Father announced casually, as he moved from the side of the open hole over which hovered the casket in which lay my dead grandmother, that his winter coat had been pilfered.
“You see this coat?” he pinched the long blue fabric from his chest. “Where do you suppose I got it?”
We, the bereaved, were silent. I, for one, was not entirely sure where one would purchase a long winter coat of the variety that a catholic priest would wear. It is possible that others knew and were silenced by gaping grave, the piles of flowers, or the particularly arresting way the lilac casket gleamed in the bland noon light of mid December.
“A thrift store?” offered my aunt helpfully after some thought.
“No” said the priest with the authority of a man who had just, as far as I can tell from my thin knowledge of catholic tradition, performed a significant role in helping my dead grandmother over the threshold of the finite and into the eternal. “I took it home last night from the wake after discovering that my good coat had been taken”. The emphasis on the word good was pointed. “There must have been some mix up” he offered generously, so as not to imply that our mourning family, or my dead grandmother, kept company with questionable characters. “but this isn’t even a coat I could trade in for anything”.
And that was the last we heard of Father. With a smile and some chuckles, he disappeared into the thin winter light to attend a Christmas brunch complete with Santa clause and crucifixes.
She died on a Thursday. We buried her on a Monday.
Among traditions of my family, arriving everywhere late is chief and runs deep in our veins. Naturally, this tradition cannot be altered by death or a funeral.
The morning of the funeral, we were even later than usual. We all suspected that our difficulty getting out the door was in some way related to my mother. In order to understand her behavior, one must first know that she is not catholic, and had, possibly, never been to a catholic funeral mass. Also, her husband of 23 years, who had recently become her ex-husband of about one year, and whom she had not seen in a year and a half, had called her an old hag with all the conviction of a revivalist preacher in his voice the last time they did meet. It was his mother who lay in the casket, and he had made the long trip back to us to bury her. To say my mother was nervous to see him would be something like calling the Weathermen conscientious objectors.
By the time we managed to drag her out of the house and pack ourselves into the car we were so late that it would have been laughable, had it not been such a grave matter to begin with. We got to the funeral home and sheepishly entered the hushed room where the open casket waited - our heads down, our eyes averted - and quietly sat amongst the punctual others.
We waited, uncomfortably staring, shamed pale Irish Protestants amongst ruddy, solid, French Canadian Catholics. “Now that we are gathered” spoke the older funeral home woman - who can really only be described as a picture of herself, as if someone had painted a portrait of a real person, immortalizing and perhaps embellishing the perfectly static tidiness of the pose, and she had climbed from that picture to move about in real life, every hair in place, every thread of her sanctimony righteously stitched into her dark grey dress suit, a military woman, unwaveringly the same, always. “We will say a final prayer” I was surprised at how corporal, how compulsory this prayer was, but bowed my head reverently. As soon as the amens were murmured and the various Catholics crossed themselves, she issued her next command. “Now the back row” (this was us) “will pay their last respects”. I tried to look solemn as we fell over ourselves to get to the open casket. We half knelt and half leaned against Mimi’s little metallic purple bullet of a casket, looking into her made up face. She looked small, but pretty, and far more like herself than the last time I saw her, ravaged by dementia. Death had restored her to herself. It wasn’t as if her soul lingered, but rather that death left us with the gift of sight. To see her in this taxidermy stillness and see something closer to her than the melting mess of flesh and fluid I had seen last, was something like closure.