Okay, this is just to get it out of my system. Hopefully once I spill it here, I'll stop brooding about it and having it give me nightmares like it did last night. I do not want this to turn into my new anxiety dream; I'm very attached to the missing-the-school-bus version, thanks very much. So here's what happened while I was trying to have a memorial for Mom:
In all actuality, like most funerals, it has the makings of a farce and elements of it, especially taken in toto, are so absurd as to be ridiculous. I may even laugh about it someday, but not anytime soon. And there are parts of it that I will never find funny. In my mind, this story has two elements: the stuff that couldn't be helped, and the stuff that could. It's the stuff that could that really upset me.
First of all, you need to understand that Oscoda is a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, the entire population of which could fit on one subway train here, with room to spare. Flint, of Roger and Me fame, is the largest big city and it's 100 miles away. Cingular, my cell phone company, which connects 270 million people, has not yet reached Oscoda. I get signal about 20 miles south of my dad's house, if I'm lucky. North of it? Forget it. Dial-up internet access is impossible because there are still party lines. Wireless? Surely you jest. There's one cable company with 5 religious stations on the basic package. (All of them had a field day with Pope John Paul's death and Cardinal Ratzinger's election, needless to say.) There are two florists, a couple of drug stores, several fast food joints and overpriced gas stations, three funeral homes, two stoplights, a number of bars, lots of touristy gift shoppes, a Dairy Queen, two supermarkets, a Kmart, and one movie theater. In short, there's no there, there. Going back to Oscoda is not a treat for me. I don't drive and there's no public transportation. I feel alien and isolated there and only Mel and Sally make it bearable, aside from seeing Dad.
When I arrive on Friday, April 15th, the temperature is in the 70's and all the clothes I've brought are too warm. I don't need a coat, socks, or fleece shirts. Keep this in mind.
Nothing got very eventful until around Monday night, when I called Mel to order flowers. I wanted just an arrangement for in front of the speaker's podium at the Hall, figuring other people would send flowers too, and Mel suggested adding a bouquet to put in one of Mom's vases. I thought some gladiolas would be good, since they're tall and make a nice big arrangement for the podium and they were one of Mom's favorite flowers. Mel said, no problem.
The next day she calls me up and says the glads are a no-go: the national florist supply truck has driven over a cliff in Georgia somewhere. I still don't know if the driver was okay, or what exactly happened, but there were no glads for anybody. I can live with that. Nobody's fault. Hope the driver's okay. No matter what it is, Mel will do something beautiful with it. She could make dead sticks and brown grass look good.
Various relatives call to confirm, various friends check in. Errands are run, arrangements are made, word is spread, even though this was a confirmed date back in December. The cousins from Canada; Mom's sister and brother-in-law, their daughter and son-in-law, all from Traverse City, and daughter and son-in-law from Ann Arbor; more cousins from Pontiac; and Paul and Myron from Chicago; Uncle from Beaverton are coming. Dad's not coming because I told him he didn't have to. I know he hates stuff like this, and it would just make him positively squirm. Everybody grieves in their own way. I hardly know anybody at Mom's new or old congregations anymore, since I've been away for 25 years, but my pal Sally is there, and my two oldest pals from school, Mel and Paul will be too. I'll be okay.
Wednesday, I get a card from my Uncle Dave, who's one of Mom's older brothers. He's been on oxygen 24/7 for some time now and says he won't be able to come because he's been feeling pretty crummy lately and it's hard to get around. Instead, he writes a beautiful little eulogy of his own and includes it in the card. This seems perfectly reasonable to me. I send him one of Mom's cards and tell him it's okay.
Later in the week, the mother of a woman whose family was in Mom's old congregation in Ossineke, and whom we've known for years (they regularly did house maintenance for mom and dad too), dies. Her funeral, I discover, is scheduled for 1 pm on Saturday: an hour before Mom's memorial, 35 miles away. I figure, okay, Phyllis's grief is fresher; she gets a free pass. Mel now has to do flowers for that funeral too, though she doesn't want to tell me. I know she does, though, because there are only a couple of flower shops, and Mel's the only real designer in the area. She does tell me she will may not be able to make the memorial because there's no one to work for her, but she'll do her damnedest. Mel would have to do much worse than this to piss me off. She's always been there when I needed her and she's doing everything she can now. I'm okay with that. I couldn't get to her dad's funeral either.
Thursday she calls me with more bad news. Paul, my other friend from high school (he and Mel and I are the Three Musketeers; we've known each other for 35 years or so) can't reach me on my cell phone because there's no service. Instead, he calls Mel and tells her he's leaving for San Francisco immediately. The person in the Levi's San Francisco office who was supposed to run their big retail show has had to leave because her brother was killed in a welding accident. I actually get his voicemail on the way to the memorial, when I approach civilization and have service on my cellphone again. He sounds ticked and really apologetic. He wants me to come out to Chicago and we'll have our own memorial. To do what he can to make up for it, he sends a pile of flowers: amazing orange roses, tulips, foxgloves. These turn out to be the only flowers besides the ones I've ordered. Nobody else sends any. By this point, I hardly notice.
Friday, April 22nd, the temperature is in the low 40's and the forecast is for 6-10 inches of snow, beginning around midnight. Under the cumulative pressure of all the crap that's gone on, I flip out and have a nice little tantrum through which Dad says nothing. We have the same temper (which is why we always fought when I was kid), and I'm ready to heave something through a window, but don't. By the time I'm out of the shower, it's over.
Dad's supposed to drive me to the airport Sunday morning to catch a 6:30 am flight. Obviously, this is impossible now, with the evil weather. I'm not making an 85-year-old man drive 90 miles roundtrip in bad weather in the middle of nowhere at the crack of dawn. I decide I'll get Sally to drop me off at a hotel near the airport on her way home. Only one of them, the Day's Inn, has an airport shuttle, because that's where the pilots stay. Yippee. I make a reservation after I'm through being hysterical.
Next phone call: Cousin Carole's husband has had to fly to Atlanta at the last minute because a friend of his committed suicide, and her son Kyle has been sick. She might not make it either.
Saturday morning, the Pontiac cousins call and cancel. Downstate has blizzard conditions and we have about 3 inches on the ground already. The Canadians have not checked in at all. I don't know where they are, or if they even set out. By the time the memorial rolls around, it's really snowing out, and I'm worried about the Traverse City (directly across the state, on the west coast) relatives, but they make it okay, including Kyle and Carole, along with my cousin and her husband from Ann Arbor.
That's all the crap that couldn't be helped: bad timing, bad coincidences, untimely deaths, freak weather. About all that, I'm pretty sanguine. It's the pointless obstructionism that really got to me.
I'd planned that Mom's favorite elder would give the memorial talk, and then I'd read the eulogy I wrote, and Sally would say a few words of her own, we'd have a prayer, and then while some finger food was served in the back, I'd play the CD of jazz standards I put together that make a little musical story of Mom's life. Nothing elaborate. No wailing over the coffin (nonexistent), no sackcloth and ashes (ashes still unscattered in New York), no rending of garments (too cold). No wake, no shiva, no unseemly emotions or display of self-importance.
Neither of the eulogies nor the music were allowed. The talk was 20 minutes long and said virtually nothing about Mom, and nothing that I would say. There was no good reason for it except that the elders decided to disallow it, probably because the circuit overseer was there, among other reasons. I know there was no good reason for any of it because I researched it afterwards. Not one Biblical principle was involved, and I would not have said a word of protest if that had been the case. I did protest, however, but I did not make a fuss because Mom would have loathed that. Instead, I just ate it.
Now, granted, I probably should have done a better job of keeping touch with John over the last four months, but it also took every ounce of energy I had to do what little I did. I also never dreamed that anything I was planning was the least bit controversial. I've never heard of a eulogy by the deceased's daughter being forbidden. Nor did I know the sound system at the Hall was somehow too sacred for secular music. These buildings where meetings are held are dedicated but not consecrated, unlike a church. While it is a house of worship, there was nothing disrespectful, tasteless, or obscene in anything that I wanted to do.
As far as I can tell, this was a show of raw power, misogyny (no women on the platform and just a woman being buried), and lack of balanced reasoning (and "balance" was the excuse I was given for not giving a eulogy). I have never felt so thoroughly and unjustly silenced or mistreated, and I've put up with a lot of nasty remarks from the narrow-minded conservatism up there. This took the cake though. What hurt the most was that I was not allowed to give Mom one last gift of the talent she always encouraged in me. On top of this, I think it did Mom a real disservice too. She was a Witness for almost half a century and half of her last day of consciousness she spent getting ready for, driving to, being at and coming back from the Hall. For this, she gets a three-sentence mention at her own memorial?
And yet, had I known it was going to turn out this way, I'm not sure I would have made other arrangements. Having her memorial at the funeral home instead of the Hall feels too much like she'd done something wrong and was being banished. Why shouldn't she have a send-off from the Hall after being faithful for so many years? The issue is why couldn't she have had the memorial she deserved? Instead of 20 minutes, she'd have gotten an hour, maybe, to acknowledge almost 50 years of service and 76 years of life. I don't think one hour out of 665,000 give or take of her life (a large number of which were spent in Jehovah's service) is really an outlandish fraction to allow her. What I was going to say wouldn't have taken longer than 10 minutes, and I'm sure Sally's wasn't much different. Why is that excessive? Anybody got a good answer?
Okay, now that that's off my chest, maybe I can put it behind me and get on with it. I'm sending copies of both the eulogy and the CD with cards to everyone who couldn't make it, and some of the people who were there who would appreciate it. Sally's coming out in November to help me scatter her ashes; I'll probably go see Paul sometime soon in Chicago and we'll hoist a glass and make fun of her opera and praise her pizza.
Back to my missing-the-bus dreams now.
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