Donald
Dewey has written some 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, as
well as contributed scores of stories to magazines and other
periodicals. He has also had some 30 plays staged in Europe
and the United States. Dewey was editor of the ASME-award winning
magazine Attenzione and was editorial director of the
East-West Network, overseeing a dozen in-flight magazines and
the PBS organ Dial. Don's latest book, Nullo,
is now available.
We
have had a lot of practice lately in the pieties triggered by
death. Between the fatalities scored by the pandemic and those
by regular mass killings at the hands of gun terrorists, few
of us have been able to avoid a ritual expression of sympathy
to mourners, in person or remotely, on the telephone, at funeral
homes, or at cemeteries. Even fewer of us can say we have managed
to avoid both ends of such exchanges. Awkwardness is the best
to come out of most of these encounters: however lingering the
illness of a loved one, the rule of thumb is that we are not
prepared, not only as an immediate mourner but as the would-be
comforter of that mourner. The dictionary can seem like a very
thin book.
Unfortunately,
the rule of thumb can also be accompanied by a middle finger
rule that leads to imbecilic, when not altogether callous, blurtings.
In
the Hall of Stupidity, my first prize goes to a Catholic priest
who said the Requiem Mass a few years ago for a neighbour. With
her parents, husband, brothers and dozens of cousins and friends
sitting before him in grievous attendance, this man of the cloth
decided that it was the perfect occasion for vaunting his theological
principles by reminding them that their daughter, wife, sister,
cousin and friend wasn't at that moment "looking down on
them from some Paradise but was suffering the flames of Purgatory
for sins she committed on Earth." Lynch mobs have been
organized for less.
But
then reassurances aren't always what they might be, either.
This I learned at my own mother's funeral when a priest sought
to calm anxious spirits by declaring: "Don't worry. In
a few weeks you will forget her." Fortunately, it's his
name I've forgotten.
To
be ecumenical about it, I was also om hand when a well- meaning
Presbyterian minister contributed a harrowing moment or two
-- or three or four or five -- to a funeral service. The minister
couldn't have been more accurate or sympathetic in detailing
what a tragedy a woman's passing represented. What he had overlooked,
however, was the shoddy work of his dentist so that every time
he referred to the deceased (and it was often), his denture
rose off his lower gum to decry the death of the diseased. By
the time services were concluded, getting out of the church
felt like an escape from Typhoid Mary.
An
uncle's defense against such mishaps was a practiced
Irishism, "I'm sorry for your trouble." Whether addressing
an
aunt, a co-worker, or a neighborhood grocer in a funeral parlor,
Uncle John was sorry for the trouble that lay in the casket
a few
feet away from them. When I worked up the nerve once to ask
if he didn't think that was something of a bloodless greeting,
he Why stick your nose in if you don't know what in hell
is going on? Stick to the trouble. That you can see in front
of
you. No guesswork."
When
it comes to the ritualistic, of course, there is little to compare
to all those public ‘thoughts and prayers’ sent
to the family of a deceased. Granted it's possible that condolences
of the kind can be genuine, but the laboured use of the phrase
for so long risks making the most heartfelt of intentions sound
like a Hallmark card, $1.50 not counting the stamp. Where there
is seldom ambiguity about the phrase is when it drips out of
the mouth of a politician or other public official. At a minimum
it reflects a mechanical reaction to the loss of human life.
More shamelessly. it cloaks in religious robes the hypocrisy
of some congressman responding to another gun slaughter by thanking
God for defending the right of every citizen to wield a bazooka
in the strip mall or school of his choice.
Bulletin:
God is interested in neither Purgatory nor the
Second Amendment. What mourners are interested in are the
comforts that can be extended by family and friends during a
crisis moment of their lives. As anyone who has been through
that experience can attest, presence is far more important than
words. Take it from every writer who ever lived: Words can
count for very little. Or as a Yiddish proverb has put it, the
fastest way to show how wise you are is to think twice about
the garbage in your head and not share it.
