Pitfall Memoir
Dearly Departed: An Unholy Look At Some Passings
“Death is a very narrow theme, but it reaches a wide audience.” — Socrates
Grandpa Harry died on my sister, Mary’s, birthday. January 16. It was no great loss to me or to any of his family as far as I know. Grandpa Harry’s death was not an event one could genuinely grieve over — he wasn’t a nice person.
All that I remember was that he lived in the shadows in the kitchen. The lights would be off, the curtains drawn, the gallon-size aluminum percolator would be simmering on the back of the stove, he’d be smoking a Pall Mall and drinking a cup of coffee at the table in the dark. And he played Solitaire. Endlessly.
He didn’t smile that I ever remember and I sincerely doubt that he even knew my name.
I did my best to stay out of his way because of the sour expression he always wore, that pained look. And because of the stories of his violence.
When he was a boy, he’d been hit by a street car. He wasn’t quite right after that.
He drank and he went through lots of jobs including prison guard and policeman. He moved his family every few months. There were six kids, including my Mom, and they were all born in different towns from Missoula to Phoenix to Tacoma.
Aunt Edna said that once when she was young, in February, Grandpa Harry decided it was time to relocate. Again. Maybe he’d just lost a job. Again.
He packed the family up and they moved from Montana to Arizona just like that. The kids rode in the back of a pickup truck.
“It was so cold,” Aunt Edna said.
So when Grandpa had his stroke and was laid to rest, I hardly even remember it except there is an 8 ½ by 11 black-and-white glossy photograph of Grandma and all of my aunts, uncles and cousins who attended the burial and I’m in it. I was 11.
In high school, Eliza was my best friend. Sister Charles Mary called Eliza out of the eleventh-grade classroom one January morning.
On the way out of the room, Eliza had something smart to say that she didn’t get all of the way out because she saw the look on Sister Chuck’s face and it was grim. Well, more grim even than usual.
The door shut after them and later, someone came in for Eliza’s purse and her things and we didn’t see her in class for the rest of the week. After Eliza left, Sister Charles Mary came in and announced to the class that Eliza’s brother, Dominic, had died the night before in a car accident.
It was a widely-known fact that Dominic was an alcoholic. It wasn’t that he was just wild or reckless or hard drinking — people actually said he was an alcoholic. And that’s what got him killed along with Ricky Jamison’s older brother, and George Winthrop, and someone else who I didn’t know.
They were out in Vernonia, a tiny logging hamlet, on a looper which is when you place a half-case of beer on the console between the front seats and drink it while driving a loop road, telling stories, listening to music, being young and getting drunk. When that half-case is gone, you get another out of the trunk and drink it until it’s gone and on and on.
Their car hit a tree. It wasn’t until morning the next day that a man on his way to work happened along and found them all dead in or near the car. One of them was decapitated. But it wasn’t Dominic.
Dominic was probably even better looking in death than in life. His suit was pressed, his white shirt starched. He had black hair and white skin and the longest, blackest, thickest lashes. He had a goatee and oddly, a rosary wrapped around his hands which were clutched together and resting on his abdomen. I wondered what he might have thought about that touch.
I noticed that his lips were glued shut and so were his eyes. You could faintly see the clear epoxy, evenly applied between the lips, between the eyelids.
I noticed that the room was small, the carpet red, the picture on the wall of a beatific Jesus looking down on Dominic in the casket. My sister, Judie, and I went down to Hughes-Ransom for the viewing and no one else was there at the time so we spent as much time there as I actually wanted to.
I suppose this reveals something about me but when there are people around, living ones, I never feel free to study the corpse like I want to. I want to look closely, I want to take more than a fleeting impression.
It would seem grossly morbid to spend more than an instant on the kneeler next to the casket if there were other people around, taking note. With Dominic, I got a full fifteen minutes.
Grandpa Alfred got sick when I was sixteen and when his cancer had advanced beyond the point of hope, but while he was still well enough to attend it, Grandmere planned a family reunion.
Grandpa’s skin wan and yellow. The mirth was gone from his eyes and the troubled look on his face had more to do, I believe, with his physical discomfort than the fear of his own passing. For that, he was as prepared as any good Catholic could be.
Details of his funeral, I remember none whatever.
The thing of note that happened was when we were all leaving to return home after the reunion. My Aunt Meg was very seriously injured in a car accident. Aunt Meg was a tall, slim, attractive woman who had a reputation, according to Grandmere, for being “fast.”
Whether she was or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that the brain damage that resulted from this car accident slowed her down considerably whether she had previously been fast or not.
Meg was never the same, most memorably, her bloodshot eyes protruded from her face, frog-like, thereafter. She lived a long, long time unable to feed herself or dress herself or take care of her bodily functions.
After a few years, Uncle Albert, her husband, put her in a nursing home where she finally, mercifully, did her passing.
My Uncle Guy was visiting his mother, my Grandmere, at the estate where she was caretaker on a small island in the Umpqua River. One afternoon, he took a small motor boat out onto the river and when he failed to return, Grandmere called the sheriff and then his sisters and brothers, including my father, to search for Guy.
After a time, the sheriff gave up looking but the siblings didn’t. It was my Dad who found his brother, obscured by the reeds and rushes on the river shore. Uncle Guy had a nasty gash on his head.
Grandmere felt that Uncle Guy had met with foul play but since he was a notorious alcoholic, it was more likely an accident borne of his drunkenness. What probably happened is that he fell out of the boat and the propeller blade nicked him on the head. But Grandma had an imagination and told me, confidentially, that Uncle Guy was murdered by some thugs because of some sensitive information that he knew.
Uncle Guy wasn’t a bad sort, really, it’s just that the drink got him and when it did, he lost his home and his family and everything of real value to a human being, like a connection to the divine, dignity, and hope.
I knew Uncle Guy was an alcoholic even then because the bottle took him directly to the streets and he died disheveled, homeless, a bum.
He was an embarrassment to me when I was a senior in high school. I’d watch him from the plate glass window of Davey Jones Locker where I worked as a waitress.
He’d be across Marine Drive, weaving his way from one little nose-dive tavern to another. His hair would be dirty, his clothes wrinkled and sometimes, there’d even be piss down the front of his trousers. God oh god I hoped that he wouldn’t ever come over to where I worked and recognize me.
When they buried him, Uncle Guy was 42.
The next one to die was my mother’s brother, my Uncle Ed. I didn’t know him well. Uncle Ed was a beefy guy with a round face, hazel eyes, a bald head with a monk’s fringe, and freckles.
He wore plaid shirts cut cowboy-like with mother-of-pearl covering the snaps. His Levi’s fit like shrink-wrap and under his pooty belly, he closed his belt with an enormous, flashy, spit-shined buckle. His belt was of tooled leather and when he’d come to the house, he’d bring other items made of the same material — handbags and billfolds mainly.
He also brought guns that he tried to sell to my Dad but my Dad would just open them up, look down the barrels and admire them; he never bought them. Shortly after Uncle Ed’s visits, the FBI would come knocking on the door to ask questions.
There were long periods of silence between Ed’s visits. Those were the times that he was in prison which is where he spent a good part of his life for various felonies including armed robbery. But even with his inglorious history, his brothers stood up for his character saying that although he did bad things, he wasn’t all that bad hearted.
Some of the things he did time for were just plain stupid like when he schemed to get rid of a car for the insurance on it. He was going to crash it or roll it off a cliff or something but he met a woman in a bar who needed transportation to Montana and being the kind of guy that he was, he gave her the keys and told her to call him when she got there and he’d just report the car stolen after she was finished using it.
But when she got to Montana, she decided to keep the car and when he reported it stolen and she was found with it, she told the police all about Uncle Ed’s plot.
And then there was another time when he broke Laverne, his first wife’s, jaw. This was years after they were divorced. Anyway, he biffed her in the face and broke her jaw. She had to go to a Portland hospital for surgery and when she was recovered enough to be released, he felt remorse and drove up to Portland to give her a ride back to Astoria. But on the way home, they got into another row and he drubbed her again and broke her jaw a second time. So back he goes to prison for that.
Live by the sword and die by the sword. That fit how Uncle Ed died pretty well. He had been clean for a number of years, or at least he hadn’t been caught or jailed in that time. He was remarried and had started some kind of business.
Anyway, he was driving along the interstate and he saw two fellows carrying a gas can so he stopped to give them a hand. As it turns out, they had just finished holding up an all-night grocery when their car broke down. They were nervous and probably under the influence of drugs or alcohol and they pulled a gun on Uncle Ed and started barking orders for him to drive here, faster, faster, turn here, and Uncle Ed ended up having a heart attack which killed him. He wasn’t very old, either, somewhere in his forties.
Have you ever seen a Shar Pei, the little dog whose skin hangs in folds all over its face, all over its body? This is exactly how my Grandma Vesta looked.
It was always kind of a wonder that Grandma Vesta lived as long as she did. She was the saddest, loneliest person I ever knew.
She had rheumatoid arthritis so bad that her fingers were perpendicular to her hands. Her knuckles, elbows and knees were swollen with knobby masses that looked like bunches of grapes covered over by thin skin. Her feet were so gnarled that she could only get them into stretchy canvas sandals.
For years and years she smoked Tareytons and was in and out of the hospital with pneumonia and other ills so often that I lost count.
When I think of her now, I realize that Grandma had a broken heart. It was always broken as far as I knew. What might have broken it, I learned fairly recently. When she was 13, she was raped by a parish priest and then she was sent away in shame by her family.
Through Grandma Vesta, I learned that mother isn’t simply the one who brings you forth from her womb. Mother is archetype, goddess, and no matter how unable she is to love you, you cry desperately and act desperately all of your life trying, trying to win that love.
That is how my mother was with her mother. But Grandma Vesta simply wasn’t capable and no matter that Mom drove her to town for doctor appointments or ran to the store to purchase her groceries, or brought her over to our house for dinner, Grandma couldn’t help but criticize.
“Good god, Dolores, you have eight girls. You ought to have the cleanest house in the world and not the dirtiest.”
Or, “If you weren’t gadding around all the time, you’d be better organized.”
Or, “Don’t you think, Dolores, you could spend a little more time on your hair and maybe you could even buy yourself some new clothes and a decent coat?”
When Grandma died, they had her body cremated and it wasn’t until months later that there was a service. The priest who did the service was gifted. He was young and bright and an excellent speaker.
He also didn’t know Grandma and when he spoke to her children to learn something about her, they were all at a loss as to how to describe her. They felt they had to be kind.
But years before Grandma died, she sold her home and divided her time between her living children, staying with them for weeks and months until her general atmosphere of negativity and her caustic tongue disrupted their families and then she would board a Greyhound bus en route to the next son or daughter.
And it was hard for them to think of something nice to say, their wounds being still quite fresh, except for Aunt Lila who has a loving heart and who never has a mean thing to say about anybody.
So, it turned out that they described Grandma Vesta as a gypsy and the priest made a wonderful eulogy from it. For the tragic person she was, I wondered that she somehow attracted such a loving man to praise her life.
Nothing happens by mistake I’m told. And maybe, maybe in this spiritual boot camp on planet Earth, all of our deeds and misdeeds, thoughts, words and actions are met with such unearthly compassion. It comforts me to think so.
Grandmere was 92 when she died and she had been wanting to go for a good ten years before she finally did. Until her death, Grandmere was able to care for herself and remain in her apartment. This is not to say that she didn’t start slipping.
Her final years brought hardening of the arteries in the brain, resulting in paranoia. She was convinced that the neighbors had a key to her apartment and made visits, went through her things, and stole from her during her absences. This would account for the things she had mislaid.
Anyone who had ever visited her apartment knew this was absurd; she had nothing that anyone would covet let alone bother to steal. Her apartment was full of boxes of cloth remnants from which she stitched together quilts for the poor. But not lovely, artistic, heirloom quilts — she made artless, functional quilts that weren’t really even all that functional since they failed to hold together after the second washing.
Between the onset of her last illness and her death was a period of about a month. Grandmere was in the hospital for about a week before she finally expired and while she was at it, she said “I didn’t realize what hard work this dying is.” For her, it was another chore.
She would have been happy that she succeeded on August 14, the eve of the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven. It would have been one of the most joyous times in the celestial kingdom and particularly meaningful for a Marionophile, that is, a devotee of the Blessed Mother, which Grandmere was.
The day that Grandmere was buried was glorious. It was warm, cloudless and the sun was shining — a rare enough thing in Clatsop County. But the whole day seemed to have a magic about it, something extraordinary pervaded the atmosphere.
It wasn’t even ruined when we climbed the back stairs to the St. Mary’s Star of the Sea Church and upon opening the swinging doors beyond the vestibule found, to our mild surprise, Grandmere’s open casket right in the line of traffic so that you couldn’t miss it whether you wanted to or not. Of course, I wanted to take a good long look. And what did I see?
Grandmere, all her life a plain, peasant woman whose cheeks had never known rouge, whose lips had never come into contact with lipstick was, on her burial day, all tarted up like a common floozie.
Her white hair was teased and bent into compliant spit curls, then lacquered with aerosol mist like she’d just stepped out of a 1960s beauty shop. I had to look long and hard to determine whether this was, indeed, the corporeal remains of my dear Grandmere.
The general size was right so I guessed it was her. There aren’t many women, living or dead, who measure just 4’10.” I mean, I think it was her. But even now, I’m not quite sure.
After the service, I drove to the cemetery with my daughters. While waiting at a stop sign, a car came barreling towards us from the opposite direction and for a moment, it looked as if the driver had lost control and would hit us. We caught our breath as he sped past us, barely missing my driver’s side door.
In that instant, I recognized how utterly vulnerable I was, any of us are. There was nowhere I could have gone, not forward, not back. There was nothing I could have done but taken the impact and in that instant, I was able to give up, surrender to the inevitable. It was the simplest, easiest, lightest, and only thing to do.
At the cemetery, the priest said a few words over the open grave and when the casket was lowered into the ground, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great- great-grandchildren tossed handfuls of dirt onto the coffin. The day was bright and all of the flowers and little girls’ hair ribbons and dresses were so vivid.
When Grandmere was laid to rest, I felt such incredible lightness for her. This was a life lived to its very end. It was a complete life and there was no sadness in me for her departure. Whenever I envisioned her, I saw her in full radiance and joy. When I see her still, all these years since, her bliss is undiminished.
After the burial, I walk through the cemetery. Some of the names are familiar — Landwehr, Saavolinen, Heikkala, Rupp — the names of the families I grew up with.
There’s Uncle Guy’s headstone, near Grandmere and Grandpere’s. There’s Marjo’s, the lovely young classmate taken by a brain tumor before we were 21, there’s Sue Karna’s, another young classmate, a piano player, whose “fingers are stilled but whose music lives on.”
Up, over the hill, I’ll find my parent’s headstone.
The sun washes through me as I make my way towards it.
Thanks for reading!
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