on adult-onset acceptance
Music: Spiritualized: Lazer Guided Melodies (1992)
Today seems oddly elongated into two: the "yesterday" of this morning's mourning of my uncle and the "today" of cooking my family dinner, watching something called HGTV, and following polling results. The stark contrast between these two days is hard to describe as anything other than using mundane routine to create distance from the body we interred.
I was both close and distant with my uncle, close because of affection he always had for me, and distant in recent years because of spaces between us, both the increasing physical distance of my moving farther and farther away and the buffer created by an ever-growing set of grand- and great grandchildren.
Richard was the kind of uncle who spoiled me with attention. Richard was the uncle who tickled me as a kid until I'd pee my pants.
The reflective posts as of late are not intentionally personal, just sort of representative of the pressing thoughts and feelings of the past week. It's not always academic with me or the blog, and I think I have had a tendency to "intellectualize" life events too much.
Last Tuesday I didn't imagine being "home" again, now typing on a guest bed that reeks of cat pee (someone---some furry one---doesn't like guests, I guess). I have been thinking during the "today" of today that normally I would be wound-up about the funeral service, but instead I feel resigned, ready to drown out the day in some Battlestar Galactica episode with a nip or three from ye trusty smuggled flask (the family---extended included---are Baptist teetotalers).
Growing up attending Southern Baptist funerals, I grew to resent them in my teenage years. After a manipulative and horrifically abusive funeral for Sonny---a man who practically raised me---when I was 24, I swore off going to a service ever again. Of course I went the next year to one. What angered me so about the Southern Baptist funeral was the way in which many people saw it as an opportunity to save me and other heathens from the Pit of Hell. Preachers would often piggy-back on the grief felt by the bereaved to alter calls, heaping on the guilt. I remember one service in which the preacher insinuated the soon-to-be-interred was in hell. And at the last funeral I attended two years ago my self-righteous cousin's eulogy was about how, even though my great aunt had gone to the same church every Sunday for the past 60 some-odd years, she witnessed to her and made sure she was right with Jesus (so smug!). I could go on and on with the stories, but I reckon I should save them for the novel.
Anyhoo, I expected many of the same brand of abuses today, but surprisingly, the preacher didn't go down that sickening path of manipulation. He talked a lot about the blood of Jesus, but then read the 23 Psalm and a few passages about heaven. He talked a lot about where my uncle was now playing and so on. He gave what I thought was quite a selfless eulogy designed to make as many people as he could feel better.
Although the preacher did much to set a more upbeat tone, I realized bowing my head for prayer that I had changed a good bit in the last five years. In part because of my work with the Masons, I think about religion in a very different way (I'm still agnostic, though): death is the great equalizer. In part, because I think I've successfully (and mostly) exorcized the abuses of my evangelical youth in writing and teaching about religion. In part, because the evangelical bastard I must call my president is on his way out of office. Seven years ago or so I would still be fuming about some of the things that happened or were said today; yet nothing other than the expectation of "viewing" seemed bothered me. The sight of my grieving aunt made me lose my composure more than once, but that's ok. The point is that today was about my aunt and uncle and being here for others and myself. There was still a heavy-handed politics of grieving, to be sure, but one that I sincerely recognize has value.
The one thing that did momentarily reduce me to a teen inside: the request that the pallbearers do a final viewing before the casket is closed. I do not find staring upon a poked, prodded, and sewed body anything like a comfort or a part of the grieving process. I looked at my cousin and aunt and said, "I can't do this." "It's ok, it's ok," I was assured. I'd much rather have the image of Richard in my head that I always have had: an image of him laughing. He was always laughing. I didn't want that image to be eclipsed.