Notes from a funeral

The appearance of bagpipers for Daddy’s funeral was apt and moving but also like a movie cue from the Celtic DVD catalog: This is grief! You have suffered a terrible loss and you need this soundtrack.

We ran down to the beach this morning and stripped down to our bare feet so we could wade into the chilly water. Maybe if my feet are freezing, I won't know my heart is breaking.

The two-day wake-funeral doubleheader is like a long distance race of grief. You have multiple opportunities to grieve (i.e., lose it): when I arrived at the funeral home, I kneeled by Daddy and left a note; then there was a brief service; then I said my goodbyes at evening’s end; when we returned this morning – along with a large party of family members – we had another occasion to say final goodbyes. And throughout the wake, people appear like guests on "This Is Your Life," triggering additional bouts of grief. 

(That's no complaint -- I now know the funeral ritual performs a purpose as old as our race with precision; when my beloved relatives and friends arrived, I abandoned myself to their embrace. I no longer needed to stand on my own. That's the power of the funeral rite).

I said goodbye for Leo, too; he sat apart from the rest of us, as if to physically distance himself from the corpse across the room. He appears confused and angry but most likely also -- or simply -- sad.

I’m allowed to spread the “pall” over the casket. I don't know what the funeral director means when he makes this offer, but I know it will be clear when the moment comes, and it is. Somehow it feels right and proper to spread the little shroud over the coffin.

So many occasions to realize my father's life is over, no chance at rebuttals or re-dos. I try to tell Leo that in some ways being so engulfed in grief is a good thing – I am not ready for our shared time together to come to an end. My father was called to play the role of Daddy and now I see he gave a star turn. No one else could have been my father.

At Aunt Mary’s funeral mass last month, I’d seen the officiant ring the bells on the altar, and like many other moments during that day, it had telegraphed to me that our marking of her passing from this world was a rehearsal for my father’s day and time. And today, sitting in the front row, I could see the bells again.

Similarly as I’d prepared to enter the church, I’d heard the church bells tolling from the steeple, and I thought, ‘Today they toll for me – or for someone so close to me, no distinction can be made.’

As we pulled away from the cemetery, I looked back through the window of the limo and saw his casket after it had been lowered into the ground. In other words: buried. The work required after the solemn words are pronounced -- the whole point of the trip, indeed.

When I’d arrived in Avon two days before the wake, my devoutly Catholic but heavy in mourning mother speculates that perhaps heaven – the idea of life after death -- is all “a hoax.” Billions of people have died, she says, and yet we don’t really know what happens.

Before I got in the car, I'd thought: I am driving into the unknown. He will not be there. He will not be elsewhere. He’s no longer sick but he also isn’t better in the sense we normally mean.

Only one person now lives at 329.

I spent Sunday and Monday in a way I rarely do: constantly checking my phone. And the phone responded in a way it rarely does: new texts or emails every time.

I am not wracked with grief every moment of the day but when I wake up or when I transition into another activity – collecting something from a shop, for example – I am suddenly aware that he is no longer. I am fine, I am even happy, I am moving about and then a piece of information smacks me across the face. He’s gone.

I imagine my life as a country and all the borders are secure, or so I think, and then suddenly I see one corner of my nation has been infiltrated, invaded. There is a gap, a hole, a breach. Everything is not OK: He’s no longer your father in the way you’ve always known him to be.

It's as if unbeknownst to me, I loved being his daughter – loved the version of Earth where he was still alive. 

As I'd packed my suitcase for the funeral -- the reckoning -- I gathered a few books to keep watch over me. I found myself reading Psalm 23 over and over (“The Lord is my shepherd” – or as my father would have said, “The Lord is my Taylor.”). I also looked up Psalm 40, marveling over how Bono made the Bible verse even better in song. I will sing, sing a new song. 

I threw clothes into a suitcase. I don’t have anything nice, or in any event, I don’t have anything for a funeral. But besides, what would I want to wear? Nothing will seem right. I pictured myself standing awkwardly in some dress that was ill-fitting perhaps because air would feel ill-fitting.

I write these notes as we sit in the limo, headed toward the repast. I have not been thinking a lot about writing. But while editing for CNN the other day, I opened up the file for the photo gallery entitled, 'People We Lost in 2021,' and I thought, well, I have someone to add.

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