The Undertaking Read online

  I thought maybe some empirical evidence, albeit gathered from my own narrow studies, might satisfy his current hunger. I told him of a man I once embalmed, a worker in a scrap metal and salvage yard, on whom a car had fallen, fatally. No doubt, someone’s plummet from a great height would have been more illustrative but by ordinance the tallest building in Milford is three stories, so that death by nosedive is rare around here. So this was no Icarus, no man fallen from the sky. Rather this was a man on whom the sky had fallen, in the form of a ′67 Mustang convertible, itself the victim of a head-on collision. Both the Mustang and the huge magnetic disc that held it dropped on the poor fellow when the giant crane from which they hung gave way on account of a thing called metal “fatigue.” The victim of the tragedy was rummaging for hubcaps in a heap below—in the wrong place at the wrong time, to be sure.

  Few comforts can be wrung from such events. No compensation from the insurance carrier, no lofty talk in praise of the dead, nor fellow feeling for those left behind can right the wrongness of such happenings. It was, in the words of my eldest son who brought the body back from the county morgue, “a bad thing.”

  Something in the look on Matthew’s face told me that further detail on the dead man’s circumstances, or family, were hardly called for, so completely had Matthew already identified with this hapless client, killed one weekday by the falling sky.

  But what I thought I ought to tell my friend was this, that for all the damage done, and it was considerable—we’re talking several tons here from maybe a hundred feet—the look on your man’s face was serenity itself, a peace that proclaimed nothing so loudly as his ignorance of or concurrence with the Unknown Forces that dropped this car on him. There was, among the wounds and contusions and fractures and traumas, an aspect of the man’s visage that looked like he wanted to tell us Have a nice day! And though I thought it might be a source of encouragement to his mother and his significant other, they pretty much had their mind set on a closed casket.

  Now brimming with sympathy for his fellow pilgrim, his fellow traveler through this vale of tears, Sweeney looked westward through the window where the sun was declining into the North Atlantic on the brink of which his wife and children, for Rosemary had tactfully removed them for “some fresh air,” stood silhouetted by the evening light. Gulls hovered in the updraft at the cliffs’-edge, overhead them. The lights of small boats bound for the bay mingled with the light of early stars.

  I ordered him a snifter of brandy.

  If life is like a box of chocolates, no less should be said for a lobster dinner. There are lessons for the living to be learned from it. Among the ones I’ve learned are these: Some of us taste and some of us savor. For some it’s a chore, for others, a treat. Some eat and run and some eat and wonder. Some of it’s hunted, some is gathered. Some is slaughtered, some we reap. Some of it’s fresh and some is fermented. Some of it’s living, some of it’s dead. All of our hungers are not the same.

  After years of dining with Matthew Sweeney, after years of trading poems, stories, recipes, and friends, I have come to believe that what he sensed as a baby, what he knew as a boyo, what he knows as a man is that we die. On this account he is absolutely right. If his wariness seems acute, intense, at times neurotic, it could just as easily be called a gift.

  Perhaps he sees the ghost in the mirror. Or feels the chill in every touch. Perhaps he hears the imp more clearly. Or sniffs the rotting with the sweet.

  Maybe it’s only his taste buds are better for the seed in his being of his ceasing to be.

  All Hallows' Eve

  I wanted to know the day I would die. It seemed a useful bit of information for handicapping insurance policies, timing regrets, tendering farewells to former lovers. I wanted some precision in the calculation—if not the day, then possibly the age at which I’d cease to be, at least so far as those around me were concerned.

  The gene-pool was unclear on this. The men in the family had all died of hearts: congested, infarcted, occluded, spent—all of their ends had proceeded from their chests, mostly in their sixties. My mother’s father, a great bingy man, died in my childhood, a narrow memory now of a bald man telling bear stories. He’d grown up in Michigan’s upper peninsula around the turn of the twentieth century, come downstate for an education at Ann Arbor, and married, as my grandmother told it, the first woman who’d have him. But Pat O’Hara, though he lived the civilized life in southeastern lower Michigan ever after, would leave his bride, Marvel Grace, every autumn for a month and return to the UP where he’d drink and hunt and fish and make up the stories I remember him telling us, of being treed by bears and wolves and other wildlife we would never see. And though Pat died at age sixty-two, Marvel, my grandmother, lived on after him for nearly thirty years until a stroke left her cognizant but bedfast for eight months of withering to death at age ninety. I was thirty-five the year she died and beginning to think of myself as mortal.

  My father’s father died, likewise, of a heart attack, when I was sixteen. I remember the call at the bowling alley where I worked. He was sixty-four. He’d driven up to Frankenmuth with the missus for dinner at Zehnder’s Famous Chicken Dinners—two and a half hours north of Detroit. On the way home, the pain started shooting down his left arm. He thought it might be the gravy or the chicken livers. Back home, they called the doctor, the fire department, the priest, and my father. All were at the bedside where he sat upright in his suspenders and undershirt while the doctor examined him and the priest nodded assurances to my grandmother and the firemen stood ready with oxygen tanks—an assemblage resembling a Rockwell print that might have been titled: “The Good Death.” My father, just turned forty, probably felt wary and helpless. I’m only guessing. Anyway, the doctor pressed the stethoscope in the usual places and after considerable silence pronounced his diagnosis: “Eddie, I can’t find a thing wrong with you.” Whereupon Eddie, ever contentious, slumped to the floor, turned purple, and died in an instant, proving for all in attendance, once and for all, the fallibility of modern medicine, and the changeability of life in general.

  Because my father owned a funeral home, it fell to my brother Dan and me to dress Pop Lynch and casket him—the first of my people I ever tended to professionally. I can’t remember now if my father simply asked if we would or insisted or offered us the opportunity. But I remember feeling, immediately, relieved that I could do something, anything, to help.

  Still, I subtracted my years from his years and began to think of the future as finite—the first among those facts of life that look like arithmetic.

  Gramma Lynch, like Nana O’Hara, lived on until she was ninety. The decades of their concurrent widowhoods became, for me, a series of Sundays and Christmases and Fourths of July when we’d find them on the patio or at the kitchen table, tippling their Canadian whiskey and water, arguing politics and religion and correcting the English of their grandchildren. Gramma Lynch was Republican, practical, younger by ten years and only Catholic by conversion. A Methodist by rearing, she regarded the clergy as circuit riders and opportunists, passers-by in the life of faith. She mistrusted the celibacy and the celebrity of priests and ate meat on Fridays. She lived within her means, was slow to criticize, and temperate but genuine when it came to praise. Nana was a Democrat, a member of the teachers’ union, Catholic in the devout and idolatrous style of the Irish, scrupulous, full of etiquette, eloquent and extravagant in praise and shaming. Their arguments were brilliant, better than any theater. Where Nana used language as a weapon, Gramma used silence. If Nana spouted certainty, Gramma whispered reasonable doubt. Nana punctuated with the pointed finger, Gramma with the arched eyebrow. No one won. That they lived long lives and that I lived mine in earshot of their quarrels was, I can only say, a gift. They are buried now in different sections of the same cemetery, beside the men they outlived by years and years. I remember their obsequies: prim and proper and full of high talk—like them.

  My grandmothers were powerful women—mighty in ways I see i
n their granddaughters and great-granddaughters. Neither ever suffered any problem she could not give a name to. There was no mention of silence in need of breaking. There was, to be sure, little silence at all. A division of labor, typical of their generation, did not require an abdication of power. If they earned sixty-three cents to their husbands’ dollar, they got to live another decade or two or three on their dead men’s pension or social security. If their husbands had political and financial and large muscle advantage, the women had emotional and spiritual and demographic comeuppance. The realization that God could be female required the consideration that the Devil could be also. My grandmothers were inclined to leave well enough alone. For most women, of course, things were just not that well enough. The world as they knew it was about to change.

  My mother and I shared that portion of the century that saw gender gaps begin to open and close and open again. Women gave up homemaking in favor of house payments, lobbied for political and fiscal parity, and began to die of the heart attacks, car wrecks, and gastrointestinal disorders their menfolk had always died of, younger and better insured than their mothers before them. Even their suicides, formerly dainty, ladylike endeavors involving pills and gas stoves and other hushed methods, became more assertive and noisy—pistols first, then shotguns. The silence was broken. In some odd quarters, this was counted as progress.

  A traditionalist in most matters of life, my mother was, nonetheless, ahead of her time when it came to death, dying twenty-eight months before my father, when she was sixtyfive, of a cancer that took her voice away.

  So neither gender nor gene pool was much of a predictor. I began to look elsewhere for some answers.

  I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines. I think the theory holds for women, too. The vision of pleasure in the arms of the beloved, or of triumph after great effort, of safety snatched from the hold of peril, or of comfort after long struggle—whether produced by memory or expectation, age or youth, the ache is the same, and so is the vision.

  My theory held that we could calculate the precise midpoint of life by an application of these none too ponderous truths. And knowing the precise midpoint would, of course, give me the Thing Most Unknown: the day I would die. Knowing the middle, the end could be known. It was algebra: x’s and equal signs, a’s plus b’s.

  If the past is a province the aged revisit and the future is one that the child dreams, birth and death are the oceans that bound them. And midlife is the moment between them, that frontier when its seems as if we could go either way, when our view is as good on either side. We are filled less with longing than with wonder. We fear less and worry more. These are only a few of the symptoms. The old write memoirs, the young do resumés. In midlife we keep a kind of diary that always begins with a discussion of the weather. The present is where we live, equidistant from our birth and death. We find our current spouse as compelling as the memory of our first lover or our fantasies about the tight asses and flat bellies in the magazine ads for undergarments.

  There is about midlife a kind of balance, equilibrium—neither pushed by youth nor shoved by age: we float, momentarily released from the gravity of time. We see our history and future clearly. We sleep well, dream in all tenses, wake ready and able.

  Think of it, I would say to anyone who’d listen in my drinking days, think of it as America. You emerge from the broken water of the womb like your forebears on Ellis Island. The language is unknown to you. You don’t understand the food, the customs. You’re willing but unable to work. You need someone to show you the ropes. In the best of cases your parents will do this. You head west, dreaming of gold and glamour and your future. Somewhere in the Poconos you meet a girl. You pick up some savvy and street smarts in Ohio. Maybe you detour to the quick comforts of Memphis or New Orleans, or northward to fish the salmon run in Michigan, but you never stray far or very long from the urgent westward intention of youth. California is where gold and memorable sex are. California is Hollywood and a City of Angels. It is where, when you get there, you will belong.

  Maybe, when you cross the river in St. Louis, the girl you first took up with in Pennsylvania begins to seem a little backward for such a trendy fellow as yourself. Or maybe she dumps you for a guy from the old neighborhood or some slick talker from the Rockies with money. Good riddance is the thing you say and travel lightly, never looking back. In Vegas you get a little crazy, sleep around, buy a convertible, take your losses, drive out in the desert where it occurs to you you’re your own worst enemy. You think of the gang from the old neighborhood, your elders are dying now or are dead. You keep remembering the flesh of your first lover. You make a lot of long-distance calls. For the first time in your life, you slow your pace, taking your time through the Grand Canyon, beginning a lot of sentences with when I was your age and twenty or thirty years back now. There are days so beautiful you regret you will die.

  When the desert or the mountains or the wilderness doesn’t kill you, you find yourself in California. Nothing seems as important as it once did. You mention to anyone who will listen that it was never the destination, after all. It was where you came from and the going there. Someone, meaning to be helpful, says you can never go home again. If all goes well at this point, you will take your leave easily, falling of the long dock in Santa Barbara, remembered by your children and their children, who grieve you all across the continent of age.

  Of course, the middle of your life was back in Kansas where the horizon seemed endless on either side. You can see for miles, the stars come out, you are balanced between your infancy and decrepitude, your Bronx and Santa Barbara, your beginning and your end; balanced by your equal vision of what’s behind you and before you, the done deals and possibilities. Upright, at ease in your skin: Kansas. It only lasts a moment. When you recognize the terrain, you are in the middle. Double your age for the day you will die. If it happens when you’re twenty, figure on forty. If you’re forty when it happens, count your blessings, save more, pick names for great-grandchildren. It’s a simple theory, really. Algebra, history, geography, nothing fancy.

  I was eighteen when this theory came to me. I was considering options for my future. I was a college student, not so much dodging the draft as trying to ignore it. Emblematic of the age was that one’s prospects for Vietnam—as synonymous with death as cancer was, still is—were determined by a lottery, the brainchild of the Nixon administration. The days of the year were pulled from a hat—the order in which they were pulled would be the order in which new soldiers were called to serve. The issue of your mortality was linked to the day of your birth. I was playing Hearts in the student union when they drew the numbers. Mine turned out to be 254. It was widely figured they’d never draft past number 150. I was to be spared. I had a future. I wanted to be a poet. I had discovered Yeats. I wanted to be Simon and Garfunkel. I could play the guitar. I considered teaching, briefly. I thought getting my license as a funeral director would be no bad thing, in case I didn’t get a record contract or a Pulitzer. I was utterly preoccupied with the first person singular.

  About the only thing I knew for sure about my future was that I wanted to spend a good portion of it in the embrace of Johanna Berti, or someone like her. She had recently disabused me of years of blissless ignorance the nuns and Christian Brothers had labored to maintain. For these, the only good body was a dead body: Christ’s. St. Stephen’s, St. Sebastian, the poor bastard, St. Dorothy, Virgin and Martyr, patroness of gardeners. In parochial school of the fifties and sixties, love and death were inexorably connected. Passion meant a slow death for a good cause. Our schoolrooms and psyches were galleries of crucifixions, martyrdoms, agonies in the garden, ecstasies of unspecified origins, all for the sake of love. Johanna, herself a good Catholic and Italian who bore more than a passing resemblance to St. Catherine de Ricci, the correspondent of St. Phi
lip Neri, fixed all of that in the ordinary way—by extending the available welcomes of one body to another. My future seemed abundant and shapeless.

  I was living in my father’s funeral home at the time. Not the one I own and operate now, but an earlier version. I took death calls at night and went on removals. One night a woman called to say her son had “taken his own life” and was now at the county medical examiner’s where they would be doing an autopsy in the morning and would we go then and pick him up. When I got him back to the funeral home and unwrapped him, I was amazed at the carnage. The T-shaped incision on his chest was no surprise—the standard thoracic autopsy. But unwrapping his head from the plastic bag the morgue-men had wrapped it in, I found a face unimaginably reconfigured. There were entire parts of his cranium simply missing. He’d gotten a little liquored up and gone to the home of his ex-girlfriend. Rumor was she had broken up with him a week or two earlier and he had moped around the edges of her life in a way we would call “stalking” nowadays. He drank too much. He went to her house where he pleaded with her to take him back. Of course, she wouldn’t, couldn’t, wanted to be “just friends,” etc …, and so he broke in, ran up to her parents’ bedroom, where he took the deer rifle from her father’s closet, lay on the bed with the muzzle in his mouth, and pulled the trigger with his big toe. It was, according to the ex-girlfriend, “a remarkable gesture.”

  As I considered the gesture on the table before me, it struck me, he looked ridiculous. His face had been split in two by the force of the blast, just above the bridge of his nose. He looked like a melon dropped from the cart, a pumpkin vandalized by neighbor boys. The back of his head simply wasn’t. Here was a young man who had killed himself, remarkably, to deliver a message to a woman he wanted to remember him. No doubt she does. I certainly do. But the message itself seemed inconsequential, purposefully vague. Did he want to be dead forever or only absent from the pain? “I wanted to die” is all it seemed to say clearly. “Oh” is what the rest of us say.