Ave Maria, and All That Business

I’m writing this the evening of Tuesday, May 1st.

We buried my grandmother today.

Well, not exactly buried. She’s in her casket in a wall. You see, when cemeteries run out of space to put people in the actual ground they start building up, so when we ‘buried’ my grandfather five-ish years ago, we put him in this… cubby in his casket, and now my grandmother is in there, too. The cubbies are two casket-lengths deep, ideal for couples.

“Darling, I love you, and I want to spend eternity with you end-to-end in separate decorative boxes in our own granite tunnel in a big granite wall full of other granite tunnels with other people in their own decorative boxes.”

And they say romance is dead.

Honestly this wall my grandparents are in puts me in mind of those maximum density hotels they have in Japan. Or, you know, a morgue. There’s not much difference, really. This one is just gussied up to be presentable for the general public as opposed to the cold, clinical filing cabinets for the deceased you find in the bowels of hospitals.

But it’s done. We said the prayers and sang the songs and got her up via a Genie lift and into the wall.

And you know what? I’m going to say it. Her casket looked like a nineteen-fifty-something powder-blue Cadillac. It was very… blue. She loved blue — she did — but I just can’t seem to reconcile myself to this casket. Maybe I’m just too used to wood, or more neutral colors, or something, because it just looked weird to me. And you’re not supposed to giggle like a maniac at your grandmother’s casket. It’s generally considered bad form.

As this was a Catholic funeral, it came with all the usual Catholic trappings. The night before, we had the traditional viewing and rosary. Well, an abridged rosary, anyway. This was held at the little chapel at the cemetery with the ‘deacon on duty’, so to speak. Since, for some reason, our liaison at the cemetery was somewhat braindead, the obituary never made it to the papers, so there were nine of us all told for the viewing: me, three aunts, five uncles. And I had so consciously parked a gazillion miles away so that the adorable little old Catholic ladies could have the spaces closest to the chapel! Anyway, Deacon Dave (for real) showed up at about six-thirty and did a delightful mini-service thing for us. Deacon Dave was wonderfully Irish. It was a joy to listen to him speak, and just as much to hear him sing.

Until a cell phone went off mid-hymn.

We’re all looking at each other, trying to figure out who to throttle, and this phone just keeps on ringing.

Deacon Dave finishes his song and says, “Sorry about that, it was God calling me.”

The Deacon. Forgot. To turn off. His phone.

Once we stopped rolling in the aisles laughing like idiots things got back on track and we finished up with the call-and-response and the praying and the ‘stand up, sit down, fight fight fight!’ routine. Those Catholics, man. They love to keep you moving.

Bottom line, Deacon Dave is a fucking TREASURE.

On to Tuesday.

It was a ten-thirty mass at the church my grandparents had attended for eons, and my father and his siblings grew up attending. We had a decent turnout for someone who was ninety-three and had spent the last few years living in a different town. Obviously there was a great deal of extended family, but the adorable little old Catholic ladies I was expecting the night before showed up in force, and some former neighbors and family friends rounded out the numbers. Father Moran said the mass — another Irishman, but sadly far less jovial than Deacon Dave (we should have hired him out, obviously) — and four of the kiddos from the church’s school did what I suppose you have to call altar kid stuff these days, since they let girls do it now, too. In his introduction, Father made mention, of course, of all of Nana’s children, and of me, since out of her five kids, all she got was ‘one lousy grandchild’. He said, and I quote, “She has no great-grandchildren, but I’m sure those will come in time.”

One of my aunts turned to me and jokingly whispered, “Yeah, will you get on that already?!” as I was sitting there making a face and doing the ‘Cut!’ motion with a hand across my neck.

Geez, Father. Make assumptions much?

All the tasks — readings, carting communion stuff, crucifixes, and Bibles around, pall-bearing — had been pre-assigned (during the ridiculous amount of time spent waiting on our braindead liaison to get her shit together) and everything went smoothly enough. I read a very abridged version of Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.’ It popped into my head as an allegory for letting go — releasing the physical and keeping the memories.

And memories? Those we have in abundance.