Christmas Time:
But First, a Funeral

THREE HUNDRED PEOPLE came to the funeral. About 50 were family, and another 30 or 40 were people I recognized but whose names hadn’t ever registered. But the rest, who knows? Most of the funeral logistics had been handled by my sisters, but I didn’t recall them phoning more than a dozen people. Then I remembered the obituary, which I’d delivered to the newspaper in the aftermath fog, with instructions to run it for two days. In a town like Penticton with its elderly majority, the obituaries are the paper’s most-read section.

My mother was well liked in her community. In her last years, she had, like many older people do, worked harder at being likeable, and not just by recounting every good deed she’d done to everyone who’d listen. She’d always been good at working a crowd, and as a hospital volunteer, she’d gotten better at one-to-one with strangers. People liked her, and why wouldn’t they? She never whined about old age and the infirmities it brought, and her natural sweetness and her good manners masked her steely shrewdness better than ever. Her investment counsellor showed up too, a young woman in her late twenties, and I don’t think she was in tears only because she was losing my mother’s portfolio.

But three hundred? I don’t know that many people, let alone expect them to come to my funeral.

I’d been occupied with catching up on sleep and getting my part of the family there. Jesse, my oldest son, flew in, and Leanna and Hartlea managed to get a flight out of Toronto hours after my mother died. I’d gratefully driven the 60 kilometres north to Kelowna to pick them all up. Max, who’d already bused up while his grandmother was still alive, opted to write his exams, and I didn’t object. He’d said his goodbyes while she could still wave back at him. Nearly everyone in the extended family showed up, a full motel of them, even though there’d been no pressure applied.

They knew how to do funerals in Penticton, and why wouldn’t they? There were enough funerals that the mourners understand the balance between grief and celebrating the life just ended. Nearly everyone in the church was dressed in black or other muted colours, but most were chattering away at one another, albeit with enough tears flowing to make it respectful. And anyway, when an old friend dies at 90 years of age, part of what you’re doing at the funeral is covering your bets for your own. Losing the presence of someone like my mother in the community is cause for regret, sure, but her death wasn’t really a major interruption of human possibilities. Her possibilities had largely been explored, and everyone seemed to understand that she’d gone without regrets.

My siblings and I had been discovering, in the three days between her death and the funeral, just how prepared she’d been. The living will had been just one part of it. Her legal will, when we rescued it from her safety deposit box, was a masterpiece of careful detail, designed with a single goal: to keep us from fighting over the estate, which was quite a lot larger than anyone expected, including my father. She’d managed, over the decades, to accumulate a sizable portfolio of annuities and bonds, which the will told us exactly how and where to locate. All of it was to be divided equally, as were the contents of the house. At the bottom of the will, in capital letters, was this message to us all, written in her hand: NO FIGHTING!

When we read that, we burst out laughing—our first collective laugh in two weeks, and not a trace of it was cynical. But how determined she was to see it go as she’d dictated became evident as we gradually discovered that virtually everything in the house that was even remotely valuable or attractive had one of our names written on the back of it, or underneath it. She didn’t want any fighting.

We were each, in different ways, too exhausted to fight over anything even if we wanted to. And when we weren’t, we were too angry and upset at the travesty we’d just seen to its terrible end to think about crossing her or one another. The graceful and painless exit she’d planned for herself had gone brutally wrong, so the least we could do was make the aftermath go according to her wishes, and that included conducting the funeral exactly the way she wanted it.

We executed the funeral according to her instruction sheet, all the way down to hiring an almost-in-tune soloist to murder “Breathe on Me Breath of God.” Then we lined up three or four eulogies, including one each from my brother and me. Both of us tried to tell the truth about her as we knew it, and both of us, about halfway through, lost our composure and blubbered our way to the end of what we were trying to say, still far too close to what we’d just witnessed to hold ourselves together.

Nobody seemed to mind our blubbering, and the two women who spoke after us, one from the hospital auxiliary and a younger woman from the local Beta Sigma Phi chapter my mother had grandmothered, fell apart when they spoke, too. My sisters, never much for making speeches, stayed in their seats, and so did my dry-eyed father, who spent most of the service rubbernecking. Then the local Anglican priest blathered on for a few minutes about the arms of the Lord and the Glories of Heaven, then read the formal liturgy as if what had happened was supposed to be a good and sweet elevation of being. I recalled that my mother had been quite a lot less than completely fond of this man, and that he hadn’t shown up at the hospital to check out what sort of elevation her being was getting. If he had, I doubt that he’d have been rattling on the way he was.

But no one seemed to mind his platitudes, and when he was done, everyone repaired to the church basement to munch on sandwiches, coffee, and tea and talk about how much they were going to miss Rita Fawcett. I got a lot of “there-theres” deposited on my shoulders, and I tried to pretend that I recognized the depositors. I did take some comfort from the warmth of it, and even found myself admiring the ones who were probably wondering, in the backs of their minds, if they were going to be the next to be feted this way.

We’d also planned a smaller wake the following day, mainly for family, but we also invited a couple dozen of my parents’ closest friends. At the end of it, after the outsiders left, we planned to read the will aloud to the assembled family, and then let the women divide up my mother’s clothing and jewellery. Between the four of us we’d already agreed that we weren’t going to take any of the household stuff, none of the furniture, and only a few of the mementoes apportioned to us in the will. My father still had a life to live, and we didn’t want to disrupt it any more than it had already been.

My father had spent much of his time before the funeral napping, staying out of everyone’s way, and muttering darkly about where my mother had accumulated “all that goddamned money.” When he wasn’t doing that he was spending a lot of time on the phone trying to cadge dinner invitations for the weeks after we left. He seemed more agitated than stricken by grief, but I couldn’t tell if that was a result of the tongue-lashing he’d received after his sole visit to the hospital, or whether he really didn’t give a damn.

It wasn’t either of those, as it turned out. He was formulating, rapidly and ruthlessly, his plan for the future. If I’d been paying attention, I’d have gotten a taste for exactly how ruthless his plan was, too. About two months before my mother had the stroke, he’d finally given up his driver’s licence and sold off his big green Cadillac. Now, with no one to drive him here and there, he wanted the licence back, and something to drive.

This was not a good idea in anyone’s mind but his, because he’d long been a menace on the roads, virtually blind, mostly deaf, and with an attitude that anyone who didn’t like his driving style was a careless sonofabitch in too much of a hurry. A couple of Thanksgivings before, I’d brought then infant Hartlea to Penticton to show her to the family for the first time, and made the mistake of letting him pick us up at the airport. He drove the kilometre-long stretch from the terminal to the highway at 20 kilometres an hour on the wrong side of the road. It was midday, but he didn’t care, swearing at the several cars that pulled over to the margins, horns blaring: What the hell do they want? When he ran the stoplight and made a left turn into the main highway’s oncoming lane, I decided that I cared enough that I never again got into a car he was driving.

Here he insisted that I drive him down to the motor-vehicle office, where, in less than ten minutes, he alternately bullyragged and then tearjerked the bewildered clerk into reinstating his driving privileges on compassionate grounds: his wife had just died, and he was isolated and poor. It seems there was a provision for this that the clerk didn’t know about but which my father, himself pretending to be on the edge of tears, successfully insisted was at the clerk’s discretion. Then he bullied me into transferring the ownership of my mother’s car to him for $100, getting by my objections by promising to have the cataract operations he’d been avoiding, while arguing that paying anything more for an old heap like her car was highway robbery. The car was a ten-year-old compact we both knew was worth considerably more than $100, but never mind that.

He managed to hold his driver’s licence for six more years without killing anyone—although he once forgot to engage the parking gear and had to watch as the little car rolled across the street, up the driveway of a neighbour and through his garage door. It was early in the morning and the neighbour was out of town, so my father walked across the street, retrieved the slightly damaged car, and pretended innocence later that day when the suspicious neighbour asked him if he’d seen what happened. He hadn’t heard a thing, he said, pointing out that he was barely able to see enough to drive his own car, let alone act as the local watchdog.

The wake was as cheerfully uneventful as the funeral had been. Everyone there, Protestants to the bone, was as lightheartedly determined to celebrate her life as her four children were unwilling to inflict the horror of her death on them. That the reading of her will gave $10,000 to each of her ten grandchildren leavened their spirits considerably, not that this was needed. The crowning event of the evening was when the 20 or so females in the extended family retreated to her bedroom and amidst much laughter, told stories about her while they took turns picking their favourite things of hers. My mother would have enjoyed every moment of that, particularly when there was very little left after they were done.

There was just the one sour note, and my father provided it. While the rest of us comforted one another with silly stories and ate sandwiches left over from the church-basement reception, my father stood in the kitchen and made phone calls to a list of women he’d drawn up, wondering if they might want to move in with him. When he phoned a woman in Prince George he’d sold the family house to 20 years ago, and about whom there had been some suspicions after he’d sold it to her well below its market value, my sister Serena, normally the most even-tempered of us, ushered him outside and exploded.

“For God’s sake, Dad,” she roared, loud enough that everyone inside could hear her. “Mum hasn’t been gone for four days and you’re trying to pick up women at her wake? What on earth is wrong with you?”

My father was cowed, but he wasn’t contrite. “I have to arrange a housekeeper,” he answered. “I don’t imagine any of you are going to take care of me.”

Serena wasn’t having any of it. “You weren’t asking them to be your housekeeper. And you can bloody well wait a week or two before you move in one of your girlfriends. Show some respect.”

He didn’t make any more phone calls that day, but it was plain to all of us that he wasn’t listening, either. He was reacting to the end of his life with my mother like a man just released from prison: by rapidly, openly, and almost giddily attempting to get on with the rest of his life. At the top of his agenda—this was a man who hated to be alone, remember—was companionship. Trying to pick up women at the funeral reception was only part of it, and my sisters continued to take an extremely dim view of his behaviour and his general attitude. I didn’t understand what he was up to either, and found myself wondering if he’d lost his marbles.

A complete break between my father and me was, at that moment, a possibility for the first time in my life. My mother, you see, had imposed a non-negotiable rule at the centre of our family life when the first of us reached adolescence. She told us that we could fight as much as we wanted, any and all of us, but we still had to come home. It had been one of her ways of preserving the family in the face of my father’s often clumsy and aggressive attempts to control us, and I suppose it was also her way of getting around the stubbornness and stupidity of people in adult bodies without adult minds. She made it clear that there was nothing any of us could have done with our lives horrible enough to get us exiled. There was probably a line somewhere across which we couldn’t go, but she made a fair show of trusting our good natures not to. None of us had ever challenged the rule or come within a country mile of the ultimate penalty.

But now that she was dead, I could break contact with my father, thus ending our long war and, not incidentally, making him the scapegoat for my helpless rage, punishing him for what I hadn’t been able to do to protect my mother. I’ll admit that I was looking for someone or something to blame. I couldn’t talk to my sisters about it. They were leaning on their rebirthed belief in God to get them through the mess we’d made, and I was thinking any God that allowed such cruelty as we’d just witnessed wasn’t anything more than a target to throw custard pies at. My brother and I saw things more similarly, but we hadn’t been getting along for a long time and this wasn’t the time to resolve our differences—if they could be resolved at all.

The most sensitive and emotionally reserved of us, my brother was putting on a brave front despite his unresolved issues with his mother, who he half believed hadn’t ever adequately connected with him because, well, she’d preferred me or my sisters. This had come up in the last few days at the hospice, and I’d tried to explain to him that she’d always practised a scrupulous emotional democracy amongst us, and that what he saw as her lack of interest was the dynamic of having had three children within 18 months of one another, of whom the elder two were identical twins and he was, by nature as well as seniority, the less-demanding third. But it was true that the two of them had never quite worked it out, and at the moment of her death I was almost as moved by his evident pain at losing her with that unresolved as by my own private loss. There was no way I could communicate any of this to him.

The afternoon before I left Penticton, my brother and sisters drove down to the mall to shop for groceries, I sent Leanna and Hartlea after them, and my father and I had it out. I told him that I didn’t like the way he’d treated my mother, that I’d never liked it, but that his behaviour since her stroke was unforgivable.

“How dare you try to pick up women in the middle of your own wife’s wake!” I snarled. “You were married for a long time, and you should have at least had the decency to wait until the family wasn’t around before you start screwing around.”

My father listened to my tirade with an uncharacteristic calmness. “Are you finished?” he asked, when I—and my rage—began to run down. “Because I need you to hear my side, for once.”

“Okay,” I said, still bristling. “I’m listening.”

“I’m 93 years old,” he said. There was a directness in his voice that I’d never in my life heard from him before. “I don’t have much time left. I could be dead in six months, or in two years. I’ll be lucky if I get much more than that. Very lucky.”

I began to object, but he waved it away, held my gaze, and maintained the same almost-pleading tone. “Your mother and I have been fighting for 50 years, and as you already know, my feelings are pretty mixed about her. I imagine they’re as mixed as yours are about me right now.”

I nodded, but kept my mouth shut.

“Your sisters,” he said, “talk about a decent interval. I don’t have time for a decent interval. I have to get on with my life now because it’s going to be over pretty soon and I want some joy and happiness before I go, if I can find it. You kids can do whatever you think is best, but whether you like it or not, I’m going to go out there and find someone, and try to make it someone I can be happy with. I don’t have time to wait, and I’m not going to waste a minute of what I do have. I can’t tell you what to do with this, so I’m not going to try. I just wanted you to hear my point of view.”

He was finished, and he stood in front of me like a child, waiting. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of an answer. It wasn’t a question of believing him. I did. What I couldn’t get around was myself. The anger and shame I was feeling was too front and centre, too raw and, maybe, too compelling to allow me to think straight let alone figure out what I was feeling about him. I could tell him it was all okay, or I could insist on continuing the war as my mother’s proxy. Rage prevented the former, but the logic of what he’d just said and his vulnerability made the latter feel like cruelty.

What I did was nothing at all. I drove to Kelowna the next morning, got on the plane with the wife and daughter I loved, and flew home to Toronto. I told myself I’d never come back but I knew I would. That duty was intact, cemented in place by my father’s plea for understanding.

Christmas? Well, Christmas came and went. When we got back to Toronto I put up half the outdoor lights I normally festoon the house with, but we put up the same lavishly decorated oversized tree as always. I cooked a turkey—unbrined—and stuffed the way my mother had taught me, and I moped my way through to New Year’s and the beginning of the twenty-first century. The holiday season wasn’t made brighter by the parcel of small gifts—including the net bag of kids’ trinkets—my mother had mailed a few hours before the stroke.