Natural Causes

I grew up across the street from a cemetery, and I used to joke that before I was ten I'd probably seen - from a distance - more than six hundred funerals. Not to mention that I still associate the sound of bagpipes playing "Amazing Grace" with Sunday mornings and the smell of coffee, to this day.

And since the cemetery was a pretty vast stretch of property, with plenty of hedges and bushes and only a few meandering service roads, it was an extremely convenient place for us to do all the things teenagers like to do when adults aren't watching.

I don't believe any of us felt we were disrespecting the dead; we had hung around the place so long I think the reality of what its function was had long been lost on us. And in our defense, we never trashed the place or made much noise -  morality aside, that would have attracted unwanted attention.

We were all pretty young and healthy, so Death was not just another country for us - it was another world.

And my situation was even odder, in that my parents had decided to entirely isolate my sister and I from our large extended family in New Jersey, where they'd both been born and raised, so that aside from a few visits a year to my prematurely senile Grandpa Frank in Paterson, we knew nothing of that world. All of the ceremonies and rituals - including funerals - that bound those big Irish-Polish clans together through the years were attended by my father as sole ambassador, and he never reported anything back about the events. We may as well have been the very last of our line, as far as we ever saw.

This rejection of ritual eventually reached disturbing lengths, when my mother refused to have even a memorial service after my father died in 1986. Still working my way through that one, as you might imagine.

That's how it came to be that I never actually attended a funeral until my father-in-law Skip Hayes died in 1999. I'd like to make clear the fact that I'm not complaining; though I do believe with all my heart that the gathering of friends and family after a person's death can bring wonderful comfort and support to the survivors, I find formal funeral and burial services to be a brutal ordeal and I'm having none of it; mark my passing with lively music and overindulgence.

What's prompted all this, you ask? Not sure, really, but the past year or so has brought news of death to me often enough, and in enough different forms, that I can no longer pretend that it's an aberration or abstraction, or that it's a foreign thing whose residence is far away.

Suicide, accident, illness, even murder - when I say they're all natural causes, please don't think I'm being callous or flippant. I only mean that they all take place in one world. This world.