First, a note: I apologize for having been largely absent here on MO 25 for quite a while. It wasn’t intentional; it’s just been a bit of a season that hasn’t allowed me to be digitally present while I’ve needed to be physically and emotionally present with the people and animals in my life. I’m hopeful that there will be a little more space for me to be back here full strength soon. Thanks for your patience and support while I navigate many communities.
Sixteen years ago, my grandfather died.
Seven and a half years ago, my mother died.
Just over two years ago, my father died.
This year, my grandmother died.
That’s a hell of a way to start writing anything, and not the way I’d like to begin, but it’s a set of bare facts that readers will need to understand why I ended up in a small town in Connecticut this weekend standing next to a damp hole in a field while my uncle played Alan Jackson gospel covers on a portable speaker.
You see, of all those people I listed who died, only one of them — my grandfather — had a funeral. I wasn’t there. Sepsis killed him in a Florida hospital just three weeks before I gave birth to my second child, and I wasn’t cleared to fly. So when he died, I just sort of…sat down at my piano and played aimless music until I felt as numb as possible. Then I spent a lot of time on the phone with all the family members who were there for his death and for the memorial service, and then I went into false labor, which is a whole separate story I won’t tell here.
Almost eight years later, I was there when his daughter, my mother, died in a hospital near my childhood home in Upstate New York. I was complicit in her death, actually, since I was one of the three people — my father, my sister, and myself — who told the medical personnel to go ahead and disconnect everything keeping her alive. When we started making the phone calls to tell everyone what had happened, people kept asking us, “What will the funeral arrangements be?” And my father said “Nothing,” and that was the end of it.
We did not have a funeral for her. Her two brothers flew into town with my grandmother so they could all say goodbye, and we sat in the family room of my parents’ house visiting with one another, and at some point my sister and I cleaned out the freezer, refrigerator, and pantry and did some grocery shopping and made some meals to leave for my father. That was our memorial service, working side-by-side in my mother’s kitchen as we had done our whole lives, her presence at our backs. And when I had stocked that fridge and freezer with individual servings of pot roast and spaghetti sauce, and hugged my grandmother and my uncles and driven my sister to the train station, I told my father I’d call him and I drove back home to my own family in Rhode Island and I made dinner for my kids and I went back to “normal” life the next day.
I’m beginning to realize this whole post is going to be a longer story than I thought it would be.
When a New York hospital called me at 3 a.m. to tell me that my father was dying, and asked if I wanted to try to get there to say goodbye, I was a three-hour drive away. So I sat on my couch in the small dark hours of the night and clutched the phone to my ear and eventually a nice doctor with a compassionate voice came on the line and said “I’m sorry, Dad’s gone.” He passed me off to a nurse who asked if she could help me make the arrangements. I said “Whatever he did for my mother is fine,” and together we figured out who to call about cremation. I asked a neighbor to pick up his belongings and look out for his wedding ring. I called my sister and asked what we should do about a funeral. “Nothing,” she said, and that was the end of that, and I later told my very concerned mother-in-law that “I guess we’re just not funeral people.”
After that, my parents’ remains were stored underneath the guest room bed on the third floor of my house, and my sister and I would occasionally ask each other “What will we do with Mom and Dad?” We jokingly remembered when we helped clean out the apartment of an elderly relative who’d died, and how the items on the top shelf of a closet fell on my sister — among them, the ashes of a long-forgotten abusive ex-husband. “I don’t want our parents’ ashes to become another McFetridge situation,” we’d say, and promised each other we’d figure out what to do with their cardboard-boxed remains, in the absence of any guidance or directive from either of them.
Then, this past fall, I walked offstage at a local cathedral after having performed a choral concert, and was greeted in the green room by a text from my uncle to tell me my grandmother was gone. There was no immediate funeral planned, he said, but he’d let me know what we were going to do when it became apparent, probably sometime in the spring. My grandfather, he said, was in a closet or a bookshelf somewhere or other, and had left instructions for the disposal of his remains, but he’d waited patiently for Gramma these past 16 years. There would be plans. He’d call me.
We just enacted the plans. Actually, we did the Plan B, because it turns out the memorial garden at the Florida church where my grandparents had intended to be left for eternity was not a viable option any longer. That made things awkward. But it also made the eventual answer pretty clear, for all of us.
Home.
Now, home means a lot of things to a lot of people, and certainly the concept of “home” was complicated for some of these four dearly departed people — my mother, for starters. She and my father were small-town kids who, when presented with the opportunity to leave, did so, probably with skid marks in their wake. The many reasons why are both complicated and not, and better left unlisted at the moment. But whatever she, or any of them, might have said about their hometown, it still stands. And within it stands the house where my great-grandparents began their life in America after coming over from Sweden.
That house still stands on the ancestral farm, and as luck would have it, that farm is still in the possession of the extended family, and all around that farmland the various cousins who peopled my mother’s childhood still live with their own families. So when my uncles called up home and spoke to some of those people about digging a hole, the answer was essentially “How big?”
Not very big, really. Not big enough to contain all my memories of my parents and grandparents, of summers in the mountains and big cookouts and board games and fancy holiday dinners and bedtime stories and being thrown into various pools and lakes and picking berries and bathing outdoors and
And
And somehow it was just big enough to contain the feeling of looking up at a man I don’t know very well, but who I would recognize anywhere as my mother’s cousin because he looks just like his father. And I said to him, standing by that hole, that his father (dead these eighteen years, and yes, I was at that funeral, swaying in the back with my newborn baby) had taught me to bake all the family recipes that came from Sweden. Because I thought he probably didn’t know that, but it seemed important to tell him, at the time.
It really wasn’t a very big hole.
We put in an engraved box that held the commingled ashes of my grandparents, and then we put in a smaller velvet bag that held exactly eight trowels full of each of my parents, which — as an aside — I will tell you is a fairly hilarious conversation to have early in the morning as you’re preparing for a road trip to bury part of your parents’ remains and you can’t quite figure out just how much of them you’ll be shoveling into a bag. But eight trowels of Dad and eight trowels of Mom seemed somehow like an appropriate bagful for the occasion, and if you’re wondering why we didn’t bring all of them, you’re starting to understand on some level the conflict we felt about whether this particular “home” was home enough for them both to want to entirely rest there until the end of time.
“I haven’t prepared anything,” I said, when my uncles asked if my sister or I would speak a few words about Mom and Dad. Then I turned to the half-circle of assembled people who had grown up with my parents and grandparents, but who I mostly didn’t know very well, if at all. And I told those people that my parents had left them behind as fast as they could go, but that a funny thing had happened sometime when I was in middle school, and my mom, at least, had seemed to get homesick.
“That’s when we started coming back here,” I said, and recalled how I got to visit frequently with my great-aunts and uncles, and I looked up briefly at the farmhouse sitting just up the hill. Inside, the only surviving one of those aunts and uncles sat with his caregiver. Before we walked down to the hole, I had gone to say hello, wondering if he’d remember me. But his face lit up when he saw me come around the corner. “Hello, Uncle Richard,” I had said. “Can I give you a kiss?”
“I always like kisses from pretty girls,” he’d said, so I kissed his cheek and he grasped my hand and I laughed a little. He caught his breath.
“When you laugh,” he said, holding onto me hard, “you sound just like your mother.”
This is a much longer story than I thought it would be, so I’m telling it in parts. I hope you’ll come back later this week for the rest.
Heartfelt, lovely story. My younger sister and I found out we weren't funeral people in much the same way. And yes, how we're going to deal with the ashes, touching the ashes, and actually carrying out the persons wishes are bizarre conversations to have. My sister and I are all the closer for having done that, and for the fact that years later we can share our stories and laugh together.
Bri, this is so lovely. The details you are able to recall and write about so eloquently, just love it. The last sentence had me holding my breath. Looking forward to the next chapter.