Friday, February 8, 2019
Lili Wronker
Vyacheslav Ovchinnikkov
Albert Finney
Thursday, February 7, 2019
Frank Robinson
Rosamunde Pilcher
Wednesday, February 6, 2019
Funerals
First of all, I don’t remember being particularly morbid. I
am not a goth nor any other species of darkness-dweller, clad in black, dour,
wan, and surly. So how is it that I am now an obituary hound, as well as a
horror-film historian? Do we see a trend here?
I finally put it all down as a lifelong attempt to master my
heart-stopping fear of decay and dissolution — but it hasn’t made me adept at
funerals.
My little sideline in all things deathly, from end-of-life
issues to death itself, to the grief, the burials, the memorials, does not
extend to being a connoisseur of final rites. I am horrible at funerals, as
planner, executor, participant, and guest. My presence provokes disaster.
For instance, the case of the passed-out pallbearer. No one
anticipates this, though I would assume that the bigger funeral firms have
stage managers, security, designated backup handle-grabbers and all that. But
what do the amateurs do? Funerals are for the living, not the indifferent dead,
and the theater geek in me wants the show to go off well. Keep up the pace, no embarrassing
longeurs, please!
Now, a pallbearer passing out is technically not a problem.
A coffin has six handles, you lose one guy (I must say the patriarchy still
holds sway here — I can’t remember ever seeing a female pallbearer), you are
still at 85 percent. However, pallbearers are primarily chosen on the basis of
their relationship to the deceased, not on their ability to heft their dead
weight. Sometimes one falters.
Nothing puts a damper on a funeral faster than an
unconscious person blocking the main exit. Little is less enchanting than
holding the dead up with one hand and helping the fallen up with the other.
Casket-lowering devices, too, are a source of diversion during
the solemnities. These can jam during descent, leaving the deceased suspended
precariously between heaven and earth, forcing some the funeral attendants to
strip off their suitcoats and wrassle with the mechanism while the bereaved are
shepherded away from the excavation site.
You see, there are two enormously conflicting impulses at
work in my family history. One of them is conservative and respectful. We are rule-followers, observant
of hierarchies, submissive to authority, confident in the system. We are the
descendants of “holy Danes,” God-fearing, tight-lipped, Scandinavian immigrant
farmers and preachers, all hopped up on a kind of dogmatic, fundamentalist
Lutheranism (an oxymoron personified). This is a theology founded on the
rock-solid and reigning principle that we are not here to have fun.
Instead, we are trapped in some kind of hellish foyer,
nervously on our best behavior, waiting our turn for judgment. We are here to
suffer and be tested. We will pass into Glory if and when it is determined that
we lived a good enough life to merit union with the Blessed Elect. (My
great-uncle’s second wife locked him in the basement on Sundays so he couldn’t
watch Hopalong Cassidy reruns. T’was a violation of the Sabbath, t’was.) This status
is conferred by a consensus of the survivors, and is subject to revision as the
evidence accumulates.
On the other hand, our tribe is a bunch of goddamned crazy
anarchists, reprobates, wisenheimers, failures brave and cowardly, addicts,
obsessives, mockers, freethinkers, corrosives, despiters, drunks, and
adulterers, mad and lonely, lost and angry in a world not of our own making and
not to our own liking. The pathologies squeezed out from under the compression
of conformity. A relentless, questioning strain of intelligence infuses our
heritage with skepticism. We learned to laugh to keep from cracking until the
solemn strain.
These impulses collided. My father had an older brother who
died quite young, and in my grandparents’ house, in the living room, was
enframed an arrangement of photos of Alan, alive around the edges and, in the
center, posed dead in his coffin. This last was not an uncommon practice at the
time, and was not perceived as strange.
Beneath his photo was Eugene Fields’ bizarre, sentimental
nightmare of a poem about a dead child, his 1888 “Little Boy Blue”:
The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and staunch he stands;
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket molds in his hands. . . .
The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and staunch he stands;
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket molds in his hands. . . .
Are you kidding me? Imagine that being one of your first memories.
No wonder I have problems.
My first big funeral was my grandfather’s, when I was seven.
He died two days before Christmas, so we left the presents under the tree and
drove back to Nebraska to bury him.
No one told me the open-casket rule was in effect. Now, the
funeral home had “visitation rooms,” in which they’d traditionally set up the
coffin, folded open to display the deceased if aesthetically possible. There
were “visiting hours.” There were two rows of folding chairs, split by a
central aisle. I was urged to go and look at Grandpa. I got close enough to see
his features. He was mottled, waxy, disturbingly lifelike. I was told it was
OK, it wasn’t really him. The padded coffin lining, the pillow beneath his
head, all spoke of sleep. But this wasn’t sleep. I backed out, away from the
thing that was him and not him. I had already had enough.
As a whole generational wave of ancestors passed away,
frequently came the call to slip on the Sunday shoes, suit, and tie. We sat in
pews listening to lugubrious sermons. We heard homilies. We sang hymns we could
barely remember the words to, mouthing silent approximations. We ate potluck
Jello dishes in church social halls afterwards. (It seems you cannot legally
hold a funeral in the Midwest unless Jello is provided.) We looked at the faces
of the departed, “improved” and altered by the ministers of the so-called
“restorative arts.” Many of them went underground in a state of unrecognizable
prettification.
There are other flashes of remembered panic. Writing my
parents’ obituaries. That time I couldn’t deliver a eulogy because I was crying
too hard. The time the minister tried to comfort us after the service with hand
puppets. That time during my dad’s funeral when whatever holy Joe the chapel
rounded up to preside stopped everything to drum up business. “And if anyone
here finds themselves in a similar situation, I urge you to please consider this
establishment to meet your needs.” A commerical.
(Before this, the first funeral home we tried went like this
— Funeral Guy: “What I can I do you for?” Us: “Uh . . . our dad just died.”
Needless to say, we didn’t go with Johnny Smooth.)
True, there things work out. Dad it made to his gravesite
without mishap, where he currently lies on top of his second wife. (With a
narrow plot, side-by-side placement was not in the cards.) My mother, who
experienced most of these mishaps with us, chose cremation.
However, even this attempt to slip away gracefully failed
miserably. The container with her ashes sat around for a few months, during
which it was lost, refound, sat on, and opened by mistake. It is not quite as
depressing to view a loved one turned into “cremains” as it is to see them as a
corpse . . . but neither is it a fiesta. I can’t describe what it feels like to
accidentally stick your hand into a bag of your mother.
In the end, according to her wishes, her ashes were
dispersed near the farm where she was raised. I heard the ceremony was nice. I
opted to go on a long-scheduled trip instead. I am still happy with that
decision. As much as I dislike the mechanisms of burial, I would prefer to live
the rest of my life without wondering whether some of the dust that’s blowing
into my eyes is Mom.
At least I’ve figured out my personal funeral formula. Having
converted to Judaism years ago, I am assured that I won’t be cremated or
embalmed. I will be stuck into a plain wooden box, and my people will shovel
the dirt in over me. I like that idea. After a year, I get a gravestone (the
deceased’s memory is deemed to be fresh enough not to warrant one for some time
after death).
Mourning is strictly prescribed in Judaism, with a set of
rules that gives grief the proper space without letting it overwhelm everyday
life. It’s scripted, in easy-to-remember units of one week, one month, one
year. In this case, the ritual is based on an understanding of how the human
soul operates, and it channels the feelings. Excessive visits to the graveyard are
discouraged in Judaism; life must go on.
Whereas in childhood, our visits to the graveyard were
almost weekly, bordering on ancestor worship. Eating at the grave site, not so
different from the Asian and Hispanic grave-tenders we found in our National
Geographics.
We would stand among the labeled stones while various late
individuals were pointed out and praised, or anathemized. As the grown-ups
became distracted, we would break away and start playing. Soon we were slipping
off our uncomfortable Sunday shoes, running in the sunshine, leaping over the
headstones. Defying the gravity.
Izzy Young
Tuesday, February 5, 2019
Ken Welch
Nita Bieber
Monday, February 4, 2019
Chin Yang Lee
Ron Hutchinson
Candice Earley
Julie Adams
Clive Swift
Sunday, February 3, 2019
Irv Brown
It's AFTER all this that I remember Irv. He and microphone partner Joe Williams created great sports-talk radio for 25 years. Always a hoot to listen to, but interlaced with serious talk about important sports-related issues, as well as interviews with sports figures across the spectrum.So familiar was he that I used to do impressions of him as part of my comedy act. Wherever he was broadasting from, IRv would plug the joint the same way: "So, c'mon down, just some good people down here. They'll take care'a ya!" A warm and witty voice, personable, energetic, inquisitive, inclusive -- he seemed to reach through the radio, just the guy you'd like to listen to and shoot the bull with for hours. "You make the show," he said, and he meant it! Thanks, Irv.
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