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The Lost Art of Funerals I spend a lot of time thinking about funerals. Not about death, just funerals. And not an inordinate, obsessive amount of time — just more than the average forty-something. This could be a result of growing up in a household where, "The green dress — that's the one I want to be buried in. Not the pink one," was considered part of a normal conversation. Photos arriving from 'the old country' — Czechoslovakia — often showed dead relatives in coffins and live relatives gathered around tombstones, smiling brightly for the camera. Maybe it's a Czech thing? All I know is that my friends give me strange and horrified looks when I tell them stories from my childhood that begin: "This one time, at the funeral home... " and "There's this one cemetery that we go to... " Today, I'm on my way from my home in South Carolina to what was home twenty-five years ago, upstate New York, for Grandpa's funeral. I can't wait to get there. Not really an odd reaction to a death in my family, where funerals are one part mourning, two parts social event. It's not that we're callous about death, but that we consider funerals just one more celebration of life, like births, weddings and holidays. Like so many families today, though, we've spread out. My generation left home for college, career and family. Every return for a funeral makes me wonder, what will happen when we — those of us who've moved away — die? When I arrive home, my family — mother, stepfather, brother, in-laws, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles and cousins — greet me at the airport. This is a family event, after all. We spend a late night laughing over memories of Grandpa "and his little dog, Toto, too," and in the morning, go together to the funeral home to make arrangements. My brother’s three children; eleven, eight and five, have already been to their fair share of funerals. Their 'other' Grandfather, Richard, died only a month earlier. The funeral director, Mr. Sedlock, greets my nieces and nephew by name and they help themselves to the candy dish on his desk. I'm pleased to see them so at-home in a funeral parlor. Sadly, funerals are a fine art that is rapidly being lost in today's world of geographically separated families and feel-good-all-the-time culture. I'm shocked to learn how many of my friends have never attended a funeral and how many won't allow their children to attend them, to "protect them". Avoiding funerals doesn't make a death easier to bear. Funerals are a necessary process that helps us deal with the loss and celebrate the life of a loved one. Done right, they combine joy and mourning, tears and laughter, and through it all, they affirm that the life of the departed continues through family and friends. Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of playing with my cousins at funeral homes. Organ music whispering in the background, a tropical fish tank bubbling in the corner, and old ladies smelling of mothballs and perfume ferociously patting my back. “Ti si velika girl-yeh,” Czech-lish for ‘what a big girl’. Our favorite funeral home was Pecko-Oswalds, an old Victorian house complete with hidden passages. It was the perfect setting for funerals. My cousins, brother and I would sit on the landing of the stairway and dare each other to look behind the dark door at the top, certain there’d be dead bodies on the other side. We shrieked with delighted horror when we discovered that's where the Pecko family lived. Cemeteries were another place we loved to visit. As soon as spring arrived, we would climb into Grandma’s car to ‘make the rounds.’ First to Calvary to plant geraniums in the marble planters on either side of Grandpa Borush’s headstone, then to Aunt Anne's grave. She was my grandmother’s sister who'd died as an infant. As Grandma scrubbed the small, white marker, I would talk to my baby aunt while petting the stone lamb, its features blurred by sixty winters. After that, we'd go to Riverhurst to pull out the plastic flowers that adorned Great-Grandpa’s grave during the winter and put in colorful new pansies and marigolds. Sundays, dressed up in our church-clothes, we'd return to the cemeteries to visit dead relatives. Grandma took pictures of us standing next to their gravestones. Great-Grandma especially loved having her picture taken there. Side by side in one album are two pictures of my brother Matt and I next to our Great-Grandparents' headstone. In the earlier photo, Great-Grandma stands between us. Ten years later, in a photo taken at her funeral, a white human-shaped blur fills the space between us. It could be the sun reflecting off the lens, but we prefer to think Great-Grandma wouldn't let something as minor as death stand between her and a photo op. At the funeral home, Mr. Sedlock leads us into a room full of caskets and we examine them, looking for the one best suited to Grandpa. Five-year old Robert takes my hand. “Watch this, Aunt Lynne.” He reaches under the pink silk lining of a casket and pulls out a wrench. Lifting the pillow, he inserts the end and turns. The lining lowers. “That’s so they don’t pinch Grandpa’s nose when they close it.” I'm impressed. Matt and I hadn't discovered that until we were much older. We select a metal, matte gray finish casket with an American flag sewn on the white silk lining and American eagles at the four corners. We all knew immediately that this was Grandpa's. He served four tours in WWII—two in the navy, one in the army and one in the marines—then spent the next thirty years in uniform working for the US Postal Service. Two days later we return to Sedlock's, this time dressed in somber black. Matt nods his head and whispers, “He looks good for a dead guy.” It's a long-standing joke we'd share with Grandpa at funerals when people complimented ‘how good’ someone looked in a casket. The family surrounds Grandpa, patting his hands, straightening his tie, and smiling at his ever-present grin, as if there was some big joke that only he's in on. My mother frets. “I should’ve put him in his funeral suit.” Matt and I barely suppress our giggles. Grandpa was a frugal child of the depression, never buying a new shirt when the old one still had life in it. He had a new suit that he'd only worn once, to my brother's wedding. Whenever our mother prodded him to wear it he’d say, “It’s not comfortable. I’ll wear it for my funeral.” When it came time to select clothes to take to the funeral home, Mom didn’t want Grandpa to be uncomfortable for eternity, so she took his old Sunday suit. “He’s going to haunt you for this,” Matt teases. Throughout the next two days, family and friends stream into the funeral home. Quiet tears give way to laughter as tales are told of a long and full life. We hear of a Grandpa we’d never known. "He was the State singles tennis champion when we were in high school," his old doubles partner told us. "He came to every ship reunion we had until the last few years, after your grandmother died," we hear from a navy-buddy. "He was quite the prankster at the post office," my mother's mailman tells us, "always slipping something into our bags when we weren't looking." "When we had to start driving the jeeps on our rounds, he'd drive around the corner from the post office, park the thing, and walk the three miles to his route," another former co-worker told us. These stories about the man who was John Pranaitis, not just Grandpa, make him even larger to us in death than he had been in life. * * * After two days of viewings, it's time for the family to say our final, private good-byes before the lid comes down. We examine the mementos visitors have slipped into the casket. There's the blue corduroy driving cap he always wore, a rubber chicken key-ring, photos and notes, and a pocketful of drink chips from his favorite haunts: Red’s Kettle Inn, the VFW, and Sharkey's. I put the cap on his head. “Now he looks like Grandpa,” says my niece, Kimberly. My mother surreptitiously slides a box beneath the covered half of the coffin. “Toto’s ashes,” she whispers. They’d been inseparable. Grandpa kept the dog’s ashes on the mantle after Toto died. “Don’t cry, Aunt Lynne,” Robert comforts me as I laugh through my tears. “He’s not really in there.” He thumps hard on Grandpa’s chest and we hear a dull, wooden thud. “See? Empty. And, look at this,” he scrapes a small finger down Grandpa’s cheek. “Make-up,” he says, certain this proves it's not really Grandpa. “You’re right, Robert. Grandpa's in heaven, and in here.” His mother taps Robert's chest. On the way to the cemetery, Mom and I realize we forgot our cameras. We emerge from the limo giggling over the lapse and try to compose ourselves for the graveside prayers. When the VFW honor guard raises their guns for a final salute, a volley of flashes split the air. My cousins haven’t forgotten their cameras. The roar of the guns drowns our sobbing laughter and we cling to one another, comforted in our shared sorrow. As the crowd walks away from the mausoleum I notice Kimberly is missing. Matt and I find her on a ladder, the upper half of her body swallowed by the black hole in the mausoleum’s marble façade. “I hope you don’t mind,” the young man holding the ladder says. “She asked to see inside.” “I saw Grandpa Bob!” she tells us. My father died before she was born but she grew up with stories and photos of Grandpa Bob all around her. “He’s next to Great Grandma,” another dead relative she’d never met. “It’s really cool how they fit them in. They're perpendicular to each other, like this.” She shows us with her hands. My brother and I exchange a look — we want to go back and see. Before leaving the cemetery, we visit all of our dead relatives, stopping to touch a marker, pluck out a weed, and chat. We take a picture by Great-Grandma and Grandpa, hoping for another visit from Grandma's ghost, but the picture is blur-free. I say good-bye to Aunt Jerry and Uncle Frank. I was living out of the country when they'd died and had missed their funerals. Touching the cool, marble stone, and whispering an apology and a farewell, gives me some consolation. We head to church for the traditional post-funeral luncheon. Quiet conversations over fruit salads and sandwich meats are broken by hearty guffaws as people recount stories about Grandpa. I can't see him, but I know he's in his usual seat in the corner, by the coffee maker, taking it all in. Afterwards, we make our way across the street. Every family wedding, funeral, baptism, and confirmation ends at Sharkey’s. The nieces, nephews and cousins play the electronic bowling game with the metal puck and hanging plastic pins—the same one we’d played as kids. Watching them, I am hopeful. The art of funerals, their importance in marking the continuity of life and family, isn’t lost. Our family — those who've come before and those yet to come—will continue to live through their generation's celebrations of life and death. “A toast,” Cousin Jean raises her glass, “to Uncle John.” We lift our glasses and echo, “To John.” “You all throw a helluva funeral,” Grandpa’s neighbor nods solemnly. "John would've had fun." Grandpa would agree. |
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| Lynne M. Hinkey |
| Lynne Hinkey is an adjunct assistant professor of biology for the University of Maryland University College—Europe. She has published research and marine science educational materials in academic journals and through Sea Grant. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and travel writing have appeared in the Stars and Stripes, and literary journals such as Skyline Review and The Painted Door. She is currently working on a novel based on her experiences living in the Caribbean for thirteen years. Lynne lives in Charleston, South Carolina with her husband Matt and their dog and cat. http://lynneandmatt.spaces.live.com/ |
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