We held the service this morning. Thankfully it produced nothing inappropriate or mindbending. The opposite, in fact - it did what we needed it to do. It began to move us beyond the immediate circumstances of his death and into a different state, still transitional but suddenly at a remove from the nursing home and the Alzheimer's.
The visual was this: my father's remains in their temporary container, a black cardboard cube ten inches high by eight inches wide by five inches deep, placed on a small round table with a big menorah (electric but strangely somehow tasteful) behind it. A new image - my father as a sort of abstraction - the essence, not the person. Like all radical new images, it takes its place alongside all the others and re-informs them. Somehow, all of a sudden, the past few years seemed extremely distant, and the more distant past - when he was whole, and before I knew him - was more immediate. For an instant I thought of the koan: "What was the face you had before your parents were born?" My father as black monolith was a sort of answer.
The rabbi did well. It can't be easy to make a coherent statement about someone you've never met, based only on scraps of information from a phone call. Most can't manage it but this one did. I'm not sure how. Simplicity helped. The readings were basic and essential: Psalm 23, the memorial prayer, Mourner's Kaddish. A few comments about my father's finally coming to a place of rest (something I'll expand on a little when I get him to Woodlawn). And a comment about his names - the fact that he was officially Barnett, preferred to be called Bud, and then there was the name that only G-d knows. Cf. "What was your original face?", above. The overall effect of the ceremony was quiet and in equal measure warm and austere - just right, in other words.
About Kaddish - it's a remarkable prayer, worth knowing. A cantor I knew described it in a sentence as, "I will praise G-d no matter what." To praise G-d - which is also to say, to praise existence - in a moment like this takes a degree of strength. Christian friends will recognize it as The Lord's Prayer, which borrows its first two lines directly from Kaddish and parallels much of the rest. Jesus may in fact have been praying Kaddish at that moment, or a variation on it - his audience would have recognized it. In a different way, there's a parallel to the koan I mentioned the other day: "The great way is not difficult if you just don't pick and choose." This experience has been about working with the whole existential package.
We took a few moments to reflect... and then, back to present reality. Miss Pothole (earnest again and very eager that everything go right - she's really grown on me) took the container and placed it in a small green canvas bag, with handles on it and the word "Dignity" stenciled on the side. I took it, along with the transit paperwork, and put it in the car and brought it home. From now until March 3, my father will reside in my office, in the top drawer of my file cabinet. It keeps him safe from the cats. Did I say we were through with cognitive dissonance? No, not yet, not exactly. About urns and cats - there's a story I'll get to, from the time of my mother's funeral. It's not what you're thinking - not nearly that bad - but it sheds some light. There's a lot of the past yet to explore and I'll be doing that here, so stay tuned.
For the moment, though, we've arrived at a resting place. So for the weekend at least I'm going to do that.
To close this phase - the movement from death to funeral - there's another reading. I thought about adding it to the service but it doesn't entirely fit with the theme of accepting life in its totality - swallowing it whole, so to speak. Still, it gets at the Alzheimer's mourning experience, which is separate from mourning the whole life, and - eleven days into the process - still doesn't seem like mourning at all. The reading is a free translation by Joseph Campbell of a section of a Middle Kingdom Egyptian text called "A Dialogue Between a Man and His Soul," written around 2000 B.C.E. It goes like this:
Death is before me today:
like the recovery of a sick man,
like going forth into a garden after sickness.
Death is before me today:
like the odor of myrrh,
like sitting under a sail in a good wind.
Death is before me today:
like the course of a stream;
like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house.
Death is before me today:
like the home that a man longs to see,
after years spent as a captive.
You may have seen it before - it gets around. Neil Gaiman even used it, memorably, in The Sandman #8, as part of an extraordinary riff that also includes the Shema, a reference to Mary Poppins, and a representation of Death as an an extroverted, high-energy Goth girl. But to me, more than anything else I've read, it captures what the exit from Alzheimer's feels like - certainly to me, and maybe to my father, too.
More to follow.
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