When I was a little girl my mother informed me, early and often, that “children should be seen, and not heard.”
An obedient sort, I soon learned that if I would only keep my piehole closed, I was quite welcome to hover at the periphery of adult gatherings, until well past bedtime. There, I would quietly drink in the stories that would bubble up and out of various aunties and uncles whose guards were let down and tongues loosened—for better or worse—thanks to a steady imbibing of what they called “the creature” in all its shades.
These relatives were never glad of a present moment, but once it had slipped into the ether of memory, they were happy to indulge in the sloppiest of sentiments about the glory of days gone by. In particular, they loved retelling the stories that reinforced their understanding of themselves as Irish Stereotypes in Good Standing—the “donnybrooks,” between families, the “fisticuffs” between siblings of either sex, the “shenanigans” they suspected were going on everywhere and at all times.
Since Irish wakes usually served up the donnybrooks, fisticuffs, and shenanigans along with healthy helpings of superstition and drunken excess, the most often retold (and most often exaggerated) stories—the ones that brought table-slapping guffaws and wheezes from all sides—were tales of the in-house wakings of their beloved dead. Most infamous among these was the circa 1930 wake of one “Uncle Charlie” a child-beating brute who died of a stomach cancer but not before being written up in a medical journal, for—my mother claimed—“being the curious case of a man burning out his gut from his own acid hate.”
My mother, who often bore the brunt of his wrath, was six or seven years old at Charlie's passing, and she recounted approaching his laid-out body with great care, just in case he still had a slap left in him. The rest of the family had moved from the parlor (“we called them parlors, then”) to the kitchen to take either liquid or solid suppers. “There was a cube of ice, somewhere in that box, but I don’t know that,” she said, “and as the thing melted, Charlie shifted in the box. I screamed 'he’s alive, he’s alive!' and tore into the kitchen, and Uncle Joe brought me back out along with a plate of beef and carrots and potatoes and laid it on Uncle Charlie’s chest; ‘shush, ye child, he just wants to be included.’”
Hearing these stories in an age when death had been moved out of the parlor and into the funeral home, it was both spooky and exotic to consider that once upon a time people took care of their own dead; they washed the bodies and made them presentable, and then invited the neighbors in to toast him farewell, “everyone came,” my mother said. “See, they wanted to make sure he was dead, but even the mailman stepped in and tipped his hat and had a healthy dose to his memory.”
Death, for the people of that era, and every era before, was no stranger and brought no squeamishness. There was nothing mysterious about death beyond those questions we still ask—will we see them again in the next life, and why, so often, do the good die young while old bastards hold forth for far too long? A family mourned and drank, and fought and keened and then stumbled into church for the funeral; they buried their beloved and stumbled about some more, and life went on.
We are much more fastidious, these days. Our dead, even when they die at home after a long illness, are collected by authorities who certify them for the bureaucrats and then deliver them to the funeral homes, where trained people work wonders with fillers and cosmetics and open their “presenting room” doors to a family that has been prevented—some might say protected—from so much as straightening a tie knot or fastening a bow for their loved one.
Death has become so sterile and detached, so grisly and unknown and “other” to a generation that has loved nothing so much as its own life, that one can perhaps find some charity for those who recoil in shock when they hear about a couple bearing their dead infant son home so his siblings can see him. For a society that has experienced death as a hidden thing—something that happens behind a closed door or within the depths of a womb via suction hose—bringing death out into the light might seem “crazy” and “weird,” especially to a perpetually adolescent mind that has no concept of the sort of victory that can be found there.
It’s difficult to find charity, however, when such minds attempt to politicize a family’s open-hearted efforts to find consolation and closure in the celebration of a short life well-loved, but I think we must. Best, perhaps to simply pray for the politicizers, that their hearts are turned before their guts have burned from the acid hate that led them so easily to that place.
And pray for all of us, too, for our lives have become so intruded upon by conventionalities as to leave us unprepared to deal with difficult but natural realities—hinting that we no longer know ourselves, at all.
Elizabeth Scalia is the Managing Editor of the Catholic Portal at Patheos and blogs as The Anchoress. Her previous articles for "On the Square" can be found here.
RESOURCES
Colmes Mocks Santorums for Bringing Dead Son Home
Robinson says Stillborn Baby story is very weird
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Comments:
I believe I am approximately the same age as the Anchoress, and I submit it is time to stop this puerile inter-generational sniping, which sounds so much like siblings who continue childish quarrels long after there is no parent to impress or inheritance to hope for. However much we all dislike it, the early baby-boom, the latter baby-boom and Gen X are just now the only people available to debug everything that is malfunctioning. Fighting about who introduced which bugs is a waste of time.
David Nickol: I don't know if the Santorums told their story for political gain or to witness to their faith. Or both. I think they must have known that it would give them little political gain but they told it anyway because that is what Christians do.
Felapton: You can't fix what you don't recognize as broken and the "generation that has loved nothing so much as its own life" needs to be called out until they do recognize what is broken. I am part of the late boomer generation and I take no offense. That said, I don't see it as generational as much as cultural. There are plenty of pre baby boomers who have taken on the same odd ideas about love, life and death as the younger generations. I am thinking of 70 and 80 year olds who should know better, who did know better but "drank the kool aid" and spout the same liberal crap as the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Hillary Clinton, et al.
This issue with the Santorums has, for me, opened up a big, dark hole, that radiates hopelessness and evil. God have mercy.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/theanchoress/
Btw, I followed Douthat's remarks on this story -- I am a big fan of his -- but I don't know that I agree with him. I think it's a bit oversimplistic to say, "hey, you're in politics, you chose to discuss this, so now it's all fair game." I wonder if thinking so is evidence that we're too mired in the sludge of politics to the point where we've lose sight of the depths of madness to which our society has so swiftly slipped. When one is riding a roller coaster, after all, even the hairiest swoop begins to seem like a reasonable and expected part of the ride.
Al Gore talked about his sister's early death, and I don't recall anyone politicizing it. As Ann says, my impression was that the Santorums, in sharing their story of Gabriel, were witnessing more to faith than a political agenda. Beyond that, politicians are in a hard place: if you don't talk about EVERYTHING, you're accused of hiding something. Then if you talk about everything, you're told "well, you talked about it, so now we can kick it around like a tin can." I think there really does have to be some sort of common sense LINE that people should be able to find, for themselves. If these pundits absolutely HAD to discuss the death of Gabriel Santorum and how the Santorums handled it, there had to be better, less politicizing and slightly more respectful ways to do it. What Colmes and Robinson engaged in was simply and purely hackery. They gleefully found a way to play a "crazy" and "weird" card moments after Santorum's victory in Iowa? Sorry. There are PLENTY of substantial criticisms they could have made about Santorum; they chose to go for the sensational. It was unnecessary. It crossed that line of decency that used to be instinctive, but which we apparently are completely losing as a divided and partisan, over-politicized people.
I think it's more like this: yes, th Santorums put the matter out there fore public consideration (whatever their motives), but that does not entitle anyone who takes issue with it to abandon common human decency in how they address it. Whether or not you agree with how the Santorums handled the situation, there's no warrant for treating their situation -- which is undeniably horrific and deeply personal, no matter how they handled it -- like something that can be flippantly disparaged in causal language. At least act like adults who understand human suffering, if you have a problem with what they did, not like children on the playground mocking one another because they do things differently at their house.
Note that she probably didn't write the headnote. "Dictates" is a barbed, tendentious word choice. It should be "teachings."
But the real content of the article is what Clift wrote, and that's fine. It's impressive work when you remember that she's probably on the opposite side of the Santorums on the abortion issue, which she sees (accurately, in my opinion) as the subtext of the story about how they mourned the death of their newborn son.
The entire experience affirmed for me that at their core (and though they don't always show it) most people are very, very good. I was amazed by the outpouring of support and compassion I was given by friends and strangers alike.
While reeling over the diagnosis, along with my sorrow, rather than questioning God, I was given the grace of *gratitude* to have been gifted with this son, who would soon die. When the very dry technician told me that my child's condition was "incompatible" with life, I was able to somehow reflect with immense clarity and say, "I'm honored to be this child's mother." We were in a big, impersonal clinic, but suddenly everything changed. The technician asked me and my husband (who was sobbing), if we (and her intern) would pray with her. I was so moved by how she got beyond her "professionalism" to reach out to us.
Over the next few days, I was lavished with so much support, prayers, and messages, that I never felt alone, or despair in my grief. I wish I could even properly recount the sense of being protected, in God's hands.
In the delivery room, after being in induced labor for almost 24 hours, right as we had to send the anesthesiologist away, (I was at "10"), everything stopped, because a eucharistic minister had arrived with Jesus. We were enduring together. There was profound holiness in that room.
The delivery room nurses couldn't have been more compassionate. The one who wrapped up my son's tender little body wept.
We buried him on a radiantly beautiful day in August. He was surrounded by his eight brothers and sisters--(even his oldest brother who was in Paris, and on skype) Nearly everyone came in white, and the children surrounded the small and beautiful casket that my husband had made so exquisitely with his own hands, with white flowers. Xavier sat next to it protectively. Our good priest, a childhood friend, said the simple blessings.
Now, when people say things like "I don't know how you got through that", I tell them, *knowing* from the bottom of my heart, that God took the sting out of death, and that He never gives us a burden that He doesn't shoulder with us.
You are quite right about the way the seemingly unstoppable Juggernaut of Commercial Modernism (and it is definitely a corporate-government hybrid) has co-opted much of the self-sufficiency and community that we used to have.
My wife is a poet--a fitting metier for anyone of Irish descent, I think--and one of her early poems was a sort of ode to the traditional Irish wake. I'd like to share a couple of stanzas from it here:
When a man dies, we, the bereaved ones,
sit in his kitchen and tell jokes
to give his soul enough ballast to fly home.
While he makes progress, we regress.
We open his encyclopedia of ailments and laugh
about his chronic indigestion,
about his lifelong fear of botulism.
We tell stories his grown children have never heard:
how he lined his mother's Victory Garden with sauerkraut,
how the stench won the War.
We talk with our mouths full, for we are trying
to take in as much as he did in a lifetime,
we are stuffing ourselves with loss.
When we have drunk enough of the dead man's liquor
to experience the giddiness of flight, his widow
makes us eat more, for the giddiness of flight
must belong only to her husband.
Since we are young with little ones, people ask us often how many we have and how many we are going to have. We like to say,
"We have 4 children. We parent 3 daughters here and have 1 in heaven."
As always, an insightful article. Thank you for writing.
I'm reminded, in reading this, of Evelyn Waugh's "The Loved One." In typical fashion, Waugh manages to satire the British, the film industry, and the funeral business all in one go. What stands out from the book, to my mind, is his perception of the sterilization which the creepy mortuary of the book enforces upon the dead it receives. It's all really quite unsettling, and I think in this article you've put your finger on the reason that it is unsettling. Of all the things we can give over to the government and "officials" to handle, must our bodies really be one of them? I realize they like to do all kinds of things to preserve the body better, but really - who cares at that point? It isn't as though we haven't been dealing with bodies for the past few thousand years or so.....
I came across this poem by Joseph O'Brien in an archived edition of Dappled Things - "Irish Wake." Thought you might enjoy it. (Not sure if I can paste HTML into this comment or not.) Here's a snippet:
Oh, now there’s the one true memorial
For the dearly departed: sudsy flecks
Of talk in a slow slide down the side
Of empty glasses and generous tongues
Irrigating friendships with gob and gab.
I think Ross Douthat was correct in his recent column and this interview:
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DOUTHAT: . . . I don't think it's fair for the Santorums to say, well, it's OK for us to talk about our miscarried child and to talk about it in the context of, essentially, a pro-life argument about fetal life, but then to say, well, but we have a zone of privacy, and nobody can cross this zone of privacy and criticize us.
CONAN: So we can tell our story, but nobody else can tell it.
DOUTHAT: Right. Because other people, you know, I think that the fact that the way that their story was contested was stupid and arguably offensive doesn't mean that it crossed a line of privacy, if that distinction makes sense. And I know it's sort of a fine distinction to make.
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/09/144914744/op-ed-for-candidates-private-public-line-blurry
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We can quite reasonably criticize Colmes and Robinson for *what* they said. But Santorum himself "politicized" the events surrounding the death of his child.
Frankly, I think there is something questionable about the propriety of politicians using their personal tragedies as selling points for their views or their candidacies.