family

The Funeral


My third funeral since September was just this last week. People I either didn’t know at all or barely had the time to get to know. This last one was for Fraser, Rob’s father-in-law and Farron and Jordan’s grandfather. It was held at the United Church in Beaverlodge, which is not far from Grande Prairie, and as close to mile zero of the Alaskan Highway as a person can be without being there. The minister was European. Don’t ask me from where. English is his fifth language and as such his accent was fairly hard to place – even for Rob who is generally good at this type of thing. He was not your average Christian minister, bearing in mind here that my experience with Christian means Catholic and when I think “minister”, I see “priest”. He didn’t believe in the idea of being saved. He operates on the principle that we were saved by Christ’s dying on the cross, and our access to heaven was assured by the Resurrection. I found that surprising and refreshing. Surprising because I spent too long living among the Protestants in central Iowa who had this curious habit of disbelief when it comes to this idea of having been saved already, and refreshing because my own Catholic upbringing is so heavily guilt laden and filled with recriminations and doubt of worth. I could almost see myself attending worship if this guy was the minister in charge and if I didn’t suspect that organized religion was organized in the first place for reasons other than promoting the ideas they claim to represent.

 

Rob was asked to give the eulogy by Shelley’s brother, Jason and Fraser’s nephew, Brian. He did a good job. He’s a Virgo after all and spent time writing and rewriting and running his ideas by me, Jordan, Jason and Cory (Shelley’s nephew) and taking suggestions and incorporating them into revisions he wrote. It was a longer eulogy than one might expect from someone who doesn’t do that sort of thing for a living. I could hear an old man behind me doing that heavy sigh thing that Katy does when she is bored but doesn’t want to risk voicing her opinion. It went on until the man finally muttered to someone nearby, “It’s forty minutes already!” Not Rob’s eulogy, the entire service up to that point. I was a bit annoyed and if my back hadn’t been gripped in a series of agonizing spasms that afternoon, I’d have turned square around and given him the teacher stare I normally reserved for the hell spawn. As if forty minutes was too long a time to give up to remember someone, which for some of them would be the last time they bothered to at all because so many funeral attendees have put the passing behind them almost as soon as they exit the venue in search of the post-funeral chow down.

 

The church was packed to the point of over-flow with seating set up in the basement for those who couldn’t be squeezed into the main church. Despite that the interment in the very wet, muddy cemetery outside of town was sparsely attended. Just immediate family and close friends while the rest of the mourners scurried ahead to the Rio Grande Hall to snap up the best parking and be first in line for the food. I find just about everything to do with wakes, funerals and funeral dinners – disturbing or disgusting. Peering at corpses who in no way look “natural” or “better than they had in years”. Socializing as though one was attending a family reunion. Eating. As I put it to my mother once during the last of our memorable arguments concerning my refusal to willingly attend funeral dinners – “Someone’s dead. So let’s eat?” I have never attended a single one of these functions since that time that has changed my opinion one iota. Despite this I allowed myself to be coerced into a visitation/wake for Will, my late husband. I spent the evening observing others as they chatted and gave vent to their grief but didn’t feel comforted or able to grieve myself. I gave comfort and was patted on the back for my efforts. And except for the wake and funeral of my 10-year-old cousin, I don’t think I have ever really attended an event where everyone was sad – visibly and demonstratively.

 

The dinner was held at one of the many community halls that dot the farming communities around Grande Prairie. Rio (Rye-o) Grande hall was a place that Rob could remember attending dances with Shelley. Between each dance couples would stroll around the hall hand in hand waiting for the next record to begin much like I remember doing at the roller skating rink when I was in junior high. Once as he and Shelley were strolling, the widowed mother of a classmate slipped her hand in his other and strolled with them. Shelley teased him about that for the rest of the night.

 

Family ended up parking on the side of the muddy road, as the parking lot was full and then making their way inside to find the line at the food tables snaking around the outer walls. To the family’s credit, we all cut the line and I filled a plate for Katy. Cheese strips, pickles and Timbits of which she ate the latter two. We didn’t stay long. Everyone was in a hurry to get back to the farm, which was less than two minutes away. People followed and rapidly filled the kitchen to overflowing and then the drinking began.

 

I have a lot to say about alcohol, given my personal history, but for now I will say that I don’t think much of the practice of funeral “after-parties”. Grief makes a poor mixer. Especially when last will and testament readings are involved.

 

Things finally began to settle a bit in terms of numbers about 9:30 that evening and by ten it was almost quiet enough for Katy to conk out in Jason’s old bedroom above the kitchen – though how she slept through the variable noise levels that followed with regularity until 7 the next morning, I don’t know because Rob and I didn’t.

 

I was exhausted enough by 10:30 that I managed to drop off but that was just until Rob woke me at 1:30AM in a cold rage and ready to pack up and head for home. I could see us getting about two hours of the six it takes to make the Fort and then sleeping on the side of the road for some super semi to plow into in the cold dark, so I talked him down until he could sleep. Then I was awake, listening to the inebriated mourners until closing in on four. Apparently, everyone was in bed by seven that morning and though we had planned to get an early start as Rob was going to help Jordan pick up her new car before the dealership closed, he decided that we should sleep in a bit and we did, not getting on the road proper until well after 10AM.

 

There is talk of a great gathering at the farm again on the May long weekend (Victoria Day) with a bonfire of all of the old out-buildings and yes, more drinking (I should note here that there is a considerable amount of wine left courtesy of Uncle Raymond that is now part of the legacy left for the children and grandchildren and since Ray’s still is intact and fully operational somewhere – there could be even more by May). We are doubtful for this gathering at this point, but things may be different then.

 

All in all, I am hoping we will have no more sad reasons to revisit Grande Prairie anytime soon.

Off to Grande Prairie – Again



At some point in the next 24 hrs we will pile into the Avalanche and make our third pilgrimage up north to Grande Prairie in less than five months. Three funerals in five months. In many ways this is beginning to remind me of my childhood back in Dubuque. Around the time my Uncle Jimmy died back in 1972, there was a rash of deaths on my dad’s side of the family that had us attending wakes and funerals almost constantly, or so it seemed to me at the time. For a while, between my dad’s relatives dropping like flies and my mother’s nieces and nephews weddings, the only time I saw my extended family was in church or in a church basement after for dinner. Chicken, ham, and turkey and dressing sandwiches. Artery clogging side dishes. Homemade desserts brought in by the ladies of the various rosary societies. Food and death. Food and marriage. Linked eternally in my nine year old mind.

The only other spate of death I can remember in my life came the summer between my junior and senior year in college. All in July. My ten year old cousin died in a farm accident on the 4th. My great-uncle, Father John, one of the nastiest men I have ever know died in Texas mid-month. And Kyle died. I am fairly certain it was around the same time, but it’s been over twenty years now, so I am not totally sure. Kyle was my friend Sarah’s boyfriend’s roommate and friend at the Lambda Chi house. He was funny and very cute and a tad bit on the wild side. We ran into each other here and there over the course of my junior year. In bars or at parties. We flirted. We eyed each other and on occasion, we made out a bit. He was not interested in a girlfriend and I was not auditioning for the part – mostly because I might have gotten the job and I really didn’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend at that point in my life. Despite my laments to the contrary, I did my best to keep relationships at bay. For a lot of reasons.

The last time I saw Kyle was one of the last nights of finals week. It was warm. People were running around from bar to this party and that. I kept my eye out for Kyle and eventually ran across him. It was awkward. The last time I’d seen him, I’d sorta blown him off to go running about with my friend, Leslie. Guys don’t like that when they are trying to put moves on you. Anyway, we left it as “see ya in August and we’ll see”. 

I was twenty-one. You don’t think at that age that you won’t see someone again. That anything bad could happen. But, Kyle drowned that summer and there was no “see ya”. I remember that I cried when I found out. I was at home in Dubuque for my uncle’s funeral, and I was owly the whole rest of my stay. My mother especially found my behavior irksome. She had never understood my aversion to the social aspects of death – the visiting and the eating. I could have explained, I suppose, but I really didn’t share much of my life with her. I still don’t really. 

I went back to school. I didn’t discuss it. I am sure no one knew about how I felt about Kyle or that we had tentatively reached out to each other a bit. It was just a school girl thing and I still think of that way. 

I only thought about this because Rob had mentioned that this will be the fourth funeral up there for him, starting with Shelley’s back in August of 2006. It will Jordan’s fifth funeral overall as she lost a friend to suicide around the time her grandmother died in December. It seems unfair when these cycles catch us up, but it’s life, right? Just as there are cycles of happiness and joy, there are darker periods of sadness and grief. 

So, we are off to Grande Prairie. 

A Good Question


As we were driving back from the hospice last evening, Rob asked me how I could have been so upset with the grief counselor on Wednesday night for suggesting that I needed to go through her 10 week grief and loss workshop and then turn around and dig through such painful memories at the parents’ session at Pilgrim house. It was a good question and I needed a bit of time to work out the answer into words and sentences because though I could feel why, it was hard to articulate even to Rob – who knows the answer already.

But the answer, when it came, was quite simple. What was being proposed in the workshop was purposeless digging. Like taking a butter knife to excise an scar. What would be the point? I understand that introspection is a useful tool in getting to the root of problems one might be having in their daily lives but when no problems exist than it is little more than emotional navel gazing. The topics that come up at Pilgrim house aren’t scripted really and they usually grow out of our conversations about our children. That we are there at all is to help our kids learn to cope with and integrate what has happened in their lives.

The subject came around to the genetic legacy that Katy was left by her dad. She is a carrier of what killed him and this will have to be addressed and dealt with at some point in her teens and then again when she decides to have children or not. It could even end up effecting her physical in middle-age if she happens to fall in the unlucky 10% or carriers who end up with dorsal nerve damage, so this is something she will have to plan for – the possibility of eventual physical disability. I try not to dwell to much on this. It is the future and who knows what that holds really, but they are things that sit in the corners of my mind, out of sight but never truly forgotten. 

Talking about that last night was good for me in the moment. There was another couple there who have lost children to a genetic illness. Are carriers themselves. Have been through the diagnoses and the doctors and hospitals and long, slow declines to death. I seldom meet people who really know what that feels like firsthand. It was like finding my first widow board. The MerryWidow, and feeling for the first time that I was not a freak. Grief and worry are lonely enough without that sense of being only.

Not so ironically, anymore, our evening was book-ended by death. Rob’s father-in-law has not been well and went into the hospital Sunday complaining of heart trouble. He’d been in all week and the doctors hadn’t been able to pin point a root cause although he did have heart issues. I got the first call from one of Rob’s nieces in the late afternoon. She hadn’t been able to reach either of the girls and wanted to let us know that things were deteriorating. She sounded very small and lost when she told me that her grandfather reminded her of the way her grandmother had been at the end back in December. I remember from all those months Will was in hospice that you come to know the signs of impending death. The way it sounds and looks. There is a feeling in the air even. I felt badly for her. No one should have to watch a loved one die and she was bedside at her second such loss in just a few months. At one point in the conversation at group, a widow who’d lost her husband suddenly in a car accident remarked that she felt that her despair over not having had a chance to say good-bye was small compared to what I and the other couple had gone through watching the death process. I remarked that I had always been envious of those were widowed through sudden death because I would give much to be able to erase the memories and purge what I know. I sat and saw and still didn’t get to say good-bye. Not really.

Shelley’s brother, Jay, called shortly after we’d gotten home last night to let us know that Frazier had died a few hours earlier. The doctors still weren’t sure of the cause, but it’s not uncommon for elderly widowed people to follow shortly after their spouses and I suspect this was the real root issue.

I didn’t know Frazier but for a few visits to Grande Prairie and the first time I had met him in the city here after Leona’s surgery in August. He was nice and friendly and didn’t have to be and I still appreciate that. He was always after us to come and stay at the farm. We didn’t and I am sorry about that a bit now. Rob was asked to give the eulogy and he asked me what exactly goes into one. I only know Catholic funeral mass really, and eulogies are always given by priests. They usually talk about the person in general terms as they often didn’t really know the person, but if they did they would tell stories to try and paint a mental image for the congregation. They would recall the things about the deceased that brought home way he or she was loved. And they would try to comfort with images of heaven and God. We don’t believe in heaven though and my views anyway on what/who God is or may be are still evolving.

In all likelihood Rob and the girls will go to Grande Prairie without Katy and I. I have mixed feelings about this. I think that the family will expect to see us as we went up for Uncle Raymond’s funeral in September and again fro Leona’s in December. We are family. On the other hand, I have problems taking Katy to yet another funeral. It is the only reason we have ever gone up north and seen everyone. She is just five. Too knowledgeable in my opinion and maybe in need of more sheltering than she has gotten in the past. She will also plague her sisters with questions about the situation and how they are feeling. Farron bares up quite well and handles Katy and her curiosity without any visible effect but Jordan is far more fragile and I worry more about her. And Rob. I worry about Rob. He is the rock. The spoke in the family wheel. Both for Shelley’s family and for his own. Not to mention for me and our girls. Too many people lean on him and expect him to fix things and be there and hold up. He will need me because I am the only one who sees that he is not superman. 

It would be nice if people would stop dying, but as I reminded Rob when he brought this up, we know too many old people. My own reprieve from death on a family level has stretched out to two years now and I wonder how much longer the luck will hold given the age and physical infirmities of my parents, aunts and uncles. Still, I was reminded in a letter from my cousin yesterday just how fickle death is when she mentioned that our great-aunt will be 100 years old on March 5th. No rhyme or reason but yet rhyme and reason.