I eulogized my father and stepped down from the altar. The people in the church burst into applause. I stopped in my tracks. I felt like I was in big trouble. People applaud everything in America except in the Catholic Church. Priests give great sermons that motivate you to the point where, anywhere else, you’d be up on your feet, hugging and clapping, but in the Catholic Church -- stony silence. Choirs lift the roof with rousing hymns, but when they’re done, all you hear are crickets. Once in awhile, if the priest says it’s okay, you’re allowed to clap for a newly married couple or if some kids get their first communion, but other than that, you leave that “put your hands together, y’all” back in the Branson of your mind. Want To...But...Can’t...Clap But I feel the discomfort, the something missing when people want to applaud but can’t. It’s like a class filled with eggheads who have been told by the teachers to let someone else answer for a change, and all those anxious kids can do is sit on their hands and groan. The Vatican Ruling on Heavily Breaded Chicken When I ate the cheap, breaded chicken nuggets on a recent Lenten Friday, was that wrong, because even if I couldn’t find a speck of chicken in all that breading, it was my full intention to gnaw at chicken flesh? With all the stuff going down in the world, I can’t believe God even has time to notice whether I eat dead, cooked chicken versus dead, cooked fish -- and if He does, then what does he think about people who wear fur? Are they all right as long as they don’t eat their coats? These are heady discussions for another time. Anyway, I got applause for the eulogy in a place where applause isn’t welcome. I sat back down. “That’s embarrassing,” I told my wife. She set me straight: “That was for your father,” she said. She gave me a look: egomaniac. Egomaniac? Good Catholic? A Little of Both? True, it wasn’t about me. I wasn’t Garrison Keillor up there, doing eggheaded comedy, although I got some nice laughs. The vainglorious schmuck side of me, the part that wants to be a stand-up comic, was delighted in thinking that this was an audience I’d “killed.” The part of me that wants to walk the walk of Saint Francis (minus the leper-hugging) could see that I’d just done the “words” equivalent of blowing a haunting version of Taps. How Do You Pack For That? Instead of notes through a trumpet I shared a few anecdotes, which made me realize that when it all comes down to it, all we have are a few things to remember people by. There’s an exhibit at Ellis Island featuring personal items people brought with them in the treasured space of their few parcels and bags. Dolls, spoons, purses, small pictures, pendants, prayer books in their native tongues, tiny wooden toys. Imagine leaving your homeland, your town, your mother and father, with a good chance you’d never see any of it or them again, putting all your belongings in a couple of trunks. You choose a few things, and then those things become the embodiment of all that you love and miss about home. How do you pack for that? That’s also a eulogy. You can’t tell your departed loved one’s life story. You pick a few things that best represent how that life touched you. Eulogies Are Beginnings Eulogies aren’t the ending. They are the beginning. They encourage others to share their stories. Right after the funeral, at the luncheon, my father’s best friend approached me. “We used to go out dancing a lot,” he said wistfully. “But we never did anything we were ashamed of.” That was sweet, as reverential to my dad as to me. He told me about how my father tired of going out and how that led him to think of contacting the woman he met in the war, a young woman who was still in England, and how three years after the war ended he still thought about her and decided he would strike up a correspondence with her again in the hopes that it would lead to something special. I saw the woman across the room, tired but gracious in her moment of widowhood. I heard this story for the first time on this, his burial day, a story that made him seem more alive than ever. Lust In the Receiving Line People tried to share other stories with me in the receiving line at the funeral home, but that’s a blurry time with the long line of people and the recent shock of the death. You remember weird things, like the old guy who wore these incrediby ruby-red dress shoes. Or the astounding handshake grip from the otherwise feeble old man who served in the same army unit as my father, and on behalf of the 4th Armored Division, handed my mother a flag. An old couple paid their respects. I shook their hands. But all I could think of was their high school daughters and how they looked thirty years ago (like Julie Christie.) "Your father was such a nice man," they said, and my tired, time-traveling brain wanted to respond, “Thank you so much -- and are your daughters still HOT?” Union Ballcaps A little eulogy replays in my mind every time I see an old man in a store or in church, wearing the blazer and porkpie hat or union ballcap, the last of the World War II veterans who are also the last to remember listening Bob Hope on the radio, who smoked all those L&Ms, who danced the right way -- touching the girls and not themselves, but -- who didn’t do anything they were ashamed of. Well, I know there’s no way that can be true. I know human nature better than that. But each one of those old fellows triggers something in my long memory about my father, memories so resoundingly warm that I just want to stand up and applaud, even if applauding isn’t permitted in the Wal-Mart hardware section.
