The Blue Hours of Middle Life: Never Miss a Funeral

“You can skip a wedding, but you should never miss a funeral,” a friend observed, after I called to gush about how healing it was to attend a relative’s memorial service recently. My friend explained that her father always said this and that she didn’t really know what he meant by it and that she couldn’t ask him because he was dead. But she observed that weddings, with their trumpet calls for the future, were simpler affairs, whereas funerals with their requiems for the past took us into deeper places, and in these places we found wisdom.

Waking at four in the morning, skittish at the prospect of driving from western Massachusetts to the Cape, logging the first 85 miles to the Courtyard-Marriot Motel in Milford, where I was meeting my sister to carpool the remaining 100 miles across the Bourne Bridge and down the mid-Cape highway to St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Chatham for our uncle’s memorial service, I would have preferred to be heading to a wedding.

The last time I had seen my father’s younger brother, who passed away this past December in Charlottesville, Virginia at the age of 89, was at another funeral--for my grandmother at the First Congregational Church in Pittsfield, Mass. That was thirty-one years ago, and in the intervening decades, the family had split asunder, like an ancient tree whose branches needed to be lopped off to avoid the ravages of Dutch elm disease. I had never met my uncle’s grandchildren or great-grandchildren. I had never been to the house on Dune Drive where the funeral party was gathering after the burial. Though our DNA washed through us strong as the tides along Chatham Bars beach, I wasn’t sure I would recognize my relatives, or they me.

It would have been easier to stay away,to let bygones be bygones,

but my father and his younger brother had reconnected over the telephone shortly before my uncle’s death—“laughing and joking as if they were boys again,” so my father’s longtime partner had reported. In my condolence letter to my cousin, I confessed that I didn’t understand why the two brothers had been estranged, but that it didn’t matter anymore, and that I myself had warm memories of my uncle, his gentle smile, his skill on the tennis court, and regretted that I had not known him better. I wrote, too, that I had fond memories of that side of the family: the very first wedding I had attended had been that of my cousin’s and his wife’s and that I could still see the crowded ballroom of the Pittsfield Country Club, where the reception was held, with the bridesmaids in pastel gowns, the men in dark suits, and that it was, to my 12-year-old romantic soul, a scene of transcendent bliss.

My cousin e-mailed back saying that he also didn’t understand the brothers’ rift, but that he and his wife, Peggy, (they were still married after 40 years) and brother, Tony, appreciated my letter and hoped we could come to the memorial service in June.

My sister and I signed the guest book in the anteroom of the chapel and shook the hand of the rector, who, in a curious six-degrees-of-separation connection, was the son of one of her friends in New Hampshire. As we took our seats in a back row and scanned the program, she asked what was the difference between a pastor and a rector, wondering whether she had committed a faux in addressing her friend’s son as “Pastor.” One was for Catholics, one for Protestants? I offered weakly. It occurred me that my ex-husband would have known, but we were divorced so I wouldn’t be asking him, and I was filled again with sadness for all family rifts, those that could be mended and those that could not.

“Oh look, I said, “glancing through the program, “the 23^rd Psalm, and in the King James version. Ma loved the King James Bible, and always said it was the only one worth reading.” Ma was our grandmother, the one whose funeral we had all attended 31 years ago, mother of the man whose life and witness we were celebrating. The sixteenth-century words of the Psalms were working their miracles upon our diseased family tree, and it already seemed as though our collective cups were indeed running over.

Then the organist started playing “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” a bit louder and a group of people started down the aisle, and I whispered to my sister that there they were: my older cousin, wide-browed, bow-tied and erect, and his younger brother, bearded and bespectacled with that same lantern jaw that my sister and I had: family.

My cousin, Peter, brown hair now flecked with silver, whom we always referred to as young Peter, to distinguish him from his father, spoke first, pointing out that the reproduction of the seascape on the program’s cover had been done by his dad, who had taken up watercolor in his retirement. I turned the stapled pages and peered at the swathe of water through marshlands, thinking initially that it had been a Winslow Homer or Marsden Hartley. Peter’s wife Peggy, who stood beside him on the podium, then spoke about how her father-in-law had had a show at the assisted living facility where he spent his last years, and how proud she was of him.

Next up was Peter’s younger brother, Tony, talking about his dad and how he would wrestle with him and his brother every afternoon after he came home from work, how his dad taught him to appreciate classical music as well as how to cook, and how, more recently, Tony would call from Arizona, and he and his dad would get to musing about Roman history (Tony was a schoolteacher) and an hour and a half later, father and son would hang up the phone.

Two granddaughters then spoke, their voices breaking with emotion as they talked about their Bompa. The youngest grand-daughter, very pregnant with her second child, read her remarks from her I-phone, which she said was somehow fitting as her Bompa had been curious about iPhones, computers, Facebook, and Twitter, and was always asking her to explain whatever newfangled device she had.

We then filed out into the memorial garden where we watched as my uncle’s ashes were tucked into the edge of a rich green lawn, lush with the rain that had been falling steadily for the past few days. Then we repaired to the house on Dune Drive, and there was a lot of hugging, eating, and drinking, and we stayed and stayed and talked and talked—to the cousins and their children and their children’s children, and to friends of the family that had been at Peter and Peggy’s wedding reception at the Pittsfield Country Club in 1968 and it seemed that the thirty-one years were all collapsing into seeds of sea lavender waving in the mist on the marshes, into grains of bony ash secreted in the loam of the memorial garden.

Never miss a funeral. Your own will come soon enough. In the meantime, you will remarry yourself to the world.