by Thomas Lynch
My mother thanked God I had not been killed, then fixed her eyes on me in a way it seemed she’d had some practice at—casting the cold eye of the long suffering in the face of a boozy loved one. My father had quit drinking the year before, joined AA, began going to meetings. My brothers and I had been a little surprised by this as we had never seen him drunk before. I had overheard my mother’s sister once, complaining aloud about my father’s drinking. I must have been six or eight years old. I marched down to Aunt Pat’s on the next block and told her outright that my father wasn’t a drunk. And once, the Christmas after his father had died, I heard him and my mother come home late. He was raving a little. I thought it must be grief. He insisted the doctor be called. He said he was having a heart attack. The doctor, I think, tried to cover for him, behaved as if there was something wrong other than drink. In any case, by the time I’d taken my dive off the balcony, my father had a year’s sobriety under his belt and should have been able to recognize an inebriate when he saw one. But instead of a curse, he saw blessing: his son, somewhat broken but reparable and alive.
Now they are both dead and I reckon a fixture in my father’s heaven is the absence of any of his children there, and a fixture in my mother’s is the intuition that we will all follow, sooner or later but certainly.
WE PARENT THE way we were parented. The year they began to make real sense to me was 1974. In February the first of my children was born. In June we purchased the funeral home in Milford. I was a new parent and the new undertaker in a town where births and deaths are noticed. And one of the things I noticed was the number of stillbirths and fetal deaths we were called upon to handle. There was no nearby hospital twenty years ago; no medical office buildings around town. The prenatal care was not what it should be, and in addition to the hundred adult funerals we handled every year in those days, we would be called upon to take care of the burial of maybe a dozen infants—babies born dead, or born living but soon dead from some anomaly, and several every year from what used to be called crib death and is now called Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
I WOULD SIT with the moms and dads of these babies—dead of no discernible cause—they simply forgot to breathe, trying to make some sense of all of it. The fathers, used to protecting and paying, felt helpless. The mothers seemed to carry a pain in their innards that made them appear breakable. The overwhelming message on their faces was that nothing mattered anymore, nothing. We would arrange little wakes and graveside services, order in the tiny caskets with the reversible interiors of pink and blue, dust off the “baby bier” on which the casket would rest during the visitation, and shrink all the customs and accouterments to fit this hurt.
When we bury the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited. Memory is the overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort.
But burying infants, we bury the future, unwieldy and unknown, full of promise and possibilities, outcomes punctuated by our rosy hopes. The grief has no borders, no limits, no known ends, and the little infant graves that edge the corners and fencerows of every cemetery are never quite big enough to contain that grief. Some sadnesses are permanent. Dead babies do not give us memories. They give us dreams.
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 heroics 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.
THE GOLFATORIUM
Write, read, sing, sigh, keep silence, pray,bear thy crosses manfully; eternal life is worthy of all these, and greater combats.
—Thomas à Kempis
It came to me high over California. I was flying across the country to read poems in L.A. I had gigs at the Huntington Library, UCLA, San Bernardino, and Pomona College. And between engagements, four days free to wander at will in Southern California. It was a beautiful blue end of September, the year I quit drinking and my mother died. Crisp and cloudless, from my window seat the nation’s geography lay below me. The spacious skies, the fruited plane, the purple mountains’ majesty.
I was counting my blessings.
To have such a day for my first transcontinental flight, to have someone else paying for the ticket and the expenses and to be proffering stipends I’d gladly pay taxes on, to say that I was the poet and I had the poems that people in California were paying to hear—these were good gifts. My mother was dying back in Michigan, of cancer. She had told the oncologists, “Enough, enough.” They had discontinued the chemotherapy. I was running from the implications.
I was scared to death.
From Detroit we first flew over Lake Michigan then the grainy Midwest and Plains states, then the mountains and valleys of the Great West, and finally the desert west of Vegas and Reno until, in the distance, I could make out the western edges of the San Bernardino Mountains. The Mojave was all dry brown below until, just before the topography began to change from desert to mountain, I saw an irregular rectangle of verdant green. It was the unspeakable green of Co. Kerry or Virgin Gorda purposely transposed to the desert and foothills. I could only hazard a guess at its size—a couple hundred acres I reckoned, though I had no idea what altitude we were flying at. Had we already begun our final descent? The captain had turned on the seat belt sign. All of our seat backs and tray tables were forward.
“MUST BE A golf course,” is what I said to myself. I could see geometrically calculated plantings of trees and irregular winding pathways. “Or a cemetery. Hell!” I r
emember thinking, “This is California, it could be both!”
In the Midwest we think of California as not just another state and time zone but as another state of mind, another zone entirely, having more in common with the Constellation Orion than with Detroit or Cleveland or Illinois.
And then it came to me, the vision. It could be both!
I’ve been working in secret ever since.
It is no especial genius that leads me to the truth that folks in their right minds don’t like funerals. I don’t think we need a special election or one of those CNN polls on this. Most folks would rather shop dry goods or foodstuffs than caskets and burial vaults. Given the choice, most would choose root canal work over the funeral home. Even that portion of the executive physical where the doctor says, “This may be a little uncomfortable,” beats embalming ninety-nine times out of every hundred in the public races. Random samplings of consumer preference almost never turn up “weeping and mourning” as things we want to do on our vacations. Do you think a funeral director could be elected president? Mine was and is and, godhelpus, ever will be The Dismal Trade. We might be trusted (the last ones to let you down my father used to say) or admired (I don’t know how you do it!) or tolerated (well, somebody has to do it) and even loved, though our lovers are often a little suspect (how can you stand to have him touch you after . . . ?). But rare is that man or woman who looks forward to funerals with anything even approaching gladness, save perhaps those infrequent but cheerful obsequies for IRS agents or telemarketers or a former spouse’s bumptious attorney.