The Undertaking Page 5

  When Nora Lynch got sick they called. The doctor at the hospital in Ennis mentioned weeks, a month at most, there might be pain. I landed in Shannon on Ash Wednesday morning and on the way to the hospital stopped at the Cathedral in Ennis where school children and townies were getting their ashes before going off to their duties. The nurses at the hospital said I was holier than any one of them—to have flown over and gotten the smudge on my forehead and it not 9 A.M. yet in West Clare. Nora was happy to see me. I asked her what she thought we ought to do. She said she wanted to go home to Moveen. I told her the doctors all thought she was dying. “What harm …,” says she. “Aren’t we all?” She fixed her bright eyes on the spot in my forehead. I asked the doctors for a day to make arrangements for her homecoming—a visiting nurse from the county health office would make daily calls, the local medico would manage pain with morphine, I laid in some soups and porridges and ice creams, some adult diapers, a portable commode.

  The next day I drove back to Ennis to get her, buckled her into the front seat of the rental car, and made for the west along the same road I’d been driving toward her all those years since my first landing in Shannon—an hour from Ennis to Kilrush to Kilkee then five miles out the coast road to Moveen, the townland narrowing between the River Shannon’s mouth and North Atlantic, on the westernmost peninsula of County Clare. It was the second day of Lent in Ireland, the green returning to the fields wracked by winter, the morning teetering between showers and sunlight. And all the way home on the road she sang, “The Cliffs of Moveen,” “The Rose of Tralee,” “The Boys of Kilmichael,” “Amazing Grace.”

  “Nora,” I said to her between verses, “no one would know you are dying to hear you singing now.”

  “Whatever happens,” she said, “I’m going home.”

  She was dead before Easter. Those last days spent by the fire in ever shortening audiences with neighbors and priests and Ann Murray, a neighbor woman I hired to “attend” her when I wasn’t there. Two powerful unmarried women, sixty years between them, talking farming and missed chances, unwilling to have their lives defined for them by men. Or deaths.

  And I noticed how she stopped eating at all and wondered what the reason for that was.

  When I first was in Ireland, that winter and spring a quarter century ago, Nora and I bicycled down to the Regan’s farm in Donoughby. Mrs. Regan had had a heart attack. We were vaguely related. We’d have to go. The body was laid out in her bedroom, mass cards strewn at the foot of the bed. Candles were lit. Holy water shook. Women knelt in the room saying rosaries. Men stood out in the yard talking prices, weather, smoking cigarettes. A young Yank, I was consigned to the women. In the room where Mrs. Regan’s body was, despite the candles and the flowers and the February chill—a good thing in townlands where no embalming is done—there was the terrible odor of gastrointestinal distress. Beneath the fine linens, Mrs. Regan’s belly seemed bulbous, almost pregnant, almost growing. Between decades of the rosary, neighbor women shot anxious glances among one another. Later I heard, in the hushed din of gossip, that Mrs. Regan, a lighthearted woman unopposed to parties, had made her dinner the day before on boiled cabbage and onions and ham and later followed with several half-pints of lager at Hickie’s in Kilkee. And these forgivable excesses, while they may not have caused her death, were directly responsible for the heavy air inside the room she was waked in and the “bad form” Nora called it when the requiems had to be moved up a day and a perfectly enjoyable wake foreshortened by the misbehavior of Mrs. Regan’s body.

  At night Nora would crawl into bed, take the medicine for pain, and sleep. “Collins is our man,” she told me toward the end, meaning the undertaker in Carrigaholt who could be counted on for coffins and hearses and grave openings at Moyarta where all our people were, back to our common man, Patrick Lynch. She turned over the bankbook with my name on it, added, she said, after her brother had died all those years ago. “Be sure there’s plenty of sandwiches and porter and wine, sherry wine, something sweet. And whiskey for the ones that dig the grave.”

  Nora Lynch was a tidy corpse, quiet and continent, only a little jaundiced, which never showed in the half light of the room she died in, the room she was born in, the room she was waked in. She never stirred. And we waked her for three full days and nights in late March before taking her to church in Carrigaholt. Then buried her on a Monday in the same vaulted grave as her father and her father’s father and her twin brother, dead in infancy, near ninety years before. We gave whiskey to the gravediggers and had a stone cut with her name and dates on it to overlook her grave and the River Shannon.

  There was money enough for all of that. She’d saved. Enough for the priests and the best coffin Collins had and for pipers and tinwhistlers and something for the choir; and to take the entourage to the Long Dock afterward and fill them with food and stout and trade memories and tunes. It was a grand wake and funeral. We wept and laughed and sang and wept some more.

  And afterward there was enough left over to build the room that housed the toilet and the shower and haul that ancient cottage—a wedding gift to my great-great grandfather, my inheritance—into the twentieth century in the nick of time.

  Still, there are nights now in West Clare and nights in Michigan when I eschew the porcelain and plumbing in favor of the dark comforts of the yard, the whitethorn or lilac or the mock-orange, the stars in their heaven, the liberty of it; and the drift my thoughts invariably take toward the dead and the living and the ones I love whenever I am at the duties of my toilet.

  I think of Nora Lynch and of Mrs. Regan and of the blessings of their lives among us. And lately I’ve been thinking thoughts of Don Paterson who made it back to the Atlanta Hotel—he to his room and me to mine. And maybe it was the drink or curry or the talk of toilets, or all of it together that made him kneel and hug the bowl and look into the maelstrom as we all have once or more than once, adding to the list of things not to be looked at in the face, the godawful name of Crapper.

  The Right Hand of the Father

  I had an uneventful childhood. Added to my mother’s conviction that her children were precious was my father’s terrible wariness. He saw peril in everything, disaster was ever at hand. Some mayhem with our name on it lurked around the edges of our neighborhood waiting for a lapse of parental oversight to spirit us away. In the most innocent of enterprises, he saw danger. In every football game he saw the ruptured spleen, the death by drowning in every backyard pool, leukemia in every bruise, broken necks on trampolines, the deadly pox or fever in every rash or bug bite.

  It was, of course, the undertaking.

  As a funeral director, he was accustomed to random and unreasonable damage. He had learned to fear.

  My mother left big things to God. Of her nine children, she was fond of informing us, she had only “planned” one. The rest of us, though not entirely a surprise—she knew what caused it—were gifts from God to be treated accordingly. Likewise, she figured on God’s protection and, I firmly believe, she believed in the assignment of guardian angels whose job it was to keep us all out of harm’s way.

  But my father had seen, in the dead bodies of infants and children and young men and women, evidence that God lived by the Laws of Nature, and obeyed its statutes, however brutal. Kids died of gravity and physics and biology and natural selection. Car wrecks and measles and knives stuck in toasters, household poisons, guns left loaded, kidnappers, serial killers, burst appendices, bee stings, hard-candy chokings, croups untreated—he’d seen too many instances of His unwillingness to overrule the natural order, which included, along with hurricanes and meteorites and other Acts of God, the aberrant disasters of childhood.

  So whenever I or one of my siblings would ask to go here or there or do this or that, my father’s first response was almost always “No!” He had just buried someone doing that very thing.

  He had just buried some boy who had toyed with matches, or played baseball without a helmet on, or went fishing without a life p
reserver, or ate the candy that a stranger gave him. And what the boys did that led to their fatalities matured as my brothers and sisters and I matured, the causes of their death becoming subtly interpersonal rather than cataclysmic as we aged. The stories of children struck by lightning were replaced by narratives of unrequited love gone suicidal, teenagers killed by speed and drink or overdosed on drugs, and hordes of the careless but otherwise blameless dead who’d found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  My mother, who had more faith in the power of prayer and her own careful parenting, would often override his prohibitions. “Oh, Ed,” she would argue over dinner, “Leave them be! They’ve got to learn some things for themselves.” Once she told him “Don’t be ridiculous, Ed,” when he’d refused me permission to spend the night at a friend’s house across the street. “What!” she scolded him, “Did you just bury someone who died of a night spent at Jimmy Shryock’s house?”

  He regarded my mother’s interventions not as contrarieties, but as the voice of reason in a world gone mad. It was simply the occasional triumph of her faith over his fear. And when she stepped into the fray with her powerful testimony, he reacted as the drunken man does to the cold water and hot coffee, as if to say, Thanks, I needed that.

  But his fear was genuine and not unfounded. Even for suburban children who were loved, wanted, protected, doted over, there were no guarantees. The neighborhood was infested with rabid dogs, malarial mosquitoes, weirdoes disguised as mailmen and teachers. The worst seemed always on the brink of happening, as his daily rounds informed him. For my father, even the butterflies were suspect.

  So while my mother said her prayers and slept the sound sleep of a child of God; my father was ever wakeful, ever vigilant, ever in earshot of a phone—in case the funeral home should call in the middle of the night—and a radio that monitored police and fire calls. In my childhood I can recall no day he was not up and waiting for me and my siblings to awaken. Nor can I remember any night I lived at home, until I was nineteen, when he was not awake and waiting for our arrival home.

  Every morning brought fresh news of overnight catastrophes he’d heard on the radio. And every night brought stories of the obsequies, sad and deliberate, which he directed. Our breakfasts and dinners were populated by the widowed and heartsore, the wretched and bereft, among them the parents permanently damaged by the death of a child. My mother would roll her eyes a little bit and dole out liberties against his worry. Eventually we were allowed to play hardball, go camping, fish alone, drive cars, date, ski, open checking accounts, and run the other ordinary developmental risks—her faith moving mountains his fear created.

  “Let go,” she would say. “Let God.”

  Once she even successfully argued on behalf of my older brother, Dan, getting a BBGun, a weapon which he promptly turned against his younger siblings, outfitting us in helmet and leather jacket and instructing us to run across Eaton Park while he practiced his marksmanship. Today he is a colonel in the army and the rest of us are gun-shy.

  Far from indifferent, my mother left the business of Life and Death to God in His heaven. This freed her to tend to the dayto-day concerns of making sure we lived up to our potential. She was concerned with “character,” “integrity,” “our contribution to society,” and “the salvation of our souls.” She made no secret of her belief that God would hold her personally accountable for the souls of her children—a radical notion today—so that her heaven depended on our good conduct.

  For my father, what we did, who we became, were incidental to the tenuous fact of our being: That We Were seemed sufficient for the poor worried man. The rest, he would say, was gravy.

  There were, of course, near misses. After the usual flues, poxes, and measles, we entered our teen years in the sixties and seventies. Pat was sucker-punched in a bar fight by a man who broke a beer bottle over his head. Eddie drove off a bridge, crashed his car into the riverbank, and walked away unscathed. He told our parents that another car, apparently driven by an intoxicant, had run him off the road. We called it “Eddie’s Chappaquiddick” privy as only siblings are to our brother’s taste for beer and cocaine. Julie Ann went through the windshield of a friend’s car when the friend drove into a tree and, except for some scalpline lacerations and scars, lived to tell about it. Brigid took too many pills one night in combination with strong drink and what her motivation was remained a mystery for years, known only to my mother. For my part, I fell off a third-story fire-escape in my third year of college, broke several Latin-sounding bones, fractured my pelvis, and compressed three vertebrae but never lost consciousness. My English professor and mentor, the poet Michael Heffernan, was first downstairs and out the door to where I had landed. I must have appeared somewhat dazed and breathless. “Did you hit your head?” he kept asking once he had determined I was alive. “What day is it?” “Who is the president of the United States?” To assure him I had not suffered brain damage, I gave out with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—a moving rendition I was later told, marred only by my belching through the couplet where your man says, “I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Then I puked, not from the fall but from the J.W. Dant Bourbon that was credited with saving my life. I had been sufficiently limbered up, it was reasoned, by generous doses of Kentucky sour mash, to have avoided permanent damage.

  In the hospital I woke to a look on my father’s face I shall always remember—a visage distorted by rage and relief, at war with itself. And by amazement at the menagerie of friends and fellow revelers who accompanied me to hospital. While Professor Heffernan could affect the upright citizen in tweeds and buttondowns, not so Walt Houston, who studied physics and comparative religion and lived most of the school year in a tree somewhere on the edge of the campus and scavenged for food scraps in the student union. Nor Myles Lorentzen, who successfully failed his draft physical after the ingestion of massive doses of caffeine—pot after pot of black coffee followed by the eating whole of a carton of cigarettes. Later, Myles would do hard time in prison for the illegal possession of marijuana. A month after his release they made possession a misdemeanor, punishable by a twenty dollar fine. Worse still, Glenn Wilson, whose only utterance after a six pack of beer was always “Far out, man!” which he would say, for no apparent reason, at the most inappropriate of times. Harmless drunks and ne’er-dowells, my father looked suspicious of my choice of friends.

  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 A.A., 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. An
d 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.