The attendance at the little church on the highway was nearly doubled this morning owing to the great number of family and friends who had come to pay their respects to my mother, not only for her life-long faith in God but also for her devotion and loyalty to my father whom she had followed all over the United States as he performed the job for which he felt called.
It was one of those beautiful Texas winter mornings where the sky is blue and the sun is shining and the air is comfortably cool enough to warrant light jackets. As is our custom, Dad and I opened the building and turned on the lights and the heat and greeted folks as they arrived. The regulars came in and shook our hands and extended their condolences and then stood around to meet the friends and family and make them feel at home. Normally there are around 30 regular attendees; today there were well over 70.
Normally I would be leading the singing for both the Bible Class and the Worship service but today as one of the grieving family I was allowed to just sit in the pew with the rest and practice my harmonies. The Hopkins boys took on the song-leading responsibilities, and there was a guest preacher (Charles) so Dad could relax for the morning (although he would have been happy to do the lessons himself).
Charles taught the Bible Class and then did the sermon as well. My brain was far too foggy to remember what was said. I'm sure he understood our preoccupation.
As soon as the service was over, the family headed back to the ranch to eat a quick lunch as we were expected to be over at the funeral home prior to two o'clock for the Visitation. We ate quickly and spent a little while chatting; Dad went over earlier than the rest. Cheryl and I followed soon after.
The funeral home was laid out into four basic rooms: a conference room up front, a large gathering room in the middle, the viewing room with the casket to the left of the gathering room, and a smaller overflow room to the right. Most everyone milled around in the gathering room or walked reverently past Mom's casket, with the right-side room being used mainly by those who had brought small children. The video presentation of Mom's life was playing in the conference room and in the back of the gathering room.
We hung out for nearly the entire two hours, from 2 til 4 pm. There were lots of family and friends we hadn't seen in quite a while. We heard lots of stories about Mom and what a wonderful person she'd been, as friend, sister, cousin, mother, grandmother. It would have been nice to record them all -- but that would've been a bit unwieldy to arrange. It was sufficient to wander around the room and catch stories here and there, little bits of conversation that were passing around the room like loose balloons in the wind.
It was odd seeing Mom in her casket all done up like she was sleeping. Of course she doesn't really look like she's just sleeping; no one ever does. There's always some level of lifelessness to the bodies on display in caskets even if the makeup is perfect. There's a level of unreal stillness to a body that can't be faked by the living; or perhaps it could be said that there's an realism in the subtle motion of a living body that can't be duplicated by a corpse. Her hands in particular looked far too flat and still to be living. That helped to reduce the disquiet of being around the shell of what had once been my mother. It was obvious that she wasn't there anymore. She was gone; whatever soul/spirit had once inhabited that body was long gone. I don't like open casket visitations or funeral services as a rule. I don't need to see the body to know that it is no longer in use. I'd rather remember them as they were in life: vibrant, colorful, exuberant, in motion. I'd rather just look at portraits taken in their prime. Better yet, a sequence of portraits showing them from youth to middle age. We can skip the older, decrepit years. Those are just depressing.
After it was all done and they were ready to usher us out, we went back to the ranch to get some dinner. Dad and Mike Hardaway and I went to Dad's office and worked on the Order of Service for the funeral. I wasn't particularly hungry so took a walk around the property to do some thinking and then went inside to take a nap and try to remove the fuzz from my brain.
It almost worked.
2 comments:
One doesn't see open-casket funerals much these days. I've been to one, before Mom's, in probably the last 20 years. But there is something about seeing the person's empty body that reinforces the idea that they are, indeed, gone. There is also something somewhat doll-like in the way the inanimate body seems to retain its connection toits former inhabitant, in that one may still feel the urge to speak final words of love or farewell over it. I know I did.
Perhaps that is why I don't like open-casket funerals. They do reinforce the idea that they are really gone, and I don't want to accept that, deep down. I just want to remember them the way they were when they were strong and healthy and happy and laughing and living. I have a picture of Mom and Dad as my desktop background from Christmas '92. She's wearing that blue house robe with her reddish-tinted hair sitting in a comfy chair with her feet up on the coffee table (and Dad has a Cheshire grin on his face!) and she's looking right at me and I can hear her voice in my head and it soothes me.
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