The Undertaking

by Thomas Lynch

  And I remember in those first years as a father and a funeral director, new at making babies and at burying them, I would often wake in the middle of the night, sneak into the rooms where my sons and daughter slept, and bend to their cribsides to hear them breathe. It was enough. I did not need astronauts or presidents or doctors or lawyers. I only wanted them to breathe. Like my father, I had learned to fear.

  And, as my children grew, so too the bodies of dead boys and girls I was called upon to bury—infants becoming toddlers, toddlers becoming school children, children becoming adolescents, then teens, then young adults, whose parents I would know from the Little League or Brownies or PTA or Rotary or Chamber of Commerce. Because I would not keep in stock an inventory of children’s caskets, I’d order them, as the need arose, in sizes and half sizes from two foot to five foot six, often estimating the size of a dead child, not yet released from the county morgue, by the sizes of my own children, safe and thriving and alive. And the caskets I ordered were invariably “purity and gold” with angels on the corners and shirred crepe interiors of powdery pink or baby blue. And I would never charge more than the wholesale cost of the casket and throw in our services free of charge with the hope in my heart that God would, in turn, spare me the hollowing grief of these parents.

  There were exceptions to the “purity and gold.” Once a man whose name I remember shot his two children, ages eight and four, while their mother waited tables up in town. Then he shot himself. We laid him out in an 18-gauge steel with the Last Supper on the handles and his daughter and his son in a matching casket together. The bill was never paid. She sold the house, skipped town. I never pursued it.

  And one Christmastide twin six-year-olds fell through the ice on the river that divides this town. It ran through their backyard and no one knows if they went in together or one tried to save the other. But the first of the brothers was found the same day and the next one was found two days later, bobbed up downstream after the firemen broke up the ice by the dam. We put them in the one casket with two pillows, foot to foot—identical in their new Oshkosh B’Gosh jeans and plaid shirts their mother had mail-ordered from Sears for Christmas. Their father, a young man then, aged overnight and died within five years of nothing so much as sorrow. Their mother got cancer and died after that of grief metastasized. The only one left, the twins’ older brother, who must be nearing thirty now, is long gone from this place.

  And I remember the poor man with the look of damage on him whose wife strangled their eight-year-old son with a belt. Then she wrote a fourteen-page suicide note, explaining why she felt her son, who had been slow to read, faced a lifetime of ridicule and failure she felt she was freeing him from. Then she took three dozen pills, lay down beside the boy, and died herself. First he selected a cherry casket and laid them out together in it, the boy at rest under his mother’s arm. But before the burial, he asked to have the boy removed from the mother’s casket and placed in one of his own and buried in his own grave. I did as he instructed and thought it was sensible.

  So early on I learned my father’s fear. I saw in every move my children made the potentially lethal outcome. We lived in an old house next door to the funeral home. The children grew up playing football in the side yard, roller skating in the parking lot, then skateboarding, riding bikes, then driving cars. When they were ten, nine, six, and four, their mother and I divorced. She moved away. I was “awarded” custody—four badly saddened kids I felt a failure towards. And though I was generally pleased with the riddance that divorce provides—the marriage had become a painful case—I was suddenly aware that single parenting meant, among other things, one pair of eyes to watch out for one’s children with. Not two. One pair of ears to keep to the ground. One body to place between them and peril; one mind. There was less conflict and more worry. The house itself was dangerous: poison under every sink, electrocution in every appliance, radon in the basement, contagion in the kitty litter. Having been proclaimed by the courts the more “fit” parent, I was determined to be one.

  I would rise early, make the sack lunches while they ate cereal, then drive them to school. I had a housekeeper who came at noon to do the laundry and clean and be there when the youngest came home from kindergarten. I’d be at the office from nine-thirty until four o’clock, then come home to get dinner ready—stews mostly, pastas, chicken and rice. They never ate as much as I prepared. Then there was homework and dance classes and baseball, then bed. And when it was done, when they were in bed and the house was ahum with its appliances, washer and dryer and dishwasher and stereo, I’d pour myself a tumbler of Irish whiskey, sit in a wingback chair and smoke and drink and listen—on guard for whatever it was that would happen next.

  Most nights I passed out in the chair, from fatigue or whiskey or from both. I’d crawl up to bed, sleep fitfully, and rise early again.

  The poor cousin of fear is anger.

  It is the rage that rises in us when our children do not look both ways before running into busy streets. Or take to heart the free advice we’re always serving up to keep them from pitfalls and problems. It is the spanking or tongue lashing, the door slammed, the kicked dog, the clenched fist—the love, Godhelpus, that hurts: the grief. It is the war we wage against those facts of life over which we have no power, none at all. It makes for heroes and histrionics but it is no way to raise children.

  And there were mornings I’d awaken heroic and angry, hungover and enraged at the uncontrollable facts of my life: the constant demands of my business, the loneliness of my bed, the damaged goods my children seemed. And though it was anything but them I was really angry at, it was the kids who’d get it three mornings out of every five. I never hit, thank God, or screamed. The words were measured out, meticulous. I seethed. After which I would apologize, pad their allowances, and curry forgiveness the way any drunk does with the ones he loves. Then I stopped drinking, and while the fear did not leave entirely, the anger subsided. I was not “in recovery” so much as I was a drunk who didn’t drink and eventually came to understand that I was more grateful than resentful for the deliverance.

  But faith is, so far as I know it, the only known cure for fear—the sense that someone is in charge here, is checking the ID’s and watching the borders. Faith is what my mother said: letting go and letting God—a leap into the unknown where we are not in control but always welcome. Some days it seems like stating the obvious. Some days it feels like we are entirely alone.

  Here is a thing that happened. I just buried a young girl whose name was Stephanie, named for St. Stephen; the patron of stonemasons, the first martyr. She died when she was struck by a cemetery marker as she slept in the back seat of her parents’ van as the family was driving down the interstate on their way to Georgia. It was the middle of the night. The family had left Michigan that evening to drive to a farm in Georgia where the Blessed Mother was said to appear and speak to the faithful on the thirteenth of every month. As they motored down the highway in the dark through mid-Kentucky, some local boys, half an hour south, were tipping headstones in the local cemetery for something to do. They picked one up that weighed about fourteen pounds—a stone. What they wanted with it is anyone’s guess. And as they walked across the overpass of the interstate, they grew tired of carrying their trophy. With not so much malice as mischief, they tossed it over the rail as the lights of southbound traffic blurred below them. It was at this moment that the van that Stephanie’s father was driving intersected with the stolen marker from the local cemetery. The stone was falling earthward at thirty-two feet per second, per second. The van was heading south at seventy miles per hour. The stone shattered the windshield, glanced off Stephanie’s father’s right shoulder, woke her mother riding in the passenger seat and, parting the space between the two front seats, struck Stephanie in the chest as she lay sleeping in the back seat. She had just traded places with her younger brother who cuddled with his two other sisters in the rear seat of the van. It did not kill Stephanie instantly. Her sternum
was broken, her heart bruised beyond repair. A trucker stopped to radio for help but at two A.M. in Nowhere, Kentucky, on a Friday morning, such things take time. The family waited by the roadside reciting the rosary as Stephanie gasped for air and moaned. They declared her dead at the hospital two hours later. Stephanie’s mother found the stone in the back seat and gave it to the authorities. It said RESERVED FOSTER and was reckoned to be a corner marker from the Foster Lot in Resurrection Cemetery.

  Sometimes it seems like multiple choice.

  A: It was the Hand of God. God woke up one Friday the 13th and said, “I want Stephanie!” How else to explain the fatal intersection of bizarre events. Say the facts slowly, they sound like God’s handiwork. If the outcome were different, we’d call it a miracle.

  Or B: It wasn’t the Hand of God. God knew it, got word of it sooner or later, but didn’t lift a hand because He knows how much we’ve come to count on the Laws of Nature—gravity and objects in motion and at rest—so He doesn’t fiddle with the random or deliberate outcomes. He regrets to inform us of this, but surely we must understand His position.

  Or C: The Devil did it. If faith supports the existence of Goodness, then it supports the probability of Evil. And sometimes, Evil gets the jump on us.

  Or D: None of the above. Shit happens. That’s Life, get over it, get on with it.

  Or maybe E: All of the above. Mysteries—like decades of the rosary—glorious and sorrowful mysteries.

  Each of the answers leaves my inheritance intact—my father’s fear, my mother’s faith. If God’s will, shame on God is what I say. If not, then shame on God. It sounds the same. I keep shaking a fist at the Almighty asking Where were you on the morning of the thirteenth? The alibi changes every day.

  Of course the answers, the ones that faith does not require, and are not forthcoming, would belong to Stephanie’s parents and the hundreds I’ve known like them over the years.

  I’ve promised Stephanie’s headstone by Christmas—actually for St. Stephen’s Day, December 26th. The day we all remember singing Good King Wenceslaus. Stephen was accused of blasphemy and stoned in 35 A.D.

  When I first took Stephanie’s parents to the cemetery, to buy a grave for their daughter, her mother stood in the road and pointed to a statue of The Risen Christ. “I want her over there,” she said, “at the right hand of Jesus.” We walked across the section to an empty, unmarked space underneath the outstretched granite right arm of Christ. “Here,” Stephanie’s mother said, her wet eyes cast upward into the gray eyes of Christ. Stephanie’s father, his eyes growing narrow, was reading the name on the neighboring grave. FOSTER is what it read. It was cut in stone.

  Words Made Flesh

  Events unfold in ways that make us think of God. They achieve, in their happening, a symmetry and order that would be frightening if assigned to Chance. Things that happen here intersect with things that happen elsewhere, as if there were a plan. Coincidence makes way for correlation which, in its turn, bespeaks the intimate consortium of cause and effect—first in whispers, then in the full blushless voice of certainty: because it says, because. Eventually everything is suspect: I wash the car, it rains; she wears that perfume, he is dizzy with desire; as long as you whistle that tune no tigers appear. Ironies? Happenstance? Or is it that tune that keeps the tigers at bay? The finger of fate or of fate’s Maker that taps, deliberately, those dominoes, the tipping of which, down the ages, is history.

  Two years ago, my friend and mentor, the poet Henry Nugent, was cast into woe by the sudden dissolution of his second marriage. In hindsight there are always signs: troubles with teenagers, the death of elderly parents, professional appointments and disappointments. To the imponderable crises of middle age were added the ordinary stresses on a marriage that had survived seventeen years but would not make another.

  They had met when she was a student and he was an associate professor of English at a small state university in southeastern Kentucky. His first marriage, a barren, seven-year mismatch born of lust and mistrusting, had just been abandoned, amicably, as they say, before the accumulation of property or progeny. Henry Nugent, at thirty, had boyish good looks, a tenure-track position, no discernible emotional baggage, and a down payment on his literary estate in the form of his first book of poems on the shelf. Just out of her teens, the now former Mrs. Nugent was a singular beauty, darkly Italian, possessed of a marketable degree, her own ambitions, and the circumspection with respect to men you see in women raised with brothers. Hers were attributes of body and mind that amounted to more than the sum of those parts, which Henry spent the best part of the next two decades trying to decipher in verse. And she was attracted to the balance, she saw him always trying to maintain, between the tweedy man of letters and the lyric and irrepressible poet. That he made the whiteness of her inner thighs, the dark line of hairlets beneath her navel, and the bend of her body as she lay beside him the subject of well-crafted sonnets and villanelles and sestinas had been attractive in those early years. But if women in their twenties will trade favor for poems and warm to the easy duty of muses, by thirty they grow wary and by forty regard it as invasion of privacy and politically incorrect. They won’t be muses. They’ve their own version of the story. But she was twenty then.

  They were smitten. They married. Moved to Ohio. Made babies. And seemed happy enough until, on the brink of her thirty-seventh year, she called me one day to say she had had enough. She just needed a break. She couldn’t take it any more. She took the boys and the Buick and drove back to Kentucky, only returning when he had been served with papers and evicted by a force of law and custom too many men in the Western world are familiar with.

  Later, of course, the unflattering details shook out: a fling with a middle management type at the chicken processing plant. The name brand of the chicken would be recognizable to frequenters of the fresh meats section of their local grocery. There were hushed references to “diagnoses,” “appetites,” and “tendencies.” And public talk, inevitably, of the most private matters—trusts broken, faiths breached, a house divided by hurts. In the end it was a sadness, as all such events are sadnesses, beyond the consolation of friends or the power of prayer. It was a bad thing that happened to good, if not especially perfect, people.

  If Love and Death are the great themes, the death of love, in the lives of poets, is a predictable mystery.

  My friend, cut loose from the dockage of his household, looked into the barrel of his forty-seventh year bereft of wife and sons, bereft of the four-bedroom split-level he’d recently remortgaged, bereft of prospects of any kind. He came to the unhappy conclusion that many divorcing men with good life insurance come to—that the best thing he could do for his family, what was left of it, was to drop dead. His lawyer advised against rash judgments.

  Halfway through the legal imbroglio, his fourth collection, Good Counsel, was published by a highly respected university press. It was dedicated to his soon to be former spouse, who couldn’t have cared less, and to his sons, themselves not terribly impressed, lost as they were in the shuffle of marital failure. A brief but enthusiastic review in the Washington Post did little to cheer him, though it helped to sell, in one weekend, half of his book’s first printing. Harried and hapless, he spent months immersed in the minutiae of divorce: attorneys, private investigators, depositions, interrogatories. A scholar by training and disposition, and a pushover for languages and jargon, he became conversant in case law and precedent, show-cause, suit and countersuit. When he once referred to his sons as “the minor children,” I objected. I could not bear to hear these beautiful boys who had their mother’s wisdom and their father’s brains, his dark humor and her brown eyes, called anything but precious. He kept crafting his testimony and his closing arguments for a day in court I told him would never come. The billable hours on both sides were plentiful.

  Once the litigants had spent all they had saved toward the boys’ college educations, the attorneys, well paid for the rattling of sabers and the la
unching of salvos, met over sushi, divided the spoils, and agreed to meet for golf the following weekend, weather and caseloads permitting.

  It was done.

  Good counsel, near as anyone could figure, was unequivocally and irrevocably, finished.

  On the grand scale of things, a sad man, adrift in southcentral Ohio, compares unimportantly to the larger sorrows. War rages in the usual places, hunger whittles through whole populations. Plagues decimate the culture and the sub-cultures. The poor are with us always. The dead are everywhere. In such a world it is hard to work up sympathy for a white man with tenure, the lion’s share of his pension left, visitation rights, his health, his job.

  Heartbreak is an invisible affliction. No limp comes with it, no evident scar. No sticker is issued that guarantees good parking or easy access. The heart is broken all the same. The soul festers. The wound, untreated, can be terminal.

  But in a world that distributes victim status like coin of the realm, my friend’s demographics disqualified him from the institutional forms of relief. Where divorcing women are seen as taking charge of their lives, or getting out of abusive relationships, divorcing men are seen as damaged goods, deadbeat dads. Heartache is their comeuppance.

  Truth told, he was hardly alone. Look closely on Saturdays and Sundays when the fast food places and the cinemas and malls fill up with the non-custodial parents doing their “quality time” with their children. Real parents stay home on weekends to garden or golf or watch old movies with slow stews simmering on the stove. But non-custodials live a different life: uprooted, on the lam, forced to fit a week’s affection and discipline and guidance into what the losing attorney always calls their “liberal visitation rights.” They have to hustle to get some semblance of home life with their children. Taco Bell takes the place of turkey and mashed potatoes. The mall replaces the Main Streets of home towns always described as a great place to raise the kids. Weeklong parents buy their children underwear and orthodontics. Weekenders buy them toys and talk of trips to Disney World in the sparkling future. Many give up trying, telling themselves it’s too hard on the children, too hard on themselves. Too hard.