The Undertaking (2 page)

A
t first I thought it meant he took them under. It was the fifties and I was the child, one of several as it turned out, of an undertaker. This was a fact of greater matter to the kids I hung out with than to me.

“What does he
do
?” one would ask. “How does he
do
it?”

I said I thought
it had to do with holes, with digging holes. And there were bodies involved. Dead bodies.

“He takes them
under.
Get it? Under
ground.
”

This would usually shut them up.

Still, I wasn’t as certain as I tried to sound. And I wondered why it wasn’t
underputter
—you know, for the one who
puts
them underground. Surely to
take
them seemed a bit excessive. I mean if they were dead. They wouldn’t need
the company on the way. Like you would
take
your sister to the drug store but you would
put
your bike in the garage. I loved the play of words and the meanings of them.

At seven I was sent to learn the Latin required of an altar boy. It was my mother’s idea. She said if I was stingy with God, God would be stingy with me. This had the ring, if not of truth, then of my mother’s will, which was,
to me, the nearest thing to truth. The Latin was magic and mysterious—the acoustics made rich by its abundant vowels. Every Tuesday at four o’clock I’d meet with Fr. Kenny from St. Columban’s to learn the ancient
syllables by heart. He’d given me a card with the priest’s part in red and my part in black. He had come from Ireland and had been at seminary with my father’s uncle: a priest who died
young of tuberculosis, after whom I was named. I was vaguely aware of a conspiracy hatched between my mother and Fr. Kenny that would eventuate in my ordination. I heard a full confession of the particulars from Fr. Kenny himself, years later, after he’d retired and returned to Salthill in Galway. The world and the church had changed too much for him.

I remember him meeting my father at the back
of church. I was always released from school to serve the funerals. My father, impeccable in morning dress, the pallbearers—gloved and boutonniered—the brown casket, the sniffling family and friends behind it.

They’d changed the vestments from black to white. Englished everything. Revised the rules. Fr. Kenny did not approve of change.

“Edward” he bellowed when he reached the back, “I’m told
we are to
celebrate
this funeral. So wipe the solemn fellow off your face and kindly instruct Mrs. Grimaldi that the Cardinal expects her to cheer up for her husband’s funeral.”

The Grimaldi entourage, accustomed to Fr. Kenny’s sarcasm, looked anything but in the mood.

I stood, cassocked and surpliced between the priest and my father, holding the bucket of holy water.

“Next thing you know we’ll
be
grieving
the baptisms …,” Fr. Kenny was warming to his theme.

“Time now, Father,” my father said.

Then the priest, looking indignant in his white chasuble, sprinkled the casket with holy water and turned toward the altar where the organist had begun some upbeat number from the new hymnal. Fr. Kenny hushed him with a hard glance, breathed deeply through his nostrils, and intoned the doleful
comforts of
In Paradisum
in the sad tenor he had brought from home.

He knew that nothing would ever be the same.

By such instructions I had come to know that the undertaking that my father did had less to do with what was done to the dead and more to do with what the living did about the fact of life that people died.

In the wordsmithing of the day, new names for what he did were made.

Mortician
he could not abide because it made it sound like something scientific or new-fangled, like the cars and TVs and appliances, perennially repackaged, renewed, and improved.

Funeral director
sounded sensible. He had all the signs changed from Funeral Home to Funeral Directors, believing that it was the people, not the place, that folks in trouble counted on.

But in the mirror he saw an undertaker—someone
who stood with the living confronted with death and pledged to do whatever could be done about it. The undertaking was nothing new. It was as old, he figured, as life itself.

My pals still wanted grim details.

“The facts …,” as Joe Friday always said, “just the facts.”

And so we huddled with my father’s
Gray’s Anatomy
and Bell’s
Pathology
—books he’d bought in mortuary school—wincing over pictures
of disfigurement, disease, and death the way we would later with pornography.

But the facts were largely disappointing. No one sat up in their caskets. No one had seen a ghost. I hadn’t noticed if fingernails or hair continued to grow. Rigor mortis wasn’t all that special. The dead were unremarkable in ways that were hard to imagine.

Not so the living. Not so the glossy women in the girlie mags.
Not so the life that seemed more wondrous and more monstrous as we came of age.

Maybe it is so for every generation—that sex and death are the required lessons.

My parents, ever sweethearts, graduated high school in time for World War II. My mother went to college and worked in
a hospital. My father went with the First Marines to the South Pacific, then to China, then home when it was over.
Their world seemed full of possibilities. Their sexuality, sharpened by hunger and the brush with death, put off by threats of pregnancy, postponed by war, found its blossom in the Baby Boom. Sex and death for them were antonyms. Straight shooters and villains, virgins and whores, the right and the wrong crowd—the pictures we have of them are black and white. Known for their romance and fidelities,
the children of great wars and great depression hankered for security, safety, and permanence, wise investments and a piece of the rock. They married forever, moved to the suburbs, and lived as if they never had to die.

My generation, those boomers, born with the nuclear gun to its head, raised with it cocked in Cuba and Berlin, saw love and death like cartoons on TV. We watched the sky. We watched
the news. We played in bomb-shelters. And just as we were getting out of or going into puberty, the hammer dropped on Kennedy. That Thursday in high school or in junior high we turned from fantasies of chests and pelvises, the bright new body parts of our youth and desires, to consider the first death in our lives that took. Was it this coincidence of sex and death, of creative and deadly forces
in our lives that made our lives and deaths seem random after that? Spontaneous, casual, unpredictable, disconnected from our gravity, we grabbed all the gusto we could get. We only were going round once in this life. If we couldn’t be with the one we loved, honey, we loved the one we were with. Then and now we age with the grace (in Cummings’ careful metaphor) of polar bears on rollerskates.
Wary of being caught unawares, we planned our parenthood, committed to trial marriages with pre-nuptials, and pre-arranged our parents’ funerals—convinced we could pre-feel the feelings that we have heard attend new life, true love, and death. And for all our planning, for all our micromanagement, for all our yammering about our parents’ mistakes, we abort more, divorce more, and soon will
kevork
more than any twenty generations on the globe before us. (The verb form of kevorkian, which proceeds from the infinitive “to kevork” should observe the usage guides applied, in practice, to the other high-volume verb of our generation—a verb I never, as a matter of style, deploy whenever lesser words will do, in the hopes that it, unlike certain antibiotics, will maintain its punch—to wit: “kevork
off” or “go kevork yourself” or “take that you mother-kevorker” or in the rhetorical “are you out of your kevorking mind?”)

But for my daughter and my sons, I fear that sex and death are nearly synonyms. They rhyme too well to be that far removed. Sex is, for them, an odd game of roulette, a deadly lotto on which we figure odds for safe, safer, and safest sex (which is the name we give to none).
And death for them? A kind of yawner—a little excitement for those who can’t be shocked. A lapse of caution in which full and fatal contact is finally made. Is safe that much better than sorry? Really? Wow! Kurt Cobain grins at them on the wall. “I wonder if he
felt
it,” someone says.

They inhabit a world so rich in technology that everything works better, even the people, but no one seems to
know exactly why. Parented by proxy and prescription and by cable TV, they have achieved the loneliness their elders pursued. They enter their twenties less interested in finding themselves than in finding the way out. Faithless, hopeless, untutored in love, they make babies for the sake of company and kill themselves with unspeakable violence in staggering numbers—suffering from a deficiency in
meaning acquired from pop culture, pop psychology, feel-good religion, that tells them don’t worry, be happy, take care of yourself and your self-esteem. They stand to inherit, along with the spiritual void their parents have left them, the bill from the card it was all charged to.

W
atching my parents, I watched the meaning change, of what it was that undertakers do: From something done with
the dead, to something done for the living, to something done by the living—everyone of us.

After high school, I registered for the draft, enrolled in a college, and waited for life to happen to me. I worked at the funeral home. I worked at the state asylum. I worked at a home for alcoholic priests. I learned to drink. I fell in love. Friends of mine had died in Vietnam. The possibilities seemed
frightening.

I went to Ireland. I lived in the house my great-grandfather left a century before to come to Michigan. No phone or furnace, no plumbing or TV, no tractor or car or convenience store—the life led there seemed elemental, nearer the edges, clarified. Cows calved, neighbors died, the tidal ocean rose and fell, folks talked.

That winter and spring on the west coast of Clare my life
and times began to make some sense. And though this weary century of change is having its way with even Ireland now, I return to that place as one does to a well, a source, for the sense that it gives me of something true.

Thus, undertakings are the things we do to vest the lives we lead against the cold, the meaningless, the void, the noisy blather, and the blinding dark. It is the voice we
give to wonderment, to pain, to love and desire, anger and outrage; the words that we shape into song and prayer.

W
hen I first wrote and published poems, my father asked me when I’d write a book about funerals. I said I thought I had already. He nodded, smiled. Every so often he’d ask me again. “You know what I mean,” he said. I did, of course. I’d write the book sometime.

And much was made,
in my books’ reviews, about the odd day job—as if to say, not bad for an embalmer. “Mortician/ Poet” or “Poet/Undertaker” became the standard references. The bold print labored to catch the reader’s eye: “A Corpus of
Corpses” claimed the
Observer.
“Come Into My Parlour” said the
TLS.
The
Washington Post
read “Poetry Comes Down to Earth.” I did not object too much to this. Nice to be noticed, I
told myself, even if mainly as a dancing bear. Truth told I thought the poets I knew who taught in universities or worked in the “related” fields were undertaking too—looking for meaning and voices in life and love and death. Asked why he wrote so many elegiac poems, Seamus Heaney asked if there were any poems at all, besides the elegiac ones. “Sex and death,” Yeats wrote to Pound or Pound to Yeats,
I can’t remember now, “are the only subjects poets should write about.” Sex was lovely, the dead were everywhere. Was it any different, I asked myself, for poets-slash-English professors or poets-slash-editors or poets-slash-homemakers or poets-slashdads?

W
hich undertaking is it then that does not seek to make some sense of life and living, dying and the dead?

Still, my father’s question was
a real one. He knew how it had informed his life, shaped it, made him the husband and father and man that he was. He knew how the grief of others, the indifference of others, the despair of others, their faith and hope, the way they bought caskets and held one another, the way they sent flowers and said goodbye, how they wept and laughed and drank and ran from it, had told him something about himself,
his nature, his species, and his God. I think he knew, when I moved to Milford, twenty-two years ago today, that it would shape and change and inform my life as well.

To undertake is to bind oneself to the performance of a task, to pledge or promise to get it done. And when he died, it seemed I’d done just that. I had told him I would write the book someday. The book I had in mind would be for
poets, who had their questions about the things we do. Or maybe for people who read what poets wrote, and wondered what they
meant, or wanted more. I think what my father had in mind was a book for dismal traders, funeral types—for men and women who dress in black, and work the weekends and the holidays, who line the cars up and lay the bodies out, who rise and go out in the dark when someone
dies and someone calls for help.