The funny thing about the days afer a death and before a funeral is that we tend to sort of forget there’s anything happening. I mean, we know what’s happening – why else would I be spending so many days and nights at my parents’ house? But by day three, things started to get a little… odd.
The first day was the day after my grandfather died. I’d said my goodbye to him the Saturday morning before, believing he’d be gone within hours, and I drove the roadtrip back to work. On Wednesday, I’d just gotten to my desk when I got the call. But on Thursday, I’d decided to give my parents some time and space, since they had spent most of the last nine days – and some nights – at the hospital. When I called to let them know my plan, they were at the mall. A 93-year-old needs a new shirt and socks to be buried in.
Shopping for a dead person. Surreal Life Event #107.
The next day, Mom and I ran down to my aunt’s house to drop off some photos for the collage my cousin’s wife was making. My aunt, you’ll know if you read my last post, is just this side of certifiable. She lived with my grandfather and got the house in the will, and there is every chance she will turn full-on hoarder and begin collecting stray animals. Yet, somehow, she was the sanest of the sisters that day. The visit was blessedly brief, but when we got back in the car, my mother began an out-of-nowhere rant against President Obama that lasted 35 minutes. Captive in a moving vehicle, I could not throw myself clear. As we pulled into my parents’ neighborhood, she declared once more her insistent – and apparently persistent – belief that he is a secret Muslim.
I told her that I love her and we would therefore absolutely not be having that conversation, at which point she punted to his un-Americanness as indicated by his refusal to wear a flag lapel pin and the photo of him without his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance in 2008.
That got us into the garage.
There are many layers of madness endemic to families forced together by death.
That night, all my siblings and nephews came to my parents’ house for dinner. Mom liked the idea of having us all there, and since we all potlucked it, she didn’t have to do any work, which was a bonus. As the evening came about, though, two sisters got caught in rush hour traffic and wound up quite late. As it progressed, all three nephews engaged in various levels of meltdown, one of which was inflicted by a Goldfish cracker stuck in the toe of a pair of footie pajamas. By the time Sister 1 was deeply entrenched in a seemingly endless and mostly solo post-meal discussion about high school bullying, I was ready to check out. I was still abstaining from alcohol because of yet-unidentified GI issues, and frankly, I really needed a drink and was beginning to resent all those who were sipping on wine. Wine, I might add, that had come from my wine rack. I was completely socially unlubricated, and it was starting to chafe. It was 8:30pm and I felt like it was an hour that hadn’t yet been invented.
That was when Sister 2 put her head down on the dining room table. Didn’t say a word. Just rolled her eyes back and put her head down in a silent declaration that she was simply depleted of the emotional energy required for a conversation the beginning of which we couldn’t remember and the reason for which we presently could not possibly care less about, anyway.
Sister 1, not always good with the cues, continued the topic, which is a fine topic except it’s too heavy to go with grilled chicken, quinoa, veggies and dead grandfathers. So I got up and left the room to go watch “The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” with the barely-conscious Twin Nephs. Solving color puzzles was about as much mental hurdling as I could summon the will to do at that point.
On day three, Saturday, my father told me that Mom wanted some quiet time to herself, so we were going to vacate the premises. Fine, I get that, and I’m ready to get out, too. We went to the mall to get Dad a tie (the man just retired from upper management, yet he needs a tie?) Then we went to lunch, and then stopped by Target to get Mom a flash drive since her laptop is threatening suicide. When we got back to the house after 2 1/2 hours, Mom hadn’t slept as intended when she went back to bed at 11am, but she was still in her robe. The only thing that got her out of it was Mass.
Mass on Saturday evening meant absolutely nothing to do on Sunday. Sunday was the day before the funeral. I’ve long since decided that the day before a funeral is the most surreal day of all. You know what’s coming, but you’ve sort of pushed the reason for it away from your psyche in the days since the death. It’s a vacuum, a kind of sensory deprivation day on which you realize you feel almost normal, but not quite, and you can’t seem to figure why. It’s a kind of numbness. You’re worn out despite sleep and bored despite company – company that, at this point, you’d probably just as soon forego. There’s a strange sense of loneliness that settles in, of restlessness, being too long in each other’s space and not enough in your own, that leaves you feeling set apart and out of sorts and longing for the person not in your family who could hold you and comfort you the most and make everything fit in your head again if they were willing.
My proposed solution was to go to a movie. Dad didn’t want to come. As we arrived at the theater, Sister 3 said to Mom, “Do you know what the movie’s about?”
“George Clooney” was my mother’s answer, and I was satisfied with it.
Handy tip: if someone you love has just died after a tense time full of crazy people, endless communication problems, misdiagnoses and incorrect prognoses, questions about exactly what his advanced directive means, parsing of the difference between a DNR 1 and a DNR 2, and how the hell some total stranger’s signature wound up on an order you didn’t want that changed his DNR 2 to a DNR 1… don’t go see “The Descendants.”
***Spoiler alert*** The whole thing, turns out, is about how George Clooney’s wife is dying a slow and peaceful but tedious death in the midst of intractable family drama.
F@^% me.
I was surprised by how absolutely it appeared that this woman was truly dying, never speaking, never moving, never even with her eyes open, lying in a hospital bed connected to tubes and wires and wasting away, sallow and bent. Even the crust around her mouth looked like what had settled around my grandfather’s. Her whole look was stunningly similar to his. I was okay; I mean, I didn’t cry. Instead, I swore repeatedly in my head about the fortune of this particular film choice at this particular time. Sister 3 and my mother, they cried.
Good movie, though.
But then Monday came, and early rising. Showers and oatmeal and don’t forget the hymnal because “In the Garden” isn’t in a Catholic songbook, and it’s my solo after communion. Nylons and lint rollers and the tricky clasp on my grandmother’s bracelet. The viewing was only an hour, but felt like seven in the cold church. The American Legion representative played Taps from the back of the church. The accompanist was ridiculously late and practicing was nixed when she wanted to play over the American Legion veteran’s pre-Mass eulogy. Sister 3 started the first reading from the book of Ecclesiastes and immediately got hung up on “a time to be born and a time to die,” needing several moments before she could go on. Cousins and sisters presented offertory gifts and Bible verse, and a beautiful, delicate, quilt-pieced eulogy sewn from the memories my grandfather’s grandchildren had exchanged in the days before. It made me realize, only now, just how much I had learned from a man who was always so quiet. It took me back to the childhood I shared with my cousins and let long-latent memories dawn anew.
I sang, and my mother’s cousins told me at the luncheon afterward how much the hymn choice meant to them – a credit that goes to my mother and aunt. My grandfather was a gardener. He’d grown the food for his family as a teen and a Victory Garden after he’d returned from war, and he kept on growing vegetables and flowers until he couldn’t do the work anymore. It is because of his garden that I love roses and tulips and hydrangeas. And though his Episcopalian roots had long ago been tilled for his conversion to Catholicism, he had always loved the hymn I was honored to sing for him. I had never sung it before, but I haven’t stopped singing it since.
In the icy wind of a clear winter day, alongside the woman he’d missed so desperately for so long, we laid the last man of his generation to rest.
The next day, at work, my friends gave me a planter as a sympathy gift. They had no idea my grandfather was a gardener. I’ve given it his nickname. No gardener myself, I’m hoping he helps me keep it alive.
Creatures of habit and ritual do not generally react well to change. Oh, you should be with me when I cantor Sunday mass these days.
For those of you who aren’t Catholic (or are, but haven’t been to church in a length of time not to be judged or even discussed herein): there is a very set ritual of prayers we say during mass. Recently, the Church changed the words to some of those prayers. The whole Church. Every Catholic who goes to mass now has to say different words, no matter what country they’re in (presumably). It’s because Pope John Paul II years ago ordered a re-translation from the original language into all the languages of the world, because things strayed a bit too far from home and now not everyone was really saying the same thing. He spoke seven languages, so I guess he would know. And we’re all supposed to be saying the exact same thing. It’s about unity. One Church.
So anyway. The answer to a priest’s “The Lord be with you” used to be “And also with you.” Now it’s “And with your spirit.” We’ve been saying “And also with you” since 1963 when the Church ixnayed Atin-Lay, but now, holy hell, the words are different. We say “And with your spirit” no fewer than five times during a mass. For the first several weeks of the new translation, we took special care to remind people of this before mass started. It got to a point when sometimes we were practically yelling it.
~”The Lord be with you.”
~”AND WITH YOUR SPIRIT! I got it that time!”
I was incensed (haha, Catholic joke – get it? Incense?) when the most pious of our priests decided to sing a high mass a couple of weeks ago. No, high mass does not refer to too much incense. It’s when a bunch of the prayers are chanted. I actually gave him a dirty look when he started in. People weren’t comfortable with those chants before we changed all the words. Now, there’s absolutely no musical precedent for them. I don’t know what to sing. The people are all, “Uh, hey cantor, what do we do?” and I’m all, “Uhhh, just… wiggle your voice around a little.” I hope you’re happy, Father.
My music director wisely changed some of the prayers we sing to the new translation weeks ahead of time. The idea was that people would be comfortable with them by the time we got to the mandatory switch-over, and they’d sing them confidently.
False.
We’ve been doing the new music for three months now, and I still see all these people with their faces buried in the prayer cheat sheets. Where the music, which they know, is not written.
I don’t know why, but for a Church based entirely on believing what cannot be seen, these people have some serious trust issues.
I’m not even going to start on the Nicene Creed or how everyone panics every week because “maybe they changed the Lord’s Prayer, too.” (They didn’t.)
Catholics are accustomed not only to ritual but also to a certain rhythm. We have a way we say things, you know? A cadence. When they changed the words, the cadence got all screwed up and now nothing is said together. Which is ironic, given the purpose of changing the words. Now everything’s scattered all to hell, and it comes out sounding like, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive my roof under you, but only say the word and I shall heal my own soul or …something. *Cough.* And with your spirit?”
That bit gets said at the most important moment of the mass: the consecration. It’s the moment when the bread and wine is turned into the body and blood of Christ. This is a very holy moment. Which makes it an excellent time for Patrick, the deeply baritone and hard-of-hearing usher/sacristan, to hock up a crapload of phlegm on the other side of the altar wall, very loudly, out of sight, like the Voice of God has been stricken by post-nasal drip. He does it at the exact same time every week.
Priest: “It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, holy Father,–”
Patrick (off): “Aaachhhuugggllll!”
Priest: “–almighty and eternal God, through Christ our Lord.For he assumed at his first coming the lowliness of human flesh, and so fulfilled the design you formed long ago, and opened for us the way to eternal salvation–”
Patrick (off): “AAAYYYYAACHHHHUUUGGGGLLLLL. Uh-gull-accchhhh.”
Priest: “–that, when he comes again in glory and majesty and all is at last made manifest, we who watch for that day may inherit the great promise in which now we dare to hope.”
(I don’t have that memorized. I looked it up. I had the old prayer there memorized. But that’s gone the way of the backward-facing celebrant.)
Sadly, another fairly regular ritual at my church is the Fainting of the Faithful. The vast majority of attendees are seniors. And, God love them, sometimes they don’t have breakfast, or they forget to take a pill, or whatever, and boom. Down goes Mrs. Frazier. It’s happened so frequently that the parish has had to mark off a little connecting road between two parking lots with orange cones so that nobody (read: me) parks along the side of it because, if they do, the ambulance can’t get through.
I almost parked there yesterday, in defiance, because I was late and I really hate having to drive to the lower lot and hoof it up the hill to get to the church, out of breath just in time to sing the entrance hymn. Good thing I didn’t park there, though, because all of a sudden, right at the very beginning of the Liturgy of the Eucharist (the part leading up to that all-important moment of the consecration)… down went poor old Mr. McKinley.
I made that up, I don’t know his name.
Father saw it happen, and, when he finished the prayer he was on, he discreetly asked for any medical professionals present to attend to this parishioner. Apparently I worship at a very medical church. About six people rushed over. Had the choir been there, three more would have joined them. My church is, for reasons both spiritually and practically obvious, a pretty good place to lose consciousness.
This is always a very awkward thing for the celebrant. He has to continue with the mass. But he kind of doesn’t want to. He feels like he’s plainly ignoring the fact that one of his parishioners may or may not be dying about 20 feet away. Yesterday, because Mr. McKinley’s episode went on for so long, he calmly told the server girls as they prepared the altar for the consecration to go and get the other priest over in the rectory.
I remained prone, remembering I’m supposed to be an example up here in my lay ministry, kneeling as Saint Peter or whomever told us to do, but wondering what was taking the ambulance so long. They’re right across the street. Naturally, half the church was basically staring at the spot where Mr. McKinley had keeled over instead of paying much attention to that most holy of liturgical ceremonies, and I have to say that, as I watched the priest, he was a little distracted, too. It’s good, though, kind of, because it distracted everyone from Patrick’s lung evacuations. And then, of course, the medics arrived exactly when the bread and wine were elevated for the big moment. (Former Catholics: think “ringing bells.”) You cannot pick a worse time to be disruptive.
(left): “Sir, are you having trouble breathing?”
(from altar): “Through Him, with Him, in Him…” (off): “Ayyyucchhhhgggllll!” (left): “Any chest pain?” (from altar): “In the unity of the Holy Spirit…”
(off): “Bllluuugrrrghhuhgglll…”
Adding to all of this? The words to the hymn we sang at closing. “Let All Things Now Living.” Really? Oh, this is awkward. “Let all things now living (I hope) a song of thanksgiving to God our creator triumphantly raise! Whose passion has made us, protected and stayed us by guiding us on to the end of our days! (Which is hopefully not today)… Til shadows have vanished and darkness is banished as onward we travel from light into light!” (Go toward the light!)
I don’t know what happened to Mr. McKinley. The medics carted him off just before it was time to line up for Communion, with Father Pious High Mass tagging along.
I wonder if the prayers for the Anointing of the Sick changed, too.
The twelfth day of Christmas is the feast of the Epiphany in the Catholic Church. And I had one.
I finally. Got. Wi-fi.
Epiphany!
Yes, that’s right. Since I moved into this place, 16 months ago, I have been chained to the modem via etherlink connection. The modem is in the only possible place it can be – on the floor next to the TV/cable box in my living room. Which meant I had to be on the floor to use the computer.
Yeah.
For the longest time, it was because they were supposed to set up wi-fi when they installed my cable, but they didn’t, and I just never called them to come back and do it because who wants to call the cable company and invite them over again? And then, one of my coworkers looked at me like I had three heads and said, “Just go buy a router, for crying out loud!”
Oh. I can do that?
We are not terribly technologically savvy here at thesinglecell. I’m not an idiot or anything – I just thought the cable company had to provide the wi-fi service and if I hooked up something else they’d know and accuse me of breach of contract or something. I totally made that whole thing up in my head, though. Turns out.
So yesterday, I got a router. It wasn’t hard. I told an associate at the store what I wanted, she asked if I knew what kind I wanted, I said no, she said she’d send someone right over, I stood in the aisle for five minutes looking at boxes, nobody came, I picked one that looked reasonable (Belkin 300 N with dual something), paid for it and left. The hardest thing about installing it was finding a place to plug it in. And now, I’m on my couch, under a blanket, with the laptop where it was made to be… and I’m online.
It’s like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when everything goes from black and white to color.
Obviously, my regular readers have stuck with me through twelve days of the same title for my posts, except for one word that changed. I always celebrate the twelve days of Christmas. I don’t do pear trees or gold rings (note to self: find someone to supply gold rings for future Christmases) or drummers drumming, since they’d just make me nuts. But all my decorations stay up until the Epiphany, the celebration of the occasion when the three kings arrived at the stable to find the baby Jesus.
The little drummer boy may have been with them. I’m not sure.
Rembrandt's "Adoration of the Magi"
Melchior, Balthazar and Gaspar brought the infant expensive gifts often given to kings, gifts that may have foreshadowed the path Jesus’ life and death would take: gold, because He was the newborn king; frankincense, which symbolized deity; and myrrh, an embalming oil associated with death. These days, two of those gifts are relatively obscure, and gold is no longer a gift fit only for kings. Most of the meaning has washed away.
It’s easy for us to forget the meaning of the little gifts we get on a daily basis. We are not royalty, not deities. But this year, for the twelve days of Christmas, I wanted to be more mindful of those gifts I receive every day, and how valuable they are.
The first day: Family.
The second day: Love.
The third day: Self-awareness.
The fourth day: Friendship.
The fifth day: Health.
The sixth day: Wisdom (and humor).
The seventh day: Contentedness.
The eighth day: Music.
The ninth day: Fruits of labor.
The tenth day: Freedom.
The eleventh day: Little pleasures.
The twelfth day: Connection.
By no means are these the only gifts I receive daily. There are so many more. Writing about these made me grateful for them, mindful of them. I hope I can continue that throughout the year.
Today, the decorations come down and get put away, and I yank a big, beautiful tree through a doorway nowhere near wide enough for it to pass through. After a considerable amount of vacuuming, my home goes back to its 11-month state, feeling bare and stark for a few days at first. I’ll consider keeping the Dickens Village houses out, at least, with their warm glow and old-world charm. And then I’ll decide, like I always do, that I might as well pack them away now so I don’t have to rejigger all the boxes in storage again when I eventually take them down.
The eighth day of Christmas should have been sparkly and shiny and new. I should have woken up to find that all kinds of things were different and everything was positive and diamonds had rained down from the sky during the night. The eighth day of Christmas was New Year’s Day, and none of that crap happened.
None of it.
It was sunny, though, which was good for my fuzzy head. No, it was not fuzzy from a night of partying. (See previous post.) My head tends to get a little cottony on New Year’s Day, I think precisely because I expect things to be different and they’re totally not, except there’s a whiff of some sort of expectation in the air and everybody’s off and I get the feeling like everybody has something to do, and I feel bamboozled by the whole magic trick-that’s-not-really-a-trick. “Oh! Behold! A shiny new year!”
“Madeja look.”
New Year’s Day is a holy day in the Catholic church: the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. The purpose is to honor the role Mary played in bringing about the salvation of the world. I’m not the most religious person – mild to moderate at best. But I am a cantor at my church, and I sang the noon mass. Just me, my favorite accompanist and the contemporary group, who showed up ready to really play. Music is an alive thing, breathing and morphing, and sometimes the group just doesn’t gel. But other times, it really gets into a groove. And the instruments tend to change from week to week, which keeps things fresh even though it’s mostly because someone flaked out and another person stepped up. (A violin this time!) As a singer, I get inspired by this kind of stuff – people who just know what they’re doing and don’t need much direction, who can look at the music and play, and elevate the experience without saying a word. When you’re Catholic and a music person and a good two decades younger than nearly all of the people you see in front of you, you will take every chance you get to change things up and get them out of the rut of the status quo. The people in the pews usually respond.
I think they respond because the music becomes a spiritual power boost, which everybody can use. It doesn’t have to be some big thing. It doesn’t have to scream “religion” or “God” or “miracle” at you. It can just be an old hymn you hear in a new way, by virtue, even, of where you do and don’t take a breath. Like reading a poem and not stopping your momentum at the end of a line. Oh! That’s what that means!
The mass was a minute from starting when I looked at the accompanist and pointed to sheet music that was sitting on top of the organ (which she wouldn’t play today – the contemporary group is more of a piano crew). “Are we doing this?” I mouthed.
“Oh! We can,” she mouthed back.
“Offertory?” I suggested. It’s the moment when the altar is prepared for the Liturgy of the Eucharist, when the gifts are brought forward by parishioners. Technically, this piece is not liturgically correct to sing at that time, but it’s the only place to do it without making the mass longer. And nobody likes it when the mass is longer.
She nodded. “What key?”
“A-flat.”
The contemporary group zinged up the music enough that we were fairly enjoying ourselves from the beginning of the service, and I could tell the Frozen Chosen were, as well. Cantoring is like teaching, I think: you look out at a sea of dead faces and you’re trying to think of something that’s going to wake them up and bring light to their eyes. Music can do that if you play and sing it right. Even the old stuff. Plus it helps that we’re still in Christmas carols.
But when it came time for the Offertory, we took it down a notch. The contemporary group left their instruments. On the piano, the accompanist played the first few measures of Schubert, measures most people recognize very quickly. And I sang.
Ave Maria, gratia plena…
It is one of my favorite pieces to sing. The only trick is that it’s a bit of a pressure piece. It’s not something you sing all the time; it’s for special occasions. Weddings. Funerals. Feasts and solemnities of Mary. So when you do it, it has to be special.
It has to shine.
I sang the Ave Maria for my grandmother’s funeral in 2007. She had basically ordered me to do it, and I knew if I chickened out, or sang it badly, she would haunt me with murmured “That was nice, dear” sentiments that really meant, “I would have thought my eternal sendoff would be a bit better.” I was medicated and prayed to every saint I could think of for help as I climbed the stairs to the choir loft to sing it. I didn’t love how it went, but it was enough, thankfully, to keep my grandmother quiet.
I sang it for my sister’s wedding in 2002. Sister 2 played piano.
I sang it for my brother-in-law’s grandmother’s funeral two weeks ago. The family had requested it. They remembered it from the wedding.
It’s a piece that matters, that means something to people. A piece they close their eyes to. A piece that rings in their breath-filled chests when it’s over.
If you do it right.
For me, the only way to do it right is not to sing it myself. Rather, I have to open my mouth and let it come through me from somewhere else. Otherwise I worry too much about tempo and tone and where I can breathe, and it just doesn’t do. I run out of air, I go a little flat, I push a little. I make it about me, and it loses something. It loses shine.
On the eighth day of Christmas, I turned it all over to the gift I’ve been given instead of the brain I use, and I let it come through me instead of from me. I sang it for my grandmother all over again, for my sister and her husband, for his grandmother. The pews stilled. Eyes closed. My cottony head cleared.
I know that stuff is supposed to be for Halloween, but today is All Souls’ Day in the old Christian tradition, and Catholics still observe it. Today is the day when the Church celebrates the souls of all the dearly and faithfully departed. So my ghost story gets told today.
My grandmother died on Easter Sunday, 2000. She’d been sick for a decade: Alzheimer’s Disease and emphysema. And she’d never really had any medical treatment beyond the tanks of oxygen her brother-in-law, who was the only doctor she trusted, prescribed. He was a psychiatrist and he was eleventy-two years old, but he was the only one she trusted. She’d always been afraid of doctors, and years before, she had made my grandfather promise he would never put her in a nursing home. He never broke that promise, even though she was a mean Alzheimer’s patient. Her character had always been one of strength, fortitude and stubbornness. That was multiplied tenfold in her illness. It was a tragedy, but we found ways to laugh about it because we’d never stop crying if we didn’t.
Hey, she met someone new every day. Usually my aunt.
Anyway, she died at home on Easter Sunday. She was not the first loss in our family, but she was the first loss of someone to whom I’d been close. Frankly, as everyone in the family damned well knows, I was her favorite grandchild. So when I went to bed on that Easter Sunday night, I made her a deal.
“I don’t want to see you,” I told her spirit. “And I don’t want to hear your voice. I’m okay with other stuff, but I swear to God, I don’t want to see you. Got me?”
Deal.
Would that my mother had told her the same thing. One night, months after my grandmother’s passing, my mother was jolted awake because her bed shook. She thought at first that my father had twitched in his sleep, but no, she says… this was a more powerful, singular spasm of the mattress. She opened her eyes, and standing beside her bed was a whitish… something. It didn’t really have a shape, but it was there. Mom says she sensed right away that it was her mother. She rolled over quickly to wake my father, but by the time she turned back, the figure was gone.
This is apparently how my mother found a pair of tweezers she had been looking for for days. My grandmother, turns out, may or may not have shown up to put the tweezers back in the pocket of my mother’s robe, where they had not been the day before.
A few years after that, my parents were visiting a house they own at the Jersey Shore. My mother woke from sleep and looked down at the foot of the bed to find my grandmother standing there, in her trademark plaid pleated skirt, collared shirt, pullover sweater and brooch. She lingered a few seconds, then faded away.
Sneaky old thing.
For my part, my grandmother upheld our deal. I never saw her and I never heard her. At least, not while I was awake.
One night about a week after she had died, I dreamed of her. And not in a good way. I dreamed that my cousins, sisters and I were all gathered in the parlor of the funeral home where she had been laid out. It was the night before her funeral, and we were all, for some sick reason, spending the night there. My cousins and sisters were lying in sleeping bags at one end of the room, with all the flowers. I was on the other end of the room. And I was not in a sleeping bag.
I was in the casket.
With my grandmother.
I was lying on my side, knowing that she was right behind me.
Suddenly, the casket on its setting began to move. With increasing speed, it rolled toward the other end of the room. Terrified and paralyzed, I knew what was about to happen: the casket would crash into the pile of sleeping cousins and sisters, topple over… and my grandmother’s body would fall out on top of me.
I woke up before it happened.
A short time later, I dreamed that my parents, sisters and I were at my grandparents’ house. My grandmother had just died. She was laid out on the couch, wearing the dress in which she’d be buried. I sat near her head and noticed her neck was at an odd angle. When I tried to adjust it, I felt something in her ice-cold skin change.
She began to wake up.
My parents and my grandfather were overjoyed, but I knew this was very, very bad. I scooped up my little sister and ran into the kitchen, where my other sisters were eating Chinese food.
What the hell? We never eat Chinese food.
In the living room, I could hear the cries of happiness. It seemed only I knew we were doomed.
The nightmares kept coming, for months. With each dream, my grandmother was more undead, more decomposed, and coming closer to catching up with me. In each dream, she would stare at me menacingly – from the dining room window of my old house. From the backyard of her home. From the curb as I ran to the other side of the street. The conscious part of my brain knew I was dreaming and tried desperately to wake up the rest of me, willing me to move a leg or an arm, something that would rouse me, but I was literally paralyzed with fear (and limbic sleep). I often woke up shaking, sweating, crying. Once, I woke myself up cursing her back to her grave.
It was horrible. Why was I seeing these awful things about my dear grandmother, who was stern, to be sure, but doted on her grandchildren and would stop at nothing to protect and care for them? Why was she becoming a monster in my dreams?
The Christmas after she died, we visited my grandfather. I made a point to have a picture taken with him, just the two of us. When I had it developed (developed!), I got doubles. I got two of the same pewter frame and kept one for myself, and sent one to my grandfather. He placed the photo on my grandmother’s dresser in their bedroom.
Sometime near the end of January, as I got ready for work, I walked out to my kitchen to get a drink, passing my living room on the way. Blind for want of glasses or contact lenses, I noticed something laying on the back of the couch. Puzzled, I walked over to it.
It was the framed photo of my grandfather and me.
It was laying face-up on the back of the couch, atop a handmade afghan.
It was supposed to be sitting on the end table… on the other side of the couch.
I looked at the cat.
The cat looked at me. “What?”
I looked at the end table. At the photo. At the cat.
“What?” she cocked her head.
I looked the photo – cat- end table – cat – photo – cat.
“Oh for crying out loud,” she seemed to say.
Could the cat possibly have dragged that heavy pewter frame across the back of the couch without disturbing the afghan or dropping the photo behind the furniture?
It was impossible.
Holy crap.
Shaken, I picked up the photo and put it back where it had been the night before. I finished preparing for work. “Stay,” I said to the photo aloud as I walked out the door to head to work.
But as I drove, I suddenly remembered a dream I’d had the night before. I dreamed of my grandmother. I realized I had awoken sometime in the night, once again terrified. But now, I could not remember the context of that nightmare. I couldn’t recall what had happened that had left me so afraid when I awoke in the dark.
Now, all I could recall was the way the dream had ended.
My grandmother had finally caught me.
And we sat together, and talked. And I told her that I missed her and that I loved her. And she hugged me.
To this day, that is the only part of the dream I can recall.
I suppose, for what would have likely been the only time in my life, I may have been sleepwalking that night. I suppose I may have gone out to my living room, picked up that photo of my grandfather and me, looked at it, and put it back where it didn’t belong.
But I don’t think I did it at all.
I think my grandmother came that night.
And I haven’t had a nightmare about her since. I have dreamed of her, yes. I have, from time to time, smelled her Ciara perfume (once, I smelled it while I was on a plane that was entirely too small, sharing a flight with a Catholic Cardinal I recognized. I smelled that perfume and thought, “Oh, we’re either really blessed on this flight or we are going down.” The airline lost the Cardinal’s luggage.) I sometimes hear an ice cream truck play “You Are My Sunshine,” the song she always sang to me when I was small. Last night, I heard my downstairs neighbor playing it for her baby boy. I always think of her and smile when I hear that song. But I have never seen my grandmother, and the nightmares have never returned.
And that photo, in its pewter frame, never again moved from its station. And my grandfather’s copy still sits, alone, on my grandmother’s dresser.
It is a strange thing, keeping vigil for a death that does not belong to you. The loved one of a loved one hovers between living and dying, and you sit hundreds of miles away and wait. The family gathers at the bedside and stares at monitors and the breathing man before them who is not there. And you are at home, at work. You are on your couch, at your desk. With your phone. Your email. Your Facebook account.
Waiting with them.
********
Friday, noon
Text, with Joey, who’s waiting for his flight to depart
Me: I am at the post office. There is an uber-gay, uber-skinny, uber-jewish guy in a yarmulke mailing, i kid you not, like 40 packages.
Joey: Are you crazy? Take a photo
Me: can’t. would be soooo obvious.
Joey: PLEASE
Me: I can’t. Already gone.
Joey: gay and orthodox?
Me: No sideburn curls, so conservative or orthodox. he’s a RAIL. benji. i’d guess 26, tops.
Joey: if he’s a redhead get his #
******
Friday, evening
Text, with Joey, at the hospital
Joey: Ugh
hospital vigil
tubes are out
we wait
Me: I can’t find the best words to ask how you are
Joey: Very tough
but we are going to survive
Me: Yes, you will. and there will be happy days, and there will be joyful days. I have, no kidding, 50 people working on making that happen… just in case.
Joey: we need it
Me: no shit
you have my entire church choir (grandparents, all but 4 of them) and whatever random people get the prayer requests from the online form
jack, my sisters, my mother, for the love
my mother is praying for your family from ireland, by the way. we’ve spanned the globe!
Joey: nice
and efficient
Me: It’s all I can do
Joey: that is plenty
********
I slept with my phone beside me, inches from my hand so that I could snatch it immediately as any message or call came in. I slept in fits and starts, every waking moment wondering. Did I have it right? The circumstances? The condition? Joey, if not his whole family, had left the hospital to go back to the house. Michael’s blood pressure was up, his breathing was shallow. But he was still here. Only not really here.
Still. Waiting.
********
Saturday, 8:30am
Text, with Angie
Angie: FUCK, that’s early!
Me: ?
Angie: Did u get joey’s text that the funeral is Monday at 11?
Me: No. did it say anything else?
Angie: Nope. Just funeral is monday at 11. Meg got it too.
Me: You know, I admire Mary Ann’s efficiency, but come on.
Angie: Right? Ouch. Hey, she’s got a busy week; things to do!
********
I could not stop thinking about Michael, about Joey, about their mother, Mary Ann. As I sat before my computer, trying to be productive, I found myself wandering to Michael’s Facebook page. Friends had been posting messages for days. I traced them back to the day of the accident. Hopeful posts full of cheery words of encouragement and casual affection. Full of the expectation that Michael would one day wake and read this page, laugh at the inside jokes, the Super Bowl predictions made before game one of the regular season. And then, a slight shift. More sadness. Posts about how much he was loved. It reminded me of those vigils on the news, for teenagers at high schools, dead from some similar tragedy. Posterboards full of pink-inked messages and hearts drawn between them. Thursday night, a benefit, hastily arranged with auction items and two live bands, held at the bar where Michael worked. By Friday, Michael’s page was just heartbreaking. A girl, Sara — the most frequent poster all along, professing how much she loved her friend, telling him he has to pull through, telling him she can’t wait for him to wake up and see how much he’s loved.
At the end of the day, she posted again. “I’m fucking begging you,” she said.
I was frustrated by these messages for reasons it seems unkind to explain. I wanted these friends to understand that Michael was not coming back, that their posts on his page may only magnify the pain his family was feeling. I knew that their messages would serve as a kind of guest book. I understood their hurt, but I wanted them to stop hoping. They seemed so young. They didn’t seem to know that sometimes hope is the unkindest thing of all.
My eyes kept going to Sara’s photo. Michael is in it with her. I don’t even know this girl and I’m worried about how she’ll take this. She loves him. It is clear from just a few words in a handful of posts scattered between other people’s sentiments that she loves him. I later learned that she had been his girlfriend until two months before.
********
Saturday, late morning
Text, with Angie, Meg and Will:
Me: Joey just called. he’s totally annoyed with Michael. “you’re just draaaagging it out, aren’t you?” he’s saying his bp is up, breathing is shallow but because his heart is strong he can hold out for a while. apparently there’s a plan to stick w/monday if he dies by 5pm. omfg, right? it’s about the obit deadline. oh, and grandma fell on her face yesterday and is all bruises. joey called her a drama queen.
Meg: Wow. I don’t think there are words. Um… so, exactly what should we be praying for now?
********
Joey couldn’t sit in Michael’s room on Saturday. He told me during a phone call that he’d sat there for six hours Friday. “It’s awful. I’m staring at him, and then I’m looking at the monitor: ‘Oh, look, the line changed.’ ‘Oh, it’s down to 27.’ ‘Oh, now it’s 50.’ And then I look at Michael. “
I thought of my uncle, and how we had done the exact same thing, how staring at the monitors and almost willing the lines to flatten had felt like such a maudlin thing to do. How wondering, every time he exhaled and held still, whether he had taken his last breath. And then he would take another.
“He’s not there,” Joey told me. “I know it. He’s just… this isn’t him. He’s gone.”
********
Saturday, early afternoon
Text, with Sister 2
Sister 2: So, do you think there’s a trip to Ohio in your near future?
Me: well, i’ve already booked an early am flight monday, return tues afternoon, rental car and hotel. so this whole michael not quite dying thing is a bit awkward now.
Sister 2: Hahaha. Oh man. That’s what u get for being proactive.
Me: this is the problem with joey’s mother’s efficiency. she doesn’t mess around. she’s done this before and she wants it over. so she set the funeral for monday @11a. but now it’s like, “michael, you have to die by 5p or we’ll miss the obit deadline for the paper and we’ll have to postpone your funeral.” rude.
Sister 2: Oh my goodness. I thought u just assumed when it would be or something. That is so totally awkward.
Me: it really is. as i was booking it i was kind of like, “what if…?” so now it’s all, “So, like, uh… what’s your deal?” and michael’s fb page is a disaster. i can’t look anymore.
Sister 2: people saying their final goodbyes via fb?
Me: some goodbye, some hang on you can do this, some begging… it’s also odd b/c he’s 32 but a lot of these people seem younger.
Me (2): and joey says people are sending condolences and then coming back saying they didn’t realize he hadn’t died, maybe there’s a chance, woohoo, and joey’s like, “he’s brain dead. stop.”
Sister 2: Huh. That’s terrible. I’d stop reading that pronto.
Me: and so I did. also I just realized i accidentally sent that last msg to joey instead of you. so that’s awesome.
Sister 2: I am leaning on the washing machine guffawing at your misfortune. and what did your follow up to him say? so sorry, am letting my sister know how things are going… awkward death vigil emoticon?
Me: I thought about sending an oops sorry text but then i thought, “screw it.” i’m leaving it alone. fortunately i did NOT send him the one that I sent to angie and meg in which I quoted will: “next time, wait til he’s dead.”
********
Saturday, 5:00pm
Text, with Angie
Angie: aaaaand TIME.
Me: you are seriously not right.
Me(2): it’s like you put an expiration date on his expiration date. that said… I’m hovering over “cancel trip” on travelocity…
Angie: Ooh. Can they do a full refund? Just got Joey’s text.
Me: why am I not getting these mass texts he’s sending? what does it say?
Angie: FWD: “No change… We are in limbo and it’s exhausting and sucks. Funeral will be Tuesday at the earliest now… stay tuned.”
********
The internet can completely confuse any situation with its information. I looked up “brain death” and searched for a credible source. I was wondering what part of the brain controls heart rate and breathing. The information I read told me that if his heart was beating and his lungs taking air (however shallowly), he technically was not completely brain dead.
Which was awful news, in a terribly twisted way.
I wondered. When Mary Ann and the doctors agreed it was best not to reinsert the feeding tube, had they done something merciful, or had they missed their chance? If the latter, a chance at what? Was there valor in preserving life that couldn’t live in hopes of a miracle, or just a clearer conscience? Suddenly life teetered on a thin line not of breath and beat, but of liquefied nourishment, withheld. What would take its toll first: the relative lack of oxygen in lungs inhaling but not filling, slowly dissipating in his blood, slowly shutting down his functions? Or starvation and dehydration? Which was crueler? Without consciousness, without cognition, was either cruel at all?
********
Saturday evening
Facebook, with Joey
Joey: so over it
Me: I know honey
Joey: exhausted
and cranky
we cleaned out his room and such
my family is exhausted
Me: it will be over eventually
there will be an end to this part
Joey: Blah
a mother in law lasted TEN DAYS
Me: WHOSE mother-in-law?!
Joey: some woman
********
Text, with Angie, Meg and Will
Me: FYI, i cancelled the arrangements i booked. will rebook when we KNOW plans. i’m fb chatting w/joey… he’s “over it” and @ home eating pasta.
Meg: Oh my. if he has resorted to carbs, it must be bad.
*******
Text, with Sister 2
Me: So… michael has missed his print deadline. :-/ i’ve cancelled the trip i booked on travelocity (full refund – woot!) and i will rebook when we know for sure.
Sister 2: I was so totally just wondering how to word my question about whether or not he made the obit print deadline. Hooray for full refunds. Is joey texting u frequently or infrequently right now
Me: we’re fb chatting. he’s “over it.” he went back to the house to eat pasta. (he never eats pasta.) Ps don’t worry about wording. angie texted me at EXACTLY 5:00 and said “aaaaand TIME.” last night she asked me if we had an “official lights out” yet.
Sister 2: So, recap. Joey had another bro who already died? or am i making that up? and michael and how many sisters
Me: okay, here’s the tree. mary ann and ed had joey, michael and emily. they divorced early 80s. mary ann married tom mid-80s. his wife had committed suicide in ’82. he had melanie and jacqueline. mary ann and tom had david together. tom was an abusive alcoholic who shot himself in the head in 2001. david, who was 13 or 14 at the time, found him. he lingered for 5 days before they took him off life support. david was killed in a car accident in november 2010, three days after melanie got engaged. michael’s accident was four days before her wedding. his pneumonia set in on her wedding day and that’s what spiked the pressures, swelled his brain and led to the stroke. meanwhile, jacqueline and melanie are fighting mary ann over their father’s trust. and then there’s joey and emily.
Sister 2: I’m going to pitch their family story to Lifetime. They’re dropping like flies.
Me: we’ve decided that mary ann is basically the heroine of a steinbeck novel.
Sister 2: how do we feel about melanie’s marriage? seems cursed. and the fighting over the trust… so this is super awkward.
Me: oh it’s super-duper awkward. joey doesn’t believe jackie and melanie would have initiated the legal battle if david hadn’t died b/c he had a vote too and would not have allowed it. they started it just weeks after he died. see, melanie’s new dad-in-law is a lawyer.
Sister 2: I need to see this in a diagram of some sort
Me: took me years to get it right.
********
The way we love our friends is sometimes more powerful than the way we love our family members. It is not a matter of intensity, or depth, or sincerity. It is a matter of movement, of ache, and the odd frustration of not sharing fully in the grief, and therefore not knowing how much right we have to feel it. It was natural but disconcerting, being so consumed with thoughts of Michael when I had barely been choked up at the death of my father’s uncle two weeks before. Sitting with this, I understood that this was simply, and horribly, a case of too much suffering for a dear friend and his family, and two young men gone far too soon. My great-uncle was 87. Joey’s brothers had been 24 and 32.
I could not sleep.
********
Loss
Sunday 9:40am
Text, while I am en route to church to sing at a 9/11 memorial Mass:
Joey: Michael died at 8:30am this morning. Funeral is Tuesday.
********
I cannot cry, because I have to sing. I turn off the 9/11 memorial services playing on the radio. Later, I do cry, but it’s after church, and I am not quite sure whether I am crying for Michael and Joey’s family, or for thousands of others.
********
Joey and I spoke for a while on the phone that afternoon. He told me he’s sort of angry at Michael for dying on the anniversary of 9/11. Now his family can’t even own the day; it’s overshadowed, upstaged by national memorial events. I told Joey his feelings remind me of an interview I heard on NPR the other day, with a woman who lost her husband on 9/11. She feels that it’s odd and intrusive that the whole nation puts her through the day all over again every year. It’s such a deeply personal loss, to lose your husband, and the whole country claims him as their own. It takes away. “I find ‘Never forget’ to be a sort of odd thing,” she said. “If you want to move on, you have to forget.”
Joey, as a New Yorker, will forever be conflicted about how to grieve that day.
Joey said he thinks Michael and David are deeply upset by the Steelers’ loss. He’s sure it’s ruined their reunion plans for the day. He knows I don’t like the Steelers. “Don’t bring that up when you’re here,” he said.
“No, I won’t. There’s already been enough tragedy without me bringing up the Steelers.”
********
Sunday, late afternoon
Facebook, with Joey
Joey: Was it gauche to ask the girls to bring ice cream?
Me: Absolutely not. I love your specificity.
Joey: Um, YEAH
last thing I need is to waste the opportunity on some weird flavor
Though the sweet corn and blueberry is amazing.
Me: I’ve heard about that. And something with lavender…?
Joey: Oh, the lavender honey is delish
and odd
less of an ice cream and more of an apertif
Me: an amuse bouche
Joey: EXACTLy
I think I am going back on Wednesday
so I can celebrate my birthday at the beach
Me: ah, good man. I wondered what you’d do about your birthday.
Joey: I love it when you talk like Judi Dench.
Me: There is nothin’ like a dame.
Joey: MA is very much “back to normal.” Plus our limit is five days. It gets ugly.
Me: I hear ya. How is your father?
Joey: Oy. He’s driving me insane. He’s trying to chase down an urn. He’s OBSSESSED.
********
Minutes later
Phone call
“You are NOT staying in that hotel. It’s FOUL,” Joey declared at me.
“Joey, I know, but–”
“No. We’re not having it. You’re coming here. You’ll stay at the neighbors’.” He dropped his voice conspiratorially. “Mrs. Baker is a little put-out. She thought the others would be staying so she’s done all this work and now she wants a houseguest.”
“Well, if you–”
“My mother wants to talk to you.”
Oh, God. I haven’t offered condolences and she’s going to light right in to why I shouldn’t stay at the hotel. Don’t put her on the phone. ”Jo–”
The phone is handed over.
“You are NOT staying in that hotel, that’s ridiculous. We have plenty of room. Come here. That way when we party all night tomorrow night you don’t have to drive back to that horrible hotel. Really. A hotel? Stay here.”
“Well… if you want me to stay there, I appreciate it. I just wanted to give the family room,” I tried to explain.
“We have TONS of room!” came from Joey in the background.
“We have plenty,” Mary Ann agreed. “You won’t be with us. You’ll be at the neighbors’. It’s silly. Stay here. You’re staying here. That’s it. Cancel that awful hotel.”
********
Funeral
The night before the service, when I rang the bell at the lake house, I could hear Joey excitedly declaring my arrival through the panes of glass along the side of the front door. He wrapped me in a tight hug as soon as he opened it and thanked me for coming. Mary Ann mirrored her only remaining son’s reaction to my presence.
At the table in the expansive kitchen were three sets of neighbors, and Mary Ann’s partner, George. Introductions were made with those I had not met before. I was the first friend of my generation to arrive. They fed me. Grandma came, and was hard to look at; the way her injuries had settled themselves in her 86-year-old skin after her fall had left her entire face purpled and greened, from forehead to jawline, on both sides of her nose and all the way across to her temples. But she was smiling right up to her eyes behind scratched glasses.
Around the table, stories. Wine and laughing. So much food. Life, in stop-animation, with the understanding that it would go on, however heavily, after this. I kept looking at Joey and Michael’s sister Emily, who looked so much like Michael. She was the youngest, since David had died. I kept wondering, as she sat quietly listening and smiling, how she would do from now on with this grief. Mary Ann said a family friend, who is a doctor, had looked at Michael’s CT scans from between the bicycle accident and the stroke he suffered as a result of the injuries and pneumonia. “It was bad from the beginning,” Mary Ann said. “There was too much damage. We made the right choice.” It almost sounded like she did not need to convince herself.
Will arrived, toting a hundred pictures of the five of us friends from college, which were shared around the table. Then he, Joey and I went down to stand on the dock that jutted into the lake from the backyard. In the glow of the light from the house, we talked about the fight over the trust fund, and cast the movie version of the memoir Joey was now sure to write.
In the morning, in the Bakers’ kitchen, Mrs. Baker fed me breakfast casserole and good coffee and we talked about the unbelievable tragedies that had befallen our dear friends’ family. “We’re all so close,” she told me as she described the history of this nestled side of the big lake, houses propped next to each other separated by mere feet. She told me how, when everyone’s kids were young, there were community meals, dinners shared all together, almost every night, breakfasts almost every morning, each neighbor taking a turn until it cycled back around again. She told me how her son Nathan had been so close with David, how they had grown up together, and how he had an interview for medical school two months after David had died.
“The interviewer asked him, ‘So when you go home, what are you going to tell your best friend about this day?’” The tears came quickly and her throat closed, and she needed a moment before she could continue. “Nathan couldn’t even speak to answer the question.” She wiped her eyes. “That was the worst,” she said, mostly to herself.
She told me how angry she was at Melanie and Jacqueline. She said Mary Ann had told her two nights before, “A year ago, I had six kids. Now, it looks like I only have two.”
But the day was beautiful and the lake was sparkling, and the funeral service was just as one should be. It was hopeful, it spoke of joy far more than sorrow, of gratitude far more than pain. Joey eulogized his brother perfectly, but worked in a very pointed reference to Michael’s valued preference for family harmony – a sentence for which he leveled a steely gaze directly at Melanie and Jacqueline, who had called relatives to explain their side of the fight before the funeral; who ha arrived minutes before the service and who left immediately following, with their husbands. I had spotted Sara among the large crowd of mourners, her eyes swollen and red. I wanted to hug her and tell her I was heartbroken for her, a girl at a loss for where to sit in a world that seemed to have crumbled so quickly for her. The church, it was noted, in some ways resembled a teepee, which was a fitting representation on this occasion, given Michael’s deep passion for Native American history. There were windows all around the sanctuary, and we seemed to be celebrating Michael’s life in the middle of nothing but trees. Angie and Meg had arrived from their long drives a few minutes before the Mass began, and the happy sounds of Meg’s 10-month-old daughter echoed in the church.
After the luncheon, those closest to the family went back to the lake house. In the soothing breeze of a September day, in the sunlight that bathed the lake and the lawn, there was serenity. Friends sat circled. We five occupied steps and lawn space, the first time we had actually all been in the same place at the same time since Angie’s wedding seven years ago. As I walked into the house to gather my belongings and begin my goodbyes so I could make my way to my flight, I turned back and saw my college friends, framed by the French doors, backed by the shimmering water. “You’re not leaving,” Joey mouthed at me – a gentle restraint rather than a question or a complaint. And I wished I didn’t have to. Despite 16 years of friendship, this was the first true glimpse I had at our future, at knowing that we would do this again and again for each other.
“You know how to find us now,” Mary Ann’s partner, George, said to me, his hand on my arm. “Will you find us again?” I told him I hoped I would.
“Joey needs…” he searched for a word. “Support. Is that a good word?” I nodded. “We weren’t nearly over David,” he finished. “Not nearly over David, when this happened.” And for the dozenth time, I had no idea what I could possibly say that would sound at all graceful or right.
As I drove to the airport, the song that had been playing over and over in my head since Sunday returned. I had seen James Taylor perform it in a brief amount of coverage I allowed myself to watch of the 9/11 memorial in New York. It is a song that ruins me on a good day, for reasons I have never understood. On Sunday, with the weight of sadness that comes from the indelible memory of the attacks and Michael’s death compounding it, the song seemed fitting and absolute. I will never hear it again without thinking of Michael, and of the gut-wrenching event now known simply as September Eleventh. But I hope I will also think of a sun-drenched home on a sparkling lake, and a day when love between family and friends was as tangible as the grass on which we sat, in honor of a young man who deserved his own remembrance. And I hope, through the sadness, I will smile.
The hurricane of two weeks ago has apparently given way to monsoon season. But the pouring rain and all-day gray seem appropriate, because Irene seems to have ushered in a whole series of heartbreaking news. It’s so strange how that happens, isn’t it? Everything goes along fine, the usual little dips here and there but nothing dramatic, and then bam— too many sad things to process. Twin Nephs’ first babysitter died on September 2 from leukemia. She was in her late 50s. The news hit hard, as we understood that she was doing better. Her illness was the reason she had to stop watching Twin Nephs, little boys that she and her husband cared for from when they were three months old, boys they absolutely adored and hated to give up to someone else’s care. Her death preceded the tenth anniversary of my 55-year-old uncle’s death from leukemia by one day. It trailed word that a coworker in his late 40s has been diagnosed with leukemia by about four days.
How does that happen?
The bit of news that far preoccupies my mind right now is what’s happening with my dear friend Joey‘s family. They’ve always been given to dramatic heartbreak: divorce, suicide, complicated dynamics. Last November, Joey’s stepsister Melanie got engaged. Three days later, their youngest brother, David, was killed in a car accident. He was 24. Just a couple weeks after that, Melanie and her sister, Jacqueline, opened up a contentious legal battle with Joey’s mother, their stepmother, over the trust she oversaw after their father committed suicide 11 years ago. Joey doesn’t believe they would have done it if David were alive; David was the girls’ half-brother, sharing the same father. He had a vote, and Joey says he would never have allowed it. It has put Joey squarely in the middle, trying to preserve the relationship between his mother, himself, and the women he has called his sisters for nearly 30 years. It has gotten so contentious that the girls won’t speak to his mother. Not even at Melanie’s wedding this past Saturday.
Days before the wedding, on Wednesday, Joey’s 30-year-old brother, Michael, was hit by a truck while riding his bicycle home from the bar where he worked. The greatest injury was to his head, but the swelling in his brain decreased on its own and he was responding to painful stimuli while in a medically induced coma to quiet his brain activity and give him a chance to heal. The stimuli were working on every part of his body, so paralysis did not appear to be a possible outcome. We all believed he would recover. It might take time, but he would be alright. This family couldn’t possibly be made to endure more.
But Saturday – the day of Melanie’s wedding – Michael contracted pneumonia. His fever spiked his pressures and his brain swelled out of control. Sunday morning, surgeons removed part of his skull to allow for the swelling. On Monday, he had a CT scan to see how things were going post-op, and when the results came back, doctors discovered Michael had had a massive stroke sometime between the surgery and the scan.
The doctors say there is no hope of Michael regaining function. He is no longer responding to any stimuli. He is unable to breathe on his own. If he survives, he will be permanently vegetative. The family will make a decision tomorrow about life support.
Joey didn’t get the news until he landed back home in New York.
My dear friend is about to lose his second brother in less than a year. His mother is about to lose her second son, while she grapples with losing, in a different way, the girls she raised after their own mother committed suicide 30 years ago.
It’s far, far too much.
When he asked me for a reason on the phone yesterday, I could give him none. When he asked if God had a plan, all I could do was tell him I don’t believe in a God who does this to people on purpose. All I could do was tell him that we don’t find God in the tragedy; we find Him in the support of our friends and family when that tragedy occurs.
It seemed nowhere near enough comfort to give.
Joey and I are part of a very tight group of friends. When David died, he told us not to come. He felt it would be overwhelming, dealing with family and us there. He thought he would want to spend time with all of us and wouldn’t be able to, and that would upset him, and it was best if we didn’t come. But this time, he told me in great sobs, he’s calling in the chips. If there is a funeral, he wants us there. He said he doesn’t think he can do it this time.
And there was nothing I could say, other than, “We’ll be there.”
It’s not enough.
I think about how I would be if I lost one of my sisters, let alone two. I mean no exaggeration when I say I’m certain I would be on the floor for days. I would never, ever be the same. I would lose whole parts of me. I think of my friend, six years sober, just now beginning to realize how angry he is about the circumstances of his family’s life together and apart, feeling at once terrible and relieved to live hundreds of miles from them. When David died, it was the distance that helped him feel like he could move on. But it made him feel guilty, too. And now with Michael in a state of suspension, he’s struggling to figure out what to hope for… too anguished to think of a life without his brother, and too humane to think of keeping him alive without hope of recovery. He’s worried about his mother. He’s furious with his sisters.
And there is no reason for any of it.
But outside my window, all of it is more than reason enough for the rain.
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.
Today I’ve decided to post on a piece I’m actually working on right now, as opposed to something I’ve sung in the past or with which I’m familiar. It’s an Italian aria (aria=opera or oratorio solo, usually focusing on one particular theme) called Selve amiche, written by Antonio Caldera.
No, you should not know who that is. But so that you will: he grew up in Venice and was a choirboy at a basilica. He became the conductor at the court of the Duke of Mantua (you shouldn’t know who that is, either). Two years later, at the age of 31, he wrote an opera now referred to as Opera pastorale. Of interest in this opera is that it uses the same libretto (lyrics) as La costanza in amor vince l’inganno… which was another opera written by Caldera. But he wrote it all to different music for Opera pastorale.
Why did he do that? Well, La constanza was written for a public theater in Macerata, with paying guests who bought tickets. Anybody who wanted to see it could see it. What’s distinct about Opera pastorale is that it was performed in Rome in a private theater with invited audience members… and that meant (drumroll, please) women were allowed to perform in it. The character who sings Selve amiche is called Sylvia, and she was played by a woman in Opera pastorale. That wasn’t allowed in Rome’s public theaters at the time, which is how we wound up with a bunch of eunuchs singing soprano.
Poor guys.
Selve amiche is very short and not terribly broad-ranged. It only covers an octave, and a moderate one at that. My voice teacher let me choose from three pieces to study next, and I chose this one for two reasons: I need to work on getting more resonance in my middle range, and I need to work a little more on the close intervals that this piece exhibits in its “runs” (phrases containing a string of relatively fast-paced notes). You don’t care about why I chose it, but I wanted to show you the value in a piece that’s relatively simple, even in opera. They’re not all unapproachable and complicated, and since this aria’s quiet plea is simple, I think its composition matches it well.
Apart from that, it’s just pretty. In the opening scene of the opera, Sylvia is struggling with matters of love, and she wanders into the woods to try to find some solace.
Lyrics and translation:
Selve amiche, ombrose piante, fido albergo del mio core,
Friendly woods, shady trees, faithful shelter of my heart,
Chiede a voi quest’alma amante qualche pace al suo dolore.
This loving soul asks of you some peace for its sadness.
With that simple request, in this simple piece, I ask that you simply close your eyes and listen to Suzana Frasheri sing. Happy Music Monday.
Last week, I regaled you with the amazingness of the Flower Duet from Lakme’ and mentioned how it’s been used in commercials. I think it’s sort of bizarre when commercials use classical and opera pieces that are seemingly completely unrelated to the product they’re pushing. Case in point: this week’s Music Monday sampling.
I have Comcast cable, and the monopoly company has been running an ad lately in which people and objects sort of jump out of a television screen at a viewer who’s rather blown away by the whole thing. Nevermind that I don’t want that to happen in my house, ever, and I find it to be a fairly meaningless ad. The reason it caught my attention at all is because of the music it uses.
It’s the “Sanctus” movement from Mozart’s Requiem.
Ah, Mozart’s Requiem. I said in my first Music Monday post that I have had a love affair with it for years. I sang it in France. I’m letting that sentence fall flat because of the link; I don’t want to launch into the whole thing right now, so you can read a bit about it in that previous entry if you want. Point is, the Mozart Requiem is a very well-known work in choral circles, and it absolutely rings and echoes and soars in French churches, be they made of marble or humble stone with dirt floors. We did it in both, plus a more modern, plaster-walled place, just because we could.
The work has a back story that’s almost mythical: Mozart was commissioned to write it for the late wife of a stranger. Our Wolfgang and his wife Constanze were desperate for money and she was getting increasingly anxious about it. (Wolfgang was a bit devil-may-care about things like this; he had other things to worry about, like the Emperor.) But Mozart was becoming increasingly ill, and seemingly going mad; he felt the work would kill him.
He was right. Though he wrote the foundation of the entire work and had completed parts of it, he died in the middle of writing the “Lacrimosa” movement (coincidentally, the only movement in the work that concentrates on grief).
With her husband dead, Constanze was left to search out someone who could finish the commissioned piece so she could get the much-needed payment. Constanze was not a gold digger… she was just really strapped for cash, with mouths to feed and a husband dead at 36. Eventually, she convinced one of Mozart’s associates, Franz Sussmayr, to complete the work.
That’s all I’ll say about that for now.
The “Sanctus,” for those unfamiliar with the Catholic rite of worship and, more specifically, the funeral mass (which is what a requiem traditionally is), is the part of the mass that translates to the Holy Holy Holy. It beatifies God during the consecration of the bread and wine, in the liturgy of the eucharist. It’s a song of praise, and Mozart makes it triumphant in the midst of mourning and fear and heartfelt requests for the forgiveness of sins… but it still has plenty of the darkness that comes with the fear of God in that moment when a soul hovers between Earth and either Heaven or Hell.
Which is why I find it odd that Comcast uses it in their commercial.
There are so many beautiful moments in the work, it’s almost impossible to pick a favorite, but the “Sanctus” movement is one of mine, for the sake of one single line. Throughout all the rehearsals and performances of the Requiem, I was next to my friend Bill, who has a gorgeous tenor voice. Every time we got to this one phrase, when my soprano part dipped lower and his complementary tenor part soared higher, it was all I could do to keep my sound going; the phrase just takes my breath away. It boils down to one note, really, but Mozart was so brilliant in the way he structured the chord that it just opens the whole thing wide. Below, the link to the movement, conducted by Sir Colin Davis. I regret that I do not know which choir he is conducting or when and where the recording was made. The phrase I adore begins at 1:09, and the tenor note to listen for is at 1:14-1:15. As usual, I encourage you to find better quality recordings on your downloadable music provider of choice; if you do, I suggest a recording on the London Digital label, of the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Georg Solti and featuring Cecilia Bartoli, Arleen Auger, Vinson Cole and Rene Pape as soloists, with the Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsoperchor. (That’s a choir.) It was recorded live in Vienna in 1992, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death. If you want to buy the CD, the cover looks like this:
Apart from checking on the time for that tenor note… close your eyes and listen. Happy Music Monday.
can’t. would be soooo obvious.
