GRIEVING NOTES

Day Four: Thursday, October 18, 2007

I finally got enough sleep. We didn't have to be at the funeral home until three, so I stayed in bed until noon. In spite of the much needed charging of my sleep cells, waking up was becoming something of a drag: from the moment my eyes opened there was a brief period of not remembering; then it would hit me, my first real thought of the day--Mom is dead.

Apparently, people had been coming by the house all morning, well-wishers, flower deliveries, casseroles and muffins. The parade continued into the afternoon. None of this was a surprise. I know the drill out here in the suburbs. What was surprising was the visit from the new pastor of my parents' Southern Baptist church.

I opened the door and there he was. Only a few years older than me, he looked like Bruce Jenner in khakis. He introduced himself, telling me he had come by to go over some last minute details for the service tomorrow. I told him my name and he winked at me. I invited him in.

My older brother came down and the three of us sat in the living room. The preacher asked how my father was holding up. Chris said Dad was managing. By now I can't remember anything else the man had to say. I only remember his manner and how it made me feel. In fact, I kind of tuned out a bit and just observed the proceedings as new pastor guy did his thing.

Until this moment, all the religion, all the Jesus talk, hadn't really bothered me. Even though I'm an agnostic, my family is deeply entrenched within the fundamentalist world view. OF COURSE they were heavily relying on their religion for comfort--after all, to a great extent, this is why religion exists in the first place, to make us feel better about our knowledge that life is chronologically limited, that we die. But all the Baptist rhetoric from my Dad was okay under these circumstances. And he wasn't using it to condemn sinners as Baptists love to do; he was using it to cope with his profound loss, assuring himself that he would see Mom again in Heaven.

And what do I know? Absolutely nothing. I'm an agnostic, not an atheist. Maybe Dad is right. Maybe Mom is in Heaven right now with her dog, and her father, and her niece Debbie who died tragically in a car crash back in the 80s, all happy and content, having all human mysteries explained once and for all. There were many moments during that first week after Mom died when I would allow my intellectual reservations about God to dissolve in order to emotionally relish the prayers and Christian spirituality that were all around me. It felt good if I didn't think too much about it.

But this new young, handsome pastor made me think. I'll cut him some slack because he was new to the community and didn't know any of us, but he was just so into his...I don't know...preacher man mode. I think I now understand how Bill Clinton drives the right wing into hysterics. Preacher-man was slick, verging on fake. I mean, he was clearly trying to be helpful, but I hated him. I didn't want to pray with him. I didn't want him comforting me with his bullshit. I just wanted to get the fuck out of the house, away from this TV-perfect snake oil salesman who so well represented to me the false "love" of fundamentalist Christianity.

I kept my mouth shut and tried to be nice. He would be gone soon enough. We had to go to the funeral home at three in order to be ready for the "viewing" from four to seven.


Mom with Romanian orphans on a Southern Baptist mission trip, late 90s

And soon enough, we were back in the room with my mother's body, me, Dad, my older brother Chris, my younger brother Steve, his fiance Lesley, and her two young daughters, Caitlyn and Abigail. I didn't really know what to expect; I had never gone to a "viewing" before. At first, during the first hour, only a few people came by, people I didn't know, but who knew Mom. Conversation was awkward and superficial.

"I'm the middle one, Ron. I live in New Orleans now, just got my master's in acting from LSU, taught high school for a while, but I ended up hating it."

"Oh yes, I know all about you, your mother always talked about you and your brothers. You know, she was so wonderful."

"Yes, yes."

That's how it went for awhile. After seven or eight encounters like this I noticed that the room had filled with people; it was almost like a party now, except for my mom's dead body stashed in the corner. Then I started talking to old friends, acquaintances and mentors. Mrs. Dearman, my first grade art teacher who I last saw some thirty years ago asked me how I was doing. The daughter of the preacher who baptized me, and who I had taught in vacation Bible school when she was a kid and I was in high school, made a self-deprecating remark about how I had a master's degree but she was only a housewife--"But that's something," I told her; Mom had been a housewife for many years. My tenth grade algebra teacher, Mrs. Smith, was there, too. I noticed a familiar gray haired man across the room who cockily swaggered over and put his arm around my shoulders.

"Do you remember who I am?" he asked.

"No, I'm sorry," I said.

"You'd better remember who I am," he lightly threatened.

"Coach Camps?" I realized.

"That's right!"

Coach Camps was one of my fondest memories from middle school football back in the early 80s. Turns out he was now an assistant principal at the school where my soon-to-be niece Caitlyn was in sixth grade.


Mom, Steve, and Dad after the 1987 homecoming game

Weirdest moment: hearing my Aunt Inez's voice, then turning around and seeing her. Inez, alone among my mother's five siblings, speaks and sounds almost exactly like my mother did. It used to confuse a bit when I was little. Today, it was just plain weird. I mean, I heard her voice and realized almost immediately who it was, but still...for a split second, it was really freaky. Inez also looks a lot like Mom.

Despite it all, it was good to see her. She and Mom had had something of a falling out over extended family politics, but none of that mattered now. She was there to show her respects.


Mom, in the middle, with her mother (on Mom's left) and five siblings, late 70s--Inez is second from left.

All of this was quite remarkable, like important characters who briefly appear at the beginning of a play and reappear only during the denouement for symbolic significance. But nothing was as emotionally moving to me as the unexpected arrival of close friends from more recent years. Bob and Anne, the god and goddess of my beloved theater home in Houston, dos chicas, read the notice in the paper and made the commute up to Kingwood to show their respects. My pal Stephen, who played Ken Lay in Enron the Musical last year, came too, right on the heels of Anne and Bob.

I had kept a brave face throughout the entire event, chatting with all these people, one after another. But the unexpected, unrequested show of support by these three friends finally made me cry.

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