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No, As a Matter of Fact, He Can't Name That Tune
When the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky died of a heart attack three years ago, he'd written out his funeral from start to finish, from music to poetry. Brodsky even included who would perform the readings and in what language. Perhaps the poetic mind can dwell on death and create. My father was no such man. From what I could tell, his fatal duel with leukemia spawned virtually nothing creative, unless you count the colorful ways he cursed his disease. It seemed inconceivable that a man so mightily ticked off about the fact he was dying could imagine people at his funeral hearing a Mozart fugue or listening to a lesser known Robert Frost poem.
Still, the Sunday my husband, kids and I drove down to Pinehurst, North Carolina to say goodbye to Braddock, or Granddad, as he was also called, we played a feeble game
of name that hymn. We knew how Braddock's voice, flat and crackling, carried something fine and faithful as he sang the Episcopal hymns he loved; the problem was no one knew his favorites.
During the two-hour drive to Pinehurst, my husband Mark and I strategized. We decided to go through his blue hymnal and gingerly approach the topic of funeral music. Looking back, I can't recall if anyone actually uttered the word funeral. My guess is that we said something like this: "Why don't we flip through the hymnal and pick out a couple of good ones." My father feigned interest. He put on his bifocals and reached for the book, but the book seemed to weigh about a thousand pounds and he couldn't hold it. When we held it, he couldn't see. When we called out titles, he couldn't hear. When we read the opening lines of the first verse, he couldn't think of what the hymn sounded like.
Discouraged and a bit embarrassed by what felt like a mercurial mission, I left the room. We had waited too long for this discussion. My father was so busy "fathoming" his death, as he put it, that music seemed trivial, an impossibly remote concern. Maybe the best time for funeral planning comes years before any terminal prognosis is handed down; maybe it should be considered when wills are drawn up.
Out in the hallway, I leaned against the wall beside the bedroom. I listened to the not-so-dulcet sound of Mark's voice. He was singing some hymn I couldn't recognize. His voice, however, was unmistakable - deep and ragged and off key. A lot like my father's.
"There is a Balm in Gilead" he sang over and over and over and then stopped. Silence ensued. Finally, trying to sound cheerful, Mark said, "That's a good one."
"Nope," said my father.
Mark then picked "Go Tell It to the Lord" and it sounded to my Episcopalian ears like another primitive lament, slow and evangelical.
I peered in to get a glimpse of this bittersweet concert. Mark was seated next to my father's hospital bed, the hymnal resting on the rails, singing softly yet with all his heart. My dad had his eyes closed and was fidgeting with his glasses, a sign of serious contemplation.
Mark tried one more hymn and all I can say is that his roots in the fundamentalist faith of his Southern youth were alive and kicking that morning. Every one of those songs sounded like Church of Christ material.
If my father hadn't lost his zip, he would have told Mark he was barking up the wrong tree. However, all he could muster was, "Let's get to this some other time, okay?"
In reality, of course, he was blowing us off. Some other time was the ultimate snub from a man in my father's condition. There was no other time. Two days after this hymn fest my father was comatose; two days later he was dead.
For the funeral we made only one selection - "Onward Christian Soldiers" - not because we liked it, believe me - but because it had been included at all the other Greene funerals we'd attended. The minister, thank goodness, filled in the rest.
The selection of funeral music sent us stumbling toward ritual. What we hadn't yet realized, however, was that there was so much further to fall.
It's All Greek to Me
There was also the tombstone to consider. If we had trouble tiptoeing toward the topic of funeral music, it only follows that we never mustered the wherewithal to ask the following question: "Daddy, what do you want on your tombstone?" Again, a good time to discuss this topic is not on the threshold to eternity but rather during a fit of good health, preferably at a fun party, a stiff drink in one hand.
If only I'd cornered my father under these conditions - conditions that were, by the way, second nature to him - he would have crafted a phrase perfectly pitched between roast and boast. I have no doubts about this. It was always my father who penned a rhyming poem of humorous yet affectionate tribute for any anniversary or birthday celebration.
Many people, it turns out, prepare their epitaphs, proving you don't have to be bent on creepy morbidity to get what you want in the end. Dorothy Parker came up with her pithy epitaph "Pardon My Dust" long before her demise. The French performance artist Sophie Bella, a thirtysomething nonsmoker, has already decided upon "Ciao, Ciao" for her engraving. And recently I read about a vibrant young man from Charleston, South Carolina who shocked his mother with the creation of his crudely worded tombstone. Inspiration, and a barter deal with a memorial company, led him to this epitaph: "He loved life and tried everything. Take it back - two things he never tried, men and suicide."
Whatever gets said, whether it is shocking or sentimental, biblical or pagan-esque, it better hit a personal bull's eye. What's written on the tombstone is the parting shot, the quintessential last word. Funeral music, by comparison, is a short rain, ephemeral, important only for the thirty minutes that mourners assemble at church.
As the executor of my father's will, I took it upon myself to seriously consider the issue. I went to the library. Perhaps a book would contain the answer to our vexing question of what to put on the stone, or, at least, point us in useful directions.
Looking up death, tombstone, epitaph, and burial, I made my way into the dark, unused recesses of the library. The world I entered was esoteric and hauntingly intriguing. I read books by anthropologists, sociologists, psychiatrists, and mystics. I read books with titles like Celebrations of Death, Early Gravestone Art in Georgia and South Carolina, Funerary Art of New England, and Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs.
Oddly enough, the most assuring words initially came from the last book, a scrapbook of sorts, crammed full of ancient Greek and Latin epitaphs. That something written thousands of years ago spoke to my current predicament comforted me in the strange way; it seemed thrilling and chilling and proof that death is a supremely human event, one that ties us to each other in ways that transcend boundaries, even time.
The epitaph that illuminated our family's dilemma was this one, translated from the Latin:
"Only he who builds his own tomb for himself while alive gets what is rightfully due him. Forgetfulness falls upon children when their father is dead."
Ultimately, I think what fell upon me wasn't precisely forgetfulness but rather a distractibility brought about by a paralyzing inability to accept my new responsibilities. I no longer had a parent to consult and defer to; the parental shawl that was always wrapped around my shoulders had vanished. To make this point somewhat less poetic, let me recount my brother's reaction when first asked about the epitaph. After groaning loudly he said, "We don't really have to do this thing, do we?"
You Think You've Got Problems
Books describing American funeral practices in the 1800s make it sound as though our country was experiencing something of an artistic Renaissance. Memorials flourished. Rituals grew deep and wide. It was not at all uncommon, for example, to see mourning portraits painted that depicted the griever with a face of loss, an expression of lonely reckoning. The grief-stricken wanted to honor not only the departed, but the grief itself.
Obviously, today's antiseptic distances to the dead were not the norm in the early nineteenth century (embalming - sometimes called a "death denying" process - was just coming into vogue). Imagine that in the 1800s jewelry was made out of the hair of dead children, fathers, wives. I'd venture to guess that anyone found wearing a necklace woven with their mothers' auburn hair today would be frowned upon, if not institutionalized. We are living in a time, perhaps more than any other, separated from the dying.
In the 1800s, people wanted something tangible, something beautiful and lasting created from the detritus of death, and nowhere was this desire made more manifest than in the fields and gardens of the graveyards. Tombstones were tributes to the dead in both word and symbol. Typically, the minister and stone carver would team up with the family to create a personalized tableau. The result was a tombstone that carried verse, reflected images of death, grief, and often resurrection, and said something about the deceased to the community who was the intended audience for this funerary art. Many of today's graveyards, by contrast, are as visually appealing and symbolically charged as a telephone book, recording only names and dates on unadorned slabs of stone.
This historical perspective stoked me full of hope for collaboration the day I placed my first call to Madison Granite Works in upstate New York. In my father's files I'd found the name of the company that had made my mother's stone. As the phone rang, I held fast to my dreams of teaming up with a sensitive, articulate engraver who would help crystalize, translate, and project thoughts about my father that were eloquent, euphonious, and - why not? - maybe even transfiguring. Instead what I got was a woman named Peggy. Peggy was of the "May-I-Take-Your-Order" variety so prevalent in today's catalogue society.
After her perfunctory sympathy (which, by the way, is better than no sympathy), she asked,
"Do you want the Barre granite?"
"I don't know," I said, feeling like an eight-year-old all alone in Grand Central Station.
"It's gray, it's nice, it's what your father picked for your mother's tombstone."
"Well, yes, then, that would be right. We want them to match."
"I should tell you, though, that the prices are running a little higher than they were when your mother's stone was made up. But not a lot. Only about a hundred dollars more for the exact same thing."
This wasn't where I'd expected our conversation to go. I'd been imagining a short discussion about the symbolism of the Victorian hour glass versus the more consoling grapes and wheat motif that suggest the blood and body of a resurrected Christ. I'd have felt better if Peggy suggested an epitaph from Job or the Song of Solomon, traditional as those were.
As it turned out, we sped past finances and, somehow, I'm not quite certain how, landed on the topic of Peggy's son's college education. Peggy wondered if I thought Colgate University - the site of the Greene family plot - would be good for her son, a high school senior, a whiz kid and apparently an athlete, too. Since eighty-five-percent of the Greene family spanning four generations graduated from Colgate, including my father (class of `43), it's not such an odd question to ask, though the timing seemed in rather bad form.
I hesitated, mentally shifting gears, before giving Peggy an honest answer. "I was one of the wayward few who didn't go to Colgate," I said, "but my father would have highly recommended it, especially since it went coed in '74. You know he's going to be buried on the hill behind the music building."
"I know," she said, "that's what made me ask about my son."
The Celebration Continues
In between fits of weeping and the chilling awareness that no one else really gave a flip about this dilemma, I read another book. This one, entitled Celebrations of Death, offered an anthropological look into death around the globe. In a weird way, it just made me feel better looking at the pictures of families grieving in Thailand and Ghana. My emotional distress lifted beyond the existential into something universal and profoundly human. But even more penetrating than that was the following sentence that offered more comfort than the kindest pastor:
"The potentiality of death to release the most powerful emotions in the survivors is so obvious that it is often assumed to explain the rites that follow."
I emphasize the word "assumed" because it was this very assumption of knowledge that made me feel I was floundering as an uninitiated orphan. The author was right - it did seem that with the massive force of feeling generated by such a loss, the rites of passage would be as decipherable as street signs. But that simply wasn't the case. The rites represented yet another confusing aspect of this unexplored terrain called death.
Fortified by my realization that I wasn't alone as I stumbled toward ritual, I called the Colgate University alumni office. I needed help. Specifically, I needed someone to take a field trip to our family plot; I hadn't visited since I was seventeen, slightly inebriated, and basically indifferent to gravestones, let alone epitaphs or border design.
A work study student named Megan offered to make the trek. She seemed eager to help, especially after I told her how truly heartbroken my father was the day it dawned on him he'd never become healthy enough to make his forty-fifth college reunion (he died eight days before the gala event).
Within days Megan called back to report the following findings: a massive block of granite with GREENE in capital letters stands as the captain of the plot; no imagery of any kind, secular or otherwise; the names appear with the year of birth and death; the dead children have `In Memory Of' before their names; and my mother's tombstone includes the fact she was the wife of Braddock Greene.
It's a long story why I'd never seen my mother's tombstone, but I didn't particularly like hearing that she was immortalized as the `wife of' - it sounded like wife-as-property. She was, however, a post World War Two bride who'd arrived at the plot in Hamilton, New York without her husband to explain her connection to the clan. I suppose I could accept this. What was harder to accept, however, was that these tombstones included nothing but the facts.
"You're sure there weren't any epitaphs?"
"None," Megan said. "Believe me I looked, too."
"I do believe you, I just don't believe it. The Greene's are a family flooded with poets and professors."
"Really?" she said, her disbelief so pronounced you would have thought I said we were a family of unicorns.
Megan's reaction was proof positive that the family style of memorial was private to the point of being hidden. What did John M. Greene think about the afterlife? Why did Otto Greene die as a young man? What images reflected Constance Murray Greene's beliefs? Who knew. The markers left the viewer, family or otherwise, clueless and ultimately unengaged. The graves were as cold as the stones that marked them. It made me sad that our family, a colorful crew, came across as nothing more than a collection of dull gray granite blocks.
In Henriette Forbes book, Gravestones of Early New England, she explains that in past centuries engravings and designs carved into a person's tombstone were intended for a particular audience, namely the community. The marker was more than just an identifier, it was a means to convey something about the deceased, about death - either its inevitability or its cause - and usually the hereafter. "The gravestones," according to Forbes, "carried a message to the passer-by, both by the epitaphs and even more by the design." I read that and felt pangs of nostalgia for a past I never had. It began to dawn on me that the elusiveness about the rites that follow death may very well have tangled up my ancestors, too. Perhaps, like me, those in charge of the tombstones were in a state of stunned grief that made them tongue-tied, symbolically bereft, and completely unsure of their faith. And, who knows, when it came time for them to select the tombstone, perhaps their stonecutter also wondered whether Colgate was a good university for their high school senior?
Why I Love Harriet Butler Murray
It was now clear that to follow the Greene tombstone tradition all I needed to do was nothing. Or, nothing much. But that just didn't sit right with me, knowing my father, and knowing this was the last act I would perform in his honor. To simply coast out made me feel lazy, incomplete, borderline disrespectful. I was also aware, however, that clinging to this issue, struggling over the design and epitaph, kept my father in an active state somehow - not alive, obviously, but not quite done and gone.
And, then, there was Harriet Butler Murray who set me to dreaming deep, powerful dreams about the words I could write or find or commission on behalf of my father, a man who loved language and relished celebrations in his honor. In 1752, Harriet Butler Murray died in Georgetown, South Carolina. The epitaph on her tombstone is an elegiac gem.
In the bloom of her life
Her gentle soul was summons'd hence
To its Great Original
It obeyed
On the 22nd day of her illness
It took flight
And now
Thru the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ
Rests in Peace
With her almighty God
These words connected me across centuries to Harriet and her grieving family who counted the days of her fatal illness and yet managed to see a divine ending for this gentle soul. Because of that epitaph, I, a very distant passer-by, was moved and made aware that this loved young woman was, and then she wasn't. The emotional power and devotion behind Harriet Butler Murray's epitaph inspired me to redouble my lobbying effort. I had to persuade my siblings to tinker with family tradition. We had to include an epitaph on our father's tombstone. The athletic competitor in me came alive. This emotional shift would have pleased my father enormously for he was a man known to show off his bulk supply of Senior Olympic gold medals to anyone who walked in the door, including, one summer day, the UPS man.
Suggestions from the Greene Gallery
My siblings. To take a shortcut to understanding the dynamics of the kids in my family, I will recount something I once saw on the weather channel that seemed a strangely accurate portrait. It was hurricane season and there were three tropical storms swirling in white comet-like formations in the Carribean Ocean. One storm was like my brother Brock - forceful, gaining power, confidently bound for the coast yet capable of pulling out to sea at any moment. Another storm was wildly whipping up the waves but unclear which direction to move in and that was me. The other tropical storm was churning with possibility but directionless and very unlikely to form into anything threatening and that would be my sister, Cynthia.
So, given this, it was no surprise that when I called Brock at his office in California and asked, once again, about the epitaph he laughed, "What the hey. Sure, why not. How about using one of the classic dad-isms, you know, `Everything in moderation, including moderation' or one of my own personal favorites, `Winning isn't everything, it's the ONLY thing'."
Trying to focus my brother, I suggested, "How about `Beloved Father and Husband'?"
"Beloved?" There was a pause. "No way. Loving is better, but, still something else, something Dad-like."
I could see his point. "How about his favorite Sinatra tune `I Did It My Way'? But, I don't know, considering he died and he didn't want to, that seems a bogus theme song. If he really did it his way, he'd be on that cruise to Australia."
"Interpretations aside, the song just doesn't have enough Dad in there."
Our conversation continued like a tennis match. One would serve, the other would slam back a return shot. Getting nowhere fast, we hung up.
Later I called my sister who, in typical form, answered the phone cheerfully with the television blasting in the background. It took a little effort to reintroduce the epitaph concept. "Oh, yeah," she said, "do you really have to do that?"
"No, I don't really have to do that - we do," I corrected. "Any suggestions?"
I'd say that the silence became deafening except for the fact that the guests on Jenny Jones's show were shrieking so loudly I felt my sister was in danger inside her own apartment. "Can you actually think creatively with that televised screaming?"
"Oh," she said, pleasant as a breeze, "hang on a sec." She went to turn down the volume and when she came back she said something about Dad being a good guy, a really good guy, to which I agreed that was true, but perhaps a bit vernacular. We revisited the idea that an epitaph lasts in perpetuity.
She asked, "What did Brock say?"
"Dad's line about moderation."
She giggled. I didn't.
"Don't worry," she said, "It'll work out. You'll come up with something good - after all, you're the writer in the family."
My sister wasn't destined to be the storm to make headlines. She was in the water of grief, surely, but she wasn't pushing to get anywhere with the force of it.
A Memorable Few Days With Those Moody Old Greeks and Latins
Stymied and saddened, I hunkered down inside the web of my hammock, a quilt cushioning my backside, a pillow snuggling my head, and re-read the massive door-jamb of a book on Greek and Latin epitaphs. Ancient history proved to be a fabulous palliative. One afternoon I became so engrossed in the glossary of Latin curses carved into stone that when the darkness came and day turned into night, I lit a lantern and read until finally the smell of burnt moths drove me back inside the house.
In those days long ago before resurrection and psychotherapy, anger and revenge openly accompanied many people to the grave. Both the dead and those left behind weren't a bit shy about making their wrath known. Some epitaphs seethed with such unmitigated spit and spite they were almost scary.
"May he be sinful in the sight of all Gods," was the wish inscribed on one stone.
"He shall be accountable to the mighty name of God," banished another that, to me, conjured the image of a grave digger wiping his hands with a disgusted feeling of good riddance.
In addition to cursing the dead, some epitaphs cursed the living who had failed them; others were aimed at the passer-by who might consider destroying the stone. People back then seemed tough, but, then again, times were tough and there was no promise yet of heaven (to say nothing of Prozac or talk therapy). Despair permeated these ancient inscriptions, but none as intensely so as the one I came across half-way through the book:
"Not to be born is best of all; next best, by far, to look on the light and return with speed to the place whence one came."
Apparently, existential pain is as ageless as stone itself. So much so, in fact, that after reading this epitaph, I pulled the quilt close to my sides, closed my eyes, and took a long, dreamless nap.
When I awoke I shifted to a quirky almost uplifting section of self-reflexive epitaphs. These piquant lines of memorial gave a novel spin to that age-old idea - namely, having the proverbial last word. Reading the following example of convoluted thinking, it became clear that it may not actually be such a great idea to have the living writes their own epitaphs, after all.
"Another man may have riches but I, Hermianus, the old chartarius have this admirable and longed-for tomb within the hollow rock. I made it, deciding I would rather have it than be rich, and now I am dead I admire it."
Our family's epitaph dilemma was, I realized, a search for something heartfelt, uncomplicated by darker emotions or misguided concerns of the ego. In this light it seemed an attainable goal, a goal inspired by love for a man who died without enemies or vendettas and only one known regret - that he couldn't live longer.
Ironically, it was these self-written and existential epitaphs that charged me with optimism. Buoyed by this old world perspective, it seemed clear that my family could, with very little literary effort, easily improve upon such ancient epitaphs as, "I, a small tomb, conceal no small man."
Even Simple Can Get Complicated
In the final stages of decision-making, Lord Tennyson's thoughts about epitaphs guided my search for the perfect phrase. According to him, "The simpler the epitaph, the better it would become the simple and noble man." Considering the taciturn nature of the Greene family at times of death, I was a serious proponent of simple. No sonnet or long-winded biblical verse would be engraved upon my father's stone. Certainly not. Our generation wasn't interested in shattering tradition, merely cracking it open a tiny bit. Our words of memorial would be few and softly spoken, really just a kiss whispered on the Hamilton hillside.
As the constraints of the assignment became clear, I pressed forward with the family. The memorial service was set for July seventh, meaning there were three weeks left to craft the perfect epitaph. As the pressure mounted, my sister dropped out of the negotiations. My brother Brock and I didn't agree on what to say, however, we both wanted more than name, date, and serial number. We were ready to transform tradition.
At least, we were ready until seven conversations later when we still hadn't hit the bull's-eye. Capturing a person, a person in all their complexity and shades, seemed impossible in four words or less. My father was a character with mostly endearing contradictions. He was fiercely competitive yet sentimental as Santa Claus; he was a spiffy dresser but never figured out that checked pants just don't go with striped shirts; he was a physics major and pilot who couldn't assemble a barbecue grill. I could go on and on and still end up at the same place: I adored him.
With three days to deadline, I called my brother. "What about something really simple like "He was loved."
"Wow," he laughed, "you're really hitting rock bottom."
I wasn't offended. Over the course of my father's demise, I'd come to appreciate how my father was one person to me and a very different person to my brother, the only son, literally my father's junior.
"What about `Faithful Husband and Father.'"
"Ick."
"Okay, how about the beloved line?"
"Can't do it," Brock said, his voice tensing.
Panicked, we began leaning in favor of doing nothing. Tradition appeared like a cozy bed beckoning. Who knows, maybe grave writing only leads to empty platitudes anyway, I consoled myself. Still, I couldn't help thinking that I was letting my father down. I felt sure he was rooting for us to buck tradition in the name of his greater glory. After all, he'd been a rebellious, immodest man who expected his birthday celebrations to last - at minimum - two weeks.
The night before the deadline I had trouble sleeping. When I awoke in the predawn darkness I immediately began reading every book title in my library, hoping to find the seed of inspiration on the spine of a novel. I found nothing, unless you count admiration; until that moment I had never truly appreciated the succinct seductions of a good title.
At ten o'clock the phone rang. "I think I came up with the perfect epitaph on the drive into work this morning," my brother said, his voice revealing a hint of amusement. "What about this: Game for Life.
I said it softly to myself, and then laughed a little. It was perfect. Maybe not poetic, but in some essential way him. As executor I felt a little naughty signing off on this, until I remembered this: I had no parents. There were no ancestors around who could scold or correct, praise or encourage me. I was no one's child.
Picking up the phone to place a call to Peggy the engraver, I felt a terrifying freedom.
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