The Gift of Funerals

I went to a funeral today. It was for a gentleman with whom I used to sing, a sweet, kind, gentle, slightly pushy but never gruff man named Al.

Al wasn’t terribly young, but he wasn’t terribly old; I don’t know his exact age, because there was no program with the printed dates of birth and death on the cover, but I’d guess he was in his early 70s. He was a big man, but I didn’t get a chance to know how big until I went to the service this morning.

His family was small; his wife, Mary, their daughter Susan, her husband and their two daughters and one son. He had two brothers, and a best friend. A few nieces and nephews completed the roll, it seemed, and perhaps some cousins. But the center section of the church was nearly full, and before the first reading of the Mass, it was easy to understand why.

Albert had been a teacher; I knew that, though I can’t be sure what he had taught. Had it been music? Or English? I knew that my music director, Ed, had been his student. He had known Al since the age of 14. That was 45 years ago. Aside from the fullness of the church (something relatively unusual for an older gentleman whose family wasn’t very large), the first thing I noticed was the number of priests celebrating the Mass. This funeral was at my church; Al and I sang together in the church choir, and several fellow members had gathered to say goodbye to him. But there were four priests and a deacon on the altar. Two of the priests, I’d never seen before.

I came to understand through the service that one of them had worked with Albert at a retreat house for periodic weekends of reflection. The other had known him for years through a looser affiliation. The deacon was ours, and the pastor. The main celebrant used to be assigned to our parish and had been on the faculty at the school where Al had taught before he retired. I’m fairly certain he’d been a student of Al’s, as well.

When you get four priests and a deacon to celebrate your funeral, you’ve lived right.

The funeral began, unusually, with the eulogy. It was delivered by one of Albert’s nephews, a man I’d put in his late 40s. His name was Andy, and his writing was full of flourish. His delivery was firm and theatrical. It didn’t take long to realize that this was not necessarily because it was Andy’s nature (although I suspect it was), but because this was Albert’s nature. Albert was a man who loved the arts. Loved them. He surrounded himself with them, all kinds. Andy’s soliloquy was full of color – literally. He invoked all the crayons in the big box of Crayolas that most self-respecting men would never use in description of life: periwinkle, lavender, cobalt, light orange, fuchsia, and seafoam green.

He pronounced this last color with a great deal of weight and zeal.

Apparently Albert loved the color sea foam green, because his whole family laughed out loud.

Andy’s requiem for Al went on with demonstrative phrases about garden party invitations and what I can only assume was Al’s fondness for prompt guests who could handle being needled. It described him, I imagine mostly poetically but with a good deal of truth (indicated by the family’s laughter) as a man who literally commanded the flowers on how to behave. (“I can get the gardenias to sit up with just a stare,” he apparently mimicked.) He painted a picture of a man fond of “the show, the production;” someone who wanted things to be just right. In my several years’ knowledge of Al, I never found him to be prickly, but he was quite precise about how to pronounce the word “kyrie” when singing. He usually upstaged Ed to instruct the choir on it. At least twice a year.

It always made me smile.

Al smiled a lot. He had a sweet, round face- round everything, really – he was rotund – and incredibly soft and smooth hands. I know because every time he saw me he’d put out a hand to hold mine for a moment. He had a silky, sonorous voice that didn’t boom and wasn’t imposing, but could convey authority when called upon.  I got the impression more than once that being the former teacher was a bit of a struggle for Albert; though he was usually able to keep quiet and just follow along (often a bit behind the beat due to a loss of hearing or reflexive rhythm, either of which came with age), there were moments when he was inclined to lecture on the music we were singing in rehearsal.

It became apparent through Andy’s eulogy and, later, Father Jerry’s, that Al infused his life with the arts: music, theater, literature and painting. And through these words offered by these men who had loved him in different, but equally moving ways, I got a brighter, clearer picture of the man I had known, too.

The readings accomplished the same thing. Most Catholics are pretty familiar with the standard funeral fare, but these were not presented in the standard way, and, in one case, a reading was not the common fodder of funerals at all. Rather, it was the reading from 1 Corinthians, the one that so many people have at their weddings, instead:

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.  It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.  For we know in part and we prophesy in part,  but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.  When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

What a thing to say at a funeral.

And how absolutely right it is to say it there.

That reading was presented – not “read,” no; presented- in a wholly unpretentious but beautifully intepreted way by Albert’s friend and fellow theater lover. Clearly this man was an actor, but he did not act this passage of scripture. He knew it. It’s not just that he barely looked at the text as he went; it’s that he felt the words as he said them. For 21 years, I’ve known this was important in singing: in order to convey the proper message in the sound, regardless of the language, you have to know what you’re saying. But I had never heard this rote reading presented in such a way.

And I never want to hear it any way other than this again.

Seriously, I’m flying this guy in to do it at weddings wherever I go.

Al would have adored it. He would have adored the harmony our altos and basses sang impromptu in the hymns his family chose – standard hymns for a funeral, as they generally go, but lovely. And apparently, he would have loved the fact that we sang “God Bless America” at the end. I was thrown when the organ started its opening strains; we had sung it at the end of Mass last week, and I was worried  momentarily that Holly, the accompanist, had spaced out and started playing something that had been left on her music stand in the organ pit. But  no, soon enough I realized this was quite deliberate. Al would want his funeral service to end with a blessing on the country he loved.

I wondered if he had served; there had been no mention.

So many times, I find myself leaving funerals wishing I had known the honored dead better in life. I have learned so much about them in that brief time sitting in the pew, listening to those who loved them most tell their life stories. I’ve learned about friends’ traits and characteristics, before then untraced to previous owners, and realized, “Oh, that’s where he gets it!” I’ve come to know friends better by attending their parents’ funerals.

I’ve written a eulogy or two, and delivered them, and I’m sure that those who didn’t know my honored dead the way I knew them left feeling the same way. But I’m not saddened by the lost chance; Al and I didn’t come into each other’s lives until about eight years ago. Rather, I’m so happy to know that those who knew him best got to live his love for life through him so boldly.

What a gift a funeral is.

I’m so glad I went.

Long may you rest, and well, Albert. I will miss your smile and your softness, and I will think of you, as I do so many others, when I sing.

“The Gift of Love” by Hal Hopson
This is not our choir’s recording, but it is a piece we have sung many times, with Albert in the tenor section.

The Creepster Bunny

Ah, spring… the air is fresh, flowers are blooming, bunnies are hopping, birds are singing, April showers are… well, they kind of suck, but only because my birthday is in April and it always rains on my birthday.

But back to our happy vision… it’s finally no longer winter. That means hippity hoppity Easter is on its way. Thoughts turn to children in their best dresses or suits, little girls in bonnets, and eggs of pretty colors decorating baskets. And, of course, the Easter Bunny.

Or, as I’ve taken to calling him: the Creepster Bunny.

It is my belief that there is no childhood fantasy deliverer-of-goodies creepier than this guy.

Come ON.

Santa Claus is magical and brings tidings of comfort and joy and goodwill and childhood wonder and lessons of what it means to give, as God gave the world His Son out of love. The Tooth Fairy is also magical, comes to take our nasty fallen-out teeth, because who wants those laying around?, and leaves cold, hard cash under the pillow. Total score. Also, she’s probably kind of hot, or at least she is in my head, and though I’m straight, it’s always better when they’re pretty. Pretty = fairy. Ugly = witch. Fact.

Pretty.

Ugly. (Photo from the Tennessee Theater Company)

 

The Cree– uh, Easter Bunny is a six-foot tall furry animal with huge ears and giant buck teeth, fundamentally unrelated to anything religious but using Easter as an excuse to show up. Nobody knows how he gets into your house, and he leaves you unwrapped candy and unrefrigerated eggs.

Really? We allow this?

Which of these is the most likely to be a total perv? The Creepster Bunny. You know it. Because even though Santa lets you sit on his lap and tug on his beard and whisper in his ear, and even though the Tooth Fairy flies into your bedroom and gets super-close to you while you sleep, the Creepster Bunny is worse. He isn’t so much as marginally human. He’s not even necessary. He’s a feverish nightmare. Where do we come up with this stuff?

And why does he bring candy and eggs? Bunnies can’t eat candy and they don’t eat eggs. They don’t even lay eggs.

WTF is up with this guy?

Highly suspicious, I tell you.

So I looked it up. Rabbits are symbols of fertility. Eggs are also symbols of fertility. Spring is the time when everything comes to life, so okay, fine, that’s lovely. I get the premise there. I still argue that rabbits don’t lay eggs, so we’re confusing the children with that whole thing. Where the candy comes from I have not been able to ascertain, although there is the argument that chocolate is an aphrodisiac and that, too, is about fertility. But I made up that argument.

There is no explanation of how he gets into your house. No coming down the chimney, or having a magic key (which is what Santa has for people who don’t have chimneys, FYI). There’s no way the thing can flutter in on gossamer wings. You never hear stories about how this thing hops around the world to every (Christian) kid’s house in one night without the aid of flight.

It’s all wrong, and I’m having none of it.

I asked my sister, who is the mother of a 13-month-old, whether she and her husband are taking the kid to see the Creepster Bunny. She said, “Good Lord, no.” She and I agree on the Bunny. We remember the photo of our twin nephews, at four months old, lying in the arms of a giant, disproportionate rabbit at a mall. We discussed the photo when it came in the mail. We both thought it was so terrifying that we cringed every time we looked at it.

Now, those twins are three, and one of them is actually skeeved out by the idea of an old dude sneaking into his house in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, even if he does bring presents.

Smart kid. I’m worried about what will happen when he finds the picture of him and his brother with the Creepster Bunny.

God is not a carcinogen. Now what?

A word of warning: this is some intense stuff. 

There are things one is not to discuss in polite company. Tea partiers. Salaries and costs of homes. Personal sexual escapades. And thoughts like, “What the hell is God doing, anyway?”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Probably for about four years, if I’m really honest. I am Catholic, and I have no interest in leaving the Church. I’m not the best Catholic, and I’m not the worst. I don’t endorse some of the things the Church has gotten into, and I’m just absolutely disgusted and infuriated by other things, but my faith is a Catholic faith, and my method of worship is a Catholic method of worship, and so there I stay. But for the last few years, I’ve had what more Godly people would call a crisis of faith. Alright, maybe a mini-crisis.

This will not come as good news to the parents of my godsons, by the way.

It started with my grandmother’s death. No, not her death. Her dying. It was the first time I ever really got angry with God, a concept that I previously could not even fathom. But my grandmother had been sick for 17 years. She had devoted her life to God and serving Him. There was evidence of this throughout the house. Not the clutter of ostentatiously pious bric-a-brac, but some serious signs of ecumenical and sacrificial dedication. All of her children went to Catholic schools. She held some fundraisers and organized others for the parish. She helped put together plans for major Church events. She sang in the church choir. Articles were written. Honors were presented. When I called to tell her, on Easter 2000, that my mother’s mother had passed away, the first words out of her mouth were an awed, “Praise be to God.”

I didn’t blame God for Grandmom’s Parkison’s Disease. I don’t believe God causes bad things to happen. I get a little frustrated with people who say someone’s death, particularly an untimely one, was God’s plan, or that God wouldn’t give them anything that they can’t handle. I don’t believe that God plans for a teenager to be shot to death in the middle of a street. I don’t believe that God would “take” a life willfully, would steal a child from his mother and condemn her to a lifetime of unimaginable heartache. I’m not even convinced there is a “plan.” My way of summing this up is to say, “God is not a carcinogen. God gives us life. Life gives us cancer.” I truly do believe that.

But in July of 2007, my grandmother developed pneumonia. I was in France when she was hospitalized, but I had a horrible feeling something was wrong at home, and as I stood in the gift shop at Sacre Coeur, staring at rosaries, a voice in my head kept saying, “Grandmom. Grandmom.” I found out when I got through customs back in the States that she was quite ill, and the family had thought we might lose her while I was away. When I arrived at the hospital, straight from the airport, she seemed relieved to see me. She had thought she might not. And as I kissed her goodbye at the end of the visit, I admonished her not to say such things.

She nodded once and winked at me. “Right,” she whispered, unsmiling.

Of course, we both knew she was dying. Pneumonia is what most often claims the lives of Parkinson’s patients. She went home, but for a month, she slowly deteriorated. Then she took a turn, and I sat by her bedside at home as she slept something like 20 hours one day. Late in the night, just before I went to pick up my father from the airport and bring him to her, she woke up, held my hand, and asked me to sing “Ave Maria” to her, right there and then. She told me not to forget that I was to sing it at the funeral.

The next day, she had more energy, and she was awake most of the time. With my father back from Florida and her family assembled, it seemed all the pieces were in place. “I wonder what we’re waiting for,” she said to me.

I remember praying that God would have mercy and take her peacefully, that He would be mindful of all she had given to Him, of how she had literally and figuratively sung His praises all her life, of how she and my late grandfather had raised their family to be faithful.

But dying, it became increasingly clear, is a thing one does alone.

“Are You even listening?!” I finally screamed at Him in my head. “Are You paying attention?! Do You even care?!”

It was another week before she passed. I had had to go home, and go back to work. My father called at 6:20am from the airport in Florida, where he had been bound back north after he, too, had had to return to work. I never cried for Grandmom. I was only relieved that her suffering was over, and I believed she had been reunited with my grandfather and her parents. I was at peace with her death. I helped plan her funeral Mass, and I sang the “Ave Maria.”

But I was pissed at God. He didn’t help her. He let her suffer. After 17 years of a degenerative, humiliating, painful disease, He let her actual dying take a month. Her body was exhausted and aching, her lungs were damaged, her soul was crying for Him. But He let her die on her own.

And I started to realize the many things for which I had faithfully prayed that were never granted.

There’s a sweet saying about being grateful for unanswered prayers. There’s a parable about footprints in the sand. They are nice thoughts. I suppose they are a comfort for those who find themselves praying all the time for something that never happens. Not material things, not trivial things. Real, important things. It used to comfort me to think of the gifts of an unanswered prayer, until I realized how many of them there have been.

There are tragedies large and small literally all day long. Some of them you know about. Others you don’t. Sometimes the details of someone’s personal pain are so horrid that it’s just not necessary to impart them on the world. And then sometimes, there are catastrophic global events. 9/11. Katrina. Indonesia. Haiti. Japan. There are photos and videos of unrelenting waves marching through and obliterating towns and lives. Of cracks opening up in the earth and swallowing people up. Of buildings crumbled into piles on top of entire families. Of cars swept out to a sea that was once a mile away. Of a man clinging to his rooftop, spotted by helicopter crews, ten miles from a new kind of nowhere, nearly insane with worry about what had happened to his wife.

Eli, Eli, lema sabbachtani?

People say everything happens for a reason. I used to believe that, but I don’t anymore. I can’t see the reason for things like the human nightmare of massive earthquakes and tsunamis. Sometimes things just happen and they’re horrible and there’s no reason for it at all. But I believe we can find good, that we can force good to come out of those horrors. And I do think life is sometimes a mercurial thing, with connections we could never fathom. I have said that if 20 pints of blood donated for one sick loved one couldn’t save them, but a single one of those pints went on to save someone else, it was worth the sacrifice. I believe in miracles. I believe that maybe God did send those helicopter crews. That maybe it was a miracle that that man survived. That maybe it is God’s work when a rescue team pulls an old woman out alive from the rubble of a building that fell ten days before. I believe with God, all things are possible. But they don’t feel very likely.

And so, more and more, I wonder. Why do horrific things happen over and over in places where no one has anything to begin with? Why do some families endure innumerable heartaches and struggles? Why do individuals battle for years with everything from loneliness to illness to addiction, begging for help from God all the time, trying to listen, trying to be open to a voice, and never seem to get it? When people pray for help, does God ever answer? Of all the people who send prayers to heaven, to how many does He truly respond?

One person’s miracle is another person’s coincidence, and a third person’s logically explained development. I have always been taught that faith is the key. Keeping faith, even when it wavers, even when one doubts, is the most important thing. And so I continue to believe, however imprecisely. But the way I believe has changed. I no longer pray for myself. It seems that all the prayers I can remember saying in which I asked God for some benefit (and I have never prayed for anything material) went unanswered. Some of my deepest needs haven’t opened any other doors for me. But it also seems that, when I have prayed for others, there have been some responses. So I continue to offer fervent, faithful, hopeful prayers for those who are ill, who are dying, who are struggling, who are seeking. Perhaps selfishness is the problem; asking for something for oneself, however deep and spiritual the need… maybe that’s not the point.

From this, another belief evolves: that we should be the answer to each other’s prayers. Since the days of Job, we have questioned whether God tests us. I think being “tested” with cancer or abuse or depression or job loss is just cruel, and runs counter to the loving and forgiving God who came to us through Jesus Christ. A God who would test His faithful with such pain is not a God I want to worship. And so I do not believe that we are tested by God. But I am beginning to believe that when we see people suffering, the answer to our heartfelt prayers that God help them… is that we help them. Maybe that is what the faiths of the world mean when they teach us to recognize the God in one another, and in ourselves. Maybe prayer is just supposed to be a way to open up our hearts, minds and spirits so that we can be angels for each other.

I do not know how best to help the people of Japan. I do not know how to help the people of Darfur, or North Korea, or Iran. There are so many who need so much. It’s overwhelming. It is easier to help those I can see, those I know, those near whom I live. I do not know how to be an angel for people on the other side of the world. I am powerless to stop their horrors, and it does not seem that God will stop them, either. I can pray for them to find food, shelter, medicine, missing loved ones, peace. And now, the only thing I ask God to give me is grace. To accept, to give, to love, and to try. Sometimes that’s all I ask for because I just don’t think He’ll give me anything else. Sometimes, I’m fairly sure it’s all I need.