Funeral Laundry

"...things that are new grow old at length,
They're replaced with better or none at all:
People are prospering or falling back.
And rents and patches widen with time;
No thread or needle can pace decay,
And there are stains that baffle soap,
And there are colors that run in spite of you...
The laundress, Life, knows all about it."

-'Mrs. Kessler'
from 'The Spoon River Anthology' by Edgar Lee Masters

It started with the return to a church basement, and a horrible riff on Norman Maclean that I couldn’t get out of my head on my way out; All funerals merge into one, and a casket runs through it. The casket was carved from the world's great woods and rests under rocks in the basement of us. Under the rocks are words. All of those words are ours. I am haunted by boxes.
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Three scenarios for your consideration;

1. Your father is dying. He's heavily medicated and barely coherent at times. A family friend with a self-admitted drinking problem visits often, and while his support is welcome you can't help but notice that he drinks. He even brings his own bottle of scotch. "This is hard for me," he says, "I need it to get through seeing your father this way." One evening he gets loud and makes inappropriate jokes about death. You call him on it, he says "It's just me being me" and calls it a sophisticated sense of humour.

The next time he arrives, you refuse to let him in with his bottle. He sulks and storms out. He calls a few days later, willing to forgive you for throwing him out. He doesn't want an apology, but thinks it would be nice if one were offered.

2. Your father dies. His obituaries list a number of charities that you family has requested support for in lieu of flowers. On the first day that the obituaries run, a old friend calls to offer her condolences and asks that you include the name of a charity that she supports during the speeches at the funeral. "You've gotta give some back sometimes," she says. "This is your chance. Your dad would have wanted you to do the right thing."

3. A few days after the funeral, an acquaintence from church (religious, but not a member of the clergy) calls you about your spiritual state. She has laid out a prayer and worship program to help you cope with your loss and is very willing to work on it with you. You politely decline. She responds furiously, saying she was only concerned for your soul and for the wishes of your dead father.

In a week, she writes a long rambling letter of apology, citing her occasionally over-enthusiastic devotion to God as the reason for her outburst. You take a few days to consider a response, and receive an angry phonecall where she explains that the proper, Christian thing to do when offered an apology is to accept it. "This is important," she says, "and I won't ask again."

Let me come clean immediately - these aren’t true stories. None of these scenarios occured to me or to any member of my family during my father's illness or after his death. If you think you recognize yourself, your friend or your Aunt Minnie, you’re wrong. I've created the scenarios as sort of theme-and-variation on some incidents that did occur in the real world, rather than recounting the exact events.

This is a cheat; I admit it. The reader should know it. To get into real world detail would display levels of dirty laundry that I don't want on these pages. So ignore the incidents for a few moments and focus on the motives. Or the proper response to such situations. When faced with somebody so self-serving in the face of illness or death, what is the right thing to do?

You have a choice. You can tell them to get out and go to hell, or you can be so stunned by their disconnect that you wash your hands of them entirely. It's a harsh conclusion to make about somebody, the belief that anything you say to them will simply bounce off their surface. No change or understanding would result.

The worst behaviour that I saw always boiled down to people who were convinced that they were doing something good, responsible and required for my family, and any benefit to themselves was therefore a mere side effect. If the people in question were told quietly and politely that their timing was lousy or their gesture (however sincerely intended) was unwelcome or inappropriate, they took GREAT FULL CAPS OFFENCE (in correspondence as well as in conversation) and would explain at length how they were deeply hurt by the response.

I won't use this forum to air dirty laundry exactly, but years later I feel compelled to point at a few of the laundry bags that were left at my family's doorstep and question exactly why they arrived in the first place. Admittedly, some of it my own, mingled with others' remnants. It will be easier to remove once recognized.
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To be fair, when faced with a dying relative it's probably impossible not to feel fragile and inarticulate. As the illness proceeds, the person you love sinks into a deeper and deeper well. You can follow them in and climb out from time to time for day-to-day living, but you can’t bring them out with you.

Naturally, you spend most of your time down the well.

People visit or shout down to you from the surface. They dislodge pebbles from time to time, harmless looking little things that gather momentum on the way down and hurt when they hit you. You could spend hours explaining gravity and trajectory to those at the top, letting them know that these harmless wee things can draw blood at a distance. Or you simply ask them to be careful and not shuffle so close to the edge.

Try it sometime, from the bottom of the well. Most people will nod and keep a careful distance from the edge. Some can’t hear you and shuffle until you scream at them. And others will be busy with something else, and will say “You can take it” as they shuffle away.
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The petty, selfish behaviour I saw from time to time was done with the best of intentions on the surface, but stemmed from something unexpected and opportunistic beneath. You don't expect to see that in a friend. If it's a surprise, its horrible. If you can look at and recognize the roots in their past behavior, it's worse.

Most people want to be fair - if you accuse somebody of being a jerk, the fair thing to do is to allow the accused to explain themselves ("I'm not a jerk, I was just drunk/upset/dedicated to my cause/misunderstood"). I gave up the policy in a few cases because I was sure that any defense on the part of the accused would be entirely sincere. And utterly false, at once.

Sincerity goes bad in self-delusion. A guy falls off the top floor of a 10 story building. As he passes each floor he grins cheerfully and shouts “Doing okay so far!” into every open window.

When you consider this story, do you think that:

a) It’s a stirring parable of a guy who refuses to be beaten down by less-than-positive events?
b) It’s a good example of misguided optimism?
c) It’s a very old joke?

If you’ve answered a), we have little to talk about. I’m writing this to illustrate my support for b). If you’ve chosen c), well, I really can’t argue with you.

When you consider self-involved and oblivious (not to mention painfully sincere) consider somebody who runs a good con. Make that a great con. A few years ago, a friend I'm calling Jaz was trying to borrow $10,000 from a number of sources to join a 'money club.' It was sort of a secret money club, sort of like a pyramind scheme. But different. She had been assured that it wasn't illegal, apparently, just...sneaky. And unlike pyramid schemes, this one worked.

Wanna know the secret formula for money club success?

It was women only.

She knew her audience and manipulated them shamelessly. No husbands or boyfriends to withdraw their funds or miss payments or to decide they want to run the place.
It preyed on women who, for whatever reasons, wanted their money as far away from men as possible. Her suckers would feel very comforted maybe a little smug at the same time. They could go to sleep thinking 'I'm ahead of the game, and I'm in safe company, for a change.'

Jaz met the founder and said she was very nice, intelligent, organized, and sincere in wanting to give other women the chance to make some well-earned money for their families and needs. She was a great proponent of the idea that women work together. Women don't lie to other women. Women understand the importance of sticking up for one another. And the taxman (taxMAN of course) never had to know about any of it, since he didn't understand.


Of course, it unravelled. The money was funnelled into a vacumn around the founder and those involved lost everything (Jaz was spared - she never raised the admission fee). I don't know how it played out in court, but I have my suspicions.

And here's where the real con comes in. Once pulled into the cops, somebody running a low-level con will claim ignorance of tax and fraud laws, maybe make a passionate speech about the difficulty in making an honest buck in a crooked world...and plea bargain their way down, not looking the victims in the eye at the hearing.

But I'm under the impression that this woman was the true con artist, and somewhere along the line she had neatly skipped over the part where she was taking money from strangers, and had gotten to the point where she honestly believed that she was performing some kind of valuable service (admittedly with fragile cash flow issues). And when they dragged her into court, she probably cried the loudest and told all of her victims that she was hurt. Devastated. Perhaps more of a victim than any of them, because she had enough faith in her system for all of them. And she'd love nothing more than to pay every one of them back. And if the money club faltered, it was because there wasn't enough trust and hard work. Maybe they were all to blame, but she'd take the hit for the rest of them. By God, she was going to make it right for everyone who felt that she'd done them wrong.

If this indeed is how it played out, she probably meant every word. She'd forget it all, chapter and verse, by the time of early release. But when it came out of her, it was gospel.
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The money club is the best example I could think which illustrates something obvious, self-serving, delusional, and totally wrong. The people I've washed my hands of fit in those categories because they were convinced they were entitled to something from my family - mostly time, and influence - and they were so out-of-line to even broach these topics in the wake of my father's illness/death (and were so unreceptive to criticism or comment) that it became obvious that they had not noticed the circumstances.

The bile remaining stems from the fact that despite my best efforts, their pettiness is attached to the last flickering of my father. There were moments where I watched a situation play out and realized 'I’m not that. I’m not perfect but I’m not that.'

In simpler terms; if the best thing I can say about you is that you did not misbehave as badly as was possible at my father’s bedside or funeral, it’s not a ringing endorsement for your character.

If you arrived at the funeral for the sake of a good cry or simply to be seen offering a conspicious show of grief, I won't waste my time in your company.

If you came for yourself, spoke about yourself, referred to yourself or your causes, you did not behave properly at a funeral.

The cliché fits; Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.
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All of these issues around funerals, bad behaviour, my father's wasting, and how do we do what is best winds through me as I attend Ray's funeral a few weeks ago. There's a snippet of cheap music that won't leave me en route to the service:

"Simply from the old school
He was quiet about his pain
And if one in ten would be that great
I would never hate again..."

I wanted to remove any personal baggage that might be strapped to my back for this occasion. But I know the church, the layout, the guests. There will be many of the same people who attended my father’s service, and those who attended services for Ray's daughter, murdered in Russia over a decade ago. I want only to offer condolences to his family, minus any issues of my own. But I can't find the resigned reserve I usually carry to funerals - I can’t bring myself to look at Ray’s picture and the 38yrs of history that trails behind it.

When it's over, the classic all-purpose room in the basement is heavy with memories, most of it lingering grief. I join the line-up to speak to Fay, gritting my teeth to avoid being yet another person that weeps on her shoulder. I manage to say “He was a wonderful person, I’m so sorry” and put my arms around her.

As I'm leaving she says “I look at you, Michael, and see the sweet face of your father.” It's a compliment, but it hurts. Good intentions and well-wishers and grief and those voices that speak indeterminate and soft behind the curtain of this world and my father’s house.