HOW WE COME TO BE THE ONES WE ARE
In the summer of 2012, Gus Nichols, one of Dublin’s great undertakers and the President of FIAT-IFTA, the International Federation of Thanatologists Associations, invited me to Ireland to speak on a subject of my choosing. FIAT-IFTA is a congress of funeral directors from around the world and at this, their twelfth international convention, there would be representatives from thirty nations, two hundred and fifty registrants in all, from places as far-flung as Malaysia and Sierra Leone, Argentina and Australia, Canada and China and Columbia. My brother Patrick was the immediate past president of our National Funeral Directors Association and traveled with me as a delegate from the United States to thank Gus, Finbarr O’Connor and, indeed, several members of the Irish Association of Funeral Directors for having traveled to Chicago the year before to participate in Pat’s convention. There would be a gala banquet and golf outing, tours of Glasnevin Cemetery and the Titanic Exhibition in Belfast, and plenty of good shopping in Grafton Street. The conference was held in Dublin Castle, a huge, walled compound in the center of that ancient city, with turrets and towers, dungeons and courtyards, dating to early in the thirteenth century—eight hundred years of history oozing from its stones. And I found myself constructing a line for the obituary I am always editing in my head that would someday in the long-distant future read, “He had presented to funeral directors from around the world.” Travel and castles will do that to you. I was grateful for the invitation.
I had been to the castle once before. Indeed, I’d been to Ireland dozens of times in the forty-some years since my first visit there in the winter of 1970, in search of my roots and my future, as twentysomethings are wont to do. But my first visit to Dublin Castle was in the late 1980s, to the offices of Poetry Ireland, which were housed there in Bermingham Tower, to arrange for a reading tour of the country after my first book of poems was published.
And now, twenty-five years and several books later, rising to speak about our common calling to a room full of mortuary sorts from Asia and Africa and the Americas, from Europe and the Antipodes and just down the road, it seemed as if my life’s works and preoccupations—poetry and funerals, the literary and the mortuary arts—were finally melding into one. They were, in many ways, the same but different: equal tributaries of the one enterprise. So much so, in fact, that I had titled my presentation after a poem I intended to read them called “Local Heroes.” How many funeral directors from small-town, middle America, I asked myself, get to hold forth their ideas and recite their poems to colleagues from around the world in Dublin Castle in the middle of June? It felt like a gift and I felt lucky and exceptionally fortunate and it made me wonder, as Gus Nichols was giving me a generous introduction and I was gathering my papers and thoughts together and readying to rise to the august occasion, and praying, as we do, not to make the huge fool of myself that I have in me to do, I wondered what exactly am I doing here?
How do we come to be the ones we are?
I was raised by Irish Catholics. Even as I write that it sounds a little like “wolves” or some especially feral class of creature. Not in the apish, nativist sense of immigrant hordes, rather in the fierce faith and family loyalties, the pack dynamics of their clannishness, their vigilance and pride. My parents were grandchildren of immigrants who had mostly married within their tribe. They’d sailed from nineteenth-century poverty into the prospects of North America, from West Clare and Tipperary, Sligo and Kilkenny, to Montreal and Ontario, upper and lower Michigan. Graces and O’Haras, Ryans and Lynchs—they brought their version of the “one true faith,” druidic and priest-ridden, punctilious and full of superstitions, from the boggy parishes of their ancients to the fertile expanse of middle America. These were people who saw statues move, truths about the weather in the way a cat warmed to the fire, omens about coming contentions in a pair of shoes left up on a table, bad luck in some numbers, good fortune in others. Odd lights in the nightscape foreshadowed death; dogs’ eyes attracted lightning; the curse of an old woman could lay one low. The clergy were to be “given what’s going to them,” but otherwise, “not to be tampered with.” Priests were feared and their favor curried—their curses and blessings opposing poles of the powerful medicine they were known to possess. Everything had meaning beyond the obvious. The dead were everywhere and their ghosts inhabited the air and memory and their old haunts, real as ever, if in an only slightly former tense, in constant need of care and appeasement. They were, like the saints they’d been named for, prayed over, prayed to, invoked as protection against all enemies, their names recycled through generations, reassigned to new incarnations.
My mother thought I might become a priest. Not because I was especially holy; rather, as a devout and Catholic mother of six sons and three daughters, she would’ve known the expected ecclesiastical surtax on so many healthy babies would be a curate or two and maybe a nun to boot. “Be stingy with the Lord and the Lord will be stingy with you,” was the favorite wisdom of her parish priest and confessor, Father Thomas Kenny, of the Galway Kennys in Threadneedle Road.
I WAS NAMED for a dead priest, my father’s uncle. Some few years after surviving the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, he got “the call.” “Vocations follow famine,” an old bromide holds. No less the flu? He went to seminary in Detroit and Denver and was ordained in the middle of the Great Depression. We have a photo of his First Solemn High Mass on June 10, 1934, at St. John’s Church in Jackson, Michigan, a block from the clapboard house he’d grown up in.
His father, my great-grandfather, another Thomas Lynch, did not live to get into this photo of women in print dresses and men in straw boaters on a sunny June Sunday between world wars. My great-grandfather had come from the poor townland of Moveen on the West Clare peninsula that forms the upper lip of the gaping mouth of the river Shannon—a treeless sloping plain between the ocean and the estuary, its plots of pasturage divided by hedgerows and intermarriages. He’d come to Michigan for the work available at the huge penitentiary there in Jackson where he painted cellblocks, worked in the laundry, and finished his career as a uniformed guard. He married Ellen Ryan, herself an immigrant. Together they raised a daughter who taught, a son who got good work with the post office, and another who would become a priest—like hitting the trifecta for poor Irish “Yanks,” all cushy jobs with reliable pensions. He never saw Ireland again.
In the middle of the retinue of family and parishioners posed for the photo at the doors to the church around their freshly minted, homegrown priest, is my father, Edward, aged ten years, seated next to his father and mother, bored but obedient in his new knee breeches. Because the young priest—he has just gone thirty—is sickly but willing, the bishop in Detroit will send him back out West to the bishop in Santa Fe, who will assign him to the parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Taos, in hopes that the high, dry air of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains might ease his upper respiratory ailments and lengthen his days.
The young curate is going to die of pneumonia just two years later at the end of July, 1936. The Apache women whose babies he baptized, whose sons he taught to play baseball, whose husbands he preached to, will process his rough-sawn coffin down the mountains from Taos, along the upper reaches of the Rio Grande, through landscapes Georgia O’Keeffe will make famous, to the Cathedral in Santa Fe where Archbishop Rudolph Gerken will preside over his requiems, then send his body back to his people, C.O.D., on a train bound for Michigan and other points east.
A moment that will shape our family destiny for generations occurs a few days later in the Desnoyer Funeral Home in Jackson. The dead priest’s brother, my grandfather, is meeting with the undertaker to sort details for the hometown funeral at St. John’s. He brings along my father, now twelve years old, for reasons we can never know. While the two elder men are discussing plots and boxes, pallbearers and honoraria, the boy wanders through the old mortuary until he comes to the doorway of a room where he espies two men in shirtsleeves dressing a corpse in liturgical vestments. He stands and watches quietly. Then they carefully lift the freshly vested body of his dead uncle from the white porcelain table into a coffin. They turn to see the boy at the door. Ever after my father will describe this moment—this elevation, this slow, almost ritual hefting of the body—as the one to which he will always trace his intention to become a funeral director. Perhaps it aligned in his imagination with that moment during the masses he attended at St. Francis De Sales when the priest would elevate the host and chalice, the putative body and blood of Christ, when bells were rung, heads bowed, breasts beaten in awe? Might he have conflated the corruptible and the incorruptible? The mortal and immortality? The sacred and the profane? We have no way to know.
“Why,” we would often ask him, “why didn’t you decide to become a priest?”
“Well,” he would tell us, matter-of-factly, “the priest was dead.”
It was also true that he’d met Rosemary O’Hara that year, a redheaded fifth-grader who would become the girl of his dreams and who would write him daily when he went off to war with the Marines in the South Pacific; who would marry him when he came home and mother their nine children and beside whom he’d be buried half a century later.
“God works in strange ways,” my mother would remind us, smiling, passing the spuds, all of us marveling at the ways of things.
And so these “callings,” such as they were, these summons to her life as a wife and mother and his to a life as a father and undertaker—a life’s work he would always describe as “serving the living by caring for the dead,” or “a corporal work of mercy,” or “not just a living, but a way of life.” And his sons and daughters and their sons and daughters, who now operate half a dozen funeral homes in towns all over lower Michigan, were all called to a life of undertaking. And all are tied to that first week of August, 1936 when a boy watched two men lift the body of a dead priest into a box.
How we come to be the ones we are seems a useful study and lifelong query. Knowing how we got to where we are provides some clues to the perpetual wonder over what it is we are doing here—a question that comes to most of us on a regular basis. Indeed, a curiosity about one’s place and purpose keeps one, speaking now from my own experience, from going too far astray.
“Listen to your life,” the writer and minister Frederick Buechner tells us. “See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.”1
Thus a book that endeavors to say what I’ve learned from forty years as a funeral director might well be improved by some notes on how I came to be one.
“In the boredom and pain of it,” Buechner continues, “no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”2
All these years later it feels like grace—life itself—chancy as any happenstance, and yet we get these glimpses of a plan and purpose behind how we come to be the ones we are.
POSSIBLY MY FATHER was trying to replicate that moment from his boyhood for me in mine when he took me to work with him one Saturday morning when I was eight or ten.
The old funeral home in Highland Park was a storefront chapel on Woodward Avenue that served mostly a Romanian clientele because the owner, William Vasu, was part of that immigrant community. There was an apartment upstairs, offices that flanked the parlors, caskets in the basement, and, at the rear of the building, the embalming room. I’ve written elsewhere of this occasion—my first sighting of a dead human—how what I saw raised curiosities about the dead man in particular, adverbial sense, and how my father’s presence and steady answers, his willingness to share his own bewilderments around mortality were sufficient to me on the day. I have written that the presence of the dead human body, first encountered that Saturday morning in my boyhood, changed the gravity in the room, and still changes it today, well into my anecdotage; when one shares a room with a corpse, whether outstretched on a table, laid out on a bed or in a box, the ontological stakes are always raised, the existential ante upped, and the press of our impermanence, our mortality, flexes its terrible gravity in every aspect of our being. Possibly this is why a funeral, the ritual by which we get the dead buried or burned or cast into some particular abyss, seems a weightier enterprise than the ubiquitous celebration of life from which something essential always seems to be missing.
That was another received truth of my father’s nunnish upbringing and my own—that life and time were not random accretions of happenstance. On the contrary, there was a plan for each and every one of us, and ours was only to discern our vocation, our calling, our purpose here. No doubt this is how the life of faith, the search for meaning, the wonder about the way of things first sidles up to the unremarkably curious mind.
When I was seven, my mother sent me off to see the priest to learn enough of the magic Latin—the language of ritual and mystery—to become an altar boy. Father Kenny, our parish priest, had been at seminary with my father’s uncle and had hatched a plan with my sainted mother to guide me toward the holy orders. This, the two of them no doubt reckoned, was in keeping with the will of God—that I should fulfill the vocation and finish the work of the croupy and tubercular young man I’d been named for. I looked passably hallowed in cassock and surplice, had a knack for the vowel rich acoustics of Latin, and had already intuited the accountancy of sin and guilt and shame and punishment so central to the religious life. This tuition I owed to Father Maguire’s Baltimore Catechism and the Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who had prepared me for the grade school sacraments of Confession and First Holy Communion. I had learned to fast before communion, to confess and do penance in preparation for the feast, to keep track of my sins by sort and number, to purge them by prayer and mortification, supplication and petition. To repair the damage done by impure thoughts or cursing at a sibling, a penance of Our Fathers and Hail Marys would be assigned. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa became for me the breast thumping idioms of forgiveness and purification, atonement, reconciliation and recompense that are so central to the holy sacrifice of the Mass we Catholic school kids daily attended. Thus were the connections early on established between holiness, blight and blessedness, contrition and redemption; and these powerful religious metaphors gathered themselves around the common table. It was all a way to be ever ready for the unpredictable death that might suddenly claim us. This theater replayed itself each night at our family meals where our father and our blessed mother would enact a home version of the sacrifice and feast, the brothers and sisters and I returning prodigals for whom the fatted calf, incarnate as stew or goulash, meatloaves or casseroles had been prepared. On Fridays my father brought home bags of fish and chips. Whatever our sins were, they seemed forgiven.
Likewise were we made aware of the assistance we might lend the dead in their pilgrimage between this life and the next. Purgatory was the way station between the joys of heaven and this “vale of tears”—a place where sinners were purged of the guilt of their trespasses by the cleansing of temporary flames. Our prayers, it was well known, could shorten this purging for “the suffering souls,” and on certain days, notably the Feast of All Souls, we could pray them immediately into their eternal reward by coming and going into church with the proper combination of Our Fathers, Hail Marys and Glory Bes. There was a meter and mathematical aspect to our rituals and observances, and the dead, though gone, were not forgotten in our talk or daily rounds.
We were not alone in this. A version of my ethnically flavored religious training played out in the homes of my Lutheran friends and Methodists, Jews and Buddhists, Muslims and Humanists—each had a narrative about life and death, right and wrong, sickness and health, goodness and evil, life’s endless litany of gains and losses, joyful and sorrowful mysteries.
FOR ALL OF my mother’s and the priest’s well-intentioned connivances, and though I kept my ears peeled for it, I never ever heard the voice of God. I remember seeing the dead priest’s cassock hanging from a rafter in my grandparents’ basement, a box with his biretta and other priestly things on a shelf beside it. I tried them on but nothing seemed to fit, and over time my life of faith came to include an ambivalence about the church that ranged from passion to indifference—a kind of swithering brought on, no doubt, by mighty nature. A certain sense awakened in me when I was twelve or thereabouts that among the Good Lord’s greatest gifts to humankind were the gifts he gave us of each other. Possibly it was meditating on the changes I could see in bodies all around me and sense in my own body, late in my grade school years, that there were aspects of the priestly life that would be, thanks be to God, impossible for me.
If pubescence foreclosed any notion I might have had of the celibate priesthood, it was the early sense of mortality and of my father’s association with it that shaped my adolescence.
I remember the neighborhood celebrity my brothers and sisters and I enjoyed because our father was an undertaker. And though it would be years before I understood that word, I knew it meant that he had a lot to do with dead bodies, which would eventually find their way “under” the ground.
As my brothers and I got older we were given jobs at the funeral home. Cutting lawns and painting parking blocks at first, then washing cars. When the first of our sisters was a teenager, she was put in the office to learn bookkeeping. And while she went on to become bookkeeper and comptroller of my father’s business, my brothers and I matriculated to removals from homes and hospitals, dressing and casketing bodies, swinging the door during visitations, and working funerals.
We were dressed up in black suits, white shirts, and grey ties, shod in wingtips and barbered like men of another generation rather than the pimply boys we actually were, and we were paid by the hour to do whatever came up: cover the phones, work visitations, carry flowers, set up chairs, valet cars. It was a job. And it paid for our own cars, gas and maintenance, and left us enough money to go out on dates and other adventures. The summer days were long ones and we’d pile up a lot of overtime and lived like moguls. During the school year we would work shorter hours—evening visitations and Saturday funerals.
I think it was swinging the door where I first learned the powers of language and of presence. It was standing in the lobby of my father’s funeral home that I first heard bereaved humans shaping the narratives that would carry them through their particular sorrow.
There were abridged versions:
“We couldn’t wish him back, the way he was suffering.”
“He sat in the chair and smiled at me and was gone.”
“She never would have wanted to trouble any of us.”
“She just slept away and never felt a thing.”
“At least he died doing what he loved to do.”
And longer renditions, which touch on existential themes:
She woke in the middle of the night complaining of a pain in her back. And it was hard to know what to do or what she needed. I got her the heat pad and plugged it in. She asked me would I bring her a glass of water and one of her pills. But by the time I got back to the bed, she wasn’t breathing. She’d rolled on her shoulder and her face was blue. It’s as if the switch was thrown and the power was off. I still can’t believe she’s gone. I just always assumed I’d be the first and she’d outlive me by years.
Or the father of a dead soldier:
God must just have looked down and said that Ben had learned everything life on the earth is supposed to teach you, even though he was only twenty-two years old, and we’ll always treasure every day we had with him, so God must have said, “Come on home to heaven, Ben,” and that was that. My son was a hero, and everyone enjoying freedom tonight has boys like Ben to thank for it all.
Or the daughter of a woman dead of cancer:
She fought the good fight against it—surgery, chemo, radiation, even holistic cures—but in the end it just overcame her. But her courage, her stamina, her relentless passion for life has been an example to all of us.
Beyond the colloquies of the bereaved and the sympathies of family and friends, beyond the obituaries and eulogies and testimonials, were the raised speech and sacred texts of ritual and rubric: the Orthodox saracustas (prayers for the dead), the Blue Lodge services of the Masonic orders, the Catholics with their rosaries and wake services, and the inevitable obsequies and committals—ceremonies laden with Scripture and poetry, hymns and plainchants, psalms and litanies of praise. Both as helpless humans and as people of faith it was evident that language, with all its powers and nuances, became the life raft that kept the bereaved afloat in the unfamiliar seas of immediate grief.
It is nearly impossible to overestimate the balm that language can be. The familiar prayer, even to the lapsed and apostate, evokes a nearly protective order in an otherwise unspeakable circumstance. It became clear to me, early on, that a death in the family presented both the most faith shaking and religiously charged among life’s many changes. And it is certain that many souls have been irreversibly won and irretrievably lost because of something said or read or sung over the dead in earshot of the living.
My fascination with language and its powers began very early. Sundays were, in particular, a feast of nothing so much as the various and best deployments of the lexicon. We’d go to church at St. Columban’s in the morning, where the Latin liturgy was full of mystery and intrigue and the sense that we were communing in a supernatural and magical tongue. Father Kenny’s homiletics—often red-faced and passionate disquisitions on the obligations of stewardship—were tirades in which the priest played every part of the conversation and always won the arguments he’d set up for himself, albeit ten or fifteen minutes after most of his parishioners had ceased to listen. The liturgy, laden with religious and spiritual metaphors that could be cyphered by the interlinear translations in the missal, gave even the most indifferent witness a sense of how the word did, indeed, become flesh. Sunday afternoons were spent at home with our large extended family. Often the aunts and uncles and cousins came, but always my two widowed grandmothers were there. My father’s habit was to get them both a little liquored up and sit them in the living room and set them to arguing about something the priest failed to cover in his sermon, invariably involving religion or sex or politics—subjects that were studiously avoided in more refined families were just as studiously pursued in ours. When I would question my father on his motives, he would simply advise that I listen closely to “those old women,” and I would learn more from their contretemps than I’d ever learn in school.
Of course, the sharpness of their discourse proceeded from the fact that they were opposites. My mother’s mother, Marvel Grace O’Hara, it might be safely assumed, never suffered any low self-esteem. She was punctilious, grandiloquent, a rabid Democrat and union organizer. She became, eventually, superintendent of music in the Detroit Public Schools, raised three daughters and a son, outlived her harried husband by nearly thirty years, never discussed her age, and voiced her opinion on each and every one of her grandchildren whether she was asked to or not. She did everything in the faintly idolatrous style of the Irish-American Catholic for whom The Bells of St. Mary’s and The Quiet Man were the principal studies.
My father’s mother, on the other hand, was a quiet, formerly Methodist woman, a fine cook, quilter, gardener, and Eisenhower Republican who, I am sure, voted for him well into the 1980s; she wore print dresses, sensible shoes, her hair in a bun, and kept her own counsel, never giving any offense or scandal until early in the 1920s when she fell in love with an Irish-American Catholic. This did not please her Methodist kin, nor did her decision, in keeping with the custom of the times and to appease his parish priest, to “convert” to what she would ever after call “the one true faith?” (appending a lilt of uncertainty to the end of that phrase, as if the doubting saint whose name I also share, his finger aquiver over the wounded palm of Christ, was none too certain when he was heard to ask, “My Lord, my God?”).
My grandmother would describe her conversion experience to us saying, “Ah the priest splashed a little water on me and said, ‘Geraldine, you were born a Methodist, raised a Methodist, thanks be to God, now you’re Catholic.’ ”
Some weeks after the eventual nuptials she was out in the backyard of their bungalow in Northwest Detroit, grilling beefsteaks for my grandfather on the first Friday in Lent, when a brother-knight from the local Knights of Columbus leapt over the back fence to upbraid her for the smell of beef rising over a Catholic household during the holy season. And she listened to the man, nodding and smiling in her quiet, formerly Methodist way, and when he had finished with his sermonette, she went over to the garden hose, splashed water on the grill and pronounced, “You were born cows, raised cows, thanks be to God, now you are fish.” Then she sent the nosy neighbor on his way.
“Ah surely we are all God’s children,” she concluded her narrative, “the same but different, but all God’s children, either way.”
This notion that we are all “the same but different,” struck me, on the one hand, as quite impossible—like being short but tall, thin but fat, old but young, this but that—and on the other it rang entirely true. It remains among the most serviceable wisdoms of my life. As does the bromide advanced by my other grandmother, to wit: “The ridiculous and the sublime belly up to the one bar.” I did not, as a boy, know the meaning of this, but it had nonetheless the ring of truth about it, and in the lifetime since has proven to be among the most useful of the verities.
This, of course, was my first brush with author(ity)—the power of language to name and proclaim and pronounce and transform. Words could change cows into fish, Methodists into Catholics, things that were different into things that were the same. They held the power to redeem and reclaim and remake the everyday objects and people and concepts I was surrounded by. The voices of those dearly departed old women, quibbling over whatever came to mind, occupy one section of the chorus of voices that call us to become the ones we are.
Ideal and beloved voices
of those who are dead, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead.
Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams;
sometimes in thought the mind hears them.
And with their sound for a moment return
other sounds from the first poetry of our life —
like distant music that dies off in the night.3
So wrote the great Alexandrian, Constantine P. Cavafy in his poem, “Voices.” And this is how I still hear now the first poetry of my life, not in the voice of God speaking to me out of a whirlwind or out of the sky or burning bush, but in the voice of my parents and people, my elders and ancients and imagined ones—“ideal and beloved voices, of those dead or lost to us like the dead”—speaking to me, as if in dreams, like distant music that dies off in the night.
Sundays ended as all other days did, with our mother or father tucking us into bed with the prayer we all were required to say:
Angel of God, my guardian dear
to whom God’s love commits me here,
ever this night be at my side
to light, to guard, to rule and guide.
This prayer, said at bedside—a grim little plea for protection against darkness and death—was the first poetry of my life. Long before I ever understood its deeper meanings, I heard the memorable, and not incidentally, memorizable rhymes between “dear” and “here,” “side” and “guide.” And the thumping heart-beating iambic code of the last line—to light, to guard, to rule and guide.
Its acoustic pleasures were immediate. Before it made sense, it made “sound” to me. It rang true in my ear. There were others:
God is great.
God is good.
Let us thank him for our food.
That is how they prayed before meals at Jimmy Shryock’s house. I loved the off-rhyming between “good” and “food.” Or when I spent the night at Mark Henderson’s I was taught:
Now I lay me down to sleep
and pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
It was a Protestant version of my Angel of God—involving the same grim contingencies, the same hopes, the same sense, and slightly different sounds that were metrical cousins to the secular poetics the world seemed full of:
Twinkle twinkle little star.
How I wonder what you are.
Up above the world so high,
like a diamond in the sky.
Or
ABCDEFG
HIJKLMNOP
Or
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 4
Or
Irish poets learn your trade
Sing whatever is well made
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top5
That quatrain about the Irish poets is part of a longer poem, “Under Ben Bulben,” written by the Irish master, William Butler Yeats, some months before he died in late January of 1939.
When the English master, W. H. Auden, got word of the great man’s death, he wrote his elegy, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” which includes this homage quatrain:
Earth receive an honored guest
William Yeats is laid to rest
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.6
And all of these sounded the same but different to me—nursery rhymes, prayers, alphabets, and poems—little seven-syllable meters, seasoned with rhymes to make them memorizable formulas:
Twinkle, twinkle little star
Now I lay me down to sleep
ABCDEFG
God is great and God is good,
let us thank him for this food.
Irish poets learn your trade
Earth receive an honored guest
William Yeats is laid to rest.
It was William Yeats who wrote in a letter to a woman he was trying to impress that the only subjects of interest to a studious mind were sex and death. How nice for me, I remember thinking in my early twenties, because I was predictably fond of sex, and the dead, as it turned out, were everywhere.
Thus were the hours spent working wakes and visitations at my father’s funeral home, listening to the colloquies of mourners we met at the door, a daily instruction in the way of things—life and death and the shape of relations that gave them meaning and the rituals that tried to make some sense of the existential mysteries of coming to be and being and ceasing to be.
“If God speaks to us at all . . . then I think that he speaks to us largely through what happens to us.”7 That’s Frederick Buechner again, in Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation.
WHAT HAPPENED TO me while working at my father’s funeral home was that folks began to treat me like a hero. They were so grateful when we would show up at the hospital or nursing home or family home in the middle of the night, so grateful for the way we handled their dead carefully and with respect. Or leaving after a long day’s visitation at the funeral home, when a widow would hold me by the shoulders and tell me how very comforting it was to have us parking the cars and holding the doors and taking the coats and casseroles, directing folks to the proper parlor and bringing the flowers and for “just being there.” Or turning from the graveside once everything that could be done had been done, how they would shake my hand or hug me and thank me profusely because “we couldn’t have done this without you . . . thank you. . . . God bless you . . .” or heartfelt words to that effect. Such effusions made me feel useful and capable and helpful, as if I’d accomplished the job well done and all I really did was show up, pitch in, do my part. Before long I began to understand that showing up, being there, helping in an otherwise helpless situation was made heroic by the same gravity I had sensed when I first stood in that embalming room as a boy—the presence of the dead made the presence of the living more meaningful somehow, as if it involved a basic and intuitively human duty to witness.
By now I was beginning to think about sex and death almost exclusively—the former because I was in my twenties, the latter because, as the son of a funeral director, death and the dead were part of our daily lives. I was twenty-two and casting about for my calling. A high number in the Nixon Draft Lotto had kept me out of Vietnam, my college career had been spent reading poetry and playing cards and traveling back and forth to Ireland and the Continent in search of diversion and direction, I suppose. My younger brother Pat was starting mortuary school that fall and, possibly sensing my dilemma, my father asked if I’d like to go with him to the NFDA convention in Kansas City that year. They convened—nearly five thousand of them from across the country—on Halloween in the Hotel Muehlebach where all the meetings would be held in the Imperial Ballroom. There was to be a dinner on Sunday night with music “by Woody Herman, in concert” for dancing; a “Special Ladies’ Program”; another dinner “with radio and T.V. personality, Art Linkletter!”; the usual sessions to elect officers, conduct association business, and take reports from various committees; and a list of morning educational seminars. There was what they called an “educational display of funeral merchandise and supplies in the Municipal Auditorium” across the street. This display involved more than a hundred manufacturers and suppliers of caskets and hearses and other accessories to the trade: vaults and embalming fluids, printers of holy cards and thank you notes, suits and shrouds and gowns for burial, canned music, candles and plastic flowers, grave markers, flags and insignia—all the stuff that can be bought at wholesale, sold at retail just like books and burgers and pharmaceuticals. There was a deep shine to the limousines and hearses and I remember the odd names of things, “Frigid Fluid” and “Progress Caskets,” “Con-O-Lite” and “Phoenix Embalming.” It was a bit bizarre to be spending Halloween filling our bags with freebees and samples from suppliers to the mortuary trade—yard sticks and tie clips shaped to look like shovels and models of headstones and horse-drawn coaches—something for everybody, trick or treat.
But the stars of the exhibits were the casket companies: Batesville and National, the biggest and best, and Marsellus, which made the mahogany cabinet President Kennedy had been buried in. Springfield, Aurora, Boyertown, Belmont, and Merit were there along with local and regional jobbers like Artco, Chicago, Missouri, Boyd, Delta, Quincy, Royal, and Flint. Each came with an entourage of salesmen, always smiling and glad-handing, eager to add to their accounts. And each of the caskets had its own name too, “The President” or “Permaseal” or “Praying Hands,” which became a kind of litany of mostly metal caskets in those days, and polished woods, with plush velvet and crepe and satin insides that gave the impression in their collective display that funerals were mostly about the boxes.
Of course this was precisely the argument that Jessica Mitford had made less than a decade before with the publication of her muckraking classic, The American Way of Death. Because I was his bookish son, my father gave it to me to read when I was fifteen years old and told me to tell him what was in it. I told him I thought the style would earn her a lot of readers and that she would change the way people thought about funerals and that much of what she wrote was true and much of what she wrote missed the point entirely.
It was on the Feast of All Souls—that Tuesday in convention week—that the stuff began to give way to substance and the ridiculous began to make room for the sublime. That morning, NFDA’s educational consultant, Robert C. Slater, who taught at the mortuary school at the University of Minnesota, arranged for what was called a “Think Tank” of scholars and teachers and clergy, each of whom had served as a consultant to NFDA. Robert Fulton, a sociologist; Dr. Vanderline Pine, a funeral director and sociologist; Dr. William Lamers, a psychiatrist and hospice pioneer; Robert Habenstein, author of Funeral Customs the World Over and The History of American Funeral Service; and Roger Blackwell, the marketing and consumer guru who taught at Ohio State University’s School of Business, were joined by clergy-authors Rabbi Earl Grollman, Pastor Paul Irion, and Reverend Edgar Jackson, along with NFDA’s Howard C. Raether and Robert Slater, to carry on an open discussion about the place of the funeral and the funeral director in American culture. Much of the discussion was shaped by questions from the more than 1,200 funeral directors in the ballroom. It was the best-attended session of the convention. These were writers and thinkers and professors and preachers and, in ways that casket salesmen were not, these were men of studious minds whose version of my father’s work was much more serious than the cartoon that Jessica Mitford and the display of mortuary goods across the street would give one to believe. If psychologists, sociologists, consumer gurus, statisticians, the reverend clergy, and historians all found the funeral worthy of study, possibly the literary and mortuary arts could be commingled. And their topic was the funeral, as an event unique to humankind, as old as the species. Whereas the exhibits across the street proclaimed that the chief product of the mortuary were the cars and caskets and vaults and urns, piped in music and embalming, this think tank viewed such things as accessories only to the fundamental obligation to assist with the funeral. A death in the family was not a sales op, rather it was an opportunity to serve, in concert with the community of civic and religious, neighborhood and family circles that endeavored to respond to the facts of death.
“Take care of the service,” I can still hear my father’s good counsel: “and the sales will take care of themselves.”
That night I told my father I’d be going to mortuary school. Some months later I was enrolled at Wayne State University’s Department of Mortuary Science. After which I graduated, got my license, and the following year moved to Milford to take up residence in and management of the funeral home that our family purchased to accommodate the growing number of our funeral directors.
MY FRIEND AND fellow in this book’s endeavor, Thomas G. Long, writes with insight and candor about the changing religious landscape of America and the place of the clergy in a nation that is increasingly secular. The remarkable changes in religious practice over the past half century are coincident with, correlated to, and in many instances, trafficked in cause-and-effect with changes in our mortuary customs. Unlike the clergy who have fallen from great heights of approval, funeral directors have never been generally popular. It is the same with poets. While many people might approve the idea of poetry and are passably glad that there are poets at work, only a fraction of a fraction of the population can tolerate actually having to read a poem. Thus, a funeral director who writes poems is the occupational equivalent of a proctologist with a sideline in root canals. No less a preacher with a specialty in final things. Folks are glad to see us coming when there is pain or trouble, and gladder still to see us gone with their good riddance in tow. It was ever thus.
Thus, for two such unpopular sorts as my coconspirator and me to take on the toxic and oxymoronic topics of good death, good grief, and good funerals presumes there are others like ourselves for whom such things might be of interest.
As it often is among writers, I read Thomas G. Long before I met him. He published an article titled “The American Funeral Today—Trends and Issues” in the Director, published by the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA). It was thoroughly original, full of original notions and insights and real scholarship and written in a way that even I could get. Some months later, Mark Higgins, a friend and fellow funeral director from North Carolina, secured for me an e-mail introduction. Reverend Long and I met in New York on the twenty-fifth of June in 1998. I was between stops on a book tour and he was teaching at Princeton then. He picked me up at LaGuardia, took me to lunch in the city, and told me about the project, just underway, which would eventually become Accompany Them with Singing—The Christian Funeral, the most important book on the Christian response since Paul Irion’s The Funeral: Vestige or Value was published in 1977. Our views, shared over salads, arrived at so many of the same conclusions—some provisional, some hard-earned, some in search of replication—from our different vantage points and professional experiences. It is safe to say that the years Dr. Long has spent in ministry and teaching, coincident with the years I have spent in funeral service, have seen more changes in the nation’s religious and mortuary customs and practices than in any generation before.
We first began working together doing daylong multidisciplinary conferences sponsored by the Michigan Funeral Directors Association for hospice, clergy, and funeral directors. The public relations firm hired by the association to work up some advance publicity advised that we could never get an audience for a conference called “The Good Death, Good Grief, Good Funerals.” They saw it as a triple dose of the dire and dismal. “Think, ‘good war, good plague, good famine,’ ” I distinctly remembered one of them saying. They proffered other more welcoming, heartwarming titles involving health and healing, celebration and memories. But we insisted that people who played on the front line of final things, the ones you would find out in the middle of the night en route to a home where a death had occurred, were among those rare and indispensable local heroes—hospice volunteers, pastors, good neighbors, and funeral directors—who drove towards such trouble rather than away from it. They would understand quite readily, we told the PR firm, what could, in fact, be “good” about death and grief and funerals. And they knew what could be bad. It is just such an audience this book hopes to find, those local heroes who ante up the power of their presence, their words that ring true, the quiet they can keep through the difficult vigils, and all they have learned of compassion, in service to their fellow pilgrims among the dying, the dead, and the bereaved.
One more thing: named, as I am, for a sickly priest and a famous doubter, the life of faith for me is constantly in flux. Some days it seems like stating the obvious to say that God is good, whoever she is. Still on others it seems we are entirely alone. Years ago I quit going to church on Sunday. I found myself second-guessing the sermons and the society of it all. It is a character flaw of mine, I readily confess. But compared to what I had seen and heard at funerals, when faith and hope and love are really up for grabs, the Sunday routine seemed, well, routine. When there’s a body in the box at the front of the room or the foot of the altar and a family gathered round with a fist about to be shaken in the face of their maker and the reasonable questions about why such sadness and grief always seems to attend this life, that’s when ministers really earn their keep. Baptisms, weddings, Sundays with the full choir and fashions on parade are nothing compared to the courage it takes to stand between the living and the dead and broker a peace between them and God. And inasmuch as I was going to funerals six days a week and hearing the clergy bring their A-games to them, on Sundays I began going to one of those places where they do twelve steps and smarmy bromides like “one day at a time” and “fake it till you make it,” “let go, let God”—things like that. In the way things happen as they are supposed to happen, I arrived by the grace of Whomever Is in Charge Here at a provisional article of faith, to wit: if there’s a God, it is not me. In the years I’ve been working and writing with Reverend Long, my faith has been emboldened by his own fierce faith. I think it is what we are all called to do: to embolden, encourage, behold, ennoble, instruct, and inspire our fellow humans in troubling times. It’s what Tom Long’s faith does for mine. It is what I hope this book will do.
FORTY YEARS SINCE deciding, at a conference in Kansas City, to follow my father into funeral service, and two months after addressing in Dublin an international confab of fellow funeral directors, I find myself presenting to several hundred attendees of the Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham, in the Cotswalds in greeny England. These are mostly Anglicans and Methodists and seekers after some truth who come for a long bank holiday weekend to listen to Christian rock music and talks by poets and priests, the lapsed and beleaguered and devout. After my remarks, a woman in the audience stands to ask how might we “redeem” the funeral—that is her word—how we might redeem it from its failed and fallen ways.
Her question is at the heart of this book. And my answer is the same as it was to the funeral directors in Dublin: that we are all called to become local heroes; that the dead and the bereaved are the same but different everywhere, in need of someone who answers the call to show up, pitch in and do their part, to serve the living by caring for the dead; to be what Tom Long calls “undertakers.” Because just as a good death does not belong exclusively to doctors or nurses or hospice workers, nor good grief to therapists, psychologists, or social workers, a good funeral belongs to the species, all of us, not just the clergy and funeral directors. Each of us must reclaim these last things for our own and for each other. Then I thought I’d finish with a poem, so I gave them the one that I was asked to write for undertakers in my country who answered the call to care for the victims and families of the 9-11 attacks. It has come to be for me an homage to the men and women who serve on the front lines of dying, death, and bereavement: the first responders, police and firefighters, doctors and nurses, hospice volunteers and clergy, funeral directors, no less the family, friends, and neighbors. These are the folks who can be counted on in times of trouble; they go out in the middle of the night, in the middle of dinner, in the middle of the weekday and weekend, holiday and holy day. Theirs are kindnesses that can’t be outsourced or off-shored or done online. They are hand-delivered, homemade, deeply human, do-it-yourself. These are the ones whose voices make up the chorus that calls each of us in our own way to serve the living by caring for the dead and they are the ones for whom this book is written.
LOCAL HEROES
Some days the worst that can happen happens.
The sky falls or evil overwhelms or
the world as we have come to know it turns
towards the eventual apocalypse
long prefigured in all the holy books—
the end-times of old grudge and grievances
that bring us each to our oblivions.
Still, maybe this is not the end at all,
nor even the beginning of the end.
Rather, one more in a long list of sorrows
to be added to the ones thus far endured
through what we have come to call our history—
another in that bitter litany
that we will, if we survive it, have survived.
God help us who must live through this, alive
to the terror and open wounds: the heart
torn, shaken faith, the violent, vengeful soul,
the nerve exposed, the broken body so
mingled with its breaking that it’s lost forever.
Lord send us, in our peril, local heroes.
Someone to listen, someone to watch, someone
to search and wait and keep the careful count
of the dead and missing, the dead and gone
but not forgotten. Some days all that can be done
is to salvage one sadness from the mass
of sadnesses, to bear one body home,
to lay the dead out among their people,
organize the flowers and the casseroles,
write the obits, meet the mourners at the door,
drive the dark procession down through town,
toll the bell, dig the hole, tend the pyre.
It’s what we do. The daylong news is dire—
full of true believers and politicos,
bold talk of holy war and photo ops.
But here, brave men and women pick the pieces up.
They serve the living, caring for the dead.
Here the distant battle is waged in homes.
Like politics, all funerals are local.
THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF CREMATION
“When I’m gone just cremate me,” Hughey MacSwiggan told his third and final wife as she stood at his bedside while the hospice nurse fiddled with the morphine drip that hadn’t kept his pain at bay. The operative word in his directive was “just.” He wasn’t especially fond of fire. He hadn’t picked out a favorite urn. He saw burning not so much as an alternative to burial as an alternative to bother. He hadn’t the strength to force the moment to its crisis. He didn’t know if he was coming or going. He just wanted it all to be over—the cancer, the second guessing, the wondering whether he’d done irreparable harm, what with the years of drinking, the divorces, all of that carrying on.
It’s not that he lacked faith. On the contrary, after long years of sobriety in the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, he had sought through prayer and meditation to improve his conscious contact with God as he understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for him and the power to carry that out. He was, in extremis, ready and willing, grateful and gracious. He’d had enough. He just wanted whatever was going to happen to happen.
Loosened from his own ethnic and religious traditions, which were lost in the shuffle of postmodernity, he hadn’t any particular sense of “the done thing” when it came to funerals. He just didn’t want to be a burden to anyone, least of all the ones he loved. So when pressed by his family for some direction, “just cremate me” is what he told them all. And so they did.
They dispensed with the presbyters and processions, with casket, graveside, and monument. “Never mind the marines,” they said, when I told them that his service during World War II, from Cape Gloucester to Peleliu to Okinawa, entitled him to military honors. “Daddy wouldn’t want any of that.” Neither flag nor flowers, hymns or limousines, obits or an open bar. His son-in-law put the charges on a credit card, which earned him frequent flier miles.
And Hughey was just cremated, which is to say his body was placed on a plywood pallet, covered with a cardboard carapace and, after the paperwork and permits were secured, loaded into the hearse and driven to a site toward the back of an industrial park where a company that makes burial vaults operates a crematory on the side. The line of boxes along the wall—a couple dozen of them—contained the bodies of other pilgrims, dropped off by discount cremation services and other mortuaries. They were waiting, like planes on the tarmac, for a clear runway, an open retort.
Because our funeral home’s protocols require us to see the dead all the way into the fire, just as we see the dead who are buried all the way into the ground, the crematory operator lets us jump the line. We arrange this by appointment, same as for burials. It seems the last if not least that we can do.
When I invited—as is also our policy—any and all of his family to come with us to the crematory, or to designate one among them to come along, “just to see that everything is done properly,” they winced and shook their heads as if I’d invited them to a root canal or public stoning: a necessary but noxious procedure, the less talked about the better, thank you.
So it was one of the crematory staff who helped me roll Hughey out of the hearse and onto the hydraulic lift and stood by wordlessly while I recited the Lord’s Prayer, which Hughey would have heard at AA meetings, and set the little numbered metal disk atop the cardboard box and helped me push it into the retort, closed the door and pushed the red button that started the fire that turned Hughey MacSwiggan’s corpse into his ashes. Three hours later, after everything had cooled, the remnants of his larger bone structures were “processed” into a finer substance and all of it placed in a plastic bag inside a plastic box with a label that bore his name, the date, and the logo of the crematory. This greatly reduced version of Hughey was given to me to take back to the funeral home to await a decision from his family about what would be done with what remained.
“In a funeral we are carrying the body of a saint to the place of farewell,” writes Thomas G. Long in his study of American funeral practice, Accompany Them with Singing—The Christian Funeral.1 In short, we are carrying a loved one to the edge of mystery, and people should be encouraged to stick around to the end, to book passage all the way. If the body is to be buried, go to the grave and stay there until the body is in the ground. If the body is to be burned, go to the crematorium and witness the burning.
Ask any gathering of your fellow Americans—students at university, clergy or hospice workers, medical or mortuary sorts—how many have ever been to a graveside or watched a burial, and 95 out of every 100 raise a hand. The hillside and headstones, the opened grave and black-clad mourners are fixtures in our commemorative consciousness. If not in real life, then on TV, we’ve seen enough burials to know the drill. Next ask how many have been to a retort or crematory or witnessed a cremation and roughly the reverse is true: less than 5 percent have been there, done that.
Forty or fifty years ago, when the cremation rate in the U.S. was still in the low single digits, this would have made perfect sense. But today, when the national rate is over 40 percent and is predicted to be over 50 percent before another decade turns, it represents a kind of disconnect. How is it that so many people claim a preference for cremation but so few have any interest in knowing more about it? As a people we have thoroughly embraced the notion of cremation as an exercise in simplicity and cost-efficiency. But we remain thoroughly distanced from the fire itself and all its metaphors and meaning, its religious and ritual significance as a station in our pilgrimage of faith. For Christians, in particular—who, along with secular humanists, account for most of the nation’s increase in cremations—this disconnect is even more telling.
In Accompany Them with Singing, Long documents a troublesome shift in religious practice. In the place of funerals—the full-bodied, full gospel, faith-fit-for-the-long-haul and heavy lifting of grief events our elders were accustomed to—what has evolved, especially among white suburban Protestants, is a downsized, “personalized,” user-friendly, Hallmarky soiree: the customized, emotively neutral and religiously ambiguous memorial service to which everyone is invited but the one who has died. The dead have been made more or less to disappear, cremated as a matter of pure function and notably outside the context of faith. The living gather at their convenience to “celebrate the life” in a kind of obsequy-lite at which therapy is dispensed, closure proclaimed, biography enshrined, and spirits are, it is supposed, uplifted. If not made to disappear entirely, the presence of the dead at such services is minimized, inurned, denatured, virtualized, made manageable and unrecognizable by cremation. The “idea” of the deceased is feted for possessing a great golf swing or good humor, a beautiful garden or well-hosted parties, while the thing itself—the corpse—has been dispensed with in private, dispatched without witness or rubric.
Even when the cremation follows a wake or visitation and a public service in the church or elsewhere, we rarely process to the crematory, not least because the retort is often housed in an industrial park, not a memorial park. This disinclination to deal with the dead we burn has something to do with our conflicted notions about fire, which Western sensibilities and Western religious traditions still often associate with punishment and wastefulness.
“IF THERE IS a problem with cremation in regard to a funeral,” says Long, “it is that the cremated remains are required to stand in for the whole body of the deceased, which at its worst could be like asking Ralph Fiennes’s hat to play Hamlet.”2
This minimization of what Long calls a “worshipful drama” suggests more than a shift in religious fashion. The issue is not cremation or burial but rather the gospel, the sacred text of death and resurrection, suffering and salvation, redemption and grace—the mystery that a Christian funeral ought to call us to behold the mystery of life’s difficult journey and the faithful pilgrim’s triumphant homegoing. The memorial service, by avoiding the embodied dead, the shovel and shoulder work, the divisions of labor and difficult journey to the grave or pyre, too often replaces theology with therapy, conviction with convenience, the full-throated assurances of faith with a sort of memorial karaoke where “everyone gets to share a memory.”
Thence to the fellowship hall for “tea and cakes and ices,” having dodged once again those facts of death that, as T. S. Eliot famously says, “force the moment to its crisis.”3
“The fact is,” writes Long, “that many educated Christians in the late nineteenth century, the forebears of today’s white Protestants, lost their eschatological nerve and their vibrant faith in the afterlife, and we are their theological and liturgical heirs.” 4 Long is citing not a change of fashions but a lapse of faith in the promise of eternal life: a core principle of Christianity.
The crisis presented by a death in the family has not changed since the first human mourners looked into the pit or cave or flames they’d just consigned their dead to and posed the signature questions of our species: Is that all there is? Why did it happen? Will it happen to me? Are we alone? What comes next? The corpse, the grave, the tomb, and the fire became fixtures in the life of faith’s most teachable moment. We learned to deal with death by dealing with our dead; to process mortality by processing mortals from one station to the next in the journey of grief. The bodiless obsequies that have become the standard practice in many mainstream Protestant churches represent not only a shift of mortuary fashions from custom and tradition toward convenience, but also a fundamental uncertainty about eternal life. They lack an essential task and manifest—to assist all pilgrims, living and dead, in making their way back home to God.
Abject grief, spiritual despair, anger at God, and serious doubt are common responses to suffering and loss. And while doubt is unexceptional in the life of faith, and most certainly attends a death in the family, the role of pastor, priest, minister, and congregation, indeed the raison d’être of the Christian community, is to uphold and embolden believers, shaken in their bereavement, with the promise of the gospel. This is how the faithful bear both death in the abstract and the dead in the flesh. It is by bearing our dead from one station to the other—deathbed to parlor, parlor to altar, altar to the edge of eternal life—that we learn to bear death itself. By going the distance with them we learn to walk upright in the faith that God will take care of God’s own, living and dead.
But how, Long asks, should the living take seriously a church from which the dead have been gradually banished, as if not seeing were believing? If dead Christians are redeemed saints bound for heaven, oughtn’t we accompany them with singing? Oughtn’t we bring them to church and go the distance with them, proclaiming the gospel on the way to the grave or tomb or fire, and there commend our dead to God?
To the extent that cremation has become an accomplice in the out-of-sight and out-of-mind nature of memorial services, it is at cross-purposes with the life of faith and the mission of the church. Of course, the problem is not with cremation, which is an ancient and honorable, efficient and effective means of disposing of our dead. Nor is the fire to burn our dead any less an elemental gift of God than is the ground to bury them in. The problem is not that we cremate our dead, but how ritually denatured, spiritually vacant, religiously timid, and impoverished we have allowed the practice to become. It is not that we do it, but how we do it that must be reconsidered.
It was back in the Gilded Age that the first modern cremation in America took place. In Washington, Pennsylvania, in 1876, the corpse of Baron De Palm was burned in a retort built by a local doctor. A hundred years later, cremation remained very much the exception to the general rule—still less than 7.5 percent.5 But the past thirty years has seen a steadily growing acceptance of cremation. Across the nation, more than a third of all deaths are now followed by cremation. Among Protestant Christians the numbers are even higher if we consider that Jews, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians almost never cremate their dead and that Catholics still bury the large majority of theirs.
The reasons for this change are manifold. For our ancestors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the land remained foundational. Borders, boundaries, beliefs were all fixed and settled. But modern American culture seems in constant transit and flux. We are more mobile, more modular, less grounded than our grandparents. Our ethnic, religious, and family ties do not bind so tightly as in former times. We multitask and travel light through lives that seem to be in constant states of revision. Careers are a series of five-year plans. Communities have become virtual entities—social networks—as home pages replace home places as a key to identity. Marriages and families have been reconfigured. Cremation seems to suit many of us better—making us more portable, divisible, and easier to scatter. But while technology has made the process odorless, smokeless, and highly efficient, the culture remains ritually adrift when it comes to fire, consigning it most often to private, industrial venues rather than public, ceremonial ones.
In cultures where cremation is practiced in public, among Hindus and Buddhists in India and Japan, its powerful metaphorical values—purification, release, elemental beauty, and unity—add to the religious narratives the bereaved embrace. The public pyres of Bali and Calcutta, where the firstborn brings fire from the home fire to kindle the fire that will consume a parent’s body, are surrounded by liturgical and civic traditions. Elsewhere, however, cremation is practiced in private, the fire kept purposefully behind closed doors. Whereas the traditional funeral transports the corpse and mourners from parlor to altar, then to place of disposition, cremation, as it is practiced in the U.S., often routes around, not through, such stations in the pilgrimage. We miss most if not all of the journey, the drama, and the metaphor.
Of course, some of this has to do with consumer dissatisfaction with a mortuary marketplace interested more in sales than in service, inclined more toward the stuff than the substance, and geared more toward Hallmark sentiments than real meaning. Still, a death in the family is not a retail event; rather it is an existential one. It involves core values rather than commodities; a marketplace that spends more time and energy cataloging the possible purchases and their price points instead of the ways to engage and participate in this first among the human rubrics is of little lasting value.
For persons of faith, the essential elements of a good funeral remain few and familiar: the dead pilgrim, the living to whom the death matters, and someone to broker the mystery between them and enunciate the new status of the soul. Last but not least among the essentials is the task at hand: to get the dead and the living where they need to be. For the former that means the tomb or fire or grave or sea. For the latter it means to the edge of the life they will be living without the deceased, whose blessed body is consigned to the elements and whose soul is commended to God. Everything else is accessory. Coffins and flowers, obits and eulogies, bagpipers and dove releases, organ music and stained-glass windows, funeral homes and funeral directors—all accessories; though helpful certainly, comforting sometimes, maybe even edifying, whether costly or bargain priced, they are but accessories. Corpse and mourners, gospel and transport: these are the requisites. Everything else is incidental. To Christianize cremation requires only that Christians—clergy and laypeople—treat it as an alternative to burial, rather than an alternative to bothering. The fireside, like the graveside, is made holy by the death of saints, the witness of faithful pilgrims, and the religious context in which the living take leave of their dead.
Long writes:
Resistance to going the full distance with the dead will occasionally be encountered from some crematoriums, which are not accustomed to people who want to stay for the firing up of the retort, and some cemeteries, which view trudging to the grave as an inefficient use of employee time or don’t like the idea of families being present for the dirt being placed on the coffin in the grave. These cemeteries much prefer for funeral processions to end not at graveside but in some plastic pseudo chapel where the ceremonies can be peremptorily put to an end and the worshipers dispatched without delay, thus freeing up the burial crew to get on with their business unimpeded. These so-called chapels—why mince words?—are Chapels of Convenience and Cathedrals of Funeralia Interruptus. Tell the cemetery owner or crematorium manager, kindly of course, to step out of the way, that they are impeding the flow of traffic. You have been walking with this saint since the day of baptism; the least you can do is go all the way to the grave, to the end, with this child of God. They may refuse, but if enough clergy demand to be able to go the last few yards with the dead, change will happen.6
So much of what I know of final things I have learned from the reverend clergy. These men and women of God drop what they’re doing and come on the run when there is trouble. These are the local heroes who show up, armed only with faith, who respond to calls in the middle of the night, the middle of dinner, the middle of already busy days to bedsides and roadsides, intensive care and emergency rooms, nursing homes and hospice wards and family homes, to try and make some sense of senseless things. They are on the front lines, holy corpsmen in the flesh-and-blood combat between hope and fear. Their faith is contagious and emboldening. Their presence is balm and anointing. The Lutheran pastor who always sang the common doxology at graveside: “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow,” his hymn sung into the open maw of unspeakable sadness, startling in its comfort and assurance. The priest who would intone the Gregorian chant and tribal Latin of the “In Paradisum” while leading the pallbearers to the grave, counting on the raised voice and ancient language to invoke the heavenly and earthly hosts. The young Baptist preacher who, at a loss for words, pulled out his harmonica and played the mournful and familiar notes of “Just as I Am” over the coffin of one of our town’s most famous sinners. “Between the stirrup and the ground,” he quietly promised the heartsore family and upbraided the too eagerly righteous, “mercy sought and mercy found.”
MY FRIEND JAKE ANDREWS, an Episcopal priest, now dead for years but still remembered, apart from serving his little local parish, was chaplain to the fire and police departments and became the default minister, the go-to guy for the churchless and lapsed among our local citizenry. Father Andrews always rode in the hearse with me, whether the graveyard was minutes or hours away, in clement and inclement weather, and whether there were hundreds or dozens or only the two of us to hear, he would stand and read the holy script such as it had been given him to do. When cremation became, as it did elsewhere, the norm among his townspeople and congregants, he would leave the living to the tea and cakes and ices in the parish hall and ride with me and the dead to the crematory. There he would perform his priestly offices with the sure faith and deep humanity that seems to me an imitation of Christ.
It was Jake Andrews’s belief that pastoral care included care of the saints he was called on to bury and cremate. Baptisms and weddings were, he said, “easy duties,” whereas funerals are “the deep end of the pool.” I think he had, as we all do, his dark nights of the soul, his wrestling with angels, his reasonable doubts. His favorite studies were on the book of Job. But still, he believed the dead to be alive in Christ. He met the mourners at the door and pressed the heavens with their lamentations. It was Jake who taught me the power of presence, the work of mercy in the showing up, pitching in, bearing our share of whatever burden, and going the distance with the living and the dead. He taught me that a living faith founded on a risen corpse and empty tomb ought not be estranged from death’s rudiments and duties.
IN THE END Hughey MacSwiggan was scattered in Scotland. “He never made the trip but always wanted to go” is what his family told me. They knew my writerly duties often took me to the British Isles. “Take him with you the next time you go,” his third wife said. And so I did. I’d been invited to launch a book at the Edinburgh Festival.
When the X-ray at the airport showed “some dense packaging” in my carry-on, I told the security guard it was Hughey MacSwiggan’s cremated remains and asked if she’d like to inspect them further. She shook her head and let me pass. I did not declare Hughey at customs in Heathrow and kept my own counsel on the train ride north and checking in at the Channings Hotel. I considered the gardens off Princess Street or maybe some corner of the castle grounds, but the mid-August crowds made those sites impossible. I toyed with the notion of leaving him in a pub near Waverley Station on the theory that heaven for Hughey might mean that he could drink again.
But it was the view from Dean Bridge, the deep valley, the “dene” that names the place, the river working its way below under the generous overhang of trees—the valley of the shadow of death, I thought—that beckoned me further in my search. I worked my way down into Belgrave Crescent where I found an open, unlocked gate to the private gardens there. But it was a little too perfect, a little too rose-gardenish and manicured, and I was drawn by the sound of falling water. So I went out and around past the Dean Parish Church and the graveyard there.
I made my way down to the water by the footpath, and working back in the direction of the bridge I found a wee waterfall, apparently the site of an old mill. Kneeling to my duties, I poured Hughey’s ashes out—some into the curling top waters and the rest into the circling pool below. I remember the quick pearlescent cloud, the puff of white it made in the rush of current, almost like what you’d see when salmon spawn. And watching what remained of him disappear downstream, what I thought of was the thing they said whenever the masked man rode off at the end of the cowboy show I watched as a boy: “A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty ‘Hi-yo, Silver!’ . . . The Lone Ranger!”
There goes Hughey now, I thought—hi-yo, Silver, away. The little bone fragments, bits and pieces of him, glistened in the gravel bed of the Waters of Leith while his cloud of dust quickly worked its way in the current downstream to the eventual river mouth and out, I supposed, into the Firth of Forth and the North Sea and the diasporic waters of the world. One with all the elements now—the earth and wind and fire and water—Hughey was like the Holy Spirit of God: everywhere or nowhere, in everything that lives or in nothing at all, endlessly with us or always alone; blessed and blissful nonetheless I prayed, at his first glimpse of whatever is or isn’t.
1 Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation (New York: HarperOne, 1991), 87.
2 Buechner, Now and Then, 87.
3 Constantine P. Cavafy, “Voices,” http://users.hol.gr/~barbanis/cavafy/voices.html.
4 William Blake, “The Tyger,” in The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, et al. (New York: Anchor, 1984), 24.
5 William Butler Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben,” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 2nd ed., ed. Richard Finneran (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 325.
6 W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” Collected Poems: W. H. Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 247.
7 Buechner, Now and Then, 3.
1 Thomas G. Long, Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), 177.
2 Long, Accompany Them with Singing, 174.
3 T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 2001), 5–6.
4 Long, Accompany Them with Singing, 73.
5 See Stephen Prothero, Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), especially 15–45.
6 Long, Accompany Them with Singing, 177.