First Funerals
I’ve become obsessed with death.
I think about it more than anything else in my life. More than my work. More than my kids. More than sex. More than God.
And it’s not that I’m depressed, at least I don’t think so. I’m not overly sad or morose about it. Not inordinately fearful. It’s just always there; a splinter in my subconsciousness.
The first time I saw a dead body was when my great-grandmother died. I think I was five. The carpet in the funeral home was green, I remember. I stood in place, staring at my black shoes and how they stood out against the mossy Berber. I imagined I was a tree growing out of the ground, reaching for heaven, because what is the opposite of death if not a tree?
The casket was toward the front of the room. It’s not the body I remember, but the smell. It didn’t smell bad, at least not the way I imagined death to smell. More like the fragrance of over-watered flowers and stale coffee.
It’s weird how memory just seems to collapse back in on itself. I think back to that first funeral and I try with all my strength to remember the next sequence of events. How did I get from there to here? But the harder I try, the more I lose. The faces of the past seem slightly distorted. Events blur together. I get small bits of nostalgia.
Something fires in my brain, and suddenly the air carries some smell from the past — like breathing autumn from the bottom of a pile of leaves or the fresh cut grass in centerfield. How much of my life is now lost to me? There’s no longer a timeline, no narrative that ties it all into something meaningful. Just snippets, vignettes of a life that was. It might as well have belonged to someone else.
I think that’s where this obsession with death comes from: It’s the only thing in our lives that really makes sense, the only thing that we really have in common — a common destination. It’s wild when you think about it. We’re all going to die.
That makes me think of my second funeral: Mr. Schvitz.
He used to live next door in a lonely old house that was painted about ¾ the way between yellow and green. I never talked to him. No one did. The mailbox read “Schvitz.” Story was that he fled Poland in the early forties and that he arrived here on Oak Street alone. He just showed up one day and started living in the house (“He’s not illegal, is he?” Mrs. Janice, who lived a few houses down, asked my mother one time when she dropped off some mail that was mistakenly put in her box).
There seemed to be a gap in the neighborhood knowledge about when and how he moved in, so Schvitz was more myth than man. You figured that someone would just go ask him about it all, but people said that he didn’t talk anymore. They said he lost his words — lost everything, really. I don’t know how much of that is true.
He never left, never raised the blinds, never turned on the lights. Someone must have brought him groceries and taken out his trash, but I never saw them. The only evidence I had of his existence was the newspaper. Every morning, a new one would be flung on his porch. And every day it disappeared. That was it. That’s all I knew of Mr. Schvitz.
I was fourteen when the newspapers started piling up. Five-days-worth of current events, obituaries, sports, weather, entertainment, comics, and advice columns weighed on his porch. It’s strange that the first thing to pop into my head wasn’t the health or whereabouts of Schvitz. Instead, I thought about the heaviness of all that news.
All that backlogged tragedy. All that information that didn’t really matter five days later; all that information that didn’t really matter. I would just stare at the papers on the porch and fret over them. Do the things we never know about actually matter? That’s what I thought about when Schvitz died in his armchair and the newspapers piled up.
The coroner came and took the body away. No one knew what to do with the house and possessions, since there were some murky legal questions and not much of an official paper trail. My dad, being a lawyer and somewhat of a real estate person, bought the property as it was. “It’s going to be a real trick, to sell that house,” he said at dinner. And it was. We weren’t able to find someone to rent it for three years.
The week they took Mr. Schvitz away, my mother took me to the park. There’s a pond east of Chancey where we’d always go. We’d drive the LeBaron over to Roger’s grocer, buy some bread, and head to the park. We’d walk around, leaving a trail of crumbs for the ducks. We never really talked. We would just walk for a bit. Sit in the grass. Sometimes I’d bring a book. We would save some bread for bologna sandwiches.
This time, though, was different. We had already walked a good bit and came upon a small hill that overlooked the pond. My mom paused, thoughtful and sad. She reached into her purse and pulled out an envelope. “This is a good spot,” she whispered. “For what?” I said. “To say goodbye to Mr. Schvitz.” “Oh.” I fell silent, not sure how to say goodbye to someone I had never met.
She opened the envelope and pulled out a yellowed photo. “This was the only picture in the house.” She handed it to me. There was a hillside that vaguely resembled the one we now stood on. Standing on its crest was a petite woman wearing a bonnet. In her arms was a small child. I couldn’t tell if it was a boy or girl. I flipped over the photograph. There were words scribbled on the back that I couldn’t read. I imagined it said something like, “I love you. I love you. I love you.” But who can ever be sure?
My mom knelt down to the ground and began digging up dirt with her hands. I watched. She was careful. Methodical. Respectful. Tears dripped from her eyes into the soil. After a good bit of earth had been removed, she looked up at me and extended her browned hand. I handed her the photo. She gazed at it for a full minute and then ceremoniously placed it on the ground. Then she covered it up, like a gardener planting a bulb of hibiscus. That is one of my fondest memories of my mother.
And that was my second funeral.
Anyway, I’m not sure what any of this means or why it’s been so heavy on my mind lately. Maybe it’s having kids of my own, looking at these little humans and thinking someday we’ll all be dead. I mean, how heavy is that? And I know, when talking about death, we get spiritual or philosophical, ponder the mystery of it all, all that jazz.
That’s not really the point for me, at least not right now, at least not how death currently loiters in my mind. It’s not really a puzzle I’m trying to solve, or some sweet by and by that I’m pining for. It just is. Out of all the things in this world, all the potentialities, all the unpredictability, all the things that just might happen — death is right there, solid, unshaken. When everything else seems in flux, dynamic, evolving, becoming — death stands unbowed.
And death leaves its fingerprints on all it touches. The universe slouches toward entropy. Stars collapse in on themselves, and as they do the synapses in my brain fire and I see my mother, tears in her eyes, softly patting the soil and I see myself, just a kid, dressed in black in a funeral home, standing still, imagining my toes were tree roots and my arms were branches and that I would only grow and grow, upwards and outwards, forever and ever and ever.
