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What Remains
Down in the Dirt, v143
(the March 2017 Issue)




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Honoring the Dead

Greg Mahr

    Mother was cold. Maureen could feel Mother’s chill from across the room. Mother knelt by Father’s body, now eight days dead. The Irish tradition that called for a Saturday funeral was less convenient when the death was on a Friday, and the wait for this day seemed endless. Maureen rushed to her Mother’s side to warm her. The pallbearers gathered, and in a few minutes it would be time to close the casket for the last time. Maureen put her arms around Mother. She draped her sweater over her Mother’s shoulders to warm her up. She ordered Jeff to bring Mother a heat pack. She liked to take care of Mother, and she especially liked it that everyone could see her taking such good care of Mother. Maureen started to sing the first few notes of “When Irish eyes are smiling.” No one joined in. It was uncomfortable, even for Maureen. The notes were false, she needed a chorus to back her up. Mercifully, Mother sang a few bars. Maureen was finally satisfied; she was a good daughter and everyone knew it.
    Maureen noticed the rosary in Dad’s hands as the hearse driver began to take the flowers from the rented coffin. Maureen watched her sister Maeve stare at that same rosary. Stern and cold, angry already, Maeve marched to the coffin. “What about the rosary?” Maureen asked her.
    “It’s all set,” said Maeve.
    “What do you mean its all set?”
    “I mean its all set.”
    By this time the eldest sister Nuala joined the fray at the coffin. Mother stepped back a bit and smiled feebly toward the embarrassed crowd of family and friends. The whispers of the three daughters grew louder and louder, their hissed shouts filling the sacred space.
    “That rosary shouldn’t leave the state, you can’t take it with you to Wisconsin,” Maureen cried in a shouted whisper.
    “Mom said it should go to the oldest grandson, and that’s my son,” Maeve declared.
    “No, I rescued it from the trash when Dad threw it away in the nursing home. None of you came to visit him as often as I did, it’s mine,” Nuala announced.
    They all pulled at the rosary. Dad, eight days dead, sinews tight with rigor mortis, held on fiercely. They fought not for the value of the thing, it had none, neither real nor sentimental. The rosary was valuable because someone else wanted it. They fought so someone else would not get what they felt should be was theirs.
    In a happier day Dad would have ended the tussle definitively. “Get the feckin’ strap, I’ll whup the three of yurs arses raw!” Father was Country Irish, and those were his daughters. His was not the Ireland of Yeats, Shaw and Joyce. Not Dublin, but the peat bogs of Kilkenny, a land of failed farms, hunger, liquor and violence. Patrick converted them a thousand years ago, but civilization was accepted only reluctantly, for an hour on Sunday. “When God made time he made plenty of it,” Country Irish would say as they drank and fought and halfheartedly farmed the exhausted land. Sometimes the crack of the strap on flesh seemed the only way to keep the devil at bay.
    In just a few hours, in a grey unmarked building, miles away from the crowd and the family, gas flames would hiss to life and Father’s body would be consumed in a fiery furnace. His formaldehyde soaked flesh would be transformed into a cloyingly sweet smelling but toxic vapor that would drift out a narrow chimney, then slowly and expectantly inch towards heaven.
    The daughters finally pried Dad’s fingers apart. Maeve had the best hold, pulled the rosary away first, turned around and hid it in her purse. Nuala glared at her. Noticing that they were both distracted, Maureen quickly grabbed the wooden crucifix that decorated the inside of the coffin, hid it in her hands, then scurried back to the crowd, her theft unnoticed. Triumphantly, she told Jeff to hide the crucifix in her purse. The funeral was going well after all.



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