The Life-Givers

Yesterday was Aunt Ruth’s memorial service and I was dreading it. Having grown up Irish Catholic the buttoned-down Congregationalist funerals of Eric’s family always left me feeling desolate as though the person who died had somehow disappeared into the ether never to return, even in memory. No one told stories, no mementoes ever graced a table. In fact, if anything, everyone worked hard NOT to talk about the deceased for fear that pain would stride unbidden into the room, pull up a chair, and boorishly refuse eviction. At an Irish wake, or an Irish funeral, emotions pour like Guinness, dark, thick and blanketed in froth. Great howls of laughter ride the waves of mournful despair. My skin, my blood, my bones remember yet the prayers, the fog of incense, the rise and fall of voices reciting the rosary in a singsong cadence, “Hail Mary, full of grace …”

But my soul remembers best the stories, the lifegivers. My grandfather died when I was a senior in high school. It wasn’t supposed to have happened. The surgery was a success, no cancer, and yet he died anyway. On the same day my Latin teacher, Mr. Wahl, who somehow managed to make a dead language hilarious, died of a massive heart attack. As pallbearers carried my grandfather’s body out of the church another set of pallbearers carried Mr. Wahl’s in. The day felt surreal, an out of body experience through which I moved  like a flat cardboard paperdoll. But after the concelebrated Mass everyone piled into cars and wound their way through the streets of south Akron to my grandparent’s brown brick house which seemd to me in childhood a fortress. People filled the two parlors, congregated around the food in the dining room – my favorites, soda bread with raisins, and black currant cake eight inches high -- and squeezed into the kitchen where the old formica table served as a makeshift bar. Within minutes, the old house on Princeton Street that my grandfather had so loved and had nearly lost during the Depression, thrummed with energy. And there in the middle of all, sat himself, puffing on a cigar and holding court, alive again in the stories. I never wanted it to end.

All this week I’ve wrestled with myself about the propriety of telling a story about Aunt Ruth. Did I dare, or should I just read some agreed Bible verse? I finally opted for the middle ground and decided to send her an old Irish blessing in lieu of prayers.

“May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face and the rain fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand.”

Yes, I would do it. Even though I knew I’d cry I’d take the leap and do it anyway. But my feet dragged as we trekked up over the rise in the small old cemetery in Lodi to the very back with its panoramic view of the exposed sedimentary rock of the enscarpment. There were only about eighteen people because that’s what happens when you are very old and have outlived most of your friends. There was also no minister, which struck me odd, until I realized we might be better off without one after all. Eric’s sister began with a reading from Rosamund Pilcher’s novel September (Aunt Ruth loved Rosamund Pilcher) which begins, “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged …”

Halfway into the passage her voice broke and through the crack a door swung wide open. One by one people told a story or shared a memory. Only the women shed tears, but the men told stories too -- wonderful stories of Aunt Ruth and two of her girlfriends packing up a camper truck and heading off on a lark to Alaska back in the 70’s. How she always ordered mashed potatoes in restaurants only to be surprised when they came smothered in gravy. She’d gaze down at them, murmur “Oh my,” and then dutifully eat them. Finally after several repeat performances and her inability to ask for  something off the grid her fellow diners would shout at the waitress in unison, “NO GRAVY!”

We also laughed over some of her more infamous misinformed beliefs. The woman held a master’s degree from Case Western Reserve and yet could never be persuaded that cutting a head of lettuce with a knife would not “cut through the vitamins.” One by one each great-niece told of baking cookies, sleeping over at Auntie Ruth’s apartment, trips to Sea World, making crafts, learning recycling before it became commonplace, and as my oldest daughter put it, “always being there for us.”

For more than half an hour we stood in the sun, unmindful of the cold, and told stories. I told how we would not even HAVE our oldest daughter had Aunt Ruth not convinced the social service agency she worked for to take a chance on us back in 1974 when adoptions from Korea were about as common in Akron, Ohio as visits from international dignitaries. I recalled how warmly she welcomed me to the family in 1970 when I was a very young bride. And how when she came every Christmas Eve to spend the night she and I would stay up late and watch old movies – The Bishop’s Wife, Holiday Inn, Christmas In Connecticut. And then I spoke the Irish blessing from memory and conjoined my tears with those already shed.

Afterward we went out to lunch and sat, all eighteen of us, at a common table. There were no spirits of the alcoholic variety, but lots of food, and even more laughs. And there in the center of it all sat Aunt Ruth, quietly holding court, and snapping her endless pictures so as never, ever to forget this time.

As if we could.

(The photo at the top is Aunt Ruth, taken in 1946. I apologize for the size but cannot shrink it.)