on death and funerals and gatherings

death brings together a family that has drifted apart

charles o’shea funeral home

Aunt Lucy was my father’s sister. For the early part of my childhood, she lived a few blocks away. Her house was the party house, the place where all the kids hung out. It’s where my cousins taught me about rock and roll, showed me how to lovingly place a record on the turntable. It’s where I smoked my first cigarette and saw my first Playboy. If the atmosphere of the house sometimes seemed wild and reckless, it always at the same time felt warm and inviting.

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I’m thinking about death. Seeing the pomp and circumstance for the Queen, the mourners, the family, the queues to look at a dead body all got me thinking about wakes and funerals in my family. I always go back to Aunt Lucy’s for some reason.

I hate wakes. I hate the idea of wakes. The typical Catholic wake of two days sitting in a funeral home with a body in a casket on display in the front of the room disturbs me. I realize the wake is not for the dead, it’s for the living. It’s for people to gather and reminisce and comfort each other. It’s a time to pay respect to those left behind. In our family, that sometimes means a bar set up in the back of someone’s truck in the funeral home parking lot, the cousins — and the parents — stepping outside for a smoke and vodka tonic when it all gets to be too much. It’s our Italian version of an Irish wake and that parking lot socializing is what makes the event tolerable for me. The anxiety that comes with sitting in that stuffy room, getting up to occasionally kiss the cheek of someone who’s name I can’t quite remember, is overwhelming. The fact that the corpse of the person we are mourning is hanging out amid the flowers in the room doesn’t help. I’m outside more than I’m in.

When I was twelve, Aunt Lucy and family moved to Florida. Uncle Stash — aunt Lucy’s husband — cried when they left. I think they were the first of our family to move away from the town in which about a hundred of us had taken root. I didn’t cry then, even though I was sad they were leaving. Instead I thought about the fun we would have visiting them. I thought about them coming back for Christmas. I thought about everything but the leaving. I tried not to think about the now empty house on Hampton Street and all the people that would have to find somewhere else to gather.

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Wakes and funerals are ritualistic. We gather for the afternoon session, quiet and reverent for those first few hours of the viewing. When that session is over we head to the home of the nearest relative where we eat an abundance of food while looking at photographs and telling stories. Then it’s back to the funeral home for the night session which is more social, less reverent. We greet people we have not seen in years. We try to remember names and faces. We embrace those we have missed. We wonder where others are, why they aren’t there. We go outside, smoke, drink, talk. When I was younger, we’d hit the bar afterward. There was a dive bar next door to the funeral home — the same funeral home that has hosted the wakes of family members since I can remember attending such things. We’d walk over to Fatheads and put some Sinatra on the jukebox, drink, and play pool until closing time. Now, most of us just go home right after a wake. Then we repeat the same thing the next day. Two days of viewing. Two days of sitting in the funeral home. Two days of ritualistic gathering.

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I went to Florida to visit Aunt Lucy and family the year after they moved. Though some things had changed, their house was still the place where people gathered. Different people now, but still the same wild and reckless and welcoming atmosphere. I was thirteen at the time and struck by a sense of melancholy that I didn’t have a name for back then. I was almost sad they had found the same sort of lifestyle they had in New York. Part of me was hoping they would hate it there and they’d come back. I missed my aunt and uncle. I missed my cousins. I hated that my extended family was no longer all in one place.

They came back, eventually. They came back after Florida ate a piece of their souls. They came back worn and old and without the kids — now adults — that moved down there with them. They came back and the doctor told my aunt to quit smoking before she killed herself. She didn’t quit. They moved into my cousin’s house, next door to me. I was living in my grandmother’s house with my kids and a soon to be ex husband. It was nice to have them around again.

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I get uncomfortable at family funerals now. I have not been a practicing Catholic in many years. I attend the funeral masses and I do the sit/stand/kneel thing along with everyone else because that is part of the ritual. But I don’t go up for communion and I feel the eyes on me when I sit back in the pew during that portion. I know there are pious people in my family. I know there are judgmental people in my family. I know whose eyes are on me. I spend most of the funeral mass in a state of anxiety. I listen to the homily because even if you aren’t religious there’s a lot you can learn from listening to homilies. I try not to think about the fact that there is a coffin in the room and in that draped coffin is the body of someone I loved. I focus on other things. The stained glass. The book of psalms. The fact that I am sometimes jealous of the faith of others. I don’t focus on death. On dying. On mortality.

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After my grandmother died, my aunt and uncle moved into her house. I lived downstairs, they lived upstairs. By this time I was divorced. Aunt Lucy and Uncle Stash cooked for me often, as my grandmother did before them. There was always something cooking or baking upstairs. There were always people upstairs. Always, a gathering. We’d sit on the breezeway and people would come by, cousins, aunts, uncles, neighbors. The wild and reckless gatherings were replaced by quiet talks and shared homemade apple pies while watching Wheel of Fortune or baseball. And that was ok. They weren’t the only ones who got old. We all got older. We all looked for calm at the end of the day instead of parties. We gathered still, but quietly.

I moved to a different house, got the kids out of my grandmother’s basement. Just a couple of blocks away, like my family does. We may have started to stretch out a bit, moving to different towns and cities, but we were all still sort of tethered together by a slowly loosening string. We still gathered. We still got together for holidays. We still ate Aunt Lucy’s awesome potato salad at every family outing, we still saw each other often.

At some point the string loosened to the point of breaking and our gatherings became less frequent. Cousins moved away, had kids of their own, in-laws to spend holidays with, other things to do. At first I missed the way we used to be so tightly knit. Then I got busy with my own life. I didn’t have time for gatherings, either. I saw my cousins — most of whom were my best friends growing up — at baby showers and and weddings and funerals. My kids never had the same bond with their cousins I did with mine. Eventually I made peace with that, even though there were years when I longed for things to be like they were when we were young, when every Sunday was dinner at grandma’s, when every holiday meant 80 people crammed into one wild and reckless house. You can’t replicate the past. You can’t go home again. All of that stuff. I made peace with that, also. I had my own life to live.

Aunt Lucy was the one piece of the old life that my family kept. She still came over on holidays. She still came over on summer nights to barbecue in my parents’ backyard. She still played cards with us. When everyone else had scattered or made their own, smaller connections within their own family to the exclusion of my immediate family, Aunt Lucy was still ours. She was my connection to those days when we gathered as one.

So we will gathered again when Aunt Lucy died. And for the next three days we were that one, big family again. We laughed, we talked, we cried, we remembered, we ate apple pie and potato salad and it was, for a moment, like it used to be. But just for moment, and that’s fine because I’ve learned to separate myself from the past. I’ve learned that each generation is its own and can not and should not be a replication of of the one before it.

I’ve been thinking about death and rituals and gatherings. I’ve been thinking about what I want for myself when the time comes. I don’t want a wake. I don’t want a funeral mass. But I would love for my death to be a reason the family gathers again, if only so they get a chance to feel, once again, like family.