The Undertaking Read online

  My mother did not believe this part. Her children needed neither punishment or purification beyond that which she supplied. We were the children of God and her own best efforts. Salvation was a gift of God. Her gift to us was how to claim it. And when, after the Second Vatican Council, they got rid of Limbo and Purgatory, she fashioned it a kind of enlightenment. Still, life had sufferings enough to go around and she wanted us to use them well. It was part of Nature. “All grievous things are to be endured for eternal life,” is how my mother was instructed by Thomas à Kempis. Suffering was thereby imbued with meaning, purpose, value, and reason. Nature passed suffering out in big doses, random and irreverent, but faith and grace made suffering a part of the way by which we make our journey back to God. Atonement meant to be “at one.” And this return, this reunion in heaven, this salvation, was the one true reason for our being, according to my mother. This opinion put her, of course, at odds with everything the culture told us about “feeling good about ourselves” or “taking care of numero uno” or the secular trophies of “happiness” and “validation” and “self-esteem.” Hers was a voice crying in the suburban wilderness that we were all given crosses to bear—it was our imitation of Christ—and we should offer it up for the suffering souls.

  That is how she turned it into prayer—the “irregularity,” the cancer, the tumor that moved from her remaining lung up her esophagus, leapt to her spinal cord, and then made for her brain. This was what the doctors said was happening, preferring a discussion of parts failing to persons dying. But for her husband and children what was happening was that her voice was growing more and more quiet, her breath was getting shorter and shorter, her balance was lost to the advance of cancer. My mother was making it work for her, placing the pain and the fear and the grief of it into that account with God she’d kept, by which what was happening to her body became only one of several things that were happening to her. Her body, painful and tumorous, was turning on her and she was dying. I’m sure she was ready to be rid of it. She said her heart. was overwhelmed with grief and excitement. Grief at the going from us—her husband of forty-three years, her sons and daughters, grandchildren born and unborn, her sister and brother, her friends. Excitement at the going “home.” But as the voice inside her body hushed, her soul’s voice seemed to shout out loud, almost to sing. She could see things none of us could see. She refused the morphine and remained lucid and visionary. She spoke words of comfort to each of us—at one point saying we must learn to let go, not only grudgingly, but as an act of praise. I say this not because I understand it but because I witnessed it. I’m not certain that it works—only certain that it worked for her.

  Once you’ve made the leap it’s easy. Once you’ve seen huge tracts of greensward put to seemingly conflicting uses, the world becomes a different place. If golf courses can be graveyards, surely football fields, and soccer pitches, ball diamonds and tennis courts. And what about ski slopes? What folks don’t want to be buried on a mountain? Boot Hill we could call it. Listen up, the possible applications are endless. The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. Life is like that—death is, too.

  My mother’s funeral was a sadness and a celebration. We wept and laughed, thanked God and cursed God, and asked God to make good on the promises our mother’s faith laid claim to in her death. It was Halloween the day we buried her—the eve of All Saints, then All Souls, all suffering souls.

  Eddie and I have been looking for acreage. He’s a golfer. I’d rather read and write. He says he’ll be the Club Pro and I can be the Brains Behind the Operation. We’ve worked together for years and years. Our sister Brigid does pre-need and our sister Mary has always done the books—payroll and collections and payables. The women seem to control the money. Revenge they call it for our calling it Lynch & Sons.

  Whenever I have business at Holy Sepulchre, I stop in section twenty-four, where my mother and father are buried. He lived on after her for two more years. After he was buried we all decided on a tall Celtic cross in Barre granite with their instruction to “Love One Another” cut into the circle that connects the crossed beams. My father had seen crosses like this when I took him to Ireland the year after my mother died. He’d said he liked the look of them.

  Stones like these make golf impossible. They stand their ground. It’s hard to play through. Those joggers with their designer dogs on leashes and stereos plugged into their ears are not allowed. A sign by the pond reads “No Fishing/Do Not Feed Ducks.” The only nature trail in Holy Sepulchre is the one that takes you by the nature of our species to die and to remember.

  I miss them so.

  I think it’s my sisters who plant the impatiens every spring at the base of the stone.

  Sometimes I stand among the stones and wonder. Sometimes I laugh, sometimes I weep. Sometimes nothing at all much happens. Life goes on. The dead are everywhere. Eddie says that’s par for the course.

  Mary & Wilbur

  Like all great cities, ours is divided by water. Dublin has its Liffey, London, its Thames. Milford has the Huron River. The Mighty Huron is what knowing locals call it—afloat in the high tide of hyperbole. It is a river that, from its headwaters in Proud Lake, five miles east of town, to the dam at the west end of the village, never works up much of a commotion nor more than one hundred feet of width, except where it fattens in Central Park into what we call the Mill Pond. Of course it flows on westward through Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti and down into Lake Erie, and it begins to look like a real river downstream. You can find it on maps. But here, near its headwaters, it’s more of a stream. It is reasonably clean, good for canoers and carp fisherman and raft races. Once a year there’s a Duck Race sponsored by the Rotary Club and a good sucker run in early April. Where the train tracks cross over the river at Main Street, there’s a trestle they call the Arch and diving from it is against the law—a prohibition largely ignored by local boys for a hundred and fifty years now.

  The river divides the south side from the north. It divides the car dealers and liquor stores and light manufacturing shops on the south side from the trendy restaurants, banks, boutiques, and booksellers of the north. The south side has its Southern Baptists, North Main, its Presbyterians. Brakes and mufflers are procured on the south side, diamonds and divorce attorneys on the north.

  And as the village is divided by the Mighty Huron so too the souls and psyches of its inhabitants. When it snows we look like Currier and Ives—a Main Street on which neighbors stop to talk, know the merchants they do their business with, nodding and waving their ways between storefronts, grinning for no apparent reason. There’s a skating rink in Central Park all winter, and volley ball and tennis in fair weather. And a permanent installation of playground equipment: merry-gorounds and jungle-gyms. And east and west of Main, old neighborhoods of wooden homes built around the turn of the last century. Each comes with a history well researched by the Historical Society. Five thousand people live in town and ten thousand in the surrounding township. They occupy their cozy homes, shop locally, support their police and volunteer fire departments, and enjoy the usual parades down Main—on Memorial Day and Fourth of July and Christmas. We have Sidewalk Sales and Old Homes Tours, a Classic Car Show and Milford Memories—a festival in August that brings them in from all over the tri-county area. The past three Januarys we’ve even had an Ice Spectacular—huge blocks of ice brought in and whittled by chainsaws into likenesses of palm trees and dinosaurs. Folks brave the cold to come and see. There is the general sense that the lives we lead here are busy with the neighborly business of making what twenty years from now we intend to call the Good Old Days.

  As a past president of the Chamber of Commerce and a Rotarian in good standing, I am delighted to mention our abundant park lands, inland lakes, good schools, and churches, our proximity to hospitals and golf courses, our upmarket home values. And the wide array of services and merchandise locally available at reasonable prices. But as a citizen at large, and the undertaker here, and a witness at the c
hanging of millennia, I’m obliged, as any witness is, to say what happens.

  It’s a good place to raise families and to bury them.

  We’ve had terrors on both sides of the river. Two girls were found dead here at the end of one summer—stabbed to death and stuffed into a culvert on the wooded west end of Central Park and, in the same park, two years before, a girl kidnapped, raped, and strangled and buried in a shallow grave out in the township by a serial killer who perpetrated similar evils in townships north and south of here. The men who did these wicked things are all in jail and books are being written about them. There is talk of a movie. None of these facts provide a moment’s solace. And there have been boys killed by mischief and misadventure. One was found in pieces on the railroad tracks that run behind the west side of Main Street. Whether accident or homicide or suicide has never been determined. Was he walking home, maybe drunk, and was hit by the train, or was he killed and placed there, or did he put himself there and wait for the train to come for reasons we can only imagine? There is still talk of drink, recreational drugs, teen vendettas. As there was when the body of a boy was found hung from the branch of a sugar maple in the woods behind his house. Or when a month after Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, blew his head off, one of our local boys came home from school to do the same thing with his father’s rifle and Kurt’s tune “Rape Me” playing on the tape deck and the fire whistle blaring out across the town.

  That whistle is often the first notice we get of damage here—the signal in these parts of disaster. Men drop what they’re doing and come on the run—volunteer firemen with lights and sirens rigged to their vans and pickups. They have hoses and oxygen, stretchers and tourniquets. They’ve been trained in CPR and other heroics. And it is the one shrill note of the fire whistle that proclaims a grass fire or heart attack, car crashes or dead bodies. It is the sound of trouble heard all over the township, of damage or the threat of damage to persons or property. Dogs all over town are driven to howling. Every Saturday at noon they test the thing—a kind of secular Angelus we set our watches by. No one takes much notice on Saturdays. It’s only a test. No time to have a heart attack or kitchen fire. The Catholics out on the east end of town have their bells that toll the ancient hours of the daily office. The monkish among us stop and pray. The Presbyterians have restored their carillon that plays, at ten and two and six o’clock, old melodies: “Shall We Gather at the River” and “Abide with Me.” So our air is filled with a medley of bells and whistles declaring that in the midst of life, we are in death. God is among us and so is the Devil. The river that runs through this town divides us.

  So, while we look, in the right light, like a late-century rendition of the Waltons or Lake Wobegon, there is no shortage here of outrage and heartbreak. There seems to be two topographies—both real but vastly different.

  My wife and I take walks at night. She sees the architectural detail of Greek Revival homes, Queen Anne’s, Federalist, and Victoriana. I see the garage where two teachers, long married and childless, known for their prowess at ballroom dancing and careful fashions, were found asphyxiated in their Oldsmobile. I remember the perfect penmanship of the note they left explaining their fear of age and infirmity. Or my wife sees a well-made garden, bordering the backyard of a house where I remember painting a bedroom overnight in which a man had shot himself, so that his children, grown now, wouldn’t have to return to the mess he’d made. Some things won’t cover no matter how many coats we apply. She sees good window treatments, the warm light of habitation where, too often, I see vacancy and absence, the darkness where the light went out. We get along.

  And for every home made memorable by death, dozens are made memorable by the lives that were led there utterly unscrutinized by the wider world—lives lived out at a pace quickened only by the ordinary triumphs of daily life: good gladiolas, the well-shoveled walk, the mortgage payments made, the kids through college. Or by the ordinary failures: the bad marriage, the broken water main, trouble with the tax man, the sons and daughters who never call. We know our neighbors and our neighbors’ business here. It is the blessing and the curse of the small place. It’s getting better lately, and getting worse. As new subdivisions sprout all over the township, we have traffic jams and parking problems, and more privacy. It is a “bedroom” community. Most people work elsewhere. Here is where they come to “get away from it all.” People are less curious about one another.

  Once there were five bridges over the river. One at Garden Road, at the east end of the township; and one at Mont-Eagle Street—it was also known as Oak Grove Bridge because it provided riverside access to Oak Grove Cemetery. Then one at Huron Street, another at Main, and, finally, one at Peters Road on the west edge of Central Park, just upstream from the dam.

  In the early 1970s, the Oak Grove Bridge was declared unsafe for vehicular traffic by the county road commission. Barriers were placed on either side. Bikes and walkers could make it through but cars couldn’t. “Bridge Out” is what the signs said. Some months later, the bridge fell into the river, proving, I suppose, beyond all argument, the road commission’s point. No one seemed to notice. The only place it went was to the cemetery. There seemed no hurry to repair the bridge. Oak Grove was the elder of two municipal burial grounds in Milford, dating back to the years before the Civil War, when farmers and mill workers first made a town here. Oak Grove had served the township well, taking the dead for a hundred and fifty years—old families our roads are named after, rooted to places, settled in, in ways the highly mobile types of the late twentieth century do not comprehend. Where our ancestors stayed, we move, twenty percent of us every year, from east coast to west coast, from starter home to dream house, from condos to time shares and retirement villages. The dead and buried remain, for the most part, immobile, eating the dust of new aging generations who have learned to travel light and fast and frequently and put some distance between themselves and their dead. One of the obvious attractions of cremation is that it renders our dead somehow more portable, less “stuck in their ways,” more like us, you know, scattered.

  But just as Dante had his Lethe and Venice has its Zattere, the slow corteges that crossed the Huron over Oak Grove Bridge, all those years ago, no doubt took note of the evident metaphor—that the dead parent or child or sibling had gone to another shore, another side, changed utterly into townspeople of another dimension.

  When the kids were little, we fished off the bridge abutments on summer evenings and watched the bats fly out from the trees in Oak Grove to feast in the buggy air over the river. Sometimes I’d take them there to get rubbings of headstones to match new granite to old designs as elder stragglers of the old families were buried, shipped back home oftentimes from Florida or Arizona or North Carolina. We’d walk among the old trees and monuments trying to imagine the lives they marked. They would ask me questions about the way things worked. It was where I learned the answer “I don’t know.” What I did know was that Oak Grove was different from the newer cemeteries, where people hustled back to their cars and back to their lives the minute the minister was done with the benediction. At Oak Grove people would remain, trading news of graduations, marriages, grandchildren. They would browse among the neighboring stones of long dead elders with the look on their faces you see in libraries and museums where we study the lives and work of others to learn about ourselves. And the stones had a presence, huge by today’s standards. They could not be walked over or mowed over. Likewise, they told, in the eloquent plain chant of the stonecutter, not only the facts but some of the features. Kin was buried with kin. Lots were bought eight graves at a time, or ten. Folks stayed put. Nor has Oak Grove any “chapel” for indoor services—that tidy enterprise whereby the dead are left unburied while the family goes back to their lives, untroubled by inclement weather or harsh realities. A burial at Oak Grove means dirt, a hole in the ground, contending with the “elements.”

  Among the several duties of a funeral is, of course, the disposal of the d
ead for the living’s sake. And this trip—taken for long years from the corner of Liberty and First Streets, where our funeral home has always been, down Atlantic Street to Mont-Eagle Street, and over the bridge—passed in its threequarter-mile route, not factories or shops or shopping malls, but homes—brick and clapboard, large and small, but homes. The dead were put, properly, out of our homes but not out of our hearts, out of sight but not out of town.

  Thus, Oak Grove always seemed a safe extension, a tiny banishment of the dead from the living, a kindly stone’s throw away—a neighborhood of its own, among whose stones the living often spent their Sunday afternoons picnicking among the granite suburbs of grandparents, spinster aunts, ne’er-dowell uncles kept alive in the ordinary talk of the living. Geraniums were planted for “Decoration Day,” flags stuck in the graves of old soldiers, grass clipped around headstones all summer, leaves raked and mums planted in the fall, and grave blankets placed before the first snows of winter. The distance between the dead and the living seemed no greater than the river. Neither strange nor embarrassing, the dead were only dead, no less brothers and sisters, parents, children, friends. And death was considered part of the nature of things in a culture where crops failed, cattle starved, and neighbors died. They were waked, eulogized, buried, and grieved. And against forgetfulness, huge stones were hauled in with names and dates on them to proclaim their permanent place in our townscapes. It is this ancient agreement—the remembrance of the dead by the living—that accounts for all burial grounds and most statuary and entire histories.

  After Oak Grove Bridge fell into the Mighty Huron, we took a longer, more complicated route through town: First to Commerce, then westbound to Main, then south through the middle of the town with its gridlock and onlookers, and over the Main Street Bridge to Oakland Street on the south side. Left on Oakland past the abandoned jelly factory, the longfilled city dump, across the railroad tracks, and into the back entrance of Oak Grove. It wasn’t much of an inconvenience except for the terrible repair of Oakland Street, which had badly decomposed from years of inattention. There were pot holes in it small cars could be lost in, and we’d always have to wash our fleet—the hearse and flower car and family car, covered invariably in dust or mud or slush. And there was some difference, though I never heard it said, between crossing the river and crossing the railroad tracks, between marsh banks full of waterfowl and the town dump with old Impalas rotting on their rims, between the backyards bordered with perennials and the factory yard surrounded by chain-link and barbed wire.