do the dead pray?
Hey google play Chopin, I command. I write for awhile, then lift some weights, then write, then leave the room, get a coffee, come back. I also had 2 bouts of crying in there but I will not bore with those details except to say I’m getting better at silently crying, now if I can just do it less wetly all will be well. Or anyway better. My poor eyelashes are falling out from me rubbing at the the constant crystallization of salt on my eyelids. I come back into the room and I sit down and immediately recognize the song.
Let me restart by saying that someone on social media was laughing about childhood songs - the early memes I guess you’d say. “The worms crawl in the worms crawl out” and other ditties that all kids seem to know, somehow, before Twitter or Tik Tok even thought of existing. One of those kid jingles was to the tune of what I now recognize as a Chopin composition, and it went like this “Pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you.”
Now is probably a good time to say that after the sign (if it really was a sign) of a priest in full priestly robes and stoll flowing in his wake in the crosswalk in front of the grill of my lightly growling truck, said priest flowing past just after - as in moments, as in the time it takes to travel by automobile one city block - the thought flowed through my brain maybe I should call Father N. Which I did, and he emailed me, then he *also* called me and we talked for an hour and a half. His voice was 100% as I remembered it. At first it sounded a bit weaker, maybe aged is the word - we are all older now - but as we talked, he sounded pretty much exactly the same. He talks in that same low register. Just the sound of it was comforting somehow. I don’t know if you remember my dad very well, I said, and he says Oh yeah, A REAL MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY kind of guy. And I cried just like I did then and told him you were the only one in my whole life who saw how it really was with him and he said YOU CAN FOOL SOME OF THE PEOPLE ALL OF THE TIME BUT YOU CAN’T FOOL ALL OF THE PEOPLE EVEN SOME OF THE TIME. I always wondered why dad got away with it - even cousin M. said your dad is always laughing but it doesn’t seem to me he’s happy. I just looked at him. It’s good to be *seen* even if there’s nothing the seer can do about it. That’s how we felt about Father N vis a vis my dad. Who has changed. I told Father N. I love him. He’s sorry, even if he doesn’t remember all of it. It came from a place of wanting to keep me safe. How it must have hurt him to hear about the time I was assaulted, that I hadn’t been kept safe after all despite everything he said and did.
Father N. says that wherever you are (I don’t know where you’re at spiritually, Crissy1, he prefaced) but whether its heaven or the ether or another dimension or another form of energy, he says that you see and understand the full context of our relationship and the love that we had for each other (i.e. you see through a glass darkly) and that all is well - that you are good. I cried at that. Father N. patiently waited for me to stop crying and told me of his own first and deepest experience with grief and said it was someone you even knew Crissy, and of course I remembered - we said her name together even after thirty years. The girl we named, she was one of my earliest experiences with death - close to my age, but a million miles away in cancerland, Father N. routinely mentioning her suffering and her yearning to live in his sermons and religion class lectures. She was real, yes, but also as mythical to me as a character in a story, like one of the young martyrs on the beautiful, graphic full color holy cards Father K liked to hand out, or like Rapunzel but doomed, her hair brutally shorn.
For months I went to her grave before morning mass, Father N. said. It helped me feel connected to her. So write about C, he segues like a champ, even at his age. Write it in a journal, or wherever. No one has to read it. I am smiling as he says this, thinking of THIS BLOG RIGHT HERE like a little kid who got the right answer. Your feelings are evidence of your love, and they need to be expressed, he said, and later in a follow up text he thanked me for sharing with him the terrible loss of you.
So back to those kid songs like the Worms Crawl In; the Chopin song that comes on after I’ve been puttering around is the tune, Bugs Bunny-like, behind one of our kidsong greatest hits. Pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you, we would chant to the Piano Sonata #2 in B Flat Minor Opus 35 (hey google what is the name of this song I asked, is how I know that). So how crazy is that? It’s really starting to feel like a sign.
Did I, you ask? i.e. pray. Well, you said yourself for me to pray to whatever is out there. Today I read the higher power metaphor “the ethereal supervisors to whom we pray,” which would have made you laugh. Remember when I got you to read Heinlein’s Job: A Comedy of Justice and then you innocently recommended it to a fundamentalist who was stunned such a book isn’t burned regularly and gave us the hairy eyeball at all company gatherings after that.
In that last conversation which lasted just 15 minutes (but has never really stopped happening) I should have realized, from that sentence alone, what you were telling me: I’m on the downward ramp, you said. You knew. You knew at what rate your losses were happening and you knew your time was close. Your mom said that you asked her and R. into your office because you knew the end was near. But in the picture taken, just minutes after that conversation, everyone in tacit acknowledgment that the picture was documenting your last hours alive , your mom’s smile is big, genuine, real. Her face blazing with love, it helps with the shock of your own dear face so emaciated but recognizable, your blue eyes haunted, haunting.
You wanted me to pray for more time so I prayed and prayed for you to get more time, and I bargained my head off too, but you rocketed to the bottom of the slope and out of our reach so fast. Maybe I didn’t pray hard enough, or the right way. Certainly I didn’t pray with Chopin in the background with a childhood meme subconsciously urging me to pray for the dead because then the dead will pray for you (i.e. me). Maybe this sign is saying that I need prayers and not you which I can believe because if anyone ever went straight to heaven it was you, period (and Father N. agreed and he has some authority here).
“And the dead will pray for you” - what an image that brings.
You said, pray to whatever is out there. You are out there, now. So I pray to you.
not my real name!