by Thomas Lynch
Following O’Driscoll’s funeral liturgy, I walked with Heaney and his wife in the sad cortege from the church to the cemetery, half a mile or so, following the coffin and the other mourners. We chatted about our dead friend and the sadness we all shared. Maybe his stroke six years before and my open-heart surgery the year before eventuated in our bringing up the rear of the entourage. We were taking our time, huffing and puffing some at the steeper bits, as we made our slow but steady way up the town, out the road, to the grave behind the hearse. In Ireland the dead are shouldered to the opened ground and lowered in with ropes by the pallbearers. After the priest has had his say, the grave is filled in by family and friends. The miracle of life and the mystery of death are unambiguously tethered by a funiculus of grave ropes and public grieving, religiously bound by the exercise of large muscle duties—shoulder and shovel work and the heart’s indentures, each a linkage in the ongoing, unbroken human chain. And the strain of pallbearers at O’Driscoll’s open grave, as they lowered his coffined body into the opened ground with slowly paying out the ropes, seemed like the faithful and existential labor of the paralytic’s friends, lowering his bed through the opened roof in Capernaum to the foot of his healer for a cure.
The witness of these things drew a catch in my breath, that New Year’s Eve morning when we buried Dennis O’Driscoll, in the new row of St. Corban’s Cemetery. Watching his pallbearers lower him into the vacancy of the grave, these mundane mortuary chores replicating the miraculous narrative of the Gospels where the paralytic’s pals lower him into the place of his healing, the “slight lightheadedness and incredulity” perfectly articulated in Heaney’s poem, remains caught in my chest, not yet exhaled, and like the scribes in Capernaum, that day in Naas, though I’d seen such things all my workaday life, I’d “never seen anything like this before.”
And yet I saw it all again, months later in the late summer when Heaney’s death stunned us all on Friday morning, the 30th of August, 2013. I woke to texts and emails from Dublin. “Seamus is dead,” is what they read. “Ah, hell . . .” I wrote back. Ah, hell, indeed.
I called David Fanagan, the Dublin undertaker, and asked if I might ride in the hearse. Someone who knew the poems and the poet should ride along.
I flew to Shannon and stayed at my digs in Clare that night and drove up to Dublin on Sunday morning, stopping in Naas to visit Dennis’s grave. At Fanagan’s in Aungier Street, Heaney was laid out in Chapel 3, the corpse, horizontal and still, “silent beyond silence listened for.” Marie greeted me and thanked me for making the long journey and was a little shocked to hear that I’d had my ticket in hand for more than a month, long before Seamus had any notion of dying. She told me she thought he must have had a heart attack on Wednesday, complaining of a pain in his jaw, then tripped leaving a restaurant on Thursday which got him to the hospital where they discovered a tear in his aorta. The only thing riskier than operating, she was told, was doing nothing. He was in extremis. A team was assembled to do the procedure at half past seven on Friday morning, just minutes before which he texted her, calm and grateful for the long years of love, and told her not to be afraid. “Noli timere,” he wrote at the end, the ancient language Englished: be not afraid. He was dead before the operation began.
All the way up there people lined the way, on the overpasses, and in the halted cars at intersections where they got out of their cars to applaud the cortege of the great poet. Women were weeping or wiping tears from their faces. Men held the palms of their hands to their hearts, caps doffed, thumbs up, everyone at their best attention.
“How did you get to be the one?” I asked the man at the wheel of the new Mercedes Benz hearse, no doubt hustled into service for the television cameras. “I drew the short straw,” he told me. “We used to get extra to drive in the North, what with the Troubles and fanatics. Now it’s just a long haul and a long day.”
We picked up forty or fifty cars as we made our way, the roughly three-hour drive north from Dublin, then west around Belfast making for Derry, crossing the river that connects Lough Beg to Lough Neagh at Toomebridge, the crowds getting bigger the nearer we got. Police on motorcycles picked us up at the border, just outside of Newry, and escorted our makeshift motorcade all the way to the cemetery as we went down the boreen off the main road and drove by the family farm and onwards to Bellaghy, where a piper met us at the entrance to town and piped us through the village where the crowd spilled out of shops and pubs and houses and into the road, every man woman and child out applauding, crossing themselves, giving out with bits of “Danny Boy” and holding their hearts in signals of respect. The sadness on their faces and the tribute to the level man behind me in the box was like nothing I’d ever seen, and when we got to the grave, led there by a cadre of churchmen in white albs and copes and cowls, I took the family spray up to the grave through the cordons of paparazzi clicking photos of everything. I walked with Marie and her family behind the coffin as we went to the grave, where against my hopes that Seamus would pop out and proclaim it all a big mistake, his sons and his brothers and her brothers bent to the black ropes and lowered him into the ground, the paid-out ropes and the burn in their arms and hands and the hush of the gathered multitude notwithstanding. Leaves rustled in the overarching sycamores. The clergy struck up a verse of “Salve Regina” to re-insinuate their imprimatur on it all. We hung around in that sad and self-congratulatory way mourners do, after the heavy lifting is done. The limo had a slow leak in the right front tire that had to be tended to. Des Kavanaugh and his wife, Mary, came and spoke to me wondering if I’d be in Galway anytime soon. Brian Friel’s car pulled away; he nodded. Michael, Seamus’s son, came over to thank me for going in the hearse with his dad and I was glad of that. And grateful. I stayed until the sod was back on him, and the flowers sorted on top of that and then we drove back the road, arriving in Dublin right around dark. Anthony MacDonald, his short-straw, long day nearing its end, dropped me at the corner of Georges Street and Stephen Street Lower. I gave him fifty euros and told him to get something at the off license with my thanks for taking me up and back on the day, for getting Seamus where he needed to go, and for getting me where I needed to be. “No bother,” he said. “Not a bit.” Nothing out of the utterly ordinary, utterly pedestrian, a miracle.
Possibly these are the miracles we fail to see, on the lookout as we are for signs and wonders: for seas that part for us to pass through, skies that open to a glimpse of heaven, the paralytic who stands and walks, the blind who begin to see, the shortfall that becomes a sudden abundance. Maybe what we miss are the ordinary miracles, the ones who have known us all along—the family and friends, the fellow pilgrims who show up, pitch in and do their parts to get us where we need to go, within earshot and arms’ reach of our healing, the earthbound, everyday miracle of forbearance and forgiveness, the help in dark times to light the way, the ones who turn up when there is trouble to save us from our hobbled, heart-wrecked selves.
MOVEABLE AND STEADFAST FEASTS
My old dog Bill will be dead by Easter. God knows, he should have been dead before now. The now of which I write—the moment to hand—is that no-man’s-land of days between Christmas, New Year’s and the Epiphany. I’ve gone beyond fashionably late with this essay, which I promised for the twelfth day of the twelfth month of the last year—an essay on Easter with an Advent delivery. I’ve promised it now for Little Christmas, hoping that like the magi of old, I’ll come to see things as they are.
A member of the reverend clergy told me that the formula old preachers used to prepare their homiletics included three points and a poem. Montaigne would string his essays on a filigree of Latin poets. He worked in his library and when stuck for some leap into a fresh paragraph, he’d often quote Virgil or Catullus or Lucan and carry on as if the poem were an aperitif readying the reader for another course.
Which puts me in mind of the twelve days of Christmas I spent downstate being paterfamilias for our yuletide observations. This poem came into be
ing in contemplation of a carol we always sing this time of year.
TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
Some pilgrims claim the carol is a code
for true believers and their catechists,
to wit: four colly birds, four gospel texts,
eight maids a milking, the beatitudes,
and pipers piping, the eleven left
once Judas had betrayed the lamb of God—
that partridge in a pear tree, the holy one
and only whose nativity becomes
in just a dozen days the starlit eve
of three French hens with their epiphanies
huddled round the family in the manger,
tendering their gold and frankincense and myrrh.
The whole tune seems to turn on “five gold rings”—
the Pentateuch, those first books of the Torah
in which ten lords a leaping stand in for
the ten commandments cut in loaves of stone
which Moses broke over his wayward tribesmen.
Two turtle doves, two testaments, old and new.
Six geese a laying, creation’s shortened week,
the swimming swans, gifts of the Holy Ghost
whose fruits become withal nine ladies dancing.
Twelve drummers drumming, the Apostle’s Creed:
a dozen doctrines to profess belief in.
Still, others say it’s only meant to praise
fine feathered birds and characters and rings,
our singing nothing more than thanksgiving
for litanies of underserved grace,
unnumbered blessings, the light’s increasing,
our brightly festooned trees bedazzling.
Montaigne, the father of all essayists, himself a sort of preacher, to four centuries of readers and counting, was anxious to understand the human being and condition. It was, thanks be, his lifelong study. In his marvelous essay, “Of Repentance,” a Lenten read and Easter anthem, he wrote in French a point that Englishes as In every man is the whole of man’s estate, by which he meant we are all at once the same but different; to know the species, know a specimen. To understand the Risen Christ we’d better reckon with the wounds and miracles, betrayals and agonies. Study the scriptures and the poems.
The men in my Bible study took the day after Christmas off last week, but we met for the day after New Year’s today, in the early morning dark at the funeral home, as we have been doing now for years. The price is right, the coffee’s free, it’s quiet in the early o’clock. Except for the ones gone to their time-shares in Florida, or the ones homebound with the seasonable woo, the turnout is a good one and we’re glad to have survived into another year. We’re reading from the 24th Chapter of Matthew when Jesus is giving the disciples a list of the signs that the end times are nearing. Wars and rumors of wars, false prophets, nation rising up against nation, earthquakes and famines in various places.
The sky has been falling throughout most of history. And for everyone predicting doom, the doom is certain. Whether we die en masse, in cataclysms of natural or supernatural origin, we die in fact, one hundred percent.
Possibly this is why one of us eases the talk around to declaring a win in the War on Christmas, reporting that people are saying “Merry Christmas” again in a way that political correctness prevented up until now. Another fellow heartily agrees. I mention that the War on Christmas was invented by a cable-news host to divert attention from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which were coming, alas too late, under scrutiny in the middle naughts. I suggest they go home and Google Barack Obama and Merry Christmas. And I wonder aloud, it being the feast of the Octave of Christmas which used to be observed in the Christian calendar, the Circumcision of Jesus, why these old white male and much-aggrieved Christians weren’t willing to serve in the War on Circumcision. Why should we wish each other Happy New Year when Happy Circumcision is the more Christian, more religious greeting? They tilt their heads at what I am saying the way that Bill does when he hears an oddly pitched noise. But I digress. I was trying to relate Easter to Bill’s slow demise. This is not about birth and circumcision and magi, rather betrayal, passion, death and burial, and then the Easter we claim to believe in.
HE’S LIVED WELL past the expectations—Bill, the dog—half again beyond his “use by” date. These latter days have all been bonus time and have taught me gratitude in the stead of the “poor me’s” and the “why me’s” and the “give me’s,” which have always seemed my usual nature. I’m easily beset by resentments and begrudgeries—a character flaw from which I’ve achieved irregular remissions over the years, occasional dispensations. I’m living through one such dispensation now, watching old Bill in his withering and bewilderments as the mightiness of his shoulders and hindquarters, the deep menace of his guardian bark, and the fathomless pools of his big brown eyes have given way to lame waltzing on his “last legs,” a kind of castrato’s cough at threats he senses but cannot see through a cloud of cataracts, nor hear in the dull chambers of lost itching ears. His nose still works its cold damp magic. He finds his food and good places to squat to the duties of his toilet. His soft black curls of fur are full of dander and dry skin beneath despite the designer mash of essential oils and my wife’s tender correctives. So long as he eats and craps and can be medicated against the pain, I won’t exercise the lethal dominion over him I wish I did not have. Yes, dead by Easter I’d wager, or sooner, much sooner, as the gyre of demise works its tightening, ineluctable damage.
Back when I was researching his breed, the Bernese mountain dog, or as I joked when he was a puppy, “an AKC Registered Pain in the Ass,” the Wikipedia on my old laptop promised six to eight years of life expectancy for dogs of his prodigious size. All to the good, I remember thinking, at least I’ll outlive him. I was fifty-seven years old that late winter I got him, now twelve years ago. I was well into my last trimester of being. My father, my grandfathers, the men in my line had all died in their sixties, of broken hearts: a bad valve, clogged arteries, congestive heart failure, some embolism—quick, convincing “failures,” or “attacks,” or “infarctions.”
Bill’s gone half again older than we expected. And even that might have been a miscalculation. My wife never really wanted a dog. After the kids were grown and gone and out on their own on automatic pilot, throwing in with partners of the same species, taking mortgages, signing leases, making plans and car payments, after we breathed the sigh of relief that they all seemed poised and provisioned to outlive us, Mary settled in with Law and Order reruns and I kept to my old customs of splitting my time between the day job undertaking and the preoccupation with language, writing and words.
I remember sitting with her one Sunday afternoon, watching the episode where Lennie and his estranged daughter, Kathy, meet up for lunch—she keeps her distance because of his drinking and the two failed marriages, one to her mother. The episode, “Aftershock,” involves Lennie and Ray Curtis, his young partner, along with Jack McCoy and Claire Kinkaid, the legal team, witnessing an execution of someone they put away. Lennie’s life was always complex. And I was thinking what a good thing a dog would be to get me out of the house and walking on a regular basis and I said, on one of the commercial breaks, “What would you think about my getting a dog?”
“Are you out of your (expletive deleted) mind?” she responded. “Finally we have the place to ourselves, we come and go as we please, we’ve got some peace and quiet and you want a dog!” I took this to mean she didn’t want one.
IN THOSE DAYS I would occasionally write a poem that borrowed from a famous poem for the kernel of creation that brought it into being. This is how I’d come to write a poem called “Corpses Do Not Fret Their Coffin Boards,” which borrowed unabashedly from William Wordsworth’s sonnet “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room,” which I’d encountered that morning, possibly on the radio, listening to the voice of Garrison Keillor, who used to do “The Writers’ Almanac,” a five-minute diamond of d
aily bits and pieces that ended with the reading of a poem. Wordsworth’s sonnet is in praise of sonnets, in observation of the truth revealed to him, some centuries back, that formal constraints—“the narrow room”—often produce an unpredictable freedom. The sonneteer knows all too well that the work in words to make a sonnet is but fourteen lines of ten or so syllables, organized to rhyme in some predetermined way—a code that poets map out as AABB or ABAB or maybe, as Wordsworth did for his wee sonnet, ABBA, with the twist that the sound of A in lines one and four repeats itself in lines five and eight. There are other embellishments of sound and sense to bring it to an end in line fourteen, but what I can say is that one comes to the close of a sonnet with a sense that it must have been a loving God that brought old Wordsworth into being to speak to me years after his demise in a different century, millennium and nation.
WORDSWORTH AFFIRMS THE snug hugging and liberation of the sonnet’s terms in the last half of his, to wit:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
My own sonnet, while crediting Wordsworth, albeit sub-titularly, has less to do with space and nature than with time and money, preoccupations of my advancing years.
CORPSES DO NOT FRET THEIR COFFIN BOARDS
after Wordsworth
