In Peace
This piece originally appeared in The Literary Review in 2020.
My grandmother’s funeral was Jewish, though she was raised Catholic and died a Presbyterian. (Her religious convictions were protean and loosely held, and she liked to observe in whichever way her partners preferred—her first husband, second husband, and Bob, the Presbyterian, the great love of her later years.) Though the traditions associated with Jewish funerals were unfamiliar in practice to my Catholic extended family—the plain casket, the seven pauses on the way to the grave, the shoveling of the dirt, and so on—they were familiar to me from movies and books. They were ostensibly familiar to my wife S—, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family, but she was surprised at some of the Reform rabbi’s eccentricities, such as singing “Climb Every Mountain”—a song performed in the film The Sound of Music by a nun—while accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. So, the service, for all of us, had a dreamlike quality, that of vague familiarity shot through with moments of strangeness.
(In addition, there had been some controversy about “Climb Every Mountain” before the funeral—the rabbi had suggested the song to my mother, who promptly rejected it, and requested instead that the rabbi play “On Angel’s Wings,” by which I think she meant a hymn called “On the Wings of an Angel.” The rabbi agreed to this, and so we were all surprised, and mildly scandalized, when she went ahead and played “Climb Every Mountain” in contravention of the agreement. But later, as she led us on a procession out of the temple, the rabbi played a recording of “On the Wings of an Angel” through the tiny speaker on her phone—holding it in her outstretched palm, regally, as though it were a miniature casket—and we realized that she had chosen “Climb Every Mountain” not specifically to honor my grandmother but because it was a vaguely inspiring song that was easy to play, and that she had probably looked up “On the Wings of an Angel” after making the promise and it realized that it was beyond her ability to learn in time for the ceremony. The phone-bearing procession, then, was a sort of apology.)
The oddest moment came just a few minutes before the lowering of my grandmother into her grave. S— and I were standing at the foot of the casket as the prayers were read. S— suddenly appeared startled, then nudged me, and made a scraping motion with her finger. I followed her gaze. A small clear-plastic sticker was affixed to the molding just below the lid. It bore the name of the manufacturer, MATTHEWS AURORA FUNERAL SOLUTIONS, and the material the casket was made from: POPLAR.
Though S— had only known my grandmother for a short while, her implied insight was correct. My grandmother was famous in my family for the morbid persnicketiness that led her, among other things, to always paint her fingernails and toenails with the same color polish whenever she traveled by air, so that, in the event of a disastrous crash, her remains could more easily be reassembled for burial. She folded her dirty laundry before arranging it into discrete piles in the hamper, and her garage was furnished with wall-to-wall carpeting. She would no sooner have spent eternity in a coffin with the label still on it than she would in a dress with a price tag hanging off the neck. So I reached out, worked my fingernail under the sticker, and peeled it off. I have it here now, as I write, stuck to my laptop.
I think about how close I came to not doing it—to just ignoring the sticker and allowing it to be buried with my grandmother, out of pure social cowardice—and I shiver. I would have thought about it every day for the rest of my life, not out of any real sense of guilt, but as a general symptom of my latent obsessive-compulsiveness, which I guess is my grandmother’s most potent legacy. With it here on my computer, I can rest in peace.
