A year closer to death

It is, as a good many people here in our happy little burg keep reminding me, my birthday, specifically my 60th birthday,  for those of you who like to keep track of such things. I generally do not keep track of such things, either for myself or for other people; birthdays after age forty are simply an annual reminder that you are now officially one year closer to death. And I especially do not like birthdays that come in years that end with eight, as this means that the number on my age year clicks over to zero. This is an enjoyable experience when you turn ten or twenty; in the first instance it means that you are no longer a little kid, no matter what your mom and dad think, and in the second instance you are a.) no longer a teenager, b.) two years past the point where you can indulge your baser instincts with an adult without penalty of law, and c.) just a year short of being able to drink legally everywhere in the United States; but beyond those two points the accumulating zeroes are just annoying as hell—to find out how annoying, simply ask any woman in her late twenties just how many times she intends to turn twenty-nine before reality forces her to turn thirty—and the fact that I can now take money out of my IRA without accruing sizeable penalties is not making me feel better about reaching this age. 

So I am stuck, it seems. I was going to mark the day by buying a bottle of tequila, going home, and then getting completely hammered, but my coworkers tell me that this is more than vaguely inappropriate for a man of my gathering years and that my head will hurt like a son of a bitch tomorrow morning, so I think I will skip the tequila and just make myself a baloney sandwich instead. I have enough age-appropriate aches and pains without adding new ones to the mix. I do wish, though, that people would stop wishing me a happy birthday; I keep asking that they not do this and they keep insisting on doing it anyway, which is starting to get on my nerves, very frankly. I am waiting for next week, wherein people will stop with the Happy Birthdaying and even the belated Happy Birthdays will go away, and I can be chronologically miserable without everyone's best wishes making me feel even worse.

Death, be not proud...

Carla died ten years ago. The words don't really make any sense, as if the reality they describe was simply too odd to be true, but it is reality, nonetheless. The mind rebels against that reality, the mind rebels at the idea that someone as intensely alive as Carla could be dead at all, much less gone for all this time. Some people are like that. When the war photographer Robert Capa died in Indochina in 1954, his friend Ernest Hemingway wrote that Capa was so much alive that it was a long hard day to think of him as dead. Carla was like that. And now it has been ten years.

I hadn’t realized it was the tenth anniversary until a few days afterwards. Time passes and the slow accumulation of days the one after the other goes by so slowly that we pay no real attention to it.  There is always some new thing we must attend to: we must pay the telephone bill or get the car inspected or buy a gallon of milk because the last gallon is almost gone and there won’t be anything to put on our breakfast cereal tomorrow morning.  We worry about getting to work on time or how to get the kids to football practice or whether we can afford a new roof for the house. We wonder where we’ll go on vacation this year or whether to buy one of those big plasma televisions or how much candy to get for the trick or treaters on Halloween or how long to cook the Thanksgiving turkey or what to get the kids for Christmas, and then, before we know it, the New Year is here. And so it goes, one thing after another, one year after another, until it has been ten years since Carla died.

Time heals all wounds.  This is the comforting nostrum we tell ourselves in the wake of any great loss.  If we wait long enough, we tell ourselves, the pain will go away, and perhaps for people like me, the friends of the family, that is true. Time numbs the loss for us, so that we can go on with our lives, so much so that the tenth anniversary can come and go without our realizing the significance of the date.  Carla’s family does not have that. The suddenness of her death, the tragic loss so someone so young, vibrant, and talented as she was leaves a ragged scar on the souls of those who loved her most, the sharp edges of grief keeping the wound from ever completely healing over. 

I have not been to her grave since the funeral. I suppose it just never occurred to me to go. I am sure that everything is now as it was then: the white Dutch Reformed Church and the old graveyard behind the church, with its old and pitted gravestones marking the passing of the generations, the small flags marking the graves of local boys who died in faraway places like Gettysburg, Omaha Beach, and Khe Sanh, the long valley with its neat white farmhouses stretching away towards the sharp rise of the Shawangunk Mountains, all these things will not have changed.  There will be flowers on her grave, in the plot where her paternal grandparents also rest, and maybe a few stones as well, to show that someone came and stopped for a moment before moving on to the next thing, came and stopped and thought of the beautiful girl in the earth below and paid their respects to her. I think that will be my next thing to do, to cross the river and go and put a stone on her grave, and remember the little girl who used to rescue salamanders from the stream that ran by her house and the young artist with so much promise and the lovely young woman who was almost as tall as I am, almost, and who only grew that tall to make me feel old.

Investment advice from the fifth dimension

I got an email from my sister who’s not really my sister the other day, which is a relationship sufficiently out of the ordinary to call for some explanation. Barbara and her family lived next door to us in the Bronx, back in the days when Ike was the President of this our Great Republic and all was right in the world, except for the usual suspects like the Middle East, which was as intractable then as it is now. Barbara was a teenager then and whenever Mom and Dad had to go out, she’d come across the hall to baby-sit my brothers and me. Her own mother was in the last stages of lymphatic cancer then, so Barbara and my mother became very close during what had to have been an incredibly trying time.  Barbara always called our mother Mommy and we (my brothers and I) always thought of her as our cool older sister. She took us to the park and the playground and to the movies too; I still remember seeing Goldfinger and Thunderball—I was big on James Bond then; I had the action figures and everything—and Barbara took us all to see Mary Poppins when it opened at Radio City Music Hall in 1964, a year, I should point out to the younger readers, when there were no dinosaurs living in the New York City sewers or anywhere else on Earth, except for Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the shock wave from the asteroid hadn’t arrived yet. 

As time passed, Barbara’s fate was the fate of all cool older sisters: she went to college, she got married, and then she moved away and started a family of her own. We stayed in touch, though; she called her Mommy at least once a week, no matter where she was, and when we needed advice, we’d call her and talk to see what she thought. And we would listen to what she had to say, because her advice was always sound and because she was our big sister, and we loved her and her good opinion was important to us. 

So, it shouldn’t have surprised me that I got an email from her the other day advising me to invest in hotels in the greater New Delhi area.  Like my mother, Barbara was always on the lookout for a good deal, although the sudden interest in foreign real estate puzzled me. She’d never shown any interest in the subject before she died last year of the same kind of lymphatic cancer that killed her mother in 1959 and I wondered why she’d developed such an interest now. But I suppose being dead broadens one’s horizons in much the same way that travel does, and getting investment advice from one’s dead relatives via email certainly makes more sense that having to go to séances run by Madame Griselda, who tells her customers that she is a Hungarian Gypsy and who is, in reality, a third generation Italian American from Secaucus, New Jersey, or cracking out the old ouija board and wondering what the spirits are trying to tell you. Email is a much more efficient form of communication than mediums, ouija boards, or even the occasional burning bush, even if burning bushes have a really good spam filter.

And getting investment advice from the dead certainly makes more sense than getting advice from some Wall Street financial type. With the latter you have to spend a good amount of time wondering if they are trying to get you to invest because it’s good for your portfolio or whether they want you to invest in one thing or another because they intend to make a fortune shorting the stock once they’ve gotten enough suckers to take the bait. With your dead relatives, on the other hand, you can rest assured that they have your best interests at heart, assuming, of course, that they weren’t organ donors and their heart is now in some checkout clerk at a Wal-Mart just outside of Boise, Idaho. It’s not like the dead have any interest in earning sales commissions or shorting stocks or have someplace to spend the money once they’ve earned it. There’s a good reason why there are no good delicatessens or Citroen car dealerships in American cemeteries and the steadfast immobility of the deceased labor market probably has something to do with that.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. We live in a cynical age and I know that you’re thinking that the person on the other end of those emails is not my sister who’s not really my sister, but some subcontinental digital goniff who hacked into her account and does not know that I am on to him and his thieving ways. I would be a terrible person if I even considered this idea for even a moment. If I did, then I would be the kind of person who thinks that someone who did something like this is the verminous spawn of a syphilitic latrine cleaner of the Bhangi caste and a leprous sow, a piece of filth who enjoys inserting razor blades into his own penis in order to alleviate the pain of his baseball-sized kidney stones and telling people that if they like their doctor, they can keep them. Well, maybe that last one is an untruth too far, but you get my point. We may live in a cynical age, but I refuse to allow this to affect my happy and joyous outlook on life or to wish my older sister who isn’t my sister all the success in the world in her new career in finance and real estate.

No, I am not dead yet... and other observations about stuff

...although I must admit that I am having increasingly hostile thoughts about my left leg.  I am not sure what I've ever done to it that the damn thing would go out of its way to cause me this much pain, and frankly, I don't care.  It's a leg, it's supposed to do leg stuff, assuming that leg stuff is a medical category. It is not supposed to make my life miserable, and I just want to say that I'm going to get even with the bastard if it's the last thing I ever do.  So, while I'm here, let me just say that I'm glad Mrs. Thatcher got the full state funeral; it gave her one last opportunity to be "divisive."  The usual knuckleheads were out protesting her, and it goes almost without saying that the usual knuckleheads are the people who think they are entitled to a free ride on other people's money, plus those whose bank on the free riders to keep them in beer and pretzels (i.e. liberal politicians.)  The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on. That the caravan moves on in a way that annoys the dogs even more is just an added bonus.  Not bad for a grocer's daughter, I think.

Is no nudes good nudes?

Reuters reports that a Polish coffin company is now using nude and semi-nude models in their 2013 calendar in order to advertise their product. While babes in bikinis is a time-tested commercial strategy; when I was a young boy I often wondered about the wall calendar in my father's workshop-there did not seem to be any connection between attractive blondes and plumbing supplies that I could see, but then I was not an especially bright child; I do not believe that this method of advertising will stimulate coffin sales to any great extent. Nude women luxuriating in stylish coffins will not make the coffin's primary use any more popular than it already is and no amount of advertising can or will change that fact; like toilet paper, coffins are something you need when you need them and not before. Nude women in attitudes of erotic abandon may make what the French call the little death more interesting; indeed, you can argue that nude women and the little death were made for each other, that they go together like Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello, or peanut butter and jelly; but no one is interested in dealing with the big death unless or until they absolutely have to. However, I do see a market for this sort of thing in Muslim countries, especially those countries infested with large numbers of jihadi suicide bombers. A stylish coffin could be the perfect recruiting tool in such places, especially if you can convince the customers that Miss November will be one of the 72 virgins he can expect to wait on him forever after he eliminates himself from the gene pool. Yes, I see a veritable fortune in the making there.

AND FLIGHTS OF ANGELS SING THEE TO THY REST, UNLESS YOU'RE FLYING COACH: Death comes for all men, something I really don’t want to believe because I keep hoping that I might somehow wangle an exception to the rule, but in order to cater to this unhappy need there are two funeral homes here in our happy little burg, the P. J. Hanrahan Funeral Home and P.J Hanrahan & Sons Funeral Home, and no, the P.J. Hanarahans involved here are not the same people. Paul James and Patrick Joseph Hanrahan were brothers who came to our happy little burg in the mid-1920’s and got into the funeral business by the simple expedient of starting off as gravediggers and then moving their way up the corporate ladder by marrying the boss’s daughter.

The brothers came from Ireland, as you have no doubt surmised by now, from County Longford, to be exact, where they had fought together against the British in the Irish War of Independence and against each other in the Irish Civil War that immediately followed the War of Independence. The Irish Civil war was a particularly bitter civil war, as civil wars are wont to be—civility and good lemon danish being qualities lacking in almost any civil war you care to read about—with one side, the Free Staters, to which side Paul James Hanrahan belonged, claiming that the Irregulars were defying the legitimate government of the country, and the Irregulars, to which side Patrick Joseph Hanrahan belonged, claiming that the Free Staters had betrayed the Cause and sold out the Irish Republic declared in Dublin in 1916 to the British for a peace treaty that kept the Irish as British subjects in a sideways sort of manner. When the war was over the Free Staters had won. This tangent into modern Irish history need not concern the reader any longer, except to say that because of the war and their involvement in it the two Hanrahan brothers refused to speak to one another—ever. Their wives knew each other, their kids grew up together, but the two men never spoke to each other again for as long as they lived. If the brothers had something to say to each other, the brothers would tell their wives or the kids, who would then go and deliver the message to the other brother. I went to school with a couple of the brothers’ grandkids and they told me years ago that no matter what their political differences the brothers always loved each other the way brothers should, even if each regarded the other as traitorous scum.

I bring this incongruous bit of history up because the past month has been equally incongruous, with me spending more time than I really wanted to at both Hanrahan funeral homes. I am not yet at that happy age where going to a late friend’s wake and funeral constitutes an enjoyable evening out on the town, so this glimpse into my near future was both a bit unsettling and a chance to network with people I hope will show up at whichever Hanrahan’s home I eventually wind up at. Like Yogi says, if you don’t go to their funerals, they won’t come to yours.

The first funeral was for the mother of an old school friend I hadn’t seen in years. She looked well—the friend, not the mother—and she didn’t look that much different than she did in high school. I saw several other old school chums at the wake and the years have been about as unkind to them as they have been to me, but the one thing we can all agree on is that the former Concetta Paterno must either be a vampire or has a portrait up in the attic doing the aging for her. In either case, her refusal to age is scaring the rest of us no end. It’s not natural that this woman looks like her grandson could take her to the senior prom without someone immediately noticing the great discrepancy in their ages, not natural at all. I also don’t think it’s natural for someone I went to school with to have grandchildren, but people tell me that this is just one of my personal peeves and that I should get over it forthwith; people in my age cohort are not going to stop having kids and grandkids just because I find rugrats annoying.

The wake itself was very nice, if you enjoy this sort of thing. I went in and nodded to the grandson of P.J. Hanrahan & Sons— Mr. Hanrahan and all of the original sons having patronized their own establishment with the passage of time—and went in to see Mrs. Paterno, who, just as an aside here, was really one of the nicest people you’d ever care to meet. She lay there, bathed in pink light and surrounded by flowers and sorrowing relatives, and I knelt at the side of the coffin and said an Our Father and an Ave Maria for the repose of her soul the way any good Catholic boy would, and then went on to see Concetta and her family. It was a nice Catholic wake, with a priest and a prayer service and the muffled sobs of women and children and grandchildren, which is about what you’d expect at P.J. Hanrahan & Sons. Paul James Hanrahan was always the more devout of the two brothers and after his father-in-law died and left him the business Paul moved the funeral home from its old location on Mill Street to a large white house just across the street from the Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, so that all of the faithful coming out Mass every Sunday would know that their religious duties to the holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church would not be complete without a wake, a Requiem Mass, and burial in consecrated ground in St. Thomas’ Cemetery, all under the direction of P. J. Hanrahan & Sons. This is not such a bad thing either, because for a lot of people here in our happy little burg wakes serve as impromptu family reunions and you can catch up with all the latest family gossip and find out how everyone has been doing since the last time someone in the family passed away.

The P.J. Hanrahan Funeral Home, by contrast, is across the street from the flashing lights of Tony’s Premier Italian Pizza, a sign that contains four untruths in as many words, which may or may not be some sort of record. There is no Tony—an Albanian gentleman named Fatmir is the owner of this establishment—and his product is premier pizza only if you have no basis of comparison between what he sells and real pizza. To be blunt, calling what comes out of his oven pizza does violence to the word; burnt cardboard with hot ketchup and some melted cheddar cheese on top would bear a closer relationship to pizza than what Fatmir peddles to an unsuspecting public every day; it always amazes me what some people can get away with, although I know that at my age I shouldn’t be amazed. Patrick Joseph Hanrahan might have approved of Fatmir; I think he would have preferred Fatmir to a Catholic church any day of the week. For Patrick Joseph Hanrahan, the Catholic Church, along with every other institution of modern Irish life, was part of a British plot to crush the real Irish Republic and those who fought to establish it and he wanted as little to do with the Church as possible. Consequently, if all the good Catholics went to P.J. Hanrahan & Sons, the P.J. Hanrahan Funeral Home buried lapsed Catholics, Jews, Protestants, free thinkers, Masons, and such other benighted heathens who availed themselves of the opportunity to drop dead here in our happy little burg.

The occasion of my visit was the wake of a city councilman who was a great patron of the egregious mold pit wherein I labor for my daily bread, and as the P.J. Hanrahan Funeral Home is on my way home, the powers that be here decided that I should be the one to represent our organization at the wake. I did not want to be a representative of any sort, but it seems I volunteered to go. I don’t remember volunteering—in fact, volunteering is not something I do a lot of; it’s not really in my nature—but the powers that be thanked me for volunteering after they told me that I was going, so I must have volunteered at some point, and the fact that the annual staff evaluations are coming up shortly had nothing to do with my decision, assuming that I made one in the first place.

The city councilman did not want flowers at his funeral—he suffered from hay fever—and so there were none. I am not sure how the councilman expected to suffer from hay fever after death, especially since his cremation left him with no nasal passages to swell, but if a man cannot have what he wants or doesn’t want at his own funeral then what is the point of having the funeral in the first place? He did have several large photo boards surrounding his earthly remains, most of them dedicated to one or another aspect of his political career, which I assume is ongoing even as we speak—I had the strange sensation throughout the night that this wake was not at all the remembrance of a life, but the councilman’s announcement that he was now a candidate for sainthood. I do not know how exactly one polls such a race, but the crowd in the funeral home seemed enthusiastic about the idea and I am sure that the councilman will remain active in Democratic Party politics both here in our happy little burg and in the hereafter. Maybe it’s just me, but I am always fascinated with the way all dead people vote for the Democrats and I’ve often wondered why that should be the case, given that the Democrats do so little for dead people. Party loyalty trumps all, I guess.

In any case, the councilman’s wake was a fairly upbeat affair as wakes go—his colleagues from the city council and from his previous post as a member of the board of education stood at the podium and told the relatively enthusiastic audience what a great guy the councilman was and what a great public servant he was and how everyone in our happy little burg would miss him and his willingness to fight for the little guy every election year. There was very little crying or carrying on; it’s hard, I think, to go all teary-eyed over a can of soot; but some people tried to stay somber right up to the point where the mayor started telling funny stories about the late city councilman, and let me just say for the record here that I think telling fat jokes about the deceased was pretty damn tacky, even if they were true.

After the politicians had their say a minister from an interdenominational church got up and said a prayer that might have been Christian, but seemed to me to be thanking the Earth for the councilman’s presence. I am not sure what role the Earth had in the councilman’s presence here or anywhere else, other than being something he stuck a ceremonial shovel in every now and again to start a building project, but as Hamlet says, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, so what do I know? An excellent question and one for which I do not have an equally excellent answer. Really.