Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death (35 page)

I had never understood the deeps of my parents’ marriage,

below its glittering and bickering surface—how glamorous they

looked as a couple, their parties, their trips to Maine and to

watch horsemen race the Palio in Siena, their in-jokes, her

carping and bossiness, his occasional outbursts of “you bloody

harridan!” and his withdrawal, year after year, to work in his

downstairs study. I thought that whatever remained of their love

had burned away, leaving behind only duty, exhaustion, anger,

fear, and dependence.

In my father’s army-green file cabinets downstairs, which

once held notes about alfalfa crop yields in Cradock in the

nineteen-twenties, I would find after my mother’s death the

remorseful and tender love letters he’d written her while on a

research trip to Africa in his mid-sixties, when he’d taken her

for granted once too often and she’d threatened to leave him.

I had never written anyone such letters, and I hadn’t treasured

the ones Brian had written to me. In her desk I would find

notes he’d written her before his stroke and she’d so lovingly

collected, signed with a smiling face in a top hat or a striped

jersey. I would remember him watching her comb her long, wet,

gray hair in the kitchen sunlight, sometime in the 1980s, and

him saying to me, “Isn’t she beautiful?” when all I could see was

a woman of sixty, a woman as old as I was soon to be. I would

find the birthday letters he’d eked out to her when he could

barely remember what day it was.

I had been deaf to the chords and rhythms of their love.

I’d never loved anyone the way they’d loved each other. I had

kept Brian at arm’s length for seven years because I didn’t think

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he was good enough for me. I was starting to understand how

much I did not understand.

My heart ached as I silently watched my mother rocket

through the house, plundering and sacking. I went to the garage

and pulled my father’s mitten from the garbage can where she’d

flung it. I wanted to touch something intimate of my father’s

before she chucked it all. The mitten was covered with kitchen

rot and already permeated with stink. “You’ve got it bad,” said

my brother Jonathan, making a face. He said he’d made peace

long ago with our father’s neglect and had given his resentments

to God. He was grateful he’d arrived soon enough to say good-

bye but not so soon that he’d had to sit around with us being

miserable. I put the stinking mitten back in the garbage and

went upstairs to my father’s bathroom, where I found the black,

waterproof, plastic Timex, dusted with dandruff, that I’d bought

him to water-walk at the Wesleyan pool. I put it in my pocket.

By nightfall, my mother had erased from the house almost

every visible sign of my father’s six and a half years of illness. All

that remained was the lowered hook in the entryway, with two

spackled holes above it where the original hook had hung.

My mother had never forgotten Jessica Mitford’s 1963 best-

seller
The American Way of Death,
which both investigated and

mocked the American funeral industry. She did not even want

to give the funeral director a set of clothes to burn my father’s

body in. “Naked we shall return,” she told him, as we sat around

the dining room table going over the cremation contract. Only

after my brother Michael asked her to consider whether she

really wanted to watch her husband’s corpse plunge into the

flames in a clear plastic bag did she relent and allow me to hand

over a blue cotton shirt I’d once given my father as a Christmas

present, and a pair of his frayed khakis. She signed the papers,

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asked the undertaker about a ring he was wearing, wrote the

check, shut the door behind him, and told my brothers and me

that she wanted no memorial service. Phony eulogies made her

skin crawl.

“The dead don’t care,” she said, quoting the undertaker and

essayist Thomas Lynch.

But the living do, I said.

The funeral home arranged to have my father’s body trans-

ported from the hospital morgue to the Swan Funeral Home in

Old Saybrook on Long Island Sound. We would not wash and

dress it ourselves, the way my great-grandfather’s relatives did.

The funeral home had cremations ahead of ours. My father’s

body would lie refrigerated somewhere while my brothers and I

planned the memorial service.

We did not call it a “celebration of life.” We were mourning a

death, and we knew it. We did not hire a minister to say vague

things about a man he did not know. I downloaded a do-it-your-

self memorial template and my brothers and I patched something

postmodern together, the way people do now, out of poetry and

music we liked, and the tradition of public sharing borrowed from

Quaker and twelve-step meetings. While my father’s body lay in

the hands of strangers, we played a CD of
shakuhachi
flute, and

two hundred people, most of them old friends connected with

Wesleyan, filed into the university’s brownstone chapel.

Toni, our caregiver, sat with the family in the front row, Alice

Teng by choice with her daughter, quietly in back. My brother

Michael, the actor who’d inherited my mother’s elegance, pre-

sided in black turtleneck and black jeans. He read from Diet-

rich Bonhoeffer and invited people to come one by one up to

the lectern, where they remembered, as people do, our father’s

best qualities and their love for him.

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katy butler

My brother Jonathan stood up last, in a dark shirt, a wide tie,

and a pale seersucker suit he’d bought the day before at Syms

on my mother’s credit card. He said he was “the black sheep

of the family”—the one who’d never gone to college and drove

trucks for a living. He remembered helping my father build the

living room bookshelves in the basement woodshop at Pine

Street when he was a boy, using old carpentry tools—forged at

the turn of the century, it happened, in nearby Meriden—that

my father had inherited from
his
father Ernest, and that Jona-

than now used in his California woodshop.

One faculty wife, a devout Christian, said her young son had

asked her whether my father would be reunited with his lost

arm in heaven. Toni said that “Mr. Butler” was smiling down at

us and no longer suffering. Ben Carton, the handsome former

student who’d been close to a surrogate son and had visited

my parents often, remembered being up on our roof with my

father helping him make a repair, and listening to him describe

how he’d watched his footprints fill up with blood after he

was wounded in Italy. In all his heroic telling and retellings of

this tale, my father had never told me, as he had Ben, that he

watched the volume of his gushing blood and estimated how

many minutes he had left to live.

My brother Jonathan read out the Rudyard Kipling poem

“If.” The chapel filled with the ghostly whistling of “Colonel

Bogey’s March,” the signature tune of the British POWs in a

movie my father loved,
The Bridge on the River Kwai.
At the

close, I read a Shakespearean funeral poem
,
a perfect hymn

for nonbelievers, its rhythms majestic, its promises minimal, its

comforts true and plain:

Fear no more the heat o’ the sun

Nor the furious winter’s rages

Thou thy worldly task hast done

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Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must,

As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

A hired Wesleyan music professor stood up in the balcony, raised

her trumpet, and played taps. Alice, the evening caregiver who

seemed like an angel to me, left a bunch of white flowers in the cha-

pel, with a note echoing her nightly leave-taking: “Good night, Jeff.”

After the funeral home dropped off my father’s ashes, I carried the

brown plastic box into the woods of the old Cenacle convent, where

soon after the stroke, I’d asked him if his life was still worth living

and where, six years later, I’d taken him into a copse and bounced

a turd out of his underwear. It was late April, still overcast and cold.

“How fleeting is a lifetime! Who in this world today can

maintain a human form for even a hundred years? There is no

knowing whether I will die first or others, whether death will

occur today or tomorrow,” reads “White Ashes,” by the 15th

century Japanese priest Rennyo, often read at American funer-

als held by the Jodo Shinshu branch of Buddhism.

We depart one after another more quickly than the dewdrops on

the roots or the tips of the blades of grasses. So it is said. Hence,
we may have radiant faces in the morning, but by evening we

may turn into white ashes. Once the winds of impermanence

have blown, our eyes are instantly closed and our breath stops

forever. Then, our radiant face changes its color, and the attrac-

tive countenance like peach and plum blossoms is lost.

“What is left after the body has been cremated and has

turned into the midnight smoke is just white ashes,” said Ren-

nyo. “Words cannot describe the sadness of it all.”

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By the side of the stream, I opened the box, scooped a hand-

ful of ashes out of the plastic bag, and threw them into the swirl-

ing water, watching the heavier pieces of his bones sink and the

dust float downstream, a chalky veil on the skin of the water.

There were some curious spiraled metal wires, perhaps the

leads that once ran from his pacemaker to his heart, among the

white ashes and pieces of bone.

My father had wanted to be buried in Indian Hill Cemetery, on

the western fringe of the Wesleyan campus. Decades before his

stroke, he’d shown me exactly where he wanted his headstone

placed: on the low brow of a hill, facing across Vine Street toward

the Wesleyan freshman dining hall and a small colonial ceme-

tery known as West Burying Ground. It was a family tradition to

wander through Indian Hill, the last redoubt of the Wapanoags,

reading the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century headstones and

noting the Polish, English, and Irish names listed along with their

places of birth: Cork, Bristol, Donegal. The Sicilian-Americans,

who’d mostly arrived later, were buried in the newer Catholic

cemetery on the other side of High Street.

No trip home was complete without a visit with my father to

Indian Hill’s Civil War memorial—a low stone enclosure on a

slope overlooking the Dunkin Donuts and the old Route 66. A

boy-man in a gray granite uniform and billed cap stood watch

above a score of small stubby markers bearing the names of

dead. My father loved it as a historian and as a veteran. He, too,

wanted to leave a headstone with his particulars, so that in the

future people could piece together something of the history of

Middletown and its successive waves of immigration.

But my mother was set on cremation, she had earned the right

to decide a hundred times over, the dead don’t care, and in any

case, there would soon be no more Butlers left to visit a grave

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in Middletown. After my brother Jonathan caught his plane, my

mother, Michael, and I went up to Indian Hill to bury some of my

father’s ashes there.

We walked to the crown of the hill. It was sunny and warm,

close to midday. I’d brought a trowel and a plastic ziplock bag

of his ashes. My mother sat down on the ground and, for the

first time since my father’s death, began to weep. She spoke to

him as if he was alive and fully functioning, as though they were

alone together, intimate, man and wife.

I grabbed the trowel and cut into the earth. She cried out, “Oh

Katy! Don’t stab it like that!” She took the trowel from me, and

tenderly lifted out the clods as if the earth and the grass were liv-

ing things. Still weeping and talking to my father, she took a few

ashes out of the plastic baggie and put them into the ground. Then

she put the clods back and made a circle of daisies around them.

She stood up, sobbing loudly. She wanted to go home at

once. I didn’t. I wanted to scatter more ashes at the Civil War

monument and take comfort in the thought of my father there,

among his soldiers. Full of rage and grief, I broke away and sat

down beneath a tree near the monument and put my head on

my knees and wept. There my brother Michael found me and

gently took me back to the car. I was still Katy and my mother