The Silken Tent
My Letter to the World
July 2000
July 5, 2000
Wednesday
Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came.
-- The Beatles, “All the Lonely People”I spent my childhood and preteen years in a city neighborhood of modest double houses, businesses like a dry cleaner’s and Mom and Pop pharmacies, a playground, some churches, and both a public and parochial elementary school. I went to the parochial school, a block from my house. The church was two blocks west.
Daily mass was the traditional pre-Vatican II “low Mass,” that is, a spoken rather than a sung liturgy. Funeral masses, however, had music provided by whatever teaching sister was the parish organist plus a choir of seventh and eighth grade girls.
A girl could start singing with the choir in fifth grade. We met after school on Wednesdays, learned to read the Gregorian chant notation, and sing in a passable liturgical Latin. We learned special hymns and songs for the big festival days -- Christmas, Immaculate Conception, Easter, Ascension -- and sang on those occasions at Sunday mass. It was a special duty and privilege of seventh and eighth grade girls to sing at weekday funeral masses.
Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament Church is a big church, all arched stone and stained glass with wooden pews and thinly padded kneelers. The choir loft is above the vestibule and looks out over the 800-seat space. More often than not, the mourners gathered for a weekday funeral numbered fewer than a hundred, since most people had to be at work. Those who were not family or very close friends paid their respects at the funeral home viewing the evening before.
Such a sparse crowd looks very small from the vantage point of a choir girl. Sometimes, if the deceased had been very old, fewer than a dozen people were there, including the funeral home personnel who became the pall bearers.
I used to look down on those tiny gatherings and think it sad that so few were able to accompany a loved one safely to the door of eternity. I had been taught to believe, of course, that the soul was long gone, taken at the moment of death into the arms of God. But I had also been taught that to bury the dead was one of the important “corporal works of mercy,” and I have retained a lifelong habit of attending funerals when I can, especially if I know others are unlikely to be able to.
When I started off yesterday morning for my third trip to Mahanoy City in five days I had something of a feeling of moving toward anti-climax. I’d done the pilgrimage with my sister bit, I’d done the people-watching reporter bit, and then I’d spent most of Monday working on my novel for a workshop presentation on Thursday. My head was back in 19th century Berks County, and I had, for the moment, run out of other things to do in Schuylkill.
I stopped at the Giant for flowers, a perky mix of daisies and carnations sprinkled with baby’s breath and long stems of larkspur. There was less traffic on the interstate than there had been on Saturday. As the road began rising into the mountains a heavy fog hung over everything. Visibility was less than twenty feet, and I had to slow considerably. Driving through this dense cloud gave me a feeling of utter isolation. The oldies station I was tuned to played The Doors: “Break on through to the other side.”
And eventually I did. After about twenty-five miles I’d climbed high enough so that the fog fell away and I could see the sweep of the valley floor, the little towns of Frackville and Stony Creek and Tar Run. I was glad I’d gotten an earlier start than I had before. The fog had taken some extra time. It was 8:58 with the priest already standing at the head of the grave when I arrived.
I saw Mr. Haughney, the funeral director, say something to the priest as I pulled in to the turn-around at the utility shed. There was no canopy here, just a covering of green outdoor carpet and three folding chairs without drapes. An elderly man and a woman were sitting in two of the chairs and another man was making his way over the uneven terrain aided by a cane and a man about my age. A younger woman stood at the side. The Fegley truck was parked at the bottom of the hill.
A priest and five mourners had gathered for Margaret Flaherty’s very last funeral prayers. I made six.
The rite of graveside committal is brief, barely ten minutes. The young priest acknowledged that he had never known Margaret Flaherty, but that this was the parish of her baptism, her first communion, and her confirmation, and it was fitting that she should come home to be laid to rest. He sprinkled the casket with holy water, and then recalled the promise of eternal life made sure for us by Christ’s death and resurrection. He reminded us that in life our loved one always desired to do God’s will, and he expressed confidence that any wrongs she may have committed had been forgiven. He committed her body to the earth from which it came in the knowledge that she will be raised up on the last day.
And then the priest intoned the words I have known since childhood, and which I can still say in Latin: “Eternal rest grant unto her, Oh Lord (Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine)” answered with “And let perpetual light shine upon her (Et lux perpetua luceat eis).”*
It was not yet a quarter after nine. At the conclusion of the rite, we said the Lord’s Prayer, and no one, not even I, launched into the Protestant tag-line: “For thine...” I introduced myself to the older woman, the cousin who Mr. Fegley told me had taken charge of the arrangements.
I missed her name, though Mr. Haughney said it twice. The older man with her was her brother, Kieran Flaherty. Their father and Marge’s father were brothers. They remembered my grandmother (“Marge’s Aunt Maggie”) and knew who my mother was, although they had never spent much time together.
I told them about my connection to Marge, about the letter she’d sent me when I entered Millersville. I learned that she had taken a degree in “physical education and hygiene” and had taught in several coal region schools for many years. She was at least ten years older than her many young cousins. “It was Marge who told us what we needed to know about our first experience of womanhood,” the cousin said.
The younger man and woman were Mr. Flaherty’s son, also Kieran, and his wife.(I never determined who the other man, the one with the cane, was.) He showed me where the various Flaherty kin were laid in St. Canicus, but was unable to explain the curious family custom of including only the surname on the stone. Indeed, Anna of the quaint gifts is “over behind Father McEnroe” (an elaborate monument to a priest) with her parents in a plot that is marked only by four low posts carved “F” and a kneeling stone.
Everyone thanked me profusely for coming. I left half of the flowers at Marge’s grave, and walked up to put the rest at Anna’s. As I turned to come back down, the cousins, the younger Flahertys, and the funeral director all waved to me as they drove through the upper gate. I watched the priest get into his car and head toward the other gate.
Father McKenzie, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave, no one was saved.
And indeed, we are not saved by the good deeds we do, but by the faith that leads us to do them.
(* I know that eis is the masculine form of the pronoun. Grammatically, it should be ea for Marge, but Latin left the liturgy before the universal masculine did, so eis it will always be.)
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