funeral, take 2

Another funeral this weekend. Certainly not close enough to the last one this April to readily count as a member of a group however prior to April I think the last funeral I went to was in the early 90s.

All of the grandparents died off when I was still relatively young. The last was my mother's adopted mother who died while I was in my mid twenties and living in MI. My mother's mom, otherwise known as "Nanna", always struck me as incredibly frail. She was quite skinny, had pure white hair which she had set and styled at least once a week so it constantly fluffed out around her head, creating a brilliant, glowing poof. Her hands were exceptionally thin. They looked like bone with the thinnest layer of skin spread unevenly onto it, slipping off the more peaked parts into the wells between knuckles and ropey blue veins.

She had looked like this for as long as I remember her.

Still, she lived past cancer and even into several levels of heart failure. She had the first heart attack while out on her daily walk - far more than I manage to do these days even so go Nanna. I didn't hear the news that she had died until many days and many subsequent heart attacks and resuscitations later. My mother told me she hadn't wanted to disrupt my studies with the news. This was, like so many other things out of my mother's mouth, a load of crap. My mother had issues with her mother, to the point where she took her mother's death just one of the many inconveniences she felt the woman had thrust upon her.

The family mythology was that either my mother reported her father's was sexual abuse to Nanna or that Nanna had caught him in the act. In either version, according to my mother, Nanna had told the bastard (in front of our mother) if she ever caught him doing that again, she'd send the children back to the orphanage.

Being a sophisticated enough audience, it only took the one time for her to explicitly point out to my sister, brother, and me that this had meant Nanna had essentially sealed my mother's fate. Keep silent if it happened again or get sent back to the orphanage.

Bad Nanna!

Many years later I heard a different version of this story. This version is not nearly as cut and dry and involves my grandmother moving with the children out into the chicken coop rather than let them continue to be around the monster she had married. Mind you this was like early 1950s rural New England. There were no fucking shelters.

Nanna's funeral was the last in the family before this week's but due to my mother's machinations I didn't go to it. This week's was my uncle, my godfather in fact. We weren't close but his wife (my father's sister) and he had no children. In fact, none of the women on that side of the family had kids. I don't know for sure since I'm not at the stage of my life where my age group peers are dying off but I suspect that knowing you have family, and specifically knowing there is another generation coming up after you may be in some ways comforting or at least a little reassuring.

I may be wrong. I'm basing it on implicit impressions of older relatives speaking of death and on numerous pop-cultural reference. The aunties do like to talk about their nieces and nephew (just the one...my dear brother) .

So A____ and I went up Boston-way for a smoldering hot Saturday morning funeral mass in the "Immaculate Contraption" church (as my brother is fond of calling it). A_____ had never seen a catholic mass before - this was the real deal complete with drunk clergy.

My aunt seemed genuinely happy to see that all of us "kids" were there. We first saw her on our way into the mass. I hugged her, possibly for the first time in my life. She felt small and full of an uncomfortable energy. In our phone calls over the week between when her husband died and the funeral, I noticed she moved with little transition between speaking casually of life and its minor details to choking up on a sob when the topic touched too close to certain aspects of the notion of her very recently deceased husband. The energy I felt when I held her was both the strain of holding this in and some seepage of the very stuff which was being held in.

She had arranged for coffee and refreshments to be served after the mass at the church school, which was behind the church. I walked out after the mass was over to the front entrance of the massive, circular church (yeah J, it's like one of those conan churches!) and I realized I was on exactly the opposite side from the school. There was no shade en route. I had already been feeling unwell soon after arriving over an hour earlier. The had been church was cooler than a late morning August parking lot, but not quite cool enough to refresh me after walking to and from the car to the church entrance twice - one trip there had turned into two after we realized Hey you probably can't walk into a church with a huge cup of dunkin donuts iced coffee and they had no trash cans about. I'm sure my feeling a bit, well, swoony for lack of a better word, during the service was not helped by the usual up down up down up down of a catholic mass. After the mass concluded, my sister helped me get to a bathroom where I threw water on my face, arms, and neck. (Oh fyi, apparently the Boston area catholics save all that christlike asceticism for the restrooms.)

The water helped but I still felt drained. Seeking to avoid the rather lengthy shadeless walk to the school hall, I made my way over by walking through the outer church corridor which ran the circumference of the big round building. Every now and then there was a break in the corridor. We'd go through a door to the outside, and then a few steps later go through a door back into the indoors corridor. Hot as it was in the church, it felt positively cool compared to the oven of the nearly afternoon parking lot.

I say "we" because my aunt made this whole strange trip with me. See, just before embarking on this procession, I had taken my aunt's hand. She had started crying when saying how happy she was that we could all come up, so I held her hand and said how wonderful it was to see her. Someone mentioned we should get over to the reception, and so my aunt and I began walking. She had continued to hold onto my hand although I had somewhat loosened my grip when I realized I was planning on making such an oddly interrupted and circuitous path out of the building. She fussed about my staying indoors, commenting that this path (i.e. not so much through but around the inner part of the church) would be best. Saying "I'll walk with you dear..." and holding my hand up in hers.

So we walked together, in and out, blinding and blazing then cool and dim. Others from my family - people I know mostly by face and not name, and my sister and A___ walked behind us, A____ coming up ahead sometimes to open a stuck door for us. At some point I noticed that this promenade was like some kind of closing ritual. A counterclockwise circle made slowly and deliberately by the mourners. Not fully closed until A____ and my sister and I piled back into the hot car and drove the rest of the way around the church and out onto the street.