PAUL DIED in late February, three months before my long drive home in the dark. Peg, my mother’s neighbor, phoned to inform me on a Tuesday afternoon. Mom was right there in the kitchen, too stunned to talk. I drove up to Boston the next day, to help with the arrangements.
The wake was scheduled for Friday. By Wednesday evening my mother and I were padding through the carpeted basement of the Flanagan and Roberts Funeral Home, where the caskets were displayed, each with its price discreetly printed on the back of a card on the stand before it. We whispered such comments as “This one’s nice,” because it seemed appropriate to keep our voices down, although the dead were not present—these copper, mahogany, and oak confections, holding silk and satin froth, were empty depositories.
I knew my mother well; she was following my lead, as I’d followed hers years ago. We strived for the proper mean between extravagance and cheapness, even though Paul was paying. Waste does not enter into these calculations, and no one pictures the fine pleats of silk a year or more later, crawling with mold and stained with nasty fluids.
We’d brought the undertaker a photograph of Paul, a pair of his glasses, his honorable-discharge papers from the army. We’d signed the contract and paid a deposit and endured Tobias Roberts’ goodwill and well-oiled manner. He wasn’t pallid, he glowed; he wasn’t treacly but professional; and when we entered his “home” he behaved as if we were visiting a friend in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood instead of South Boston. He was tall and barrel-torsoed and, leading us to his office, walked with a gentle roll. I remember thinking that if I’d met him in a grocery store, I’d know he was an undertaker. Unlike teachers, accountants, engineers, or secretaries, an undertaker is his profession, and good ones wear its indelible mark with ease and grace—Cain Lites.
Calling hours on Friday were from three to five and from seven to nine. When I pulled into the driveway with Mom and Dad, Tobias Roberts appeared out of nowhere with a wheelchair for my father. It had taken us longer than I’d anticipated to fetch Dad from the nursing home, and we were late. Not to worry; no one was there yet. Mr. Flanagan (“Call me Frank”) wheeled my father up the handicap ramp, and I trailed behind with his oxygen bottle, until Frank locked the wheels and, without a word, took the oxygen from me and slid it into a bracket on the back of the chair.
He ushered us inside, where sweet music played through vents in the walls, ether for the ears. Paul was laid out in the casket we’d chosen, at the front of the room, safely distant from the rows of empty chairs. Hannah and the boys would arrive before five, having left New York at ten that morning. My mother’s friends, too, would be drifting in soon, or so I supposed. Would friends of Paul’s show up? Did he have any? I’d heard of one or two.
Time to say goodbye. Dad went first, with Mom at his side, but he couldn’t see much, having slowly gone blind in the past decade. His sedimented illnesses each added to the crush: blindness, emphysema, an enlarged and thickened heart. Congestive heart failure, beneath all the rest, meant that his blood would not circulate properly, the pump being weak, so it backed up in the veins. This in turn forced fluid from his blood vessels into organs and tissues. The tissues swelled—his ankles were enormous—and his lungs, liver, and kidneys were waterlogged, choked with a kind of black rust. Dad was pushing ninety. Longevity was the curse of our family, at least of his generation—to be kept alive and fully conscious in order to experience all those ingenious shipwrecks the body has devised that nonetheless fail to sink you. When he breathed, he wheezed and rattled and glugged. Yet his mind was sharp. All the better to know exactly what was happening.
The blessing of his life was that he fell asleep often.
Frank Flanagan pushed him up to the casket, took away the kneeling rail, then pushed him closer. The occasion was designed to gently milk tears, the kind that serve as balm, and my parents submitted. Paul may have been halfway through his sixties when he died, may have been raised by my grandmother, may have been a recluse, but still he was their child, still got dragged into the world through both of their bodies, ripping flesh as he emerged. And the realization that your child has died before you, the being who’d cut furrows in your soul, whose birth had flushed you out with the deep joy of pain—who, in a sense, had been tied to you for life, especially since he’d never obeyed the biblical injunction to leave father and mother to cleave unto his wife—such knowledge is one of life’s worst horrors for parents of any age.
My mother and father had never finished high school. They’d worked all their lives, and in what my father called their “golden years, hah!” had evolved a profound and religious fatalism worthy of Montaigne. Anyone who lives long enough develops a philosophy of life, and those of the educated and powerful are no more wise than those of the poor. My mother usually expressed hers this way: There’s nothing I can do about it, so why have a conniption?
Even savvy resignation has its limits, though, when your firstborn dies.
Dad leaned forward in the wheelchair and reached into the coffin and touched Paul’s face with the backs of his fingers, then slumped back. Frank pulled the wheelchair away and restored the railing to its place. Then Mom approached, appearing to shrink in the terrible wash of that cosmetic radiation. I reached for her arm, but she sank to the railing and bowed her head. I stood there and watched her shoulders heave, then glanced at Paul and thought, out of nowhere, The gods are present here too.
My mother seemed weak when she finally stood, but gradually regained her command. Her spirit was like four solid tires that would never blow out and whose tread would never wear. She had the soul of a survivor—that is, she felt things deeply, then went on to something else. Having been born long before the post-sixties questioning of women’s roles, she’d served men all her life, especially my father, but never assumed the part of the martyr. Her devotion to duty and great capacity for love carried her through, plus her ability to laugh and the comforts of Catholicism. Before his death, Paul and I had finally convinced her she couldn’t care for Dad anymore because it would kill her. She was physically incapable of dressing him, placing him on the commode, feeding and washing him, and Paul wasn’t much help. In the two years since he’d moved back in with them, he’d spent most of his time sitting on his bed in our old bedroom, mired in various forms of computer solitaire. He’d purchased a Packard-Bell at Sears.
Now Dad was in a nursing home, Paul was dead, and Mom lived alone, but she had countless friends, including neighbors who watched her kitchen window every morning to make sure the light came on.
My turn. I kneeled at the casket and folded my hands and looked at Paul’s face and drew a blank. It’s true that they do a remarkable job now. No gray-white pallor, no toneless features, no shrunken, flat, or darkened crevices. His was the most inoffensive and natural dead body I’d ever seen, a triumph of the cult of the effigy. He actually looked more healthy in death than in life, having always been somewhat sickly and withdrawn. Because he looked more alive now, he didn’t seem dead, just as when he was living he didn’t seem quite alive. Have those who don’t live, I thought, really died? Then I felt spiteful and arrogant for thinking it.
The thought rebounded. What about me? Have I really lived? And what did I know about Paul’s inner life and its richness or poverty? Nothing, really.
The expression on his face was neither happy nor sad, the color of his skin neither sanguine nor pale, the puddled flesh around his jaw neither too soft nor too firm. The large mole between his left eye and ear had distended and spread in the last several years, as his face sagged, but even that looked oddly natural now. I don’t think he’d gone to church in at least forty years, but they’d wrapped rosary beads around his folded hands. Tomorrow he would have a funeral mass, and it had taken the priest’s most solemn assurances to convince my sainted mother that the Church does not ask questions anymore about the dead person’s faith, and all are God’s children and therefore welcome in His house.
I clenched my folded hands—he was a child of God. Then I told myself he was just a painted corpse, and I went cold as ice. He entered the world as a stranger, and as a stranger left it. He was one of us, I thought.
In the movie Freaks, by Tod Browning, the freaks dance around a woman they’ve horribly mutilated, chanting, “One of us, one of us, ooga-booga, one of us.”
I controlled my emotions. Sadness, pity, fear. I stepped out of them as though out of a boat to kneel on the shore, and neither grimaced nor cried. Nor could I pray my usual “God, if you exist . . .” feeling too hypocritical. Paul lay there, no longer a hermit, an oddball, or a prisoner of his flesh—no longer my brother, nor my parents’ son, nor a human being anymore. I thought of his body as a honeycomb of cells from which he’d been released, having served his sentence. His genes were already pickled in formaldehyde, the genes he hadn’t passed on. Procreation’s the only way to ensure that the dead will resurrect, I thought. In the Gilgamesh epic, those who weep most in the netherworld are those who died without children.
We’ve all felt our bodies defeating us as we age—our spines curving, grip loosening, walk winded. When he was alive, Paul seemed to have lost every contest with his flesh. He’d always been small, with a head bent forward like a withered thistle on too weak a stalk, and the more he’d buried himself in isolation, the smaller he seemed when he came out. Yet he’d been flabby too, at least in recent years, and loved greasy burgers and fries and onion rings, for the way they stuffed belly and vessels, I assume. There’d been something almost subterranean about him. He often smelled of unwashed clothes, and of something else that reminded me of chicken feed. Yet here he was, presiding over this room as the center of attraction, though it was nearly empty. Already I pictured a few people coming, my parents being consoled, my mother talking with her friends . . . and Paul gradually forgotten.
If history is a vast granite wall a billion miles high and stretching from here to the farthest galaxy, Paul’s life was the faintest scratch upon it, smaller than a hair. I’d always found myself, when he was alive, making amends for his strange existence. What was it like to live alone and have no one else to reflect your solitude? Like me, like all of us, he was cloistered in his selfishness, yet unlike most people he appeared to be incapable of joining it to a pack. Suddenly I pictured him in a sort of tilted heaven in which he couldn’t stand upright but had to lean against the wall, and I almost smiled. Maybe he would come back to life, I thought, and fling those rosary beads across the empty room—wouldn’t that be something! But what did I know? I hardly knew him. I’d been afraid of him, certainly, afraid of what his life had become. But in fact, what was it? I was not telepathic, and Paul’s casket would not be provided with a phone (as Mary Baker Eddy’s was) with which he could call and fill me in on the details.
When I went off to college, he mailed me a dollar a week for every week I didn’t smoke. Fifty-two dollars a year, each arriving in an envelope with no note or message. I continued to smoke for two or three years while spending Paul’s money and then, after he’d stopped mailing me the dollars, gave up cigarettes. He himself smoked unfiltered Kools all his life, until the day he died.
I too was tied to him, I realized, like my parents. He was flesh of my flesh.
When he was born, did the universe summon him? Did it create its own need for him out of itself, beckon his tiny organism forth from the ocean of space, entice and threaten and cajole him into existence out of pure nothingness? And if it did—if it habitually does this sort of thing—does it ever, spiritually speaking, leave the job unfinished, so that someone may be said to exist, but not exist enough? Perhaps the souls of some people are small, like their hands. It could be that some of us are dragged into the world like nets dragged onto shore with just a handful of fish. Some plants sprout already carrying the eggs that will become the worms that eat them. And for some human beings, perhaps a little bit of soul, like lint or pollen, clings to their meager drops of fat, but not very much.
Or are souls, like legal rights, not admissible of quantity?
Fullness of being guarantees immortality, thought Goethe. “If I work on unceasingly till my death, nature is bound to give me another form of being when the present one can no longer sustain my spirit.” Yet poverty of being guarantees immortality too, Christ told us on the Mount. Eeny meeny miney mo.
Withdraw from the world, go ahead, Paul, I thought. Let it go to the devil. Throw down a challenge to the universe—notice me if you can. Try as hard as you can to notice me. You won’t.
Well, there it was. I was almost crying now, despite my defensive irony.
There is no permanence, I thought, not even for those who withdraw and curl up and try not to change, and therefore not to die. The weary and old must be replaced by the vigorous and young, we all know this, because as Tennyson put it, we wouldn’t want the world to grow moldy with age. So all of us are programmed to self-destruct, and someday I’d lay in a casket like Paul, although I’d already decided that cremation would be better.
I guess I should be thankful. If no one died, eventually we’d have to ensure that no one be born, lest the world grow too crowded. With a reproductive rate of zero, there could be no evolutionary change. Natural selection requires that variations be selected out, that they become extinct, but how can they be selected if there is no death? As Arnold Toynbee said, “Death is the price paid by life for an enhancement of the complexity of a live organism’s structure.”
All at once I felt the others staring at my back. How long had I been kneeling there? Just a few seconds, really. Time stops in such moments. It had stopped for Paul forever, but Messrs. Flanagan and Roberts had managed to prolong it with the science of their profession.