Final Vinyl Days (17 page)

There are those who can admit to dying and those who can't. Sometimes there are those who have been given the pink slip but can't face it, so the family calls me in to make the plans. I have seen some people sit right there at their own funerals and hear the loveliest things said about them and still not comment. It's as if they are no longer there; that the soul just up and skipped out the back door when no one was looking. But then you look closer, and you see. A memory has slipped into place and locked in. I have found that many have to move backward to get through death. They need something they can count on, and the past is solid.

One of the nicest things I ever heard about someone was that when he went to his daughter's softball games he always took a cooler of water and towels for the whole team. This same man was said to have always spoken to people on the street, and to have greeted them in a way that made them feel unique and noticed on the face of the
earth. He also fed stray cats and lifted birds back into their nests. And he hugged his wife and children and told them he loved them every single day. The people who have lived such a life get back a bit of the reward they have never asked for. Most are embarrassed by it, but in spite of the flush, there is great pleasure. Those who have lived a selfish, blind kind of life have a final chance to change. There was one poor woman who had herself a funeral and nobody came. It was just like in that Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby”—tragic—she sat there in front of that table laid out with some of the prettiest food I'd ever prepared and cried like she might have been five years old and nobody came to her birthday party, or like she might have been twenty and stranded at the altar. So I told her it was her practice run. Now she could write letters and notes and make phone calls and have another funeral. The next time she had a full house, and when she died for real they all came back with good memories of the last time they had seen her. They laughed about how she whipped off her wig and put it on her doctor's head, then turned her face to the sun. For a moment she looked like a character out of some kind of sci-fi movie, her head bald and her eyes bulging; she looked like a holocaust victim, an abandoned leper. She looked like death. “Why,” she asked those who had gathered there, “did I waste my time being such a
godawful bitch?” She laughed and said to her neighbor's child, now a grown man with three children of his own—the boy she once pinned against a fence and humiliated with criticism of his poor attire and poor manners in front of the whole neighborhood to make the point that no goddamned body was allowed to pick her flowers or shake her fruit trees—“I should have given you children those trees. I wish you had picked every peony that ever bloomed.”

I have made it my business in this business to get folks as close as possible to what means the most in this life. What are your loves and what are your regrets. I tell folks that once that door opens, there's no going back. You need to shrug off the regrets. Like the gecko lizard my kids have had for a couple of years. One time, I spent a whole day watching him slip from his crusty old skin and walk away from it, leaving it to lie there like a transparent jump suit. I said to James, “God, don't you know he must feel good to shed that,” and then, of course, I immediately came to understand where my grandmother had gotten her saying, “I need to get shed of that.” Again and again, it's the whole birth process in motion—born again, without having to give a testimony or ask anybody's permission. Some animals turn around and eat the skin, losing absolutely nothing of what has been created.

There are those who say they don't believe in anything at all but still want to have what we jokingly call “The Going-Out Party.” These are usually the young people—angry as they well should be—about getting dealt a bad hand. For these occasions I suggest songs such as Billy Joel's “Only the Good Die Young” or Queen's “Nothing Really Matters.” I have found that everybody at the party, including the dying, understands that something really does matter. It might be a grandmother recalling his first time walking—a plump, diapered boy with dimpled doughy legs and sticky hands and neck that she loved so much she kissed and kissed all the day long. It might be the girl who sat behind him on the school bus every day of junior high, the way he hoped his initials would one day wind up penned on the front of her blue horse notebook; it might be a dog, long dead himself, or the one curled at his feet, those somber, liquid brown eyes filled with knowledge and loss. Even if they continue to believe that nothing waits beyond, they are reassured that things in life do matter—every day, every word, every strain of music, every little gust of wind that stirs the branches.

It was after one of these parties for someone young that I was asked questions. The young man, for whom I had thrown a humdinger of a party, would not be lingering for much longer. His eyes reminded me of my daughter's
eyes. His hands were pale and graceful like Marjorie's. I heard my own sons in his language, and I heard James in his lengthy sighs.

“Nice cake,” he said, pointing to what remained. I had felt Marjorie's hand guiding me as I constructed a closet, solid brown chocolate as it should be with its door cracked open to let all the life come out: Barbie in a swimsuit and Magic Earring Ken, a parade of tiny plastic high heels; perfect pink triangles of frosting around the base. I had heard several people (older relatives) say that they didn't understand the cake, only to be pulled over to the side by someone in the know. He had told me he had no regrets about his choices, just about the bad luck that got factored in. After his party he asked me to open
my
file cabinet for him; he asked
me
to tell
him
a secret.

The secret that I told him was that before and after every dinner party I go through my house with a smudge stick like a torch. I do it while James is in the shower and won't know about it. He always comes out, sniffs and says, “What's that I smell?” and I say something like “your upper lip.” I don't tell him that I am casting a spell to rid our house of bad vibes and whatever bitterness a soul like that of the OB might leave, a wake of stench behind him. I don't tell him that I am still sometimes overcome with guilt over my one and only affair, a crazy brief meeting
with a childhood boyfriend who had lost a parent as recently as I had. Grief is a passion even stronger than lust, and those who don't recognize it will eventually shatter and spray blood and bone to kingdom come. I am still burning a little in guilt for loving every minute of that time and the way it took years off of my heart. But never, in my mind, did it feel like something that could jeopordize my love for James. In my mind it brought my two halves together and linked them up like two full and heavy train cars getting ready for the long haul.

I told the young man that if James knew I buy smudge sticks by the case, he'd say what he always says, that I'm crazy and superstitious and he cannot remember why he married me. Of course, that
is
a joke—'long about midnight he remembers well enough. “Now that's some magic,” he might say, and I just laugh, when in my head I'm thinking
that
's biology; magic is beyond us. It's in that flicker of light in my linden tree on an autumn day so crisp and clean I feel I could leap right up into that tree and sit like a bird for the rest of my life. Magic is when I hear the very song on the radio that I just wished to hear or when I get a check in the mail on the very day I say I sure could use one. Usually it's a joke check—like the last time I asked for money and got a check for twelve dollars
for overpaying my bill at Sears. Still, seek and ye shall find—ask, and it shall be given. I can forsake a lot of the Baptist business I grew up with, but there are those scriptures that remain in my head as if they are carved there. Sometimes, I get magic and religion mixed up in my head. I guess of the two I have to choose magic—or call it spiritual. Sometimes, when I'm riding in the car all by myself, I'll suddenly breathe in the smell of rich sweet pipe tobacco and believe that were I tempted, I could glance in the rearview mirror and see my grandfather there; it's so real to me that I never look, for fear that when I do see him I'll wreck the car.

I was only ten when he died, but I believe I helped him over to the other side. He was pointing over to the corner of the room, saying that he needed to go there. When all the grown-ups left, I helped him slide to the hardwood floor where he sat on the top sheet, and then I pulled him over there. I pulled fast, like a sled dog, because the adults would be returning with pills and doctors. I pulled harder and faster, as fast as I could and when I got him to the corner, he smiled, first at me and then into and all around the corner. He never looked back, and when the adults found me there, crouched beside him, they became hysterical. They brought it up time and time again over the years. And when they did, I allowed myself
to slip away to something better—warm sunshine on a summer afternoon, the baked brick stoop of my grandfather's porch, where I waited for him to come and pull me inside to the cool darkness of his tobacco-drenched house.

As I went on and on, I realized that I was planning my own funeral, cheese and johnny cakes like you can't find anymore, such old hymns as “Sweet By and By,” mixed in with a little Sinatra—“When You're Smiling”—and some Louis Armstrong—“Sittin' in the Sun” or “What a Wonderful World”—and it is, or at least it could be, should be, can be. People keep forgetting that and giving up, but it ain't over until it's over. My dogs seem to know that; they sniff the good pure air and stretch out in a puddle of sunshine. I decide to think about my guest list and who all would be there: cat, dog, and human, some living and some dead. I think of a little speech given by a man not too long ago, when his mind was cloudy with morphine and fatigue. He had planned a lovely speech about his family, his pets, his coworkers down at the garage, but at the last minute he said he wanted to talk about the new tax laws. He said first of all that this new law dealt with each and every person in the exact same way; there is no distinction or special consideration for any one group over another one. He said if the laws are working and people
are feeling hopeful, then that is good—trust them, believe in them, stick with them—oh, but if you see that they are not going to work, then you have to accept that. You have to embrace that truth and then find another way to go. When he stopped talking, his yard was silent; there was bewilderment and then there were nods as slowly his metaphor settled gently over us. I reached and took James's hand and squeezed it, just as I reached to take the hand of the young man beside me. His fingers were mottled and cold. My ears rang with the power of silence, which I recognized as a sign, and I knew that it was a good one.

It was with trepidation that he took the first dip in the baptismal pool. He eased in slowly, the white cotton of his robe billowing around him like a cloud. He had made the water warm, soothing. From the pool, he looked out at the rows upon rows of empty pews, heard the silence. With that silence came freedom. He did the breaststroke and backstroke.
Immersion
.

Now it's part of his routine.

The office staff members shake their heads in wonder at the young pastor who never seems to tire. “I'll stay if you need me,” the secretary says. She is middle aged. Her head of blond hair gives—from a distance—the appearance of a much younger person. Her offer is sincere. She
often speaks of the difficulties of going home to an empty house. “I don't mean it's difficult for you, dear,” she says. “I mean for those of us who once had very full houses.” She draws nods from several of the other women, volunteers there to help out with the newsletter. He once admitted he'd like to have a full house himself someday, and now he is offered photographs: daughters, granddaughters, nieces—
good girls
.

He sends her away and as the halls empty and darken and the custodian turns the last key in the last lock, he finds his way to the sanctuary, strips, and steps in. He floats. It is his meditation chamber.

Baptist/Methodist/Catholic/Jew/Whatever. He could be any, or all. But he has chosen what comes most naturally. He has fallen back on the knowledge of his childhood. He has brought to it his experiences from beyond. He has loved this place. He has felt both beckoned and rejected; understood and grossly misjudged.

Early in his childhood there was a pushing and a pulling, a twisting and a whispering. He did not think of it as religious. It was what he
knew
about things—a darkness, a brightness. And he knew better as a child than to tell anyone.

He had a great-uncle who could see germs lit up like infrared. He saw them where ever he looked. They were on
doorknobs, food, human hands. He believed his uncle even as he watched him taken away for heavy medication and arts and crafts lessons. Now there are other places to turn.

In high school, he once saw a man in the checkout line at a supermarket, whose breath labored and caught each time his chest expanded. He'd gone for hot dogs and chips to take on a camping trip. He'd go next to a neighboring county to buy beer. He'd sleep with his first girlfriend and promise her things he knew he would never give her. Waiting in the checkout line, he heard the man cough and saw the cancer cells. They were not unlike his uncle's description of the germs. They swam through the man's bloodstream, little twigs tossed into a current. Does it wash eternally or does it catch and snag without warning, embedded in the fleshy bank only to grow, metastasize? Beckoned through the big glass window by his crowd of restless friends he took his change, said his thanks, and ran out into a day wild with life. He felt lifted above it all a bit. He hovered just high enough to glimpse the edge.

The man whose cancer cells he'd seen was the husband of a woman who worked in the school cafeteria. When the man died, he snuck away and stood at the back of the crowd at the graveside service. People remarked what a kind boy he was. His mother repeated these compliments.
What she said made his skin crawl. He wondered if there might have been something he could have done that day in the checkout line to change the course of things.