Stairway to Heaven

I am back. St. Anne's Church... Baptism. First Communion. Confirmation. Death. I have hit for the cycle.

Our convoy pulled up to the front of the church and I wanted to not watch my mother's casket being carried up all these stairs because I'm afraid my relatives and the two guys from the funeral home will drop her.

A memory. I am all of nine or ten. Maybe eight. Who knows? I'm in the pew, most likely on my knees, for when are Catholics not on their knees and I can hear this amazing cacophony of voices above and behind me. But I can't see anyone. And these voices are, you know, orchestral and feminine and well, heavenly and they are most likely singing in Latin and I whisper to my mother who is kneeling beside me, "Mom, are those angels singing?"

I'm fifty-two now. It's April 4, 2006 and my mother is not beside me, but is being pulled out the back of a silver hearse and I am watching my relatives haul my mother's oak casket ("The heaviest casket we have") up these fierce, steep steps, and the day, as if on cue, was funeral weather; sunny, cold, blustery.

All the aunts and uncles and friends who are older now must find a way to get themselves up those stairs and inside... I watch my friends Lynn and Anne Marie help Lynn's mother Dot, a good friend of my mother, up the steps. I see my Uncle Renee helping his wife, Estelle. I see Aunt Lou, at 91 making her way alone, ahead of everyone. I steal a glance and my relatives in their dark suits have not dropped my mother, have made it to the top of the frigid steps and are moving inside.

We are the last ones in...The survivors. The husband, the daughter, the son and his wife and the last remaining sibling, Annette and her husband. We make our way up those windblown stairs, pull open the massive wooden doors, enter the vestibule, negotiate a few more steps and we are in and it is very nearly overwhelming, a kick in the stomach...

They have met us right at the door, like a trauma team racing to apply paddles to a recalcitrant heart. The priest is here right in front of us and my mother is in her closed casket and there is a cream colored fabric draped over her and those voices, those orchestral voices, they are above and behind me again, and they are filling this knave only now I know who they are: they are the choir we hired from the funeral director.

But they are still angelic and orchestral and moving and they are signing "Amazing Grace" which I had requested, because I love it, and because the nurse kept calling her that on account of the fact she wouldn't die, even after what seemed like forever without food and water.

And I want so badly to fold myself into Amazing Grace. I want to sob, to just let go and to touch my mother's casket and let those voices wash over me and give my self over to this moment. I want to cry like a goddamn baby.

But I have to deliver the eulogy. And I'm not going to fail.

I will deliver my mother's eulogy in this place, will deliver on my promise as her son, will honor her in front of her legions of friends and family. I have returned to this place where I'd spent a lot of time as a lost and befuddled kid who was flailing about in life and I am here to tell whoever is here to listen that I've arrived intact, in one piece and that I am put together pretty well, thank you, and I have written this eulogy and I will deliver it. For my mother. Who believed. Who never stopped believing.

And I have told myself this for weeks and so I don't give over. I close the door but leave it open. A crack.

And here comes the priest, and he is walking around my mother's casket, and he is waving his incense and he has these two altar boys with him and everybody has found their seat and they are waiting for us to make our way to the front. To the altar where my mother and her draped coffin will sit while we hold Mass and do the Liturgy, and listen to the priest tell us that "those who have faith will be far more able to absorb the loss than those who do not" and at his utterance, I check under the hood and find myself utterly, irrevocably without faith.

In fact I have less faith in these quarters than I would just about anywhere else.

My cousin's children. Rachel and her sister Michaela. They each deliver a reading, one from the New Testament, one from the Old (don't ask me what they were, don't know..we were just following orders) and they read perfectly. Beautifully. If you were their mother you would cry at the site of them, never mind everything else. Talk about faith. Anyway, my mother, who had no grandchildren of her own used to babysit those girls.

My time came and I took the long walk forward. I looked out at everyone and they seemed tiny and distant, too small for the space.

I unfolded my sheaf of papers that Linda had helped me edit to half the original length the night before.

"Good Morning," I said, my voice cracking. "Thank you for being here with us today."

When it was over we left our pew first and headed slowly to the back of the church and the doors... My sister, my wife, my father and me...a trail of tears in our wake.

My father could barely walk, his face a river.... My sister was on one side of him and I was on the other and we held him up and moved down the aisle. When people got a look at my father, they broke.

Outside my father-in-law found me on the stairs as we left. I went to shake his hand and instead he pulled me to him and I buried my face in his coat and sobbed. "It's a tough business," he said.