The Depositions

by Thomas Lynch

  That was another received truth of my father’s nunnish upbringing and my own—that life and time were not random accretions of happenstance. On the contrary, there was a plan for each and every one of us, and ours was only to discern our vocation, our calling, our purpose here. No doubt this is how the life of faith, the search for meaning, the wonder about the way of things first sidles up to the unremarkably curious mind.

  When I was seven, my mother sent me off to see the priest to learn enough of the magic Latin—the language of ritual and mystery—to become an altar boy. Father Kenny, our parish priest, had been at seminary with my father’s uncle and had hatched a plan with my sainted mother to guide me toward the holy orders. This, the two of them no doubt reckoned, was in keeping with the will of God—that I should fulfill the vocation and finish the work of the croupy and tubercular young man I’d been named for. I looked passably hallowed in cassock and surplice, had a knack for the vowel rich acoustics of Latin, and had already intuited the accountancy of sin and guilt and shame and punishment so central to the religious life. This tuition I owed to Father Maguire’s Baltimore Catechism and the Sister Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who had prepared me for the grade school sacraments of Confession and First Holy Communion. I had learned to fast before communion, to confess and do penance in preparation for the feast, to keep track of my sins by sort and number, to purge them by prayer and mortification, supplication and petition. To repair the damage done by impure thoughts or cursing at a sibling, a penance of Our Fathers and Hail Marys would be assigned. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa became for me the breast thumping idioms of forgiveness and purification, atonement, reconciliation and recompense that are so central to the holy sacrifice of the Mass we Catholic school kids daily attended. Thus were the connections early on established between holiness, blight and blessedness, contrition and redemption; and these powerful religious metaphors gathered themselves around the common table. It was all a way to be ever ready for the unpredictable death that might suddenly claim us. This theater replayed itself each night at our family meals where our father and our blessed mother would enact a home version of the sacrifice and feast, the brothers and sisters and I returning prodigals for whom the fatted calf, incarnate as stew or goulash, meatloaves or casseroles had been prepared. On Fridays my father brought home bags of fish and chips. Whatever our sins were, they seemed forgiven.

  Likewise were we made aware of the assistance we might lend the dead in their pilgrimage between this life and the next. Purgatory was the way station between the joys of heaven and this “vale of tears”—a place where sinners were purged of the guilt of their trespasses by the cleansing of temporary flames. Our prayers, it was well known, could shorten this purging for “the suffering souls,” and on certain days, notably the Feast of All Souls, we could pray them immediately into their eternal reward by coming and going into church with the proper combination of Our Fathers, Hail Marys and Glory Bes. There was a meter and mathematical aspect to our rituals and observances, and the dead, though gone, were not forgotten in our talk or daily rounds.

  We were not alone in this. A version of my ethnically flavored religious training played out in the homes of my Lutheran friends and Methodists, Jews and Buddhists, Muslims and Humanists—each had a narrative about life and death, right and wrong, sickness and health, goodness and evil, life’s endless litany of gains and losses, joyful and sorrowful mysteries.

  FOR ALL OF my mother’s and the priest’s well-intentioned connivances, and though I kept my ears peeled for it, I never ever heard the voice of God. I remember seeing the dead priest’s cassock hanging from a rafter in my grandparents’ basement, a box with his biretta and other priestly things on a shelf beside it. I tried them on but nothing seemed to fit, and over time my life of faith came to include an ambivalence about the church that ranged from passion to indifference—a kind of swithering brought on, no doubt, by mighty nature. A certain sense awakened in me when I was twelve or thereabouts that among the Good Lord’s greatest gifts to humankind were the gifts he gave us of each other. Possibly it was meditating on the changes I could see in bodies all around me and sense in my own body, late in my grade school years, that there were aspects of the priestly life that would be, thanks be to God, impossible for me.

  If pubescence foreclosed any notion I might have had of the celibate priesthood, it was the early sense of mortality and of my father’s association with it that shaped my adolescence.

  I remember the neighborhood celebrity my brothers and sisters and I enjoyed because our father was an undertaker. And though it would be years before I understood that word, I knew it meant that he had a lot to do with dead bodies, which would eventually find their way “under” the ground.

  As my brothers and I got older we were given jobs at the funeral home. Cutting lawns and painting parking blocks at first, then washing cars. When the first of our sisters was a teenager, she was put in the office to learn bookkeeping. And while she went on to become bookkeeper and comptroller of my father’s business, my brothers and I matriculated to removals from homes and hospitals, dressing and casketing bodies, swinging the door during visitations, and working funerals.

  We were dressed up in black suits, white shirts, and grey ties, shod in wingtips and barbered like men of another generation rather than the pimply boys we actually were, and we were paid by the hour to do whatever came up: cover the phones, work visitations, carry flowers, set up chairs, valet cars. It was a job. And it paid for our own cars, gas and maintenance, and left us enough money to go out on dates and other adventures. The summer days were long ones and we’d pile up a lot of overtime and lived like moguls. During the school year we would work shorter hours—evening visitations and Saturday funerals.

  I think it was swinging the door where I first learned the powers of language and of presence. It was standing in the lobby of my father’s funeral home that I first heard bereaved humans shaping the narratives that would carry them through their particular sorrow.

  There were abridged versions:

  “We couldn’t wish him back, the way he was suffering.”

  “He sat in the chair and smiled at me and was gone.”

  “She never would have wanted to trouble any of us.”

  “She just slept away and never felt a thing.”

  “At least he died doing what he loved to do.”

  And longer renditions, which touch on existential themes:

  She woke in the middle of the night complaining of a pain in her back. And it was hard to know what to do or what she needed. I got her the heat pad and plugged it in. She asked me would I bring her a glass of water and one of her pills. But by the time I got back to the bed, she wasn’t breathing. She’d rolled on her shoulder and her face was blue. It’s as if the switch was thrown and the power was off. I still can’t believe she’s gone. I just always assumed I’d be the first and she’d outlive me by years.

  Or the father of a dead soldier:

  God must just have looked down and said that Ben had learned everything life on the earth is supposed to teach you, even though he was only twenty-two years old, and we’ll always treasure every day we had with him, so God must have said, “Come on home to heaven, Ben,” and that was that. My son was a hero, and everyone enjoying freedom tonight has boys like Ben to thank for it all.

  Or the daughter of a woman dead of cancer:

  She fought the good fight against it—surgery, chemo, radiation, even holistic cures—but in the end it just overcame her. But her courage, her stamina, her relentless passion for life has been an example to all of us.

  Beyond the colloquies of the bereaved and the sympathies of family and friends, beyond the obituaries and eulogies and testimonials, were the raised speech and sacred texts of ritual and rubric: the Orthodox saracustas (prayers for the dead), the Blue Lodge services of the Masonic orders, the Catholics with their rosaries and wake services, and the inevitable obsequies and committals—ceremonies l
aden with Scripture and poetry, hymns and plainchants, psalms and litanies of praise. Both as helpless humans and as people of faith it was evident that language, with all its powers and nuances, became the life raft that kept the bereaved afloat in the unfamiliar seas of immediate grief.

  It is nearly impossible to overestimate the balm that language can be. The familiar prayer, even to the lapsed and apostate, evokes a nearly protective order in an otherwise unspeakable circumstance. It became clear to me, early on, that a death in the family presented both the most faith shaking and religiously charged among life’s many changes. And it is certain that many souls have been irreversibly won and irretrievably lost because of something said or read or sung over the dead in earshot of the living.

  My fascination with language and its powers began very early. Sundays were, in particular, a feast of nothing so much as the various and best deployments of the lexicon. We’d go to church at St. Columban’s in the morning, where the Latin liturgy was full of mystery and intrigue and the sense that we were communing in a supernatural and magical tongue. Father Kenny’s homiletics—often red-faced and passionate disquisitions on the obligations of stewardship—were tirades in which the priest played every part of the conversation and always won the arguments he’d set up for himself, albeit ten or fifteen minutes after most of his parishioners had ceased to listen. The liturgy, laden with religious and spiritual metaphors that could be cyphered by the interlinear translations in the missal, gave even the most indifferent witness a sense of how the word did, indeed, become flesh. Sunday afternoons were spent at home with our large extended family. Often the aunts and uncles and cousins came, but always my two widowed grandmothers were there. My father’s habit was to get them both a little liquored up and sit them in the living room and set them to arguing about something the priest failed to cover in his sermon, invariably involving religion or sex or politics—subjects that were studiously avoided in more refined families were just as studiously pursued in ours. When I would question my father on his motives, he would simply advise that I listen closely to “those old women,” and I would learn more from their contretemps than I’d ever learn in school.

  Of course, the sharpness of their discourse proceeded from the fact that they were opposites. My mother’s mother, Marvel Grace O’Hara, it might be safely assumed, never suffered any low self-esteem. She was punctilious, grandiloquent, a rabid Democrat and union organizer. She became, eventually, superintendent of music in the Detroit Public Schools, raised three daughters and a son, outlived her harried husband by nearly thirty years, never discussed her age, and voiced her opinion on each and every one of her grandchildren whether she was asked to or not. She did everything in the faintly idolatrous style of the Irish-American Catholic for whom The Bells of St. Mary’s and The Quiet Man were the principal studies.

  My father’s mother, on the other hand, was a quiet, formerly Methodist woman, a fine cook, quilter, gardener, and Eisenhower Republican who, I am sure, voted for him well into the 1980s; she wore print dresses, sensible shoes, her hair in a bun, and kept her own counsel, never giving any offense or scandal until early in the 1920s when she fell in love with an Irish-American Catholic. This did not please her Methodist kin, nor did her decision, in keeping with the custom of the times and to appease his parish priest, to “convert” to what she would ever after call “the one true faith?” (appending a lilt of uncertainty to the end of that phrase, as if the doubting saint whose name I also share, his finger aquiver over the wounded palm of Christ, was none too certain when he was heard to ask, “My Lord, my God?”).

  My grandmother would describe her conversion experience to us saying, “Ah the priest splashed a little water on me and said, ‘Geraldine, you were born a Methodist, raised a Methodist, thanks be to God, now you’re Catholic.’ ”

  Some weeks after the eventual nuptials she was out in the backyard of their bungalow in Northwest Detroit, grilling beefsteaks for my grandfather on the first Friday in Lent, when a brother-knight from the local Knights of Columbus leapt over the back fence to upbraid her for the smell of beef rising over a Catholic household during the holy season. And she listened to the man, nodding and smiling in her quiet, formerly Methodist way, and when he had finished with his sermonette, she went over to the garden hose, splashed water on the grill and pronounced, “You were born cows, raised cows, thanks be to God, now you are fish.” Then she sent the nosy neighbor on his way.

  “Ah surely we are all God’s children,” she concluded her narrative, “the same but different, but all God’s children, either way.”

  This notion that we are all “the same but different,” struck me, on the one hand, as quite impossible—like being short but tall, thin but fat, old but young, this but that—and on the other it rang entirely true. It remains among the most serviceable wisdoms of my life. As does the bromide advanced by my other grandmother, to wit: “The ridiculous and the sublime belly up to the one bar.” I did not, as a boy, know the meaning of this, but it had nonetheless the ring of truth about it, and in the lifetime since has proven to be among the most useful of the verities.

  This, of course, was my first brush with author(ity)—the power of language to name and proclaim and pronounce and transform. Words could change cows into fish, Methodists into Catholics, things that were different into things that were the same. They held the power to redeem and reclaim and remake the everyday objects and people and concepts I was surrounded by. The voices of those dearly departed old women, quibbling over whatever came to mind, occupy one section of the chorus of voices that call us to become the ones we are.

  Ideal and beloved voices

  of those who are dead, or of those

  who are lost to us like the dead.

  Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams;

  sometimes in thought the mind hears them.

  And with their sound for a moment return

  other sounds from the first poetry of our life —

  like distant music that dies off in the night.3

  So wrote the great Alexandrian, Constantine P. Cavafy in his poem, “Voices.” And this is how I still hear now the first poetry of my life, not in the voice of God speaking to me out of a whirlwind or out of the sky or burning bush, but in the voice of my parents and people, my elders and ancients and imagined ones—“ideal and beloved voices, of those dead or lost to us like the dead”—speaking to me, as if in dreams, like distant music that dies off in the night.

  Sundays ended as all other days did, with our mother or father tucking us into bed with the prayer we all were required to say:

  Angel of God, my guardian dear

  to whom God’s love commits me here,

  ever this night be at my side

  to light, to guard, to rule and guide.

  This prayer, said at bedside—a grim little plea for protection against darkness and death—was the first poetry of my life. Long before I ever understood its deeper meanings, I heard the memorable, and not incidentally, memorizable rhymes between “dear” and “here,” “side” and “guide.” And the thumping heart-beating iambic code of the last line—to light, to guard, to rule and guide.

  Its acoustic pleasures were immediate. Before it made sense, it made “sound” to me. It rang true in my ear. There were others:

  God is great.

  God is good.

  Let us thank him for our food.

  That is how they prayed before meals at Jimmy Shryock’s house. I loved the off-rhyming between “good” and “food.” Or when I spent the night at Mark Henderson’s I was taught:

  Now I lay me down to sleep

  and pray the Lord my soul to keep.

  If I die before I wake

  I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  It was a Protestant version of my Angel of God—involving the same grim contingencies, the same hopes, the same sense, and slightly different sounds that were metrical cousins to the secular poetics the world seemed full of:

  Twinkle
twinkle little star.

  How I wonder what you are.

  Up above the world so high,

  like a diamond in the sky.

  Or

  ABCDEFG

  HIJKLMNOP

  Or

  Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright

  In the forests of the night

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 4

  Or

  Irish poets learn your trade

  Sing whatever is well made

  Scorn the sort now growing up

  All out of shape from toe to top5

  That quatrain about the Irish poets is part of a longer poem, “Under Ben Bulben,” written by the Irish master, William Butler Yeats, some months before he died in late January of 1939.

  When the English master, W. H. Auden, got word of the great man’s death, he wrote his elegy, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” which includes this homage quatrain:

  Earth receive an honored guest

  William Yeats is laid to rest

  Let the Irish vessel lie

  Emptied of its poetry.6

  And all of these sounded the same but different to me—nursery rhymes, prayers, alphabets, and poems—little seven-syllable meters, seasoned with rhymes to make them memorizable formulas: