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50th Anniversary:
Bob and Barbara Keane |
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Final Resting Place :
Mt. Carmel Burying Ground |
My Parents’ Corpses
by
Paul Keane
I want to talk about my parents’ corpses. Both of them. It’s
all that matters. It’s what my whole
life and status as first-born had been
directed toward---although they would vehemently deny any such intention on
their parts: Getting them safely ---or
at least gracefully --- off the planet.
Hidden underground,
now in lovely mahogany cartons, signs of a comfort and affluence attained
in a lifetime of striving, further surrounded by cement boxes ------ air raid
shelters for the dead ----- and certainly, by now reeking of foul odors despite
all the formaldehyde pumped in to them by Bradley and Bishop, the august
undertaking parlor which handled the corpses of all of New Haven’s Yankee
families, reside the remains of my
parents.
Yes. Their corpses reside
next to a golf course, twenty miles from Yale, in the Yankee outpost of Mt. Carmel,
now a bedroom community for the Yale wealthy and the local industrial elites
but a modest middle class community in my day.
Their corpses had
once been warm, they had held
hands, and kissed on Star Street, a New Haven ghetto for the white poor. Formaldehyde highways now were then coursing
with blood and hormones along plaque-free tubes, which gradually hardened and constricted over
fifty years of smoking cigarettes into
trajectories of death, tighter and
tighter, waiting to do their final work:
Aitral fibrillation for my mother; pulmonary thrombosis for my father.
The pump stops.
And Bradley and Bishop collect the remains. One ---
mother’s ----- arrived by plane from
3000 miles away on the West Coast, a hearse waiting at the Hartford
international airport to collect it . Her son –--- me –--- allowed the ‘privilege’ as a
divine (a graduate of Yale’s divinity
school) --- the ‘privilege’ of opening
and closing the casket and accompanying the corpse to its final presentation.
The West Coast undertakers in Oregon did not know my mother, and the scowl they rendered on her face which
I saw when the coffin was opened was ugly to me. So was the hole in her neck
where the respirator has been inserted.
Gauze pads surrounded the hole and I wondered why it hadn’t been sewn
closed, and prettied up, which B and B would soon accomplish. An interstate law
was involved in that matter I was told.
When I was a kid I would ask my mother why there was a scar
on her neck where a man’s Adam’s Apple was located and she would recount having
nearly choked to death as a child until a doctor cut a hole in her throat to
allow her to breath. Now the scar had
been opened again decades later for the respirator, pumping life into her lungs
for 118 days, stranded on the West Coast on vacation, fully conscious but unable
to speak because of it.
Seven years later, unlike my cosmeticized mother, Bradley and Bishop had to start from scratch
with my father. He choked to death in the ambulance of the way to Yale -New Haven’s emergency
room when the artery to his lungs jammed with plaque and he couldn’t breathe
but could briefly talk, as his face turned blue.
No Oregon
undertaker had prettied him up. He died just ten miles from home. The
University chaplain, my friend and
mentor, had walked over to the emergency room when I called from Vermont to tell him I
couldn’t get there for the four hours of
driving; would he look in on my father so he wouldn’t be alone?
He was dead on arrival as the Chaplain arrived ,
himself 68, ten years younger than my
father, having got up from his privileged desk at Battell Chapel and walked the
four blocks to the emergency room, an act of civility and decency I can never
repay.
Yes, my father’s corpse had to be dealt with from scratch by
B and B unlike my mother’s already primped corpse.
I had worked with B and B’s undertakers years before when I
was a freshly minted graduate of divinity school, performing funerals for dead people who had
no money or no families, so I knew the undertakers by name, often having coffee
with them at a New Haven
breakfast joint near the Yale gym.
Charlie---- the chief undertaker, --- knew my mother
personally since she worked in the town clerk’s office near his funeral
parlor typing birth and death
certificates. He knew she was tall and aristocratic and looked like Katherine
Hepburn. He knew too that that grimace
on her face above the hole in her neck, which he would plug up and disguise,
that that grimace did not do her justice.
With hands --- thumbs probably --- whose artistry I never appreciated till
her unveiling at the funeral, Charlie took that grimace (sewn shut so the mouth
wouldn’t drop open during viewing) and turned the corners of her lips upward in
a characteristic smile which those who knew her had often seen, a smile in the
coffin which redeemed her 118 - days of suffering stranded on breathing
machines thousands of miles from home --- redeemed it so much that when my
father saw it, he did something I never thought he would do.
He ---- who hated funerals and avoided them like death itself ----- leaned over and kissed her corpse on
the lips: 51 years of kissing now culminated in a coffin. (They had “observed” that 51st
anniversary in the intensive care unit
3000 miles from Connecticut
)
But here in Mt.
Carmel , now seven years
later , is my father’s corpse. Although I called every day, I had not visited
Connecticut for ten days and the small hospital attached to the assisted living
place for rich old folks, where he --- not rich --- had been given for these
last five weeks the one bed the government mandated must be reserved in that facility solely for
a medicare patient, not a wealthy tenant.
I lived and taught in Vermont
four hours away from his home in Connecticut
, now empty and awaiting, in vain, his
return. His ten year old German
Shephard, Westy, had had a seizure the first day after my father’s
hospitalization, and died. The house was
truly empty and creepy in its silence.
DOA: Dead on arrival at Yale-New Haven Hospital. When I phoned to ask his condition, a nurse
turned me over to a doctor who said, “ Is this Mr. Keane? Your father
expired. Would you like an autopsy?”
No I would not.
Bradley and Bishop collected the corpse and without my
knowledge either shaved his mustache off or did not know that a nurse at the tiny rich folks’ hospital had shaved it without my
father’s permission. Or maybe –--
depressed and indifferent --- he had
given permission to remove this lifelong companion. I will never know.
What I did know as I looked over his corpse in the casket for
the first time an hour before the calling hours, was that my brother and his
wife from Seattle would arrive from the
airport at the funeral home in half an
hour and that they had not seen my father for several years: They had lived in
Oregon, where my mother had been stranded and died seven years before.
I knew they would not recognize this mustache-less
corpse. I barely recognized it
myself. But I did notice something
strange ---- my father’s upper lip had a slight imperfection at the seam, ruining
the Palladian symmetry one takes for granted in lips. That mustache had actually been camouflage
all these years, a secret I would never have known except for that
careless shaver.
I told Charlie, “I
know you folks can do something about this missing mustache and we need to do
it now before my brother arrives. He will never recognize him.” We lifted up my father’s head still full of
beautifully coiffed white hair (his barber insisted on styling it without fee
as a farewell ) and we cut a handful of hair off the back of his head which was
concealed by the coffin pillow.
Then we applied ordinary Duco Cement across the top of my
father’s lip, and with tweezers we
assembled a mustache, white hair by white hair, until no one could tell the
difference. Since my father’s corpse was
dressed in his navy blue pin striped suit, a stray hair or two fell onto the
suit and remained there unnoticed by the undertakers.
My father hated funerals and I believe he would have enjoyed
the irreverence and humor of our using his own hair to create a fake mustache in a panic half an hour
before viewing time. I told many of the
guests at the wake the story of
that mustache just to lighten the mood,
and they unashamedly returned to the coffin for a second look. Some smiled.
My mother had been dead for seven years. She would have been
80 if she were alive. Her 90
year-old friend –-- my ‘godmother’ --- had taken a fancy that she was my
father’s girlfriend ---because he took
her to lunch now and then --- and she too had interceded with the undertaker
without my knowledge or permission.
She ordered a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace (her favorite)
placed in my father’s hands, which like all corpses in American funerals are
sewn together so they won’t move in an inadvertent twitch during the
viewing. I was tempted to remove the
bouquet ---what right had she, I thought, especially without asking ---- but I
remained silent in deference to something
I knew not what: Old age? The dead?
Later, again without asking, she appeared at the reception
at my father’s home, in a floor length dress, and held court standing up and
greeting visitors . My, my.
Twenty-three years after my father’s death --- thirty years
after my mother’s --- I am now in my 70’s myself and I see the poetry in all
this: The living working their will on the dead to satisfy their own need for
art and order. And if they have a skilled undertaker, the dead can even smile
back at them.
Paul D. Keane
