The Silken Tent
      My Letter to the World
      December 2000
      December 28, 2000
      Thursday


      Readers of this space will know that I seem to go to an inordinate amount of funerals. I really don't have a ghoulish nor unwholesome fascination with death, although I do like cemeteries as cultural artifacts. I've written before about why I am drawn especially to daytime funerals, and at the risk of repeating myself I'll just direct you there should you wonder about this feature of my personality and practice. Suffice it to say that I regard attending funerals as what the Jews call a mitzvah, a good deed we are commanded to do if at all possible.

      Yesterday I performed such a good deed. I attended the funeral of a former classmate's father. Eileen and I have known each other for more than forty years, having gone through elementary and high school together. She attended my party on December 17, and gave the usual "fine fine fine" when I asked about her parents. A note a few days later told me how much her parents had enjoyed reading my Christmas memories. The day before Christmas Eve he didn't feel well when he got up. Before Christmas Day dawned he was gone.

      Eileen's father would have turned 90 in a few months. I remember him as tall, energetic, determined to work hard to provide for his wife and five children. He worked for the commonwealth's Public Utility Commission for 57 years (that means he started at 18 and stayed until they pushed him out at 75), but when the kids were little he often worked second jobs to supplement the family income. In one such job he managed a local drive-in movie, which I thought fascinating and very special, much more glamorous than my parents' second jobs as violinists in the town symphony and pit musicians for community play productions and church choral concerts.

      The funeral took place in the church of our childhood, Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament, the church where I learned the old Latin funeral liturgy, including the nineteen verses of the Dies Irae ("Dies irae dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla, teste David cum Sibylla ..." -- "Oh day of wrath, on that day, the day that David and the Sybil foretold..." or something like that). This is a classic stone church built in 1927 and meant to look like a scaled down version of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York.

      In the fifties the neighborhood was populated by the second and third generation families of Irish and German and Eastern European immigrants who were the backbone of the middle class. It was a melting pot of Catholics and Jews and Protestants who lived in neatly kept double houses, who knew their neighbors' names and looked out for everyone's children. The area began to decline in the early 70s, and the parish fell on hard times. Recently, however, efforts by some of my contemporaries who have returned to the neighborhood, along with an ardent and hard working Vietnamese population, have begun to turn things around. Eileen was in charge of the organ restoration, and a restoration of the three-story-high mural behind the altar is underway.

      Entering this church is like coming home for me. Despite all the reforms of Vatican II (which occurred after we moved away from there), it looks and smells and sounds the way it did when I was ten. And yesterday it looked beautiful, with poinsettias massed beside the tabernacle on the old high altar, the crèche in the space under the new forward facing table altar, pine swags at every fifth pew.

      The gathered mourners were few in number, but I did see people I knew, including a few classmates, some of whom had been to my party. We talked about how unfortunate it was to be seeing each other again so soon under such sad circumstances.

      At a similar event last winter some old friends and I lamented that we only see each other at our parents' funerals. We're all nearing our mid fifties. Someone observed that soon enough we'll be seeing each other at each other's funerals.

       
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