|
|
The
Funeral
July 30, 2011
When the end came, he was alone. Or at least I think it is extremely likely that he was, for two reasons: First, if someone had been there when he’d crashed (slumped? slipped?) to the floor, they probably would have gone for help, unless they were too messed up to notice. (Such is the range of humanity in a facility built to house the most vulnerable of the chronically homeless.) Second, and more likely, my father was alone because that was his preference. I imagine that his morning had been a normal one. He would have woken up on his bed, clothes still on, radio blaring, his memory of the previous night perhaps hazy, perhaps non-existent. Maybe he had spent the evening drinking alone, or maybe he’d gone down to the common room to play cribbage with one of the few staff members whose company he found tolerable. The options for how he might spend his time were constrained by his lack of money, his lack of mobility, and his lack of better options. He marked time with the shuffling of cards, rolling of cigarettes and slurping of beer. Football and basketball season gave him something to watch on television, and he read occasionally, despite his failing vision. He may have planned to call that evening; if he were going to call at all, it was a virtual certainty that it would be on the weekend. I mailed him calling cards so that he could use the phone in the lobby to call if he needed to hear one of our voices. I suspect, though, that whatever joy he felt when he dipped into our lives with a brief phone call was tempered by the pain of knowing how removed from our lives he’d become. I wonder if his sadness felt like it might choke him if he didn’t keep washing it back down his throat? The staff tells me that he talked about us frequently, with great affection and pride. They tell me this as if I don’t know that my father loved his three children (and their mother) intensely, that he had meant to give us a childhood that was nothing like his own. It wasn’t his fault, or ours, that alcohol had a hold on him that none of us could break. I knew that he carried us in his heart as surely as I knew that rewriting history was one of his strongest skills. He had changed the story of the last two decades from a horror movie featuring him as the villain to a tragedy in which the world had turned against him: a knifing him in the back while he slept under a bridge; sending him stumbling over a ledge into the Atlantic; lulling him to a near wake-less sleep on the coldest winter nights. In the final act, though, it was not another man or mother-nature that killed him. The doctor said he died of natural causes, maybe a stroke, maybe a heart attack. My brother nurtured the notion of foul play until he held a death certificate stating otherwise, because that would have been easier than thinking our father finally succeeded in killing himself. I knew the truth though: my father had died of a broken heart. My father’s death should not have come as a surprise. And it didn’t really, I suppose. He’d walked away so many times I’d become an expert at saying good-bye. The first time he left I was only nine and I slept in his t-shirts every night until he returned. The second time he left I was sixteen and knew he wasn’t coming back. He’d been a raging alcoholic for thirty years, living on the streets for ten. Even though he’d had a roof over his head for the last five years, his life was no life at all, and I wished him the peace of death. This, of course, was only after it had become abundantly clear that we could not draw him back to life, even when we were willing to give him back almost everything that he had walked away from. We couldn’t help that our mother – his wife for twenty-five years - was not ours to return. She had been cut the deepest by my father’s living death and the only way she could save her own life was to finally turn away from his.
August 4, 2011
Going to the funeral home to retrieve my father’s remains was certainly an interesting experience. His remains were stored in a plastic bag secured with a twist tie – like a loaf of bread, only heavier. An employee the size of a small mountain, and wearing a compulsory expression of sorrow, tucked the plastic bag into its very own carrying case – a green cloth bag that looked like something you’d use to carry your groceries. I discovered that human ashes are lighter in color than wood ashes, and they are sprinkled with bits of calcium that have failed to incinerate. I found those bone fragments comforting – as if they testified to the substance of my father, to the truth of his temporary existence.
August 6, 2011
I watch the minister scatter bits of dirt from the clump that he has just clawed up from the ground. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust...” he says. His performance is so perfunctory, and such a terrible cliché, that I barely stifle a laugh. I happen to know that the minister is in a hurry to finish the service so he won’t be late for his mother’s 80th birthday party. Two days ago he called to tell me the service would have to be held at 10:00 instead of 11:00 and I’d lied and said that was okay. Today I’d arrived early as he’d requested, to allow us time to make adjustments to the service if needed, but he was the last to arrive and had only time enough for my brother to make a rushed request for the reading of a particular Bible passage. I am embarrassed by his performance and wonder if he is too. I stand in the front row of the loosely gathered crowd of less than two dozen mourners, silently daring my estranged grandmother to assert her ownership of the son she mistreated by taking one more step forward. The minister reads a remembrance penned by my sister, works his way through the Bible verse requested by my brother. He invites people to step forward if they wish to offer tribute to my father, and a neighbor and then my mother share stories that paint a picture of the good man my father once was. I hold onto my words and memories greedily, unwilling to share them with strangers. After, when the dough-faced minister has gone and the small gathering has dispersed, my mother calls my brother, sister and me to her in the tone she used when we were young and believed that our parents knew best. She stands near the hole that will cradle my father in death. I don’t remember how his urn – a teak wood box that my brother crafted - got into the hole, but she lifts it up and tosses her sweetheart ring gently beneath it, and then I place a picture of our family, a relic from twenty-five years ago, on top of the box. Five faces stare back at us: my mother with a calm smile, holding my baby sister, who beams with unbounded joy; my older brother, smiling, too, but with a question in his eyes; me, sandwiched between my parents, smiling the trusting smile of a little girl who doesn’t know what life is going to do to her; and my father – not smiling at all, his ice-blue eyes staring into a distance that none of us would ever understand. |
