply said “closed casket,” treated the remains enough to control the odor, zipped the pouch, and gone home for cocktails. It would have been easier. The pay was the same. Instead, he started working. Eighteen hours later the girl’s mother, who had pleaded to see her, saw her. She was dead, to be sure, and damaged; but her face was hers again, not the madman’s version. The hair was hers, not his. The body was hers, not his. Wesley Rice had not raised her from the dead nor hidden the hard facts, but he had retrieved her death from the one who had killed her. He had closed her eyes, her mouth. He’d washed her wounds, sutured her lacerations, pieced her beaten skull together, stitched the incisions from the autopsy, cleaned the dirt from under her fingernails, scrubbed the fingerprint ink from her fingertips, washed her hair, dressed her in jeans and a blue turtleneck, and laid her in a casket beside which her mother stood for two days and sobbed as if something had been pulled from her by force. It was the same when her pastor stood with her and told her “God weeps with you.” And the same when they buried the body in the ground. It was then and always will be awful, horrible, unappeasably sad. But the outrage, the horror, the heartbreak belonged, not to the murderer or the media or the morgue, each of whom had staked their claims to it. It belonged to the girl and to her mother. Wesley had given them the body back. “Barbaric” is what Jessica Mitford called this “fussing over the dead body.” I say the monster with the baseball bat was barbaric. What Wesley Rice did was a kindness. And, to the extent that it is easier to grieve the loss that we see, than the one we imagine or read about in papers or hear of on the evening news, it was what we undertakers call a good funeral.
It served the living by caring for the dead.
But save this handful of the marginalized—poets and preachers, foreigners and undertakers—few people not under a doctor’s care and prescribed powerful medications, really “appreciate” funerals. Safe to say that part of the American Experience, no less the British, or the Japanese or Chinese, has been to turn a blind eye to the “good” in “goodbye,” the “sane” in “sadness,” the “fun” in “funerals.”
THUS, THE CONCEPT of merging the highest and best uses of land, which came to me high over California, seemed an idea whose time had come. The ancient and ongoing duty of the land to receive the dead aligned with the burgeoning craze in the golf business led, by a post-modern devolution, to my vision of a place where one could commemorate their Uncle Larry and work on their short game at the same time—two hundred acres devoted to memories and memorable holes; where tears wept over a missed birdie comingled with those wept over a parent’s grave. A Golfatorium! It would solve, once and for all, the question of Sundays—what to do before or after or instead of church. The formerly harried husband who always had to promise he’d do the windows “next weekend” in order to get a few holes in during good weather, could now confidently grab his golf shoes and Big Berthas and tell his wife he was going to visit his “family plot.” He might let slip some mention of “grief work” or “unfinished business” or “adult-child issues still unresolved.” Or say that he was “having dreams” or was feeling “vulnerable.” What good wife would keep her mate from such important therapy? What harm if the cure includes a quick nine or eighteen or twenty-seven holes if the weather holds?
So began the dialogue between my selves: the naysayer and the true believer—there’s one of each in every one of us. I read my poems in L.A., chatted up the literary set, waxed pithy and beleaguered at the book signings and wine and cheese receptions. But all along I was preoccupied by thoughts of the Golfatorium and my mother dying. When, after the reading at the Huntington Library, I asked the director where would she go if she had four days free in Southern California, she told me “Santa Barbara” and so I went.
THERE ARE ROUGHLY ten acres in every par four. Eighteen of those and you have a golf course. Add twenty acres for practice greens, club house, pool and patio, and parking and two hundred acres is what you’d need. Now divide the usable acres, the hundred and eighty, by the number of burials per acre—one thousand—subtract the greens, the water hazards, and the sand traps, and you still have room for nearly eight thousand burials on the front nine and the same on the back. Let’s say, easy, fifteen thousand adult burials for every eighteen holes. Now add back the cremated ashes scattered in sandtraps, the old marines and swabbies tossed overboard in the water hazards and the Italians entombed in the walls of the club house and it doesn’t take a genius to come to the conclusion that there’s gold in them there hills!
You can laugh all you want, but do the math. Say it costs you ten thousand an acre and as much again in development costs—you know, to turn some beanfield into Roseland Park Golfatorium or Arbordale or Peachtree. I regard as a good omen the interchangeability of the names for golf courses and burial grounds: Glen Eden and Grand Lawn, like Oakland Hills or Pebble Beach could be either one, so why not both? By and large we’re talking landscape here. So two million for property and two million for development, the club house, the greens, the watering system. Four million in up-front costs. Now you install an army of telemarketers-slash-memorial counselors to call people during the middle of dinner and sell them lots at an “introductory price” of, say, five hundred a grave—a bargain by any standard—and cha-ching you’re talking seven point five million. Add in the pre-arranged cremations at a hundred a piece and another hundred for scattering in the memorial sandtraps and you’ve doubled your money before anyone has bought a tee time or paid a greens fee or bought golf balls or those overpriced hats and accessories from your pro shop. Nor have you sold off the home lots around the edges to those types that want to live on a fairway in Forest Lawn. Building sights at fifty thousand a pop. Clipping coupons is what you’d be. Rich beyond any imagination. And that’s not even figuring how much folks would pay to be buried, say, in the same fairway as John Daly or Arnold Palmer. Or to have Jack Nicklaus try to blast out of your sandtrap. And think of the gimmicks—free burial for a hole in one, select tee times for the pre-need market. And the package deals: a condo on the eighteenth hole, six graves on the par-three on the front nine, dinner reservations every Friday night, tennis lessons for the missus, maybe a video package of you and your best foursome for use at your memorial service, to aid in everyone’s remembrance of the way you were, your name and dates on the wall of the nineteenth hole where your golf buddies could get a little liquored up and weepy all in your memory. All for one low price, paid in a way that maximized your frequent-flier miles.
THE IMPULSE TO consolidate and conglomerate, to pitch the big tent of goods and services is at the heart of many of this century’s success stories. No longer the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, we go to supermarkets where we can buy meats, breads, motor oils, pay our light bill, rent a video, and do our banking, all in the one stop. Likewise the corner gas station sells tampons and toothpaste (of course, no one comes out to check your oil, nor can the insomniac behind the glass wall fix your brakes or change your wiper blades). Our churches are no longer little chapels in the pines but crystal cathedrals of human services. Under one roof we get day care and crisis intervention, bible study and columbaria. The great TV ministries of the eighties—the Bakkers and Swaggarts and Falwells—were theme parks and universities and hospital complexes that flung the tax-free safety net of God over as much real estate as could be bought. Perhaps the tendency, manifest in many of today’s mega-churches, to entertain rather than to inspire, to wow rather than to worship, proceeds from the intelligence, gained generations back, that the big top needed for the tent revival and the three-ring circus was one and the same. Some of these televangelists went to jail, some ran for president, and some rode off into the sunset of oblivion. But they seemed to be selling what the traffic would bear. A kind of one-stop shopping for the soul, where healing, forgiveness, a time-share in the Carolinas, musical ministry, water parks, and pilgrimages to the Holy Land can all be put on one’s Visa or Mastercard.
In the same way the Internet is nothing if not an emergent bazaar, a global mall from which one can shop the shelves of a bookstore in Galway, order a pizza or some dim sum, talk dirty to strangers bored with their marriages, and check the demographics of Botswana all without budging from—this would have sounded daft twenty years ago—the “home office.”
Thus the paradigm of dual-purpose, high-utility, multitasking applications had taken hold of the market and my imagination.
This had happened to me once before.
Years back before the cremation market really—I can’t help this one—heated up, I dreamed a new scheme called “Cremorialization.” It was based on the observation that those families who elected to cremate their dead, much as those who buried theirs, felt a need to memorialize them. But unlike earth burial where the memorial took the form of a stone—informative but silent and otherwise useless—those who reduced the dead to ashes and bone fragments seemed to be cheered by the thought that something good might come of something bad, something useful might proceed from what they saw as otherwise useless. Such notions have root in what has been called the Protestant ethic that honors work and utility. The dead, they seemed to be saying, ought to get off their dead ashes and be good for something beyond the simple act of remembrance.
This is the crowd who can always be counted on to say “such a shame” or “what a waste” when they see a room full of flowers at one end of which is a dead human body. The same flowers surrounding a live human body hosting a tea for the visiting professor are, for the most part, “perfectly lovely.” Or when the body amid the gladioli is one recovering from triplets, say, or triple bypass surgery, the flowers are reckoned to be “how very thoughtful.” But flowers surrounding a casket and corpse are wasteful and shameful—the money better spent on “a good cause.” This notion, combined with cremation, which renders the human corpse easily portable—ten to twelve pounds on average—and easily soluble with new age polymers and resins, brought me to the brainstorm years ago of the dead rising from their ashes, doing their part again—Cremorialization. Rather than dumbly occupying an urn, what old hunter wouldn’t prefer his ashes to be used to make duck decoys or clay pigeons? The dead fisherman could become a crank-bait or plastic worms, perhaps given, with appropriate ceremony, to a favorite grandson. The minister’s wife, ever the quiet and dignified helpmate, could be resurrected as a new tea service for the parsonage, her name etched tastefully into the saucers. Bowlers could be mixed into see-through bowling balls, or bowling pins, or those bags of rosin they are always tossing. Ballroom dancers could be ocarinas, cat lovers could be memorial kitty litter. The possible applications were endless. The ashes of gamblers could become dice and playing chips, car buffs turned into gear shift knobs or hood ornaments or whole families of them into matching hubcaps. After years spent in the kitchen, what gourmand could resist the chance to become a memorial egg-timer, their ashes slipping through the fulcrum in a metaphor of time. Bookends and knickknacks could be made of the otherwise boring and useless dead. And just as the departed would be made more valuable by becoming something, what they became would be more valuable by placing the word “memorial” in front of it.
WE ALWAYS KEPT the ashes in a closet—those that weren’t picked up by the family or buried or placed in a niche. After ten years I noticed we’d accumulated several dozen unclaimed boxes of ashes. It seemed as if nobody wanted them. I wondered about the limits of liability. What if there were a fire. I tried to imagine the lawsuits—old family members turning up for “damages.” There are, of course, damages that can be done even to a box of ashes. We’d call every year around Christmastime to see if the families of these abandoned ashes had come to any decision about what should be done, but more often than not we’d be left holding the box. One Christmas, my younger brother, Eddie, said we should declare it The Closet of Memories and establish a monthly holding fee, say twenty-five dollars, to be assessed retroactively unless the ashes were picked up in thirty days. Letters were sent out. Calls made. Old cousins and step-children came out of the woodwork. Widows long-since remarried returned. The Closet of Memories was near empty by Easter. Eddie called it a miracle.
What I called it was amazing—the ways we relate to a box of ashes—the remains. And all that winter and spring I’d watch as people called to claim their tiny dead, how exactly it was they “handled” it. Some grinned broadly and talked of the weather, taking up the ashes as one would something from the hardware store or baggage claim, tossing it into the trunk of their car like corn flakes or bird seed. Some received the package—a black plastic box or brown cardboard box with a name and dates on it—as one would old porcelain or First Communion, as if one’s hands weren’t worthy or able or clean enough to touch it. One elderly woman came to claim the ashes of her younger sister. The younger sister’s children could not be bothered, though their aunt valiantly made excuses for them. She carried her sister’s ashes to the car. Opened the trunk then closed it up again. Opened the back door of her blue sedan then closed that, too. She finally walked around to the front passenger seat, placed the parcel carefully there, paused momentarily, then put the seat belt around it before getting in and driving away. For several it was a wound reopened. And they were clearly perturbed that we should “hassle” them to take some action or else pay a fee. “What do I want with her ashes?” one woman asked, clearly mindless of the possibility that, however little her dead mother’s ashes meant to her, they might mean even less to me.
The only mother who mattered was my own. And she was dying of a cancer that reoccurred a year and a half after the surgery that the doctors assured her had “got it all.” They had removed a lung. We’d all put away our worst fears and grabbed the ring the surgeons tossed that said “everything was going to be all right.” They were wrong. A cough that started at Thanksgiving and was still there at Valentine’s Day sent her to the doctor’s at my sister Julie’s insistence. The doctors saw “an irregularity” in the x-rays and suggested a season of radiation treatments. I supposed this irregularity must be different than the one for which laxatives and diuretics are prescribed. But by June, her body made dry and purple from the radiation, it still had not occurred to me that she would be dying. Even in August, her voice near a whisper, a pain in her shoulder that never left, I clung to the user-friendly, emotionally neutral lexicon of the oncologist, who kept our focus on the progress of the “irregularity” (read tumor) instead of the woman dying before our eyes, whose pain they called “discomfort”; whose moral terror they called “anxiety”; whose body not only stopped being her friend, it had become her enemy.
I never pursued Cremorialization. The bankers and bean counters couldn’t be swayed. One said I was probably ahead of my time. He was right. Strange ads turn up in the trade journals now that promise to turn the cremains into objects of art, which bear a uniform resemblance to those marble eggs that were all the rage a few years ago. Oh, once I dumped a fellow’s ashes into a clear whiskey bottle that his wife had wired to work as a desk lamp. “He always said I really turned him on,” she says and still signs her Christmas cards Bev and Mel. Likewise the widow of a man I fished with brought back his ashes after she remarried and asked me to scatter them on the Pere Marquette—the river where we’d fished the salmon run for years. She’d put them in a thermos bottle, one of those big pricey Stanley ones, and said it would be less conspicuous in the canoe than the urn I’d sold her. “Camouflage” she called it and smiled the smile of loss well grieved. But once I got him downstream to one of our favorite holes, I couldn’t let him go that way. I buried him, thermos bottle and all, under a birch tree up from the riverbank. I piled stones there and wrote his name and dates on paper, which I put in a fly-box and hid among the stones. I wanted a place that stood still to remember him at in case his son and daughter, hardly more than toddlers when he died, ever took up fishing or came asking about him.
The world is full of odd alliances. Cable companies buy phone companies, softwares buy hardwares. Before you know it we’re talking to the TV. Other combinations are no less a stretch: the “motor home,” “medicide.” By comparison, a cemetery-golf course combo—a Golfatorium—seems, fetched only as far as, you will excuse, a nine iron.
Furthermore, cemeteries have always been widely and mistakenly regarded as land wasted on the dead. A frequent argument one hears in favor of cremation relies on the notion, an outright fiction, that we are running out of land. But no one complains about the proliferation of golf courses. We’ve had three open in Milford the last year alone. And no one in public office or private conversation has said that folks should take up contract bridge or ping pong or other less land-needy, acreage-intensive pasttimes and dedicate the land, instead, to low-cost housing or co-op organic gardens. No, the development of a golf course is good news to the real estate and construction trades, reason for rejoicing among the hoteliers, restaurateurs, clothiers, and adjoining industries who have found that our species is quite willing to spend money on pleasure when the pleasure is theirs. Land dedicated to the memorialization of the dead is always suspect in a way that land used for the recreation of the living seldom is. There seems to be, in my lifetime, an inverse relationship between the size of the TV screen and the space we allow for the dead in our lives and landscapes. With the pyramids maybe representing one end of the continuum, and the memorial pendant—in which ashes of your late and greatly reduced spouse are kept dangling tastefully from anklet or bracelet or necklace or keychain—representing the other, we seem to give ground grudgingly to the departed. We’ve flattened the tombstones, shortened the services, opted for more and more cremation to keep from running out of land better used for amusement parks, off-street parking, go-cart tracks, and golf courses. A graveyard gains favor when we combine it with a nature walk or historical tour, as if the nature and history of our mortality were not lesson enough on any given day. We keep looking for community events to have in them—band concerts, birdwatchings—meanwhile, the community events they are supposed to involve, namely funerals and burials, have become more and more private spectacles. It is not enough for it to be only the repository of our dead and the memories we keep of them, or safe harbor for the often noisome and untidy feelings grief includes; comfort and serenity are not enough. We want our parks, our memorial parks, to entertain us a little, to have some use beyond the obvious. Less, we seem to be telling the dead, is more; while for the living, enough is never quite enough.
So the combination of golf and good grieving seems a natural, each divisible by the requirement for large tracts of green grass, a concentration on holes, and the need for someone to carry the bags—caddies or pallbearers.
There will of course be practical arguments—when are you going to actually “do” the burials? Can people play through a graveside service? What is the protocol? Is there a dress code? What about headstones, decoration day, perpetual care? And what, godhelpus, about handicaps? What will the hearse look like? Must we all begin to dress like Gary Player?
When my mother was dying I hated God. Some days when I think of her, dead at sixty-five, I think of how my father said, “These were supposed to be the Golden Years.” She bore and birthed and raised nine children because the teachings or the technologies of her generation did not offer reliable “choice.” The daughter of a music teacher, she understood everything but “rhythm.” It is the strength in numbers I’m the beneficiary of now. The God of my anger was the God she knew—the fellow with the beard and archangels and the abandonment issues. The practical joker with a mean streak, pulling the chair out from under us, squirting us with the boutonniere, shaking our hands with the lightning-bolt joy buzzer and then wondering why we don’t “get it”; can’t we “take a joke”?
My mother, a Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman Catholic, had her heaven furnished with familiar pieces: her own parents, her sister, friends of her youth. Her vision was precise, down to the doilies.
So checking into the Miramar—an old oceanfront hotel south of Santa Barbara, with blue roof tiles over white clapboard, I wanted to hide, for four days only, from the facts of the matter. I remember waking to the sound of pelicans, gulls, and cormorants diving into the blue water, the listless lapping of the waves. The Pacific was pacific. I needed peace. I sat on the deck overlooking the beach. Taut bodies jogged by in primary colors or walked with their designer dogs in the morning light. No one was dying in Santa Barbara. I began to make notes about the golf course-cemetery combo. Would calling it “St. Andrews” be too bold? Would people pay more to be buried on the greens? Would a bad divot be desecration? What about headstones? They’d have to go. But what to replace them with? Memorial balls? These and other questions like them quarreled like children for my attention. I ordered coffee. A grilled cheese sandwich. I avoided the temptation to float in the water. The undulent ocean glistened with metaphor. To sit and watch the sea was good. Everything was going to be all right. By sunset I was transfixed by the beauty. I’d worked out the details of my plan—the location, the capitalization, the ad campaign, the board of directors. Why shouldn’t our cemeteries be used for fun and fitness? Pleasure and pain were soluble. Laughing and crying are the same release. I didn’t know which I should do next, laugh or weep.
My mother believed in redemptive suffering. The paradigm for this was the crucifixion of Christ, an emblem of which she kept in most rooms of our house. This was the bad day against which all others were measured. She was a student of the fifteenth-century mystic Thomas à Kempis whose Imitation of Christ she read daily. “Offer it up for the suffering souls,” is what she would say when we’d commence our carping over some lapse in creature comforts. I think it was a Catholic variation on the Protestant work ethic. If you’re going to be miserable, her logic held, you may as well be miserable for a good cause.
Who were these suffering souls? I’d ask myself.
Likewise, people of the Irish persuasion have a special knack or affliction for searching out the blessing in every badness. “Happy is the grave the rain falls on,” they say as they stand ankle deep in mud, burying their dead, finding the good omen in the bad weather. Thus, in a country where it rains every day, they have proclaimed the downpour a blessed thing. “Could be worse,” they say in the face of disaster or “The devil you know’s better than the one you don’t,” or when all else fails “Just passing through life.” Invasion and famine and occupation have taught them these things. They have a mindset that tolerates, perhaps to a fault, God’s little jokes on the likes of us.
So when, as a child, I’d find myself hungry or angry or lonely or tired or brutalized by one of the brothers, among my mother’s several comforts was the subtle spiritual dictum to “offer it up for the suffering souls.” By patient acceptance of pain I could assist in the universal business of salvation. The currency of hurt became the currency of holiness the way you’d change pounds sterling to greenback dollars. God was the celestial bank teller who kept track of the debits and credits to our accounts. Those who died in arrears went to Purgatory—a kind of bump-and-paint shop for the soul, where the dents and dings and rust of life on earth could be fixed before going on to Heaven. Hell was a Purgatory that never ended, reserved for the true deadbeats who not only didn’t pay their tolls but didn’t figure they owed anyone anything. Purgatory was for rehabilitation. Hell was for punishment, perpetual, eternal, cruel and unusual. The chief instrument of both locales was fire—the cleansing, if painful, flames of purgatorio, the fire and brimstone recompense, for pleasures ill-got and self-indulgent, of the inferno.
I think sometimes that this is why, for most of the last two millennia, the western Church has avoided cremation—because fire was punitive. When you were in trouble with God you went to hell where you burned. Perhaps this created in us feelings about fire that were largely negative. We burned the trash and buried the treasure. This is why, faced with life’s first lessons in mortality—the dead kitten or bunny rabbit, or dead bird fallen from its nest on high—good parents search out shoe boxes and shovels instead of kindling wood or barbecues. It is also why we might witness burials, but cremation, like capital punishment, is hidden from us. Of course, Eastern thought has always favored fire as a purifier, as the element that reunites us with our elements and origins. Hence the great public pyres of Calcutta and Bombay, where dead bodies blacken the skies with smoke from their burning.
My mother did not believe this part. Her children needed neither punishment or purification beyond that which she supplied. We were the children of God and her own best efforts. Salvation was a gift of God. Her gift to us was how to claim it. And when, after the Second Vatican Council, they got rid of Limbo and Purgatory, she fashioned it a kind of enlightenment. Still, life had sufferings enough to go around and she wanted us to use them well. It was part of Nature.
“All grievous things are to be endured for eternal life,” is how my mother was instructed by Thomas à Kempis. Suffering was thereby imbued with meaning, purpose, value, and reason. Nature passed suffering out in big doses, random and irreverent, but faith and grace made suffering a part of the way by which we make our journey back to God. Atonement meant to be “at one.” And this return, this reunion in heaven, this salvation, was the one true reason for our being, according to my mother. This opinion put her, of course, at odds with everything the culture told us about “feeling good about ourselves” or “taking care of numero uno” or the secular trophies of “happiness” and “validation” and “self-esteem.” Hers was a voice crying in the suburban wilderness that we were all given crosses to bear—it was our imitation of Christ—and we should offer it up for the suffering souls.
THAT IS HOW she turned it into prayer—the “irregularity,” the cancer, the tumor that moved from her remaining lung up her esophagus, leapt to her spinal cord, and then made for her brain. This was what the doctors said was happening, preferring a discussion of parts failing to persons dying. But for her husband and children what was happening was that her voice was growing more and more quiet, her breath was getting shorter and shorter, her balance was lost to the advance of cancer. My mother was making it work for her, placing the pain and the fear and the grief of it into that account with God she’d kept, by which what was happening to her body became only one of several things that were happening to her. Her body, painful and tumorous, was turning on her and she was dying. I’m sure she was ready to be rid of it. She said her heart was overwhelmed with grief and excitement. Grief at the going from us—her husband of forty-three years, her sons and daughters, grandchildren born and unborn, her sister and brother, her friends. Excitement at the going “home.” But as the voice inside her body hushed, her soul’s voice seemed to shout out loud, almost to sing. She could see things none of us could see. She refused the morphine and remained lucid and visionary. She spoke words of comfort to each of us—at one point saying we must learn to let go, not only grudgingly, but as an act of praise. I say this not because I understand it but because I witnessed it. I’m not certain that it works—only certain that it worked for her.
Once you’ve made the leap it’s easy. Once you’ve seen huge tracts of greensward put to seemingly conflicting uses, the world becomes a different place. If golf courses can be graveyards, surely football fields, and soccer pitches, ball diamonds and tennis courts. And what about ski slopes? What folks don’t want to be buried on a mountain? Boot Hill we could call it. Listen up, the possible applications are endless. The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. Life is like that—death is, too.
My mother’s funeral was a sadness and a celebration. We wept and laughed, thanked God and cursed God, and asked God to make good on the promises our mother’s faith laid claim to in her death. It was Halloween the day we buried her—the eve of All Saints, then All Souls, all suffering souls.
Eddie and I have been looking for acreage. He’s a golfer. I’d rather read and write. He says he’ll be the Club Pro and I can be the Brains Behind the Operation. We’ve worked together for years and years. Our sister Brigid does pre-need and our sister Mary has always done the books—payroll and collections and payables. The women seem to control the money. Revenge they call it for our calling it Lynch & Sons.
Whenever I have business at Holy Sepulchre, I stop in section twenty-four, where my mother and father are buried. He lived on after her for two more years. After he was buried we all decided on a tall Celtic cross in Barre granite with their instruction to “Love One Another” cut into the circle that connects the crossed beams. My father had seen crosses like this when I took him to Ireland the year after my mother died. He’d said he liked the look of them.
Stones like these make golf impossible. They stand their ground. It’s hard to play through. Those joggers with their designer dogs on leashes and stereos plugged into their ears are not allowed. A sign by the pond reads “No Fishing/Do Not Feed Ducks.” The only nature trail in Holy Sepulchre is the one that takes you by the nature of our species to die and to remember.
I miss them so.
I think it’s my sisters who plant the impatiens every spring at the base of the stone.
Sometimes I stand among the stones and wonder. Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I weep. Sometimes nothing at all much happens. Life goes on. The dead are everywhere. Eddie says that’s par for the course.
Share with us—it will be money in your pockets.Go now I think you are ready.
—William Carlos Williams, “TRACT”
I’d rather it be February. Not that it will matter much to me. Not that I’m a stickler for details. But since you’re asking—February. The month I first became a father, the month my father died. Yes. Better even than November.
I want it cold. I want the gray to inhabit the air like wood does trees: as an essence not a coincidence. And the hope for springtime, gardens, romance, dulled to a stump by the winter in Michigan.
Yes, February. With the cold behind and the cold before you and the darkness stubborn at the edges of the day. And a wind to make the cold more bitter. So that ever after it might be said, “It was a sad old day we did it after all.”
And a good frosthold on the ground so that, for nights before it is dug, the sexton will have had to go up and put a fire down, under the hood that fits the space, to soften the topsoil for the backhoe’s toothy bucket.
Wake me. Let those who want to come and look. They have their reasons. You’ll have yours. And if someone says, “Doesn’t he look natural!” take no offense. They’ve got it right. For this was always in my nature. It’s in yours.
And have the clergy take their part in it. Let them take their best shot. If they’re ever going to make sense to you, now’s the time. They’re looking, same as the rest of us. The questions are more instructive than the answers. Be wary of anyone who knows what to say.
As for music, suit yourselves. I’ll be out of earshot, stone deaf. A lot can be said for pipers and tinwhistlers. But consider the difference between a funeral with a few tunes and a concert with a corpse down front. Avoid, for your own sakes, anything you’ve heard in the dentist’s office or the roller rink.
Poems might be said. I’ve had friends who were poets. Mind you, they tend to go on a bit. Especially around horizontal bodies. Sex and death are their principal studies. It is here where the services of an experienced undertaker are most appreciated. Accustomed to being personae non grata, they’ll act the worthy editor and tell the bards when it’s time to put a sock in it.
On the subject of money: you get what you pay for. Deal with someone whose instincts you trust. If anyone tells you you haven’t spent enough, tell them to go piss up a rope. Tell the same thing to anyone who says you spent too much. Tell them to go piss up a rope. It’s your money. Do what you want with it. But let me make one thing perfectly clear. You know the type who’s always saying “When I’m dead, save your money, spend it on something really useful, do me cheaply”? I’m not one of them. Never was. I’ve always thought that funerals were useful. So do what suits you. It is yours to do. You’re entitled to wholesale on most of it.
As for guilt—it’s much overrated. Here are the facts in the case at hand: I’ve known the love of the ones who have loved me. And I’ve known that they’ve known that I’ve loved them, too. Everything else, in the end, seems irrelevant. But if guilt is the thing, forgive yourself, forgive me. And if a little upgrade in the pomp and circumstance makes you feel better, consider it money wisely spent. Compared to shrinks and pharmaceuticals, bartenders or homeopaths, geographical or ecclesiastical cures, even the priciest funeral is a bargain.
I WANT A mess made in the snow so that the earth looks wounded, forced open, an unwilling participant. Forego the tent. Stand openly to the weather. Get the larger equipment out of sight. It’s a distraction. But have the sexton, all dirt and indifference, remain at hand. He and the hearse driver can talk of poker or trade jokes in whispers and straight-face while the clergy tender final commendations. Those who lean on shovels and fill holes, like those who lean on custom and old prayers, are, each of them, experts in the one field.
And you should see it till the very end. Avoid the temptation of tidy leavetaking in a room, a cemetery chapel, at the foot of the altar. None of that. Don’t dodge it because of the weather. We’ve fished and watched football in worse conditions. It won’t take long. Go to the hole in the ground. Stand over it. Look into it. Wonder. And be cold. But stay until it’s over. Until it is done.
On the subject of pallbearers—my darling sons, my fierce daughter, my grandsons and granddaughters, if I’ve any. The larger muscles should be involved. The ones we use for the real burdens. If men and their muscles are better at lifting, women and theirs are better at bearing. This is a job for which both may be needed. So work together. It will lighten the load.
Look to my beloved for the best example. She has a mighty heart, a rich internal life, and powerful medicines.
After the words are finished, lower it. Leave the ropes. Toss the gray gloves in on top. Push the dirt in and be done. Watch each other’s ankles, stamp your feet in the cold, let your heads sink between your shoulders, keep looking down. That’s where what is happening is happening. And when you’re done, look up and leave. But not until you’re done.
So, if you opt for burning, stand and watch. If you cannot watch it, perhaps you should reconsider. Stand in earshot of the sizzle and the pop. Try to get a whiff of the goings on. Warm your hands to the fire. This might be a good time for a song. Bury the ashes, cinders, and bones. The bits of the box that did not burn.
Put them in something.
Mark the spot.
Feed the hungry. It’s good form. Feed them well. This business works up an appetite, like going to the seaside, walking the cliff road. After that, be sober.
THIS IS NONE of my business. I won’t be there. But if you’re asking, here is free advice. You know the part where everybody is always saying that you should have a party now? How the dead guy always insisted he wanted everyone to have a good time and toss a few back and laugh and be happy? I’m not one of them. I think the old teacher is right about this one. There is a time to dance. And it just may be this isn’t one of them. The dead can’t tell the living what to feel.
They used to have this year of mourning. Folks wore armbands, black clothes, played no music in the house. Black wreathes were hung at the front doors. The damaged were identified. For a full year you were allowed your grief—the dreams and sleeplessness, the sadness, the rage. The weeping and giggling in all the wrong places. The catch in your breath at the sound of the name. After a year, you would be back to normal. “Time heals” is what was said to explain this. If not, of course, you were pronounced some version of “crazy” and in need of some professional help.
Whatever’s there to feel, feel it—the riddance, the relief, the fright and freedom, the fear of forgetting, the dull ache of your own mortality. Go home in pairs. Warm to the flesh that warms you still. Get with someone you can trust with tears, with anger, and wonderment and utter silence. Get that part done—the sooner the better. The only way around these things is through them.
I know I shouldn’t be going on like this.
I’ve had this problem all my life. Directing funerals.
It’s yours to do—my funeral—not mine. The death is yours to live with once I’m dead.
So here is a coupon good for Disregard. And here is another marked My Approval. Ignore, with my blessings, whatever I’ve said beyond Love One Another.
Live Forever.
ALL I REALLY wanted was a witness. To say I was. To say, daft as it still sounds, maybe I am.
To say, if they ask you, it was a sad day after all. It was a cold, gray day.
February.
OF COURSE, ANY other month you’re on your own. Have no fear—you’ll know what to do. Go now, I think you are ready.