- Is there life after Funerals?
When I retired from
full time ministry, I told a couple of the Funeral Directors I worked
with that I would be available to do 'trade funerals'. (Two things
from that sentence: 'trade funerals' are funerals for people who
don't have any connection to a church but think of themselves,
however vaguely, as Christians; secondly, what used to be known as
'morticians' prefer to be called 'Funeral Directors'.) In my 35 years
as a priest, I've decided most of them deserve that title. They do
much more than 'mortuary service'--embalming, dressing, burying
people's bodies. The really good Funeral Directors deal with a lot of
pain in their work. They 'direct things' for people who, because of
grief or shock or guilt, aren't up to 'directing' things for
themselves. Death catches people unawares, even when the lead up to
the death has been months, if not years, of fear and suffering.
“When
people die it is like a bird flying into a window on a chill February
morning.” That
is a line from a poem I read in college. It was a poem written by a
friend of mine about her friend who died in Viet Nam. (Lord, it's
been so long ago—that war that formed my generation one way or
another—and it is still as new as today for me.) Lila's poem seems
universal to me though. She talked about the shock and disbelief that
death brings. “When
people die it's like bears are loose in the streets, gobbling up the
children.” That's
why who don't fret about it during most of their lives, want clergy
at their funerals. And that's why, people need someone to 'direct'
the funerals for them.
Any how, I got a
call just over two months after my retirement from Lou, a funeral
director in Waterbury, telling me when this particular family with
their particular needs came in, he knew I was the only person he
would trust to do the service. Well, he had me hooked by appealing to
my ego, which, a friend once told me, was 'as large as Montana'. So I
said 'yes', then Lou, that sneak, told me it was a service at the
funeral home, during the wake, for a 16 year old girl who had been
raped and murdered by a friend of hers. That happened at the base of
this enormous illuminated cross that soars above I-84 on the way to
Waterbury. The cross is in a place called Holy Land. Holy Land was
the creation of some overly-zealous Italian guy decades ago. He had
the cross erected and then tried to recreate Israel in Connecticut.
I've been up there before. The whole thing has fallen into ruins of
Israel in the midst of a forest of sorts with paths through it going
all the way up to the highest point in the area where the cross
stands. A group of Filipino nuns now own the property, but it has
become the hangout of teenagers from all over the area.
(An aside of import
before more about Phoebe's wake. Lou, the guy who called me, is
someone I've worked with a lot over the last two decades. His funeral
home is well known and respected in the area and though it is 'an
Italian funeral home', ethnicity being still important around
Waterbury, many Episcopalians use it. One of my favorite people at
St. John's was Nancy. She was a Warden, a remarkably active member, a
generous and gentle woman and a dear friend. She used to make me egg
salad and tuna salad sandwiches when I would go to her house for
lunch. Some of the best of both I've ever eaten...that was Nancy's
gift, to give only the best.
Lou was the funeral
director who got the 'call' to collect Nancy's body from the hospital
when she died. Her son and I were in her room when she passed through
that wondrous and terrifying door to what ever comes next. She would
be moved to the mortuary in the hospital, where Lou would pick up her
body. But he came to the room instead and sat by her bed and wept,
holding her dead hand. From that moment on I would trust him—as
brusque and 'God Father Italian' as he appeared. “Hey,
Father,” he would say over the phone when he called about a
funeral, “I got one for you....” But I knew this: whoever cried
at Nancy's deathbed was a friend of mine.)
So, when Lou called
I would have agreed to do the service even if he hadn't massaged my
ego. 'Death', after all, is what priests' DO. In my years since
ordination I have officiated at well over half a thousand funerals.
And sat by that many and more death beds. And been with many hundreds
of families as one of the ones they loved was reaching out for the
doorknob of that wondrous and terrifying door—the door all of us
will open and enter sooner or later. God bless us. Really, God bless
us....
*
There is an ancient
Roman priest in Waterbury who is legend among the Funeral Directors
of the city. One of them told me Fr. Spinelli performed over 200
funerals a year. In his 80's himself, he buried more people in a year
than I buried in a decade. In my 35 years as a priest I've done over
500 funerals. Some of them were for people I never really knew who
had families and friends who mourned them in ways I never
experienced. And then there were several hundred who were members of
my parish and friends of mine. And I tried to 'perform' (a terrible
description of what I do at funerals, but not inaccurate) each one
with the same focus and commitment as any other.
Funerals are vital
and holy moments. Whenever we brush up against death, things get
sacred in a hurry. Not nearly enough attention is paid, in my mind,
to the importance of funerals in the training of priests. There is
really nothing else, for a priest, besides the weekly observances of
the breaking of bread for the community, that equals the obligation
and opportunity of presiding at funerals.
We are rubbed raw
with emotion when people die. (“When people die it's like a man
man is in charge of the power plant: Light/Dark/Light/Dark.... When
people die.”) There is no
other moment when it is so profoundly necessary for a priest to be
present. Not to 'clear things up' or say something meaningful, but
simply to sit by the bed of the dying or hold the hands of the living
and shake your head slowly when asked 'the meaning' of it all. That's
what people need in a time of seeming meaninglessness—someone to
agree that is so, just so the mourning folks don't think they are
crazy.
*
Unusually
enough, Phoebe's funeral wasn't the worst one I ever attended. In
fact, if such a thing is possible, the wake of that 16 year old
child—victim of a boy she considered a 'friend'--was less troubling
than many. Her paternal grandfather took the microphone and invited
people to come up and tell “Phoebe stories”. And people
did—former teachers, red-eyed friends, members of the family—and
the stories somehow took much of the pain and shock and horror of her
death out of the room. There was also a screen that was full of
slides of her—it was a power point, I think, and in the pictures
Phoebe was full of life. Since she had been cremated, there was no
coffin to draw attention to the reality of her death. I suppose Ibsen
was right, there is no suffering that cannot be borne if we put it in
a story and tell the story to each other.
The
worst funeral I ever participated in was the service for Joan, a
beautiful woman of 40-something in the first parish I served. Joan
suffered from bone cancer—not a way I'd pick to die—and she did
suffer from it. In the
last days even the sheet on her hospital bed brought her pain. I knew
dead was near so I visited her every morning for the last week or so.
The last morning I broke one of the few rules I have about what I do.
I didn't go to the nurses' station to check on her condition but
simply walked into her private room. The fact that the door was
closed didn't surprise me since Joan had complained about the
constant and sometimes disturbing sounds of the wing.
So
I walked in to find her naked on her bed, her feet tied together with
gauze and her arms straight down at her sides. She was being prepared
to go to the morgue in the basement. The nurse who was washing her
turned to see me, shocked at first but recognizing me, she simply
said, “less than an hour ago. She's finally at peace.”
I
had to agree that Joan's face was uncreased by pain for the first
time in a year. She looked serene and lovely. Finally at peace,
indeed.
Joan's
funeral was one of the “mixed funerals” I had at St. James in
Charleston. Sometimes the deceased was the Episcopalian and the
family were black Baptist or AME or something more fundamentalist
than that. Joan had joined the Episcopal Church while in college to
escape the harshness of her family's faith. But they insisted that
the funeral should be in the funeral home and their 'preacher' would
help me. I knew Joan wouldn't have wanted that but I was young them
and not bold enough to stand up for the dead against the wishes of
the grieving family.
The
funeral director was a Baptist but he well understood the Episcopal
Church's ways. So, just before the service he closed the coffin and
helped two of the women from the church put the pall on. I had been
talking with Preacher Jones for 10 minutes before that, agreeing that
he could speak for a while and I would do the burial office from the
Prayer Book. “And Preacher Jones,” I said in my harshest whisper,
“the coffin remains closed....” (I had been to family funerals of
some of the other members of St. James and seen how a closed coffin
would be opened to let the congregation have one more look at the
dead.) Preacher Jones, a retired coal miner with several fingertips
missing, hadn't been within spitting distance of any seminary of any
kind and didn't know the Episcopal practice any more than he knew how
to speak Hindi. I was going to stay in control of the service.
“Yes
sir, Father,” he told me, “just the way you want it....”
After
the solemn, lovely tones of the liturgy and readings, Preacher Jones
got up to begin his sermon. He started out softly, reminding people
of 'Otto, the Orkin Man'--a popular ad campaign for a company who
specialized in pest control...mostly termites. He was using Paul's
image of the earthly body and the heavenly body--'tabernacles' in his
King James language. He said that Joan's earthly tabernacle had been
ravaged and that the doctors and treatments were like Otto's work on
our houses when they were infested by termites. But her heavenly
tabernacle would be perfect and in need of no cancer control. It was
an interesting metaphor and I was thinking about how that was closer
than I could come to describing the bodies we supposedly will have in
the Kingdom. I drifted off a moment in the image and was propelled by
to full alertness when I heard him say, in one of those low, rolling
voices Black preachers are so good at: “I believe there are some
here who have not had the privilege of viewing Sister Joan's earthly
tabernacle one last time....”
I
rose and touched his arm. “Preacher Jones,” I whispered, “don't
go there....”
But
by that time several people were moving down the aisle toward the
coffin. Jumping away from me like a much younger man than he was, he
snatched the pall and pulled it from Joan's coffin. The two ladies
from St. James practically dived forward to grab it before it hit the
floor. I couldn't get to him because was already surrounded by
weeping and wailing mourners. The decent good order the BCP had
brought to the room was gone, replaced by a frenzy of what posed as
grief but seemed to me to be pure dramatics.
The funeral director was pushing forward to try to restore things
to some sense of decency but Preacher Jones was pulling on the locked
lid, jarring the casket around. Evan, the funeral director, looked at
me with horror—he told me later that Joan's funeral convinced him
that the Episcopal practice was, after all, the best way. I nodded to
him and he opened the casket with the tool he used before Preacher
Jones and the surge of people could knock it from its stand.
What
happened then was a tempest of despair. One woman was actually
keening and a large transvestite (I knew she was because her name was
Robert) actually lifted Joan's body up and held her for a while,
sobbing all the time. The storm stopped almost as suddenly as it
began. Evan straightened Joan's clothing as best he could in a room
full of people, quietly closed and secured the lid and with the help
of the stricken women from St. James, restored the pall to its place.
Preacher
Jones was worn out by then and after getting some “Amens” from
the congregation, went back to his seat. I finished the service
though tears of rage and failure. I had let Joan down at the end. She
would have been horrified at such goings on. And I led her coffin to
the waiting hearse, Even apologizing to me each step of the way.
After
they shut the door on Joan's coffin, Preacher Jones stretched out his
hand to me. “I can't go to the grave,” he said, “I'm sure you
can handle it.”
Rather
than reject his handshake I took his hand in mine and began to
squeeze his finger nubs. He was in his 70's and I was barely 30 and
in the best shape of my life. I squeezed until I saw tears in his
eyes. Then I whispered, “Preacher Jones, you are one sick son of a
bitch”, smiling to beat the band so the people around thought I was
being gracious in a terrible situation. I finally released his hand
and slapped him on the shoulder in a clerical way, but hard enough to
make him stumble a bit.
That
was the worse funeral I ever had a part in.
My
first funeral was of Miss Bessie. Miss Bessie was 97 and lived with
her two sisters, 93 and 87. She had been dying in the same hospital
on the same day as the birth of my son. Labor was slow going and so I
made several trips back and forth between labor hall and Miss
Bessie's room. I had been telling her about what was going on
downstairs, how my son was being born. I'm not sure she could hear me
but I kept telling her since it was all I could think of to tell
anybody at the time.
After
my second visit to Miss Bessie, I was sitting in the room with Bern.
Things were going nowhere and she was getting impatient. I wasn't
sure things could get worse but they did. A nurse stuck her head in
the room and said, in a confused and questioning voice, “your
father is here?” We knew good and well neither of our fathers were
anywhere near and caught the nurses confusion just as a voice said in
a stage whisper: “Father in God...”
For
reasons beyond all my comprehension, the bishop had decided to make a
pastoral call to labor hall!
“Get
his ass out of here,” Bern hissed at me, fire in her eyes.
He
was apologetic when I steered him out into the hallway, but I don't
think he understood why she wasn't grateful he had come. That taught
me another rule for priestcraft—never go to the room of a woman in
labor unless you're summons. There are places priests should never
go....
While
Josh was being delivered by C-section, Miss Bessie slipped away
though that mysterious door to whatever comes next. Life and death
mingled together, mixed up, passing like ships in the corridors of
Charleston General Hospital.
Three
days later, our son came home and Miss Bessie had her funeral. There
was no moaning as she put out to sea. She had lived a great span of
years and had only been sick for a week or so at the end. She was
another of those skinny, unmarried women who seem to live so long.
Might be a cautionary tale in there for women considering marriage.
The
family plot was straight up a hill ten miles or so outside of
Charleston. The only vehicle that could get there was a four-wheel
drive Ford pickup truck. The hearse carried Miss Bessie to the foot
of the hill and two strong gravediggers transferred her to the back
of the truck. I had intended to go up, but since the funeral director
had to by law and the truck would hold only three passengers, I
climbed up in the bed of that Ford and committed Miss Betsy to God
and the earth. Then off she went, bouncing up and down on a rocky 45
degree angle.
Her
sisters and a few others waited in the car while she was put in her
grave near her people. One of the sisters, Miss Mable, said, “just
two more trips to go....” I knew she meant for her and Miss
Dorothy. But I left before either of them died. They were very thin
and unmarried.
*
Once,
shortly after we moved to New Haven, Josh and I were going somewhere
in the VW bus. New Haven has several large and sprawling cemeteries
within the city limits. By chance we passed two of them in a matter
of minutes. Josh, barely 5 years old, said, “there sure are a lot
of dead people living in New Haven.”
Mouths
of babes and all that. I'm pretty agnostic about ghosts and
communications with the Great Wherever, but every time I leave a room
for a few moments, turning off the light, I say to myself, “Hello,
Virgil!” My father was the world's champion at turning off lights.
Since our children complain when they are visiting that our house is
too dark, I must be channeling Virgil pretty well.
Lots
of dead people live most places, it seems to me.
*
Once,
after a funeral when the cremains were interred in St. John's Close,
a young funeral director asked me if a person had to be a member to
be buried there.
“No,”
said knowing we had interred ashes of several folks from the Soup
Kitchen because they had no where to rest.
He
smiled broadly. “I have these cremains....”
Turns
out his funeral home had a contract with the two hospitals in town to
cremate unclaimed bodies. But after cremating them, they weren't sure
what to do with them and the boxes were taking up most of a cabinet
in a storage room.
“Most
of them are babies,” he said.
“Babies?”
I asked, “people left their babies bodies at the hospital?”
I
was initially horrified until he explained that many of them were
still births and premature, damaged children. Some people didn't have
enough money to pay for burial and others were so upset and confused
they simply signed the papers while in shock.
So,
that All Saint's Day, at the end of the Eucharist, we took the
cremains he had collected over the last few years out to the Close
and buried them together. We put the names on the plaque in the
church narthex (front hallway of the sanctuary for those who don't
speak 'Episcopalian”). One or two were indigent adults but most
were, as he told me, babies. Some of them didn't have first names so
they were 'Baby Girl Smith' and 'Baby Boy Jones'. One I remember had
the remarkable name “Baby Boy Bugalu”. Whenever I looked at the
plaque, I always found his name and caressed it with my fingertip.
So
a tradition was born. Each All Saint's Day thereafter, ashes with no
where to go found a resting place at St. John's. Other funeral
directors found out about it and brought their unclaimed ashes as
well. That little sacred rectangle of earth became home to the
forgotten and left behind of the dead who lived in Waterbury.
I
found out most everyone had the same initial reaction to the babies
as I had—shock and a bit of anger toward the parents. I spent time,
in writing and All Saints' sermons, explaining that we need to try to
imagine the anguish people felt at losing a child and how anguished
people often make strange decisions out of the fog of grief.
Then
a member of the parish came to me and tearfully told me how she had
lost a third semester baby while traveling in the south. It had been
decades before and she was so drugged up by the hospital staff that
it was well on the way home before she thought to ask what happened
to the baby. Her husband, stricken and paralyzed with loss, had
signed the body over to the hospital to depose of.
“I
can only hope she went to some place like St. John's,” the woman
told me, “and now I can finally grieve for that child I never
knew.”
The
second year a couple of people I didn't know showed up for the All
Saint's Day interments. They approached me afterward. They both had
the same story as the parishioner. In the case of these two they had
both been young and unmarried when their babies were born dead. In
fact, the two of them had discovered they shared the same secret,
since almost no one else knew their stories. They were weeping too,
mourning for those children who never lived and they abandoned in
death. The service had been a form of absolution for them both and
they weren't keeping the secret any more.
“My
husband and my two teenagers don't know about what happened,” one
of them told me. “Now I can tell them and I can finally be
comforted for that awful loss.” That sounded like very 'good news'
to me. A Gospel moment in the courtyard of a church.
*
Marty
and Fran came to St. John's one Sunday and never left until they
retired to Florida. Marty worked as a civilian for the State Police
and Fran was an office worker somewhere. They were great—Marty was
a big, grown up kid who looked like the actor Fred Gwinn. Fran was
feisty and ironic and funny. They were great fun to have around. They
both were in late life second marriages and were always bringing
visiting grandchildren to church. One of them had the first name
Bradley, so he and I had more than a passing relationship. That I
never knew which of them was the 'real' grandparent said a lot about
their relationship.
They
were two of those people who move to Florida because it is part of
the thought that that's what people in Connecticut do when they
retire. All their families were in New England, so they came back
often, always stopping in for a Sunday 'hit' of St. John's funky
parish life and worship. I liked them both immensely. Marty was one
of those 'Corvette guys' who never outgrew his love for fast sports
cars. He had a gizmo on his Buick or Oldsmobile or whatever it
was--'American' for sure—that allowed him to turn on the motor from
a distance. He's leave the heater turned on in winter and the AC in
summer and when he got to his car after breakfast it was either warm
as toast or cool as sea breezes. I always coveted that feature.
On
the way back to Florida from one of their swings north to see family,
they wrecked and both were killed. Instantly, I pray. The car went
through the medium, across 3 lanes of northbound traffic and through
the guardrail on the northbound side and into a tree. Perhaps Marty,
who was driving, had a heart attack or went to sleep. I can only hope
Fran was asleep and didn't realize what was happening until it had
happened. And it happened and they both died and the two families
wanted a joint funeral at St. John's. It is a huge, Neo-Gothic
church, and I had to figure out how to get two coffins in the
transepts without blocking the center aisle or the steps to the altar
for communion.
And
we got it done. Children from each family spoke, we broke the bread
and shared the wine and then went on a wondrous ride. Two hearses
were necessary since, unlike bicycles, there are no hearses built for
two. We buried Marty first, beside his first wife, who died before he
met Fran. Then we wound our way down the Naugatuck Valley to Fran's
family plot. I thought of them so much as 'together', it was hard for
me to imagine them being separated by death and having two different
resting places in the rocky, rich soil of Connecticut. But that's the
way we did it. One funeral and two different interments. I only hope
those two—who seemed so 'right' for each other, can find the other
in the General Resurrection. (Though, honestly, I can't say I believe
in such a thing....)
*
Mrs.
Carter was from Barbuda, a little island in the Caribbean that, from
the stories I've heard about it from her large extended family, is
about as isolated and undeveloped as any island in the chain. She and
her family have been in Connecticut for many years—all hard
working, soft-spoken and physically striking. Her children,
grandchildren, great grandchildren and assorted other relatives came
to church and sat near each other. The kids—boys in suits and girls
in dresses with little hats and white gloves (imagine that!) sat
through the services without coloring books or electronic gadgets or
even stern looks from their parents. Every time someone told me they
wanted to come to church but their children would misbehave, I wanted
to say, “Consider the Barbudians”.
Once
a new seminarian asked me in hushed tones, “why do all those Black
people sit together?” She thought it had something to do with
unwritten rules about race in the Parish.
“What
would you think if 20 or 25 people sat in the same area and all had
red hair?” I asked her.
Something
came across her face that seemed like enlightenment. “A family,”
she said, “...but so
many....”
On
Mrs. Carter's birthday, there were perhaps 75 or more family members
in church with her. I sometimes thought there were more Barbudaians
in Waterbury than in Barbuda. And each of them was fiercely committed
to her. She was truly the matriarch of that large and handsome clan.
Two of her sons and their families were very involved. Between them
and the assorted kids, we once turned over the entire service to
honor her on some milestone birthday. All the readers, chalicists and
acolytes were related to Mrs. Carter on that day.
She
was a delightful and sunny person. “Fad-er Bradley”, she would
say in her charming accent, “how are you today?” She always
brought me something from her trips back to the island. One gift was
a huge and perfect conch shell that is still in our back yard.
Another time, because she knew I kept bottles of hot sauce around the
church for my use, she brought me some hot sauce from her home. “Dis
is not like your haht sauce, Fad-er Bradley,” she said, “use jist
a drop or two.”
Well,
I like hot sauce and thought she underestimated my taste for it. One
morning I sprinkled it liberally on my scrambled eggs and spent much
of the next hour or so drinking ice water and blowing my nose. I
should have never doubted her wisdom.
Wise,
that is what she seemed to be. She had worked long and hard for her
children—mostly as an aide in a nursing home, I believe—and had
found wisdom in her work and her years. Besides her immediate family,
there were others she had unofficially adopted. People I knew to be
her nieces or cousins all called her 'momma'. And as she lay dying,
she waited for one of them to come before opening that mysterious
door and passing through. I've never figured out how people know 'to
wait', postponing death until some particular person shows up, but
I've seen it enough to know it is so.
I
visited her often during her last illness. The nursing home where she
was wasting away was on my way home, if I went the long way. And I
had seen her the afternoon before her death, surrounded, as always,
by quiet, loving guardians from her family. It was a constantly
changing assortment of people—many of them children and teens—who
sat with her daily and, I suspect, around the clock—always with a
CD of gospel music playing from the top of a chest of drawers. The
morning of her death a daughter-in-law called and asked me to come
again. I told her I'd be there in the afternoon but she insisted I
come now. The niece she had been waiting on had come—Mrs. Carter
never said that she was waiting on that particular relative, being in
a semi-coma most of the last week, but her family knew it was the
truth. Several of them had told me, “When she comes, momma will
leave....”
When
I arrived with my communion kit and oil to anoint Mrs. Carter, the
family had filled the room and were spilling out into the hallway. It
was 8 in the morning and some of the kids there were in school
uniforms with back packs. The people parted for me, murmuring thanks
and touching me softly. I never quite got used to the profound
respect they treated me with and it was only with great urging that I
ever got any of them to call me “Jim” instead of “Father
Bradley”. I never even suggested it to Mrs. Carter: I was simply
'Fad-er Bradley' to her.
I
said the prayers for the dying, noticing that people in the room were
holding each other against what was to come, sobbing without sound,
faces wet with tears. Then I realized I only had a dozen or so little
wafers for communion. Since there was no room for me to move around,
I passed the elements and told them to share. It was like loaves and
fishes in Mrs. Carter's circle of love and the last person got as
much bread to dip in the wine as the first. An hour or so later, she
died.
Her
funeral was one of the most elegant and lovely services I've ever
known. It was a cold, cold day with spitting snow but when we got to
the cemetery, everyone—dressed uniformly in black—stayed until
the casket was lowered and the grave was completely full. At first
family members tossed in handfuls of dirt and the little girls
dropped flowers in the gaping hole. But finally an end loader came
and finished the job. The 150 or so people didn't seem willing to
leave even then, touching and whispering, telling stories of Mrs.
Carter, until they were chilled to the bone.
Having
seen her finally buried, the grief lifted for the meal—an amazing
collection of island dishes, the next better and more delicately
seasoned than the one before. It was through Mrs. Carter and a
reception after the funeral of one of her relatives that I first
tasted goat. The thought was somehow revolting to me, but it was so
well prepared that I loved it. I wouldn't dare try to cook goat
though.
Several
of her grandchildren were in the Chorister Academy at St. John's and
I would talk to them before rehearsal. After her death, they told
such sweet stories about Mrs. Carter. One of them, tall and
beautiful, said, with whimsy instead of sadness, “I love her more
each passing day.” I found that remarkable coming from a 13 year
old. And I knew it was true.
*
Gravesides
are the last place people still have some connection to the one who
has died. Most people walk away with the casket still above ground.
Somehow the practice of filling in the grave seems a better final
parting—not leaving such intimacy to strangers. It is at gravesides
that the stark finality of death becomes finally undeniable. I
remember helping fill the grave of my dear priest friend, Peter. He
was deeply involved in environmental ministry and was a long time
chaplain at a exclusive private school. One way or another—as
seminarian, part-time assistant, interim rector, assisting
priest—Peter's altar had almost always been at St. John's. His wife
and daughter were wonderful parts of the parish family and just
before I retired, I baptized Peter's grandson. When his parents and
godparents presented him and said, “we present Peter
to receive the sacrament of baptism”, I nearly wept in joy and in
the memory of my friend. I remembered much, in that moment, about
Peter's life, but I also remember softly dropping evergreen boughs on
his casket and then helping shovel in the dirt. Something healing in
being part of that last gift to him.
Once,
in one of the first few funerals I was part of at St. James in
Charleston, Evan, the Baptist funeral director handed me a handful of
rose petals. He intended me to scatter them on the casket at the
words of committal.
“What's
this?” I whispered, confused.
“For
the casket,” he whispered back, confused himself by that point.
“I
want dirt,” I told him.
“Dirt?”
he asked, a little aghast.
“Dirt,”
I repeated and he found me some.
It
is sometimes remarkable to me that Christians have developed funeral
practices that seek the lessen the finality of death when it is the
finality itself that we need desperately to face head on to begin to
heal.
*
When
you have children, they are always babies in your heart. My children
are both in their 30's. Josh has three children of his own and is a
lawyer. Mimi works in Development for the American Ballet Theatre and
is a woman. Mimi is a woman—graceful and lovely beyond her
knowing...but she and the big-shot lawyer are still small children to
me. And perhaps the hardest death to bear is the death of a child.
I'm
making a list and checking it twice about things I want to check out
when and if I get to the Kingdom of Heaven. I want to have a sit down
with Yahweh and ask the Great God Almighty to clear up a few things I
think were left hanging in Creation. At the top of the list is the
question about dead babies.
Dead
babies are hideous, awful, unspeakable, unfair, nasty, brutish and
ugly. There should have been a default
built into the system that never let children die before their
parents. Something kinder was called for. Bern once gave me a pen and
ink drawing that was of seven tombstones. Each had the names and
dates on them. On either end of the stones are the parents. In
between are five children. You notice, looking at the picture, that
the parents lived to ripe old ages and all the children died in the
first three years of life. That is a profoundly painful work of art.
If I could, I'd take that with me through the mysterious door for my
sit down with Yahweh. “What the hell was this about?” I'd ask
God, and wait as long as necessary (it being eternity and all) for an
answer.
There
was a wonderful young couple at St. John's—let's call them Adam and
Eve—who became members while engaged, got married there, remained
very active and joyfully, and a year or so after their marriage, 'got
pregnant'. It was something they'd longed for, hoped for, waited for.
They were transformed by the promise of it all. They turned a room
into a nursery and started painting, picked out names, began buying
fuzzy toys (Eve) and sports equipment (Adam) for their coming child.
But
when Eve went for her seven-month checkup, their world turned upside
down and inside out.
The
doctor seemed anxious during the examination. His tension was
contagious: Adam and Eve caught it in about 10 seconds.
He
asked Eve if she'd been spotting. Only a little, she told him, just
from time to time.
Pain,
he asked, had she had any pain? Indigestion for a week or so, she
answered, her heart clutching into a fist.
No
heart beat. That was the issue, the problem, the reason for his
questions and the death of joy for Adam and Eve.
Their
baby was dead. Just like that, their world went from joy and light to
the dark night of the soul. And, for medical reasons I do not
comprehend, what Eve had to do was carry the baby to term and deliver
it, dead as a doornail. She carried the damaged fetus two more months
and gave birth to Death.
I'll
leave all the excruciating ironies of that for you to sort
through—I'm waiting until I get to ask God about it.
So,
Adam and Eve lived their lives as if in a web of sorrow. They went to
work. They prepared and ate meals. They tried to behave normally in
an insane situation. And finally, mercifully, Eve went into labor and
delivered her dead child after 10 hours of pain that did not lead to
life.
I
was there near the end (summons, not on my own). I waited with family
from both sides. All this happened in a 'birthing room' of a major
hospital. On the door of the room, the staff had put a painting of a
black rose. The other doors had blue roses or pink roses on them. In
a place of such expectation and possibility, there was this little
island of pain—cold, damning pain.
A
black rose.
In
that 'birthing room', we took turns holding that dead baby—so
perfect in every way except she could not, would not ever breathe or
laugh or cry or live. And I baptized her, not even sure what I was
doing theologically, not caring really, knowing only that it gave
some tiny sliver of comfort to people as beaten down, exhausted and
condemned to pain as anyone could be. I spoke her name—a name she
would never hear or be known by or have nicknames derived from. And I
know, from having been through it with both of my wife's pregnancies,
what Adam and Eve did, before those horrendous weeks when she found
out she was incubating death. They had played out their baby's life a
thousand times. They had, in their minds, taken her to the
baby-sitter and picked her up, listened and watched for her first
words and steps. They had lived with her, through their
imaginations—seen her through childhood diseases, off to school and
even as the woman she would become giving them grandchildren. That's
what expectant parents do—live out their child's life in their
hearts, wondering how she'll react to Christmas, if she'll like cats
or dogs, what her voice will sound like, if she'll be musical. There
is seemingly no limit to the human mind's ability to project life
into the future when a baby is coming.
(A
related aside: no one I know—even me—takes miscarriages seriously
enough. Couples who suffer miscarriages have done the same
imaginative living out of their child's life as someone who gives
birth to a dead baby. And yet I've never heard any clergy talk about
the two in the same way or with the same seriousness. Since
miscarriages are usually the result of injury to the mother or a
damaged fetus, people don't seem to assume it was a 'baby'. But I
believe the pain is the same as losing a child at birth or afterward.
Hideous pain it must be. God better be reading up on what to tell me
when I ask about all this....)
I
was with Adam and Eve for several hours between the baptism and the
funeral. I mostly said nothing and did nothing. There was nothing to
say and even less to do. All that mattered was being there—and even
that only mattered tangentially.
So
the day came. The service at the church was solemn and tearful. The
long ride to a rural cemetery seemed to be without end. And as we
stood in the snow beside that tiny little coffin, the temperature was
in the teens and the wind-chill near zero. A bitter day for a bitter
task.
It
was then that I noticed the spray of flowers on the coffin. They were
roses and baby-breath—red roses instead of black and the breath
that baby would never draw. There was a ribbon amid the flowers that
said: OUR LITTLE ANGLE.
The florist must have been dyslexic and reversed the E and L so that
the message seemed to refer to a small geometrical shape rather than
a celestial being. As I prayed the prayers at the grave, I prayed as
well that I was the only one who had noticed the 'angle' on the
ribbon. But as the short, freezing service drew to an end, I noticed
Adam shaking his head and biting his lip. Then he nudged Eve with his
elbow through their winter coats and nodded to the coffin. She saw
it, realized what it meant and I committed their child to the earth
while they choked back laughter.
A little later, at a relative's house near the cemetery, Adam and
Eve and I drank alcohol and laughed out loud. They hadn't laughed
since that awful day two months ago. They had gone through the
motions of life, completed tasks, prepared and half-eaten dinners,
laid down to sleep with Death in Eve's belly—but they hadn't
laughed, they told me, not once, until then.
Laughter at a transposed 'e' and 'l' gave them back a bit of their
lives. They went on. Moved to another state. Had a baby. They called
me from a far-away hospital to tell me about Tilitha, their wonderous
child. I noted without mentioning it that they had named her what
Jesus called the little girl he raised from death. “Tilitha cum”,
he said, and the dead lived. I can only imagine that was what they
experienced—resurrection from the death of their baby.
Every week or so I drive my dog to the oldest cemetery in Cheshire
and walk him like I walked the dog before him. There is a section of
the graveyard I call 'the Peanut Gallery' because only children are
buried there. Often, around the birth days on the stones and around
holidays, I'll discover little gifts on those tiny graves. I've
walked that path for almost two decades now. I've seen fresh graves,
yet without a stone and the toys left on the just turned earth.
Through the seasons I've seen turkeys at Thanksgiving,
Jack-o-lanterns near Halloween, Christmas symbols, little crosses of
palms and Easter eggs on those graves. I've seen it all. And I've
seen, over the years, the Barbie doll in disarray, the tiny trucks
rusting, the mouldering stuff animals. People do tend to get on with
life. My favorite grave is of a teenage girl. (Is having a 'favorite
grave' too macabre?) Her name matters not. Names, as important as
they are, pale in the cosmic stillness of death. But on her
gravestone is says this:
Caring,
kind and fiercely free,
She
moves on impatiently.
I
especially fond of the present tense of “moves”. I'm not at all
sure what I think about the mysterious door we all approach, but I'm
glad they didn't put 'moved on'. It leaves the whole question of
death up in the air a bit—dynamic and full of possibilities.
And I think the words are a wonderful way to say good-bye to a dead
daughter. I'm half in love with that 16 year old. She'd be nearing 40
now on this side of the Door. Who know where she moves on the other
side.
Fred, an intern who will be a wonderful priest, and I did the
weirdest thing I remember doing in a long time just a few months
before I retired. “Uncle Jimmy” had died. I was out of town and
wasn't at his deathbed but I knew his nephew, a gracious, generous
man who lives on the Jersey Shore, had wanted me to be sure to give
his 'uncle', who, in fact, was more like his father than his uncle,
last rites.
Jimmy was this tiny little man who had a girlfriend who was in a
nursing home. He went to see her every day on the bus and then took
the bus back to town and stopped by St. John's to sit in the nave and
pray. Then he'd go to the Elk's Club and have a nip or two before
going home. And once a month he'd stop by the church office and write
a check for his 'dues'. Lots of the older folks, mostly union members
when the brass mills were working, called their contributions,
'dues'. I'd catch him in the church from time to time and give him
communion. Wade, his nephew, an organist at his church in New Jersey,
was glad to know all that.
Since I needed to anoint Jimmy, Fred and I went across the street to
the funeral home and one of the funeral directors let us in to the
embalming room where Jimmy was laid out. There was a woman there too,
large, quite young, I thought, and, like Jimmy, covered by a sheet
with her head on a little notched support. So I anointed Jimmy,
touching his room temperature forehead and asked God to see him
through the door into whatever comes next.
When I told Wade about that, apologizing for not having done it
before Jimmy died, he simply smiled and thanked me. How gracious
people are—Jimmy dead and Wade living.
For
the living and the dead, there might
just be
life after funerals after all.
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