Have you ever observed the funeral wake; that is,
have you been present at vigils over the bodies of the dead where Christian bodies are watched over with pagan rites?Have you gotten drunk there and dissolved into laughter and,
putting aside all piety and feelings of charity, have you seemed to rejoice at the death of your brother?If you have, you should do penance for thirty days on bread and water.
Medieval Popular Religion, 1000-1500: A Reader
Shinners, ed.
I grew up with dead people. That’s the way it is when your relatives are undertakers. My family buried more than bodies. Booze, food, and prescription meds kept unruly emotions at bay, making it possible to cope in a business where you woke up to tragedy and loss pretty much every day, and often in the middle of the night too.
My great-grandfather emigrated from Poland to the South Side of Chicago near the end of the nineteenth century. He and my great- grandmother had eleven children, including my maternal grandmother, who was number seven. Helen, the youngest, died of a heart defect at age three. A brain tumor killed Isadore at thirty-three. Verna also died before I was born. My grandmother and her remaining seven siblings were all in their later years by the time I came on the scene. Some of the most vivid memories of my childhood are from their funerals. By the time I graduated from college, we were down to just my grandmother and her two unmarried sisters, June and Lucille, who was my godmother.
Family funerals were occasions. Dressed in our Sunday clothes we gathered at my uncles’ funeral home for the traditional two nights of wakes followed by a full Catholic Mass and graveside burial service. We paid our last respects before the open coffin and chanted “Eternal rest grant unto him, oh Lord.” I can still hear our whispered voices. The grown-ups would remark about what a good job my aunt had done with the makeup and hair, while we kids dared each other to step up to the coffin and touch the waxen hands clasping a rosary.
Every living thing eventually dies. This understanding created in me a morbid fascination with death and dying. There was a sense of normalcy in the deaths of my older relatives who succumbed to natural causes (heart attacks and strokes were common in our family), a feeling that while death was sad, it was also a predictable and inevitable part of the life cycle.
The losses that disturbed me were the ones like the ten-year-old girl (my age), flung from a roller coaster at Santa’s Village. Her skull cracked open the moment it hit the concrete fifty feet below. Santa’s Village was my favorite amusement park. The notion that a child could die in a place meant for innocent fun was too awful for me to think about for long.
Then there was the time my uncle had to leave my cousin’s First Communion party to pick up the remains of a suicide by train.
“I had to use plastic Baggies to get all of her. It’ll be a closed casket,” he’d muttered wearily when he returned from the tracks later that evening.
My best friend and I had once placed a penny on the railroad tracks behind our houses then waited, holding our breath as a freight train roared past. The gust of wind accompanying the train blew our hair out behind us. We bent over the iron rails, peering down at the shiny copper disk. It was flat as a pancake, with a deep groove from the train’s wheels passing through its center. That was how I imagined the body would look; all flat, even shiny like the copper penny, somehow, with two long ruts across the torso from the train rolling over it.
“Were there wheel marks on the belly?” I couldn’t help asking.
My uncle stared long enough for me to understand that I shouldn’t have asked, then walked over to the makeshift bar set up on the kitchen counter, poured three inches of bourbon into a juice glass, and drank it down in one gulp.
I didn’t fully appreciate what dead meant until I went to the funeral of someone I didn’t know. Every morning, my grandmother and her two sisters started their day with the death toll. Like traders who watch the stock market’s fluctuations, the three of them combed the obituaries daily. We referred to them collectively as The Ladies. They never wore slacks, always matched their hats to their pocketbooks, and conducted their public affairs with the elegance of royalty.
The Ladies were self-appointed professional mourners. Gram would sit in the overstuffed chair by the kitchen window, the front section of first the Chicago Tribune and then the Sun-Times spread wide in her arms, proclaiming the day’s dead like winners of some macabre lottery. Aunt Lou took her place at the table, where she made a list of people they knew who had, as Gram not so delicately put it, “bought the farm.”
A second list was begun, this one of rival funeral homes. An asterisk was made next to each establishment that had a client. From her perch near the window Gram would lift her head over the top of the paper and call, “Pomierski’s got one . . . some old Pole from Thirty-Second and Carpenter. Does Banakevich ring a bell?”
Everyone in our family knew that if you made plans with The Ladies, they were subject to cancellation in the event of a death within the city limits. During one particularly fruitful year, The Ladies attended three to four funerals a week. Winters tended to be busier than the summer months. A lot of folks seemed to get worn down by the rigors of holiday shopping and revelry. January yielded the highest number of funerals five straight years in a row. Aunt June, the record keeper, saved over thirty years’ worth of lists of the funerals they attended in a brown accordion file.
In 1996, Gram had a stroke and was hospitalized. Her demise brought on chest pains and high blood pressure for Aunt June, who wound up in the hospital too.
The Ladies relocated to Mercy Hospital. When I arrived one morning to see how they were doing, Aunt Lou was seated between her sisters’ bedsides, doing Gram’s job of reading the obituaries aloud. Occasionally she would comment on one to Gram, who was unconscious; Aunt June, who was still asleep; and to me.
“Oh!” She gasped after I’d been there for a little while. “Janie Condon’s dead!”
“Janie who?” I mumbled, engrossed in a crossword puzzle. “Janie Condon.”
My mother walked into the room carrying two steaming cups of coffee from the cafeteria. She handed one to Aunt Lou.
“Janie Condon?” She asked my great-aunt. “Wasn’t she married to Sis’s son, Roger?”
I had no idea who they were talking about but surmised it was some extended family members. We had lots of them.
“Of course, she was. They had three children—a boy, a girl, and then another boy. Don’t you remember, she left Roger when the youngest was only four or five?” This last sentence Aunt Lou whispered, as if perhaps the poor woman’s soul was hovering nearby and could hear us talking about her. “It has to be at least twelve years since we saw Janie, at the last one’s baptism. Roger was at Sylvie’s niece’s wedding two years ago, but of course Janie wasn’t with him then.” She went back to the newspaper.
“Brain tumor, it says. That’s what got her.” Aunt Lou closed the paper. “The funeral’s tomorrow at Holy Name. Ten o’clock.” She let out a long sigh. “With June laid up, I don’t know how I’d get there . . .” Aunt June was the only sister who’d learned to drive.
I’d filled in the answer to six across and was chewing my pencil while thinking about a word that meant give the cold shoulder when my mother lightly kicked my shin. When I glanced up from the newspaper she nodded toward my godmother, who sat there mournfully.
The Ladies got around in a black Cadillac DeVille. The perfect automobile for a funeral procession, it was made to follow behind a hearse, with its Day-Glo orange “Funeral” sticker permanently affixed in the right front corner of the windshield.
The night before, I’d used the Cadillac to go to dinner with my nearly-ex boyfriend. We were in the process of breaking up, knowing the relationship was over but hoping to ease the ache a little by seeing each other occasionally. I’d driven him home after dinner but when I pulled up to his apartment, I’d turned off the car. The two of us had wound up in the backseat, ripping each other’s clothes off to make frenzied, last-chance love on the slick leather before either of us could consider the repercussions.
“I can take you in the morning, Aunt Lou.” I was feeling mildly guilty about having made it in The Ladies’ DeVille. “I’ll take the Cadillac home tonight, then pick you up in the morning.”
I hadn’t been to a funeral in several years. After a week of keeping vigil at the hospital, anything was better than another day of staring at the cardiac monitor and waiting for 6:30 when The Ladies’ favorite show, Wheel of Fortune, came on TV.
Aunt Lou patted her hair. “I’d better get to the beauty shop. I’ll call Connie and see if she can squeeze me in for a rinse and a set. I’ll tell her there’s been a death in the family.”
Sure there has, if you count a cousin’s son’s ex-wife as family. I rolled my eyes at my mother, who hid her smile behind a dog-eared copy of Good Housekeeping.
The next day I zipped myself into my black wool dress, tucked my hair up under my crushed velvet hat with the floral maroon piping, and slipped my feet into black patent leather heels. When I picked up Aunt Lou, she insisted on sitting in the backseat just as she always did whenever The Ladies went out. If she noticed the lingering scent of my ex’s cologne, she didn’t mention it. In our dark dresses and hats we looked like twins, except I wasn’t wearing black gloves, until she pulled a pair from her purse and laid them on the front passenger seat. A funny feeling came over me. Was I becoming one of The Ladies?
At the cathedral, Aunt Lou smiled and nodded, greeting extended family members she saw once every ten years at best, always at a wedding or a funeral. I had never considered The Ladies’ motivation for attending funerals. It seemed like it was something for them to do; a way to break up the day-to-day routine of reading the newspaper and going to the grocery store. My grandmother had never worked outside the home and her sisters were long-retired from their secretarial jobs, so they had a lot of time on their hands. But perhaps I’m being uncharitable. They may have felt it was important to honor the dead, no matter how little time they had spent with the deceased while he or she was alive.
For me, that particular funeral was a chance to reminisce about those party-like funerals of my childhood. We’d been fortunate—no one in our immediate family had died in almost a decade. I took in all the subdued splendor of the vast church, the way light bled in multi-colors through the stained-glass windows, the hushed mourners sitting in the pews around me. I didn’t recognize any of them.
The pallbearers rolled a coffin draped with a white cloth up the long center aisle toward the altar. Three kids walked arm in arm behind the casket. In the middle stood a girl, long blonde hair stark against her black jumper. She looked about fifteen. The boy on her left was taller and older, probably seventeen. A younger boy flanked her on the right. He was eleven or twelve, with tears streaming freely down his cheeks.
For an unguarded moment I became that girl, coming of age in a way no child should have to, scanning the pews for familiar faces, for people who had loved and taken care of her all of her brief life. People who could reassure her that she would be OK, even though her mother had just died from a brain tumor that took her from them in less than six months since her diagnosis. The girl turned and caught me staring. We locked eyes. I read the questions forming in hers: Who are you? What are you doing at my mother’s funeral?
My mind returned to the lively session my almost-ex and I had in the backseat of the DeVille the night before. It seemed vulgar and wrong somehow that I had been in the throes of ecstasy while this poor girl had stood at her mother’s wake. Sex is the natural rite of passage from girl to woman. I saw from her expression that losing one’s mother does it too. The shift is faster, more permanent.
Hot tears for the girl and her brothers welled, along with shame at my earlier frustration about spending my morning at a funeral for someone I’d never met. I tugged the brim of my hat down lower. The tears increased, and soon I was crying out of genuine, long-buried grief for all those I’d witnessed lowered into graves—the elderly great aunts and uncles who’d succumbed to heart disease and strokes, the cousin killed at sixteen by a drunk driver, even my uncle’s black-and-white cocker spaniel, Smokey.
After the Mass Aunt Lou whispered, “How long will it take us to drive to the luncheon?”
“We’re not going to the luncheon. We paid our respects. We have no business showing up for the luncheon too.”
I covered the guilt I felt at her disappointment with anger. “Aunt Lou, you hardly knew anyone in church. Even her ex-husband looked surprised to see you there.”
“But we always go to the luncheon after the Mass.” She was angry, too, but I wasn’t giving in.
“Well, today we have to get back to the hospital.” We made the trip in silence, both of us stewing. Still, I felt like I’d made the right decision.
“I’m sick about missing the luncheon,” Aunt Lou later confided to her infirm sisters in a stage whisper I was meant to overhear. “Especially since Connie did such a nice job with my hair.”
Bridget Boland is a fiction and memoir writer as well as an attorney and shamanic medicine practitioner. Her debut novel, The Doula, was published by Simon and Schuster in 2012. Her writing has appeared in The New Guard, Conde Nast Women’s Sports and Fitness, YogaChicago, and The Essential Chicago. Excerpts from her work have won the Writers League of Texas Memoir Prize, and the Surrey Writers Conference Nonfiction Award.