Funerals, memory and mystery - Part II

(Note: My recent post, "Funerals bring people together," focused on the bonding and reminiscences prompted by the passing of a loved one, and how we delicately balance sadness with the celebration of life. Today I look at the speculation prompted by the specter of death: What lies ahead, and the questions we ask - questions that seem common from kids and older people alike. Universal and perplexing questions.)
 
Death impresses on us the finite and fragile nature of life. Despite the certainty we typically project, we ponder while at funerals the finality of death in the only context we can: the unknown. And ponder the afterlife - its form, whether it exists at all or follows the heaven-hell dichotomy that most of us have heard about from the ministerial pulpit all our lives.
Many of us pretend we're quite convinced we know the answers. But I'm reminded of how "The Great and Powerful Oz" handed out his tokens to the leading characters of the "Oz" story at the end: He told the lion he really had no less courage than his peers, the scarecrow that he had no less intelligence and the tin man that he had no less heart.
Indeed, many doubters, agnostics and seekers among us have no less certainty, deep down, about spiritual truths than the lifelong churchgoers.
The great Civil War historical novel, "The Killer Angels," by the late Michael Shaara, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, had a fascinating few paragraphs in which rugged, grizzled generals pondered their mortality in an almost childlike way. Death surrounded them. the book focuses on the Gettysburg campaign which happened not long after Chancellorsville, the latter recorded in history books as a Confederate victory. But the Confederacy could ill-afford battlefield losses even in victory. Attrition was sinking them. And the gray-clad generals who were still alive for Gettysburg had lost close friends/associates in the horrible recent confrontation. So they pondered death. One of them wondered, as he weighed the afterlife: "Will I see my friends? What age will they be?"
Compelling.
In the Civil War the invading army almost always lost because most Civil War battles were technically stalemates. The development of the rifled gun, replacing the smoothbore, made armies so deadly with their force that they essentially shot each other to pieces. Finally the invading force simply had to leave, to get home, lick wounds and resupply.
People in the prime of their lives draw the biggest crowds for their funerals. Tony O'Keefe RIP of Morris was a prime example in our recent past. It was almost futile trying to get into Pedersen Funeral Home for the reviewal, such as the crush of people. God rest your soul, Tony.
I often think it's sad that people who live to a quite advanced age cannot do nearly as well drawing a turnout for last rites. So many of their contemporaries have passed on. They and their accomplishments might be largely unknown to the community's young adults. My uncle Howard Williams' funeral in Glenwood fell into that category. Howard lived into his 90s and had made Glenwood and its development his life's passion, using his gregariousness and fiscal acumen as a banker.
This isn't really to "complain" about the relatively low turnout for last rites. It's understandable. All those contemporaries of Howard were presumably waiting in heaven to acknowledge his arrival. But what age would they be?
We all remember the first funeral we attended. For me it was the funeral of my grandmother Hilda Ohlson in Brainerd. But perhaps more vividly etched in my memory is the funeral for a Viet Nam War casualty, also in Brainerd. This young man was a friend of the family, the son of the sister of my mother's best high school friend (Brainerd High Class of 1942).
The deceased, who we always called "Dickie," was adorned with his U.S. Marine uniform in the coffin. There was talk that he was shot at point-blank range, perhaps by someone he trusted. As in the roiling Middle East/Persian Gulf region today, U.S. soldiers cannot be certain at all times whom to trust among the native citizenry, even those in uniform. We heard that Dickie had sent a letter to "his girl" not long before his death, expressing doubt that he would live much longer. He was truly in the lion's den in that conflagration. And he ended up in a coffin with his skin of purplish color. Purplish. I remember it like it was yesterday.
I have long suspected that this troubling scene was one reason I became a cynic/skeptic in later years, reluctant to take the word of authority figures on the adjudication of issues. That war was an abomination, a gaping wound in the developing consciousness of the "boomer" generation as it matured.
David Halberstam RIP wrote about "The Best and the Brightest" laying the stage for that war. I cannot think of that title without also remembering a Doonesbury takeoff on it: "The Worst and the Stupidest," which I believe the cartoonist was attaching to the cadre of people around Richard Nixon.
May God rest your soul, Dickie.
People die older than they used to. A gentleman I know at the Morris Senior Center told me about his bout with skin cancer on his forehead - the problem seems to be under control - shook his head and said "people used to die from stuff like this all the time."
What a blessing people can live longer, even if their final rites might only attract a Gideon's band of mourners. And what a blessing that wars of the scale of the Civil War and Viet Nam are relegated to the bookshelves, where generals can wonder "How old would they be? (of their fallen comrades)"
I once had a co-worker, Howard Moser, who was convinced that the afterlife would be like the play "Our Town," in which we would be seated in a circle discussing the adventures and misadventures of our mortal lives. We laughed about that. How old would everyone be?
I never knew my late uncle Howard as a young man. We have all probably had relatives like that, whom we can only pigeon-hole at a certain age or in a certain role. What kind of a young man was Howard? Or boy?
Would I discover this in heaven?
I once had a teacher who laughed about the idyllic, heavenly scene in the clouds, where presumably you'd be handed a harp "whether you liked music or not."
One thing about that idyllic picture and its counterpart with the fires burning in hell: syndicated cartoonists have gotten tons of mileage out of this. But how illuminating is it? How did it originate? The same way as Santa Claus in the red suit? Perplexing.
I remember the funeral for a musician friend once, held at my church of First Lutheran in Morris, where the presiding clergy (not Cliff Grindland whom I wrote about in my previous "funerals" post) spoke of the afterlife with a touch of doubt and uncertainty. I remember these exact words, spoken by this minister who liked his cigarettes pretty regularly: "We don't know. . .but we can hope."
How could those words cross his lips? One big asterisk that could be placed next to these rites was that they were in the Jimmy Carter malaise period, give or take a year. It was a time when conventional wisdom had it that everything was open to question. There were no absolutes, certainly no absolutes as set down by Western orthodoxy.
The residue of the Viet Nam experience hadn't settled into the background yet. Civil rights in the Deep South remained problematic. And we had witnessed the exit from office of a criminal U.S. president. How could we as a society be certain of anything?
Such was the disillusionment, young people drifted away from mainstream Christianity. In Morris, the older generation recognized this and began a turnaround with the "Young Life" organization which had no ties to established denominations. When I wrote a feature on this group for the local newspaper, the smoking pastor derided me by saying I had "plugged" them.
Eventually the traditional denominations got resuscitated. American ideals in general enjoyed new buoyance, largely through the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. All was right with the world. But I could never dismiss the purplish skin of my fallen acquaintance from those rites in Brainerd in the mid-1960s.
More tangible reminders of the tragic war period could be gleaned with a visit to the Viet Nam War Memorial in the nation's capital, where, as my mother did once during a motorcoach tour that I sent her on, you could hold a piece of paper over the name of a deceased loved one and rub with a pencil.
"Dickie."
In the big scheme of things, life goes on.
I remember my cousin Tom who had clergy credentials through a fundamentalist strain, officiating at final rites for my uncle Andy (yes, Andy Williams) in Glenwood. Tom, of Duluth, gestured toward the casket and said "This is just a body. Andy is gone."
Gone where? And how old would he be?
-Brian Williams - Morris Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com