We decided that Chris should be buried in the Berkshires, in Great Barrington, so that the community with which he had shared the last months of his life, and on which his death had such an impact, could say its farewell. On Thursday, November 3, in a dreary November rain, we drove to the farm, which is about 150 miles north of New York City. The funeral was to be on Saturday. There were two days for preparation and two nights for community meetings to celebrate Chris with word and song.
North Plain Farm was 10 acres of woods and pasture in the midst of a large plain north of the town of Great Barrington. The main house was a white clapboard colonial, built around 1830, sitting directly on North Plain Road, and flanked by barns and sheds and sheep pens, some old and weathered, some new and brightly painted. A stream ran alongside the muddy, unpaved driveway. Numerous additions popped up from the back of the old colonial, stuck on to one another like dominos, leading back from the original kitchen and family room with its ancient stone fireplace, tall and shallow, to the new, modern kitchen that the community was still building. Chris had worked on the kitchen. He had delighted in breaking up an old concrete slab with a jackhammer. He had learned to hammer nails straight into two-by-fours and to line up the beams. He had planted forsythia by the side of the driveway. He had learned about life on a farm. Chris learned to feed the sheep and goats and to pen them up at night. He saw a lambing in the spring and watched the lamb grow day by day. He helped nurse a baby goat whose mother had died.
When Chris first came to the farm, animals held no interest for him. They couldn’t be provoked the way that humans could be. They never said “Stop!” or “Don’t do that!” They didn’t care what he broke or if he changed the channels on the radio or wanted a different dessert than everyone else. He had largely ignored our family dog and had slept through trips to the zoo. One afternoon, as we walked with Chris and Jordan through the grounds of the Bronx Zoo, we had seen the North American brown bears putting on a rare show in their outdoor habitat. Instead of sleeping in a hidden alcove of rock, the male bears stood erect, eight feet tall on hind legs, growling, snarling, and slapping one another, then wrestling and tumbling in a mating contest. Christina and I stood transfixed by the awesome display of strength and agility. Christopher welcomed the respite from walking, taking the opportunity to sit on a bench and grab a nap.
Christina awakened him and showed him the acrobatics of the bears. “Look, Chris,” she cajoled him, “isn’t that amazing? Look at how big and strong and fast those animals are.” He didn’t care. “What kind of animals are those, Chris? You’ve seen pictures of them before. These are real.” He looked away. “Come on, Chris, what are those animals?”
“Pigs!” he groaned, to shut her up.
If animals bored Chris, walking repelled him. He was good for a hundred feet, then he wanted to stop and rest. Running was another matter. He could run continuously, especially when he was supposed to walk, or at least when he was not supposed to run. When he spied his mom at the other end of a playing field during the Special Olympics, he’d be off like a shot in her direction.
When he first came to the farm, Chris refused to hike in the woods. One reason may have been that he was taking such high doses of medication for seizure control that he was drowsy a good part of the day. Meals would also make him sleepy. He seemed to have a kind of food sensitivity, possibly to preservatives or other additives. He loved fast-food restaurants, especially McDonald’s and Roy Rogers. A meal at Roy Rogers was guaranteed to put him to sleep within 15 minutes. On a diet of farm vegetables and home-baked bread, free-range chicken and lamb stew, Chris slowly emerged from the stupor that had shrouded his days. The dose of medication for seizures had been lowered, without any increase in their frequency or severity. With the encouragement of the other residents, he began to participate in group hikes in the Berkshires, ascending a ridge and returning, a distance of about two miles, sometimes walking in the front of the group. How ironic that a hike in the woods should have killed him.
Great Barrington is a sleepy New England town flanking the Housatonic River. Its center is built around a cluster of elegant churches, separated from one another by small shops. The side streets are lined with white clapboard houses. At both ends of Main Street, the town dissolves, either into fields and meadows or into small shopping malls with large parking lots.
On Friday morning, we drove into town to make plans for a Requiem Mass at the Church of St. Peter, an impressive structure of gray stone and neo-Gothic lines, with stained-glass windows, a handsome pipe organ, and a balcony for the choir. I was not a religious person, but I had no doubt that to process Christopher’s death we needed all the tradition and ritual there was. We inquired at the church office. The church was available on Saturday afternoon and the pastor wouldn’t mind if a priest from out of town who was a family friend came to say the Mass. If we supplied our own singers, the church could supply an organist.
The funeral home was naturally enough in the center of town, near the church. St. Peter’s Cemetery was across the river, behind Four Brothers Pizza. It seemed like a good resting place. Chris loved pizza. He especially loved this restaurant because of its name, which seemed to announce for all to see that this place was meant for Christopher and his three brothers.
The florist we chose was located just behind the church. As we entered the shop, a young woman walked out with red and blue helium-filled balloons. I was seized by an irresistible impulse.
“Let’s get balloons,” I said to Christina. “Twenty-two bright yellow balloons. We’ll release them by the side of the grave.”
As soon as I said it, I had misgivings. Where did that idea come from? Was that a responsible thing to do?
“Yes,” said Christina, reading my mind. “That’s how I feel about Chris. Rising up, bright, like a yellow balloon.”
The decision to order balloons gave us a bounce. Making all the other arrangements left us exhausted. Every little thing that a parent must do to bury a child seems to carry with it the weight of the world. When you feel as if it requires all your energy to live from one day to the next, you have to make decisions about things like burial plots and coffins and music. And yet we wanted to make those decisions, because we wanted the Mass and funeral to be a tribute to Christopher’s life, not merely a ritual for expressing the recognition of his death.
We called Father Gerry Fitzsimmons, a priest and missionary in the Montfort order. Fitz had grown up in the same part of Queens as Christina and had been a parish priest in Port Jefferson, New York, when I was on the medical faculty of Stony Brook University, a few miles away. He had given Jon and Jeff their First Communion, and later he had traveled to Connecticut to baptize Jordan and to Long Island to bury Christina’s grandmother. As a missionary, Fitz was accustomed to traveling, giving missions at churches that requested him. Many did, and they usually asked him back. The surprise was that Fitz had no mission scheduled for Saturday and said he would gladly come up to preach at Chris’s Mass.
We called Margaret and Peter Cymanow, friends from Manhattan and musicians. The Cymanows were Polish immigrants who met in Kraków. Margaret had the purest, most moving soprano I have ever heard. Peter’s response brought tears to my eyes: “We will be very happy to sing for Christopher.” They would bring their friend Wojtek, who sings bass, and their two sons, Paavo and Shimon, who were playmates of Jordan’s. We selected the music together: “Amazing Grace” as the processional, Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus” for Communion, Schubert’s “Ave Maria” before the sermon, Bardos’s mournful “Eli, Eli, Lamma Sabacthani?” for the recessional.
The two evenings before the funeral were filled with communal dinners, one night at North Plain and one night at the funeral home. We talked about Christopher, we lit his prayer candle, and we sang together, folk songs and spirituals, especially the two that Chris had liked best, “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” and “This Little Light of Mine.”
Christina and I spoke with people who were particularly close to Christopher. There were two, Luke and Daniel, young men in their early 20s on whom Chris had a striking impact. I’ll share their stories later. What I learned about them as I prepared to write this book radically changed my understanding of Chris’s life.