Friday, May 4, 2001
The heartbreaking authenticity of death - THE COMMENTARY
By Joseph Planta
A bit of background on the piece I post today. I wrote this in August and posted it accordingly in The Commentary’s previous incarnation. I’ve did some minor changes and decided to post it today. It’s a favourite mind, so no apologies if some of you saw it before. Have a good weekend.
VANCOUVER -- Last August, having just attended a funeral, I composed this...
A week ago, I was at a funeral. It wasn’t someone terribly close, but we knew the man and his family quite well when I was younger, and although infrequently, we kept in touch with them. Very young was I when the man’s wife would baby-sit me and although my dad has strained relations with his own mother, he regarded my baby-sitter with a hell of a lot more reverence than his own mom. I digress.
Mother and I schlepped to New Westminster where the service was and although we missed the first exit on the highway getting there, we made it there on time, sans what my friend Rudy affectionately calls “Filipino Time”. It was a simple church, not used to by me, because I think I’m claustrophobic and it wasn’t one of these traditional churches that worked from front to back. It was in the shape of an arena-type theatre, something Shakespearean.
So we made it into our pew, and ever the keyhole peeper surveyed what was a healthy audience waiting for the service to start. The last funeral I went to was a couple of years ago when an in-law of the family died. Funerals are a funny thing, well not funny as in humorous, but thought-provoking. One, unless a funeral home worker or man of the cloth, thus appropriated in proper training, is often puzzled at how to act. Sure, I see funerals on TV all the time. Princess Diana’s comes to mind, as does Richard Nixon’s. I watched both on CNN and marvelled at the immense application of protocol. This was not royalty or significant personality being mourned, but I felt this crisp and warm sense of delicacy amongst the people in that room. It felt soft, it felt breakable. Tension? Anger? Sadness? Love?
Puzzlement of puzzlement’s, I realised that there was a sense amongst everyone there, that people, after 2000 or so years and thousands before that, don’t know who to grieve publicly. When John Kennedy died a year ago, or Lady Diana, public grief was evident, yet when death hits so close to home, you’re meandering inside a fragile shell, wanting to breakout for your own sanity, but keeping within for the sake of those around you.
After the service, a son-in-law from the family rose to deliver the eulogy. There’s something about that point of the service that absolutely gets me. I wasn’t wailing or breaking out in a crying jag -- I was verklempt -- a Yiddish word for feeling, right where it means the most, your consciousness -- your gut. He spoke rather simply about a man whose life was filled with adversity, first the living kind to survive and then the one that comes with age: disease and debilitation. He evoked for us that weren’t so close, the struggles of stroke and the struggles of cancer. I hadn’t seen the man for a number of years. We went to visit him about 5 years ago, after his first stroke and in the interval of then and two weeks ago when he finally died, he had a couple more strokes and the discovery of cancer. I had used two tissues, at which point we all felt great comfort when the eulogy spoke of courage and peace. The courage to face adversity and the peace achieved when that adversity is either defeated or ended -- death.
In between the hymns I was flipping through the pamphlet that we were given as we came in. It had info like when the person was born and where, where he died and when. I noted with the feeling of shear emptiness, that the service was one day after what would have been his 76th birthday. He had died a week prior.
We proceeded from the chapel, that took so long to find, to the burial site a vast expanse in Burnaby named Forest Lawn. It wasn’t raining, although it probably rained through the early morning, as the skies were greyish and the ground was moist. Damp. Dark. The coffin was carried from the hearse to the plot and we all gathered around the family. There was an underlying sense of stepping back, which we did, so as to give family some private time to mourn. I stood back as far as I could, as the Priest did his thing and the family touched and threw dirt and flowers into the hole. After this, we gathered around the widow, my old baby-sitter and I gave her the cards from our family and we hugged. I expressed to her our sorrow at her husband’s death and she thanked us for coming. One, at this point almost refuses to accept such thanks. The expression on her face was heartbreaking, as I watched from about a meter’s length, the wife turning from the grave to leave. Leaving her husband of fifty-one years, lying in a bronze box covered in dust, flowers and love.
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