Tag: death

Why a cross?

Periodically, some wise guy will say, “Oh, and if Jesus had been shot by a firing squad, would you Christians wear a little golden gun around your neck? If he had been electrocuted, would you hang a decorative electric chair on the wall of your church?”

Maybe we would. What-ifs are not the same as theology, so I don’t know how it would have played out. All I know is how it did play out. It was a cross that Jesus died on. And that was not just an accident of history. 

Look at the shape of the cross: It extends up, down, left, and right, and approximately in the center, at the intersection of it all, is the heart of the dying man.

What is down? The soldiers, the rabble, the clergy, the grieving women, the few disciples who didn’t run away. The stony ground, blood-soaked soil and the whole heavy earth, burdened with its load of the living and the dead. 

What is up? The heavens, the Father who said not long before that he is well pleased with his Son. Up is where Jesus cast his eyes to ask the Father why he had abandoned him, and up is where he commended his spirit just before he died. 

What is left? The criminal who looks at Jesus and says, “Aren’t you supposed to be God? Then go ahead and get us out of this mess!” Essentially: You come here and do what I want, and do it right now (Lk 23:39).

What is right? The criminal who knows who he is and why he is where he is, but also knows who Jesus is, and how wrong it is that they are on the same level. He doesn’t ask or tell Jesus to go anywhere, and he doesn’t assume Jesus should do anything. He knows, though, where Jesus will go, and he asks to be remembered when he gets there (Lk 23:40-43).

On Palm Sunday, different people read the various speaking parts of the Passion; but really, everyone who is alive today is either the good thief or the bad thief. Suffering isn’t something we may or may not have to deal with; it’s inevitable. Sooner or later, we will find ourselves immobilized on one kind of cross or another, punished and rejected by someone or something in the world. Maybe we’ll suffer at the hands of an enemy, maybe at the hands of someone we love. Maybe we’re in pain because of our own bodies, or maybe because of our own decisions. But we will all find ourselves there: on the cross, suffering, helpless and looking at Jesus. 

Then we will have the choice. We can look at Jesus and tell him where to go and what to do, how to be God.

Or we can look at him and say, “I know who you are, and I know where you are going. Don’t forget me.” 

It’s not wrong to ask for things. It’s not wrong to tell God specifically what we want to happen, or to ask him to relieve our sufferings, whether we deserve them or not. But it is futile to tell him what he must do for us. How insane does the bad thief look, stuck like a bug to a wooden cross and still somehow thinking he has some kind of power?

The other thief was just as immobilized, just as doomed, just as powerless, but from that spot, what he chose to say to God was: “I know who you are. Remember me.” He trusted that God would rescue him — in the way that God thought best, in the time that God knew was right.

That sounds so glib. If you are reading this in the midst of some horrible, painful trial, and you read the words, “trust in the Lord” or, “God’s timing is perfect,” I wouldn’t blame you for getting mad…. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image: The Crucifixion by Andrea Mantegna (1459) (Public Domain) 

Memento vivere

At our house, there are no skeletons in the closet. All our skeletons — well, all the decorative ones — are outside, zip-tied to the trees, holding up the mailbox, and popping up between dead sunflower stalks. We are officially One Of Those Skeleton Houses, and they are there year-round, not just during Halloween.

This is hardly an edgy aesthetic these days. Lots of people set up elaborate skeleton displays at this time of year, investing hundreds of dollars in the deluxe 12-foot ones that loom over suburban streets. Lots of people never take their skeletons down and simply add Santa hats or Valentine hearts or Easter bunny ears, as the season demands.

But I’m different. I have a unique personal reason for keeping my skeletons up all the time, and it is this: I like skeletons. I always have. I think they are beautiful, charming and fascinating, tragic and dear. I also have a painting of a skull on our family altar and a painted, tin-winged skeleton Sacred Heart in the dining room, and I’m working on carving a melancholy little skull out of scrap cedar for my cold weather hobby. In elementary school, I obsessively drew skeletons dancing, climbing ladders and raking leaves. In college, I startled the chef by running a load of leftover ham hocks through the industrial dishwasher because I wanted to sketch those elegant bony curves and undulations. I just like skeletons! I think they’re neat.

For a while, I tried to persuade myself that this was a good old Catholic memento mori-type fascination. I was keeping all these skulls around as a reminder of my mortality, just like St. Francis or St. Jerome. Do all your work and live all your life as if it’s your last day on earth because you never know: It might be. Make your peace with death while you still have the choice, because it’s coming either way.

I wish this were my motivation, but it’s not. The last time death came to collect someone I cared about, I fell to pieces, as if no one had ever died before, and this was some new, monstrous means of torture designed specifically to make me, in particular, unhappy.

So I can’t claim to be particularly comfortable with death. Instead, I have made my peace with a related concept: not the fleetness of life, but the perseverance of the living, even after death. The tenacity, the sheer, dogged refusal of the human body to go completely away.

The German word sitzfleisch, which translates, as you might guess, “sitting flesh,” means the kind of single-minded persistence you need to, well, sit on your bum until you get the job done. And, in fact, sitzfleisch also means your bodily bottom, your “sit meat.”

Sometimes, it means not so much the meat you park in the chair as the patience you will need to sit in one spot until things resolve themselves, no matter how long it takes.

So here we arrive back at skeletons. There is nothing more patient than a skeleton. Osteogenesis, the process of growing bones, begins in the first few weeks after conception. Tiny little skeleton, bitty little pretty bones, raring to go, gratefully, eagerly borrowing calcium from the mother’s bones and teeth, with no intention of giving it back. Single-mindedly intent on adding to itself and not collapsing back into nothingness, while the mother, knowing or unknowing, steadfastly releases herself into building someone else.

This, too, is sitzfleisch…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Did God save Donald Trump’s life?

Because I make an effort to stay in contact with people of all political stripes, my social media feed has been…especially stripey lately.

One image that keeps turning up is something A.I. churned out in response to Donald Trump’s recent brush with death: It appears to be Mary, blue-eyed and lipsticked and wearing nice little earrings, placidly extending her middle finger to twitch a bullet (still in its shell casing) out of its deadly path. Her manicured thumb and forefinger form a gesture that reminded many viewers of the white supremacy “OK” sign, but which others have argued looks more like a gesture of blessing common in Orthodox icons.

I’m analyzing this insane image in detail because it is so meaningful—not, perhaps, in the way the A.I. prompter intended, but as an illustration of this political, cultural and religious moment.

The image is being passed around by folks who believe it’s clear that God miraculously and directly intervened to save Trump from death. The bullet fired by Thomas Crooks should have hit him square in the skull, but instead it only grazed his ear, sparing his life and freeing him to go on and do whatever he will do.

And maybe that is what God did! I don’t know what God does or does not do. I’m not under the illusion that the Almighty, blessed be he, is carefully calibrating his decisions based on how a chronically online middle-aged swing state double hater like me might react. God’s ways are not my ways, and thank God for that.

Or maybe it was just a meaningless coincidence that the bullet missed. Maybe a blackfly bit that young man on the elbow right at the moment of truth, and he flinched just enough to shoot his shot millimeters astray. Or maybe he just wasn’t a very good marksman. I don’t know.

A good many commenters do believe they know. A priest prayed for his safety right before the speech, so is this not, argued many, clearly an answer to prayer? God clearly did that! But, protested others, why in the world would God spare the life of an adulterous felon who’s poised to wreak unimaginable havoc on our nation for a second time around? God would never do that!

But once we start thinking about what God clearly made happen or clearly didn’t make happen, it opens up a whole world of uncomfortable questions. If God and/or Mary and/or a flag-shaped angel did nudge that bullet aside to spare the former president’s life, then why did he let another bullet hit firefighter Corey Comperatore right in the head? How could that A.I. Mary look so placid while knowing this was about to happen? Is it because Trump is more powerful and therefore more important than ordinary folk? Was it because Our Lady knew people would be inspired by the man’s heroic death, and it would bring out the best in people who heard the story?

But some people who did hear of Mr. Comperatore’s valiant sacrifice said that it doesn’t matter because only fascists would be at a Trump rally, and “fascists aren’t people” (a comment I read with my own eyeballs on Facebook). Several said that he deserves no praise because he said awful things about Palestinians on Twitter, and it’s just as well he’s gone. You have to wonder: If Trump’s survival was God’s will, why doesn’t God care that it brought out the very worst in so many people?

The answer is to refuse to play this game. God isn’t impressed by the power of a political candidate (even the one we favor), and he doesn’t desire the suffering and humiliation of any human (even our political enemies). When we bring these ugly ideas out into the light, we must see how repugnant they are.

And yet, we do pray. We do ask God for things. If we don’t think that God listens to our prayers and responds to them, then why do we bother?

Oddly enough, dwelling on that grotesque A.I. image of Mary gave me some new thoughts about God’s providence.

I saw another image on social media…. Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

 

When the darkness passes, do not forget the Lord

It was four years ago, at this time of year, that COVID social isolation began in earnest. Remember?

First we started staying home from Mass, then from school, then from everything else. The thing that brought me up short, though, was when it dawned on me we wouldn’t be back to normal in time for Easter. It seemed so terrible not to be present for my favorite day of the liturgical year, such a loss.

Then my father died suddenly, just before Easter, and I had to adjust my views on loss.

It was a strange thing. Instead of planning for my father’s visit, we were planning his funeral. All through the Easter Vigil, live-streamed on a laptop, I was aware that this wasn’t ideal. We should be inside the actual church, actually receiving Christ’s body and blood, and instead we were crammed into our living room watching a tenor singing out “Christ our light” into an empty building.

But I couldn’t stop smiling.

It was a strange thing. The seminarian started to read from Genesis, telling us how the world was empty and void, and then God spoke, and there was light. He told us how God made the water, and fish to swim in it, the land, and creatures to crawl on it, and sun, moon, and stars to rule the day and night, and man. And breath for man, the breath of God. It was a good story, and I wanted to hear more. I was spellbound through the entire Mass, as if it were all new. Out of the void, God made something firm, something real, something for us to stand on. And then he gave us life.

When I got the call that my father was dead, even as I cried, I kept finding little stepping stones of joy. It was like trying to make your way across a dark, formless swamp. No one would dispute that death and grief are dreadful and cold, but there was always something to stand on, something good.

I kept thinking: At least he died at home in his comfy chair, not hooked up to the beeping hospital machines he loathed. At least he was a praying man, and he had been to confession. At least the last thing I told him was that I love him. There was something for my feet to stand on amid the grief.

At least I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. It’s a good story, and I want to hear more. I kept thinking of it at his burial, where my siblings and I stood six feet apart, in an almost comically tragic scene straight out of a Russian novel, with fog and mud and solitary mourners by an open grave; and I smiled then too.

That was the year when one thing after another started to unravel in my life. I kept losing things, precious things, that I thought I utterly depended on; but I also kept finding firm ground under my feet. Not a lot of ground! But enough…. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

Image via PickPik

Let the dead bury the dead

We have a new annual tradition: Once a year, as many as possible of my far-flung siblings and I meet at my parents’ grave, back in the town where we grew up. We say a rosary, chat, and reminisce. The first year, I planted a little lilac tree.

It had been a long time since I sweated that much. We sat on the grass before the granite headstone in the blazing August sun in the middle of the day, this time me and two of my sisters and my brother-in-law. I thought it would be easy to find the spot, but the last time I had been at the cemetery, this particular plot stood out more, because there were mourners gathered around, and heaps of flowers, and a priest, and a canopy, and a casket, and an open grave for my mother, and a fairly fresh one for my father. It was much easier to spot that time.

Now the grave looks more or less like all the others: The stone with names and dates carved into it looks comfortably settled, surrounded by late summer grass, somewhat shaggy, a little parched, looking like it had been there forever. Someone had stuck a bunch of artificial purple flowers into the ground, long enough ago that they were faded in the sun.

I did come prepared. I brought a little lilac sapling from my house, and a couple of hearty rose bush cuttings that transplant well, and I brought a pickaxe and a short-handled shovel, and a small jug of water. It didn’t take long to get the green things in the ground. I also brought a bottle of soapy water to squirt at the headstone, and a little scrubbing brush to clear any grime out of the cracks and the letters of their names. The smell of a soapy lemon Joy cut through the summer haze of dry grass and cricket song, and in the fierce noon sun, the water quickly shrank up and disappeared.

It was so hot, that I was afraid the lilac tree would not survive. I didn’t bring nearly enough water, and I wasn’t sure when I could be back to care for it again. It’s only an hour away, but somehow it’s hard to get there.

We prayed a decade of the rosary and talked a bit about our parents. My sister remembered my father storming home one day and demanding, “Who’s been praying for me?” The answer was, of course, my mother…Read the rest of my latest column for Our Sunday Visitor. 

 

All of life is worth living

The other day, I performed the solemn rite of white women in their late 40’s: I shared a photo of my lunch salad on social media.

The ritual goes like this: I post a photo of my lunch, and I complain about trying to lose weight, and then I humblebrag about my plate full of nutrient-dense leafy greens and lean proteins, and I say that between this and yoga, I’m going to live forever. Then my friends commiserate about how, if I keep it up, I’m not going to live forever; it’ll just feel that way. Then we all anoint ourselves in the digital stream three times, sprinkle ourselves with irony, and we are cleansed.

This ritual has worked for me for many years. I’ve always looked at health fanatics with something of a jaundiced eye, thinking, “If that’s what it takes to extend my life, I’d rather cut it short, thanks.”

Jokes like this were very much a part of my family culture, growing up. My father, in particular, believed that life was worth living as long as you were enjoying yourself, and if you weren’t, well, maybe your time was up. Or at least, part of him believed that. He especially liked to eat whatever he wanted, as much as he wanted, and he really relished heavy foods, sugary, fatty foods, noodles and greasy briskets and things filled with cream. (And so do I.) He wasn’t exactly a hedonist. He believed in constant conversion of heart and the resurrection of the body and things like that; he really did. But in practice, noodles and brisket often got the upper hand.

I want to tread carefully, because it’s easy to get carried away when you’re telling the life of someone who is dead. I don’t want to speak for him just because he can’t speak for himself anymore. So I will just tell you what I observed, as I remember it, and maybe the conclusions I drew were wrong. Nevertheless, this is what I saw:

My father’s health was poor for many, many years, partly because of his personal habits, and partly because of terrible genetics. I remember him going in for serious medical procedures throughout my childhood, starting at about the age I am now. He had a hard time staying motivated to take care of himself, although he did keep trying, for his family’s sake.

But eventually, he really lost enthusiasm. He had the choice to correct a problem with heart bypass surgery, and he didn’t want to do it. It just didn’t seem worth it to him. His family felt differently, and we urged him to consider it. We contacted a friend of his, who had had the same surgery done, and was very glad that it bought him some extra years of life; and that finally did it. My father agreed, and he got it done.

And he got better. He recovered well, even in his old age, and he started doing so well. He had a lot of health problems, still, but he accepted this; and my overall memories of him from this time are of him smiling. Smiling at my kids, smiling up at the sky, smiling at the brilliant clouds, at birds singing, at snow melting, at records playing. This was something new for him, or something he hadn’t felt in decades. He seemed to be enjoying himself in a way that I had never seen him do, ever.

But how strange it was, to see him looking small. I had to keep correcting the image I had of him in my head. I still thought of him as a powerful, deep-bellied, overbearing, heavily bearded man, taking up as much space as he wanted. Never bothering to whisper in quiet places, never bothering to follow signs that said “no admittance.” I still thought of him as doing what he wanted. And he wasn’t like that, anymore. His clothes hung loosely; the top of his head showed through his brittle hair. His voice was muffled, as if wrapped in cotton. He was so physically diminished, and he shuffled, and tipped over sometimes. But he smiled so much.

It was also during this time that some personal reconciliations happened, or started to happen. He knew he was at the end of his life. But that was the key: He knew it, and he was getting ready, rather than dolefully sliding along. He said that the Lord was taking more and more things away from him, and he was glad, because it was getting him ready for death. He smiled when he said this, too. He was grateful it was happening—the getting ready, not the dying.

So, then he died. It happened quite suddenly, and I’m not sure if it was COVID or not. He went to watch TV in his reclining chair, and when my brother went to check on him, he was on the floor. It was very hard when he died, and I won’t pretend he made his peace with every last person, or that he had righted every wrong, before he went. There were a lot of wrongs. But those last few years were undeniably, irreplaceably fruitful. For him, and for many of the rest of us. Fruitful enough that they are not yet over, even though he is dead.

If you are halfway imagining that people live the real bulk of their lives when they’re hale and hearty and doing as they please, and that they slowly dwindle into a less and less meaningful existence as the standard earthly pleasures drop away, well, possibly that’s true for some people. There are many ways for the course of a life to run, and not all of them are within our power. The end of my mother’s life looked very different from my father’s. But even that was not what you might think. Strangely enough, caring for her in her profoundly vulnerable and inert state was a huge part of what transformed my father’s final years, which makes me almost quake with fear when I think of my mysterious mother and her strange, quiet power to change people, for good and for ill. A power that continues to burn and insist, like the light from a star that is already dead. 

As I said, I am reluctant to tell you what someone else’s life means. So I’m not going to tell you that the last two years of my father’s life were his most significant. I’m just telling you that there was a time when he thought he could have done without them, and he was wrong.

Take care of yourself. Take care of your poor, dumb, needy body. Your body’s time will run out eventually, because it isn’t meant to last forever; but it isn’t meant only for pleasures and satisfaction, either. Most people are joking when they say life isn’t really worth living if you’re just eating salad, but most people also halfway believe it. Don’t you believe it. Your time on earth is your time on earth. If you’re still here, it’s for a reason.

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A version of this essay was originally published at The Catholic Weekly on May 5, 2023.

The grief of God

I never thought it was strange that Jesus wept when he saw Lazarus dead. Why would he not? You’d have to have a weird notion of some robotic, emotionless Christ to imagine him facing the death of his close friend without feeling grief and anguish.

These tears of Christ are usually explained as evidence that he was truly human, just like us. We see him displaying human emotions many times: Getting angry, being affectionate, getting sarcastic. So this time, the explanation goes, he felt sad, just like us; he felt sorrow and pain, just like anybody.

But I think when he wept at the death of Lazarus, we are seeing something more than that. I think we’re seeing his grief as God.

What I mean is that humans know that death is bad. No one has to teach us this; it’s an innate understanding that death is an ugly, awful, unnatural thing that we hate and fear and do not want, for ourselves or for anyone.

But it is possible for us to get over this knowledge. It’s possible, over time, with repeated exposure, to become comfortable and blasé toward death. Sometimes it’s just a necessary attitude that people must develop so they can do their jobs, as health care workers, as hospice workers, as soldiers, as morticians. Some people who care for the living are repeatedly exposed to death until it no longer provokes strong emotions.

And some people, without good reason, deaden their consciences so that they no longer feel horror and repulsion at the death of other humans. They expose themselves to such violent imagery and exploitative forms of entertainment, or to such utilitarian social thinking, that they don’t feel even baseline human emotions of grief and repulsion around death anymore. They have successfully amputated that emotional organ, and the tears no longer flow.

You might think that God, of all people, has been exposed to death more than anyone. He who has existed from before the dawn of time has been present for every death — every human death, even the ones that no one else in the universe was there to witness, and every other possible kind of death as well — plant death, animal death, bacteria death, planet death. God has seen it all. Talk about overexposed….Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor. 

Image: Jesus Raising Lazarus From the Dead, Spain, ca. 1120-1140; photo by Sharon Mollerus, CC BY 2.0 <Creative Commons>, via Wikimedia Commons

The man called Resurrection

[This is an essay I wrote two years ago, a year after my father died, a few weeks after my mother died, a few weeks before Easter. It was first published at The Catholic Weekly on April 2, 2021.]

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After my mother’s funeral, I drove home and took off my wet, muddy clothes, and found that I could barely move. My flesh had turned to sand and I couldn’t make my limbs work. I crawled into bed, and the longer I stayed there, the heavier I got. I kept thinking about how my mother’s body was so light, they let her coffin down into the grave by hand. They used heavy machinery to place my father in the ground just before Easter last year, but my mother had become very light. 

In my mother’s funeral sermon, the priest spoke of Lazarus. Martha thought her brother’s death was a stupid, pointless death. She accuses Jesus: If you had been here, our brother would not have died! And she was right. But Jesus wanted to show them, I suppose, that he is who he says he is. He is the resurrection and the life. Where he is, there life is. That’s who he is, said the priest: He is the Resurrection. And he comes as close as he pleases, when he pleases, to do as he pleases.

In this story, he raises his voice, and Lazarus comes out. They undo everything that has been done: They take his winding cloth off, they feed him again. Lazarus lives again. 

I wonder if Lazarus was afraid to go to sleep that night. I wonder how he felt when the newness of his new life wore off and he sinned again for the first time: how stupid he must have felt when he had to repent again, even after he had already died.

I wonder how he felt later, when he started to die again for the second time. Maybe by that time he had gotten blasé about the process, and thought he’d be protected from that final darkness for a second time. Or maybe he was afraid he would be rescued, afraid he’d be called back and asked, for some reason, to do it all again. 

Isn’t it awful, sinning again and again? Facing death, being rescued, sinning and repenting and being forgiven, and then going out and doing it again? 

When my mother first became a Christian, she was crushed to realize it was still very easy to sin. She had heard, and read, and taken to heart the idea that baptism brings the life of Christ into human souls. She thought that, since Jesus had taken up residence in her heart, he would therefore prevent her from doing anything bad. She thought you choose Jesus and jump in the water, and when you come up again, you’re set for life.

But that’s not how it works. I don’t know which sin she committed that showed her how wrong she was, but I imagine it was something petty — something small and human, which nonetheless showed her very starkly that you can be washed in the blood of the lamb and then go right back to acting like a stupid sheep. In fact, it’s inevitable. You go back, Jack, do it again. It’s not a “one and done” situation. It’s an “over and over and over again” situation, and you don’t always know what it’s for. 

One stupid thing about the way my mother died was that she was a frail and tiny woman whose brain had long since been pillaged by dementia. She couldn’t dress herself, or speak, or sit up, and sometimes she forgot how to eat. So this little tiny ravaged woman got COVID. Then she beat COVID, and recovered completely from COVID, and began to get stronger, and then she died anyway, of something else. I think they called it “undetermined” on her death certificate, which made me laugh a little. I snickered through my tears that I knew the real reason she died. The very day before, her nursing home opened up visiting hours again for the first time in many months. She never did like social occasions, and would do anything to get out of them. I imagined her seeing some guests on their way, and thinking “Not this again!” and taking some extreme steps to avoid playing host.

I’m supposed to be writing about Easter in time of Covid. All I can say is that, if you zoom out far enough and take a long enough view, Covid time is no different from any other time. When the pandemic raged unchecked, it was clear to every sane person that death was near to us, or could be, or might be. But that’s always true. Death is always very close. Both my parents died, one at the beginning of the pandemic, and one toward the end, but neither died of covid. Death of all kinds is always very close. 

My father used to say he was going through an awkward stage, the one between life and death, and I’m feeling that pretty hard right now. Some Easters on earth are like that: If not tragic, then awkward and a little stupid, stupid like Lazarus caught between his first death and his second one, stupid like sin, stupid like things that happen over and over again and seem to have no meaning. 

When my grandmother had dementia, my mother, who cared for her, used to anguish over what the meaning could possibly be for her mother’s life. It went on and on and on, long past the time when anyone could make any sense of it, least of all my grandmother herself. Eventually my mother stopped asking, and just tried to rest in the thought that there are some things we can’t know right now. It doesn’t mean they don’t mean anything. It just means Jesus knows, and when he wants us to know, he will come and tell us.

When my mother’s dementia got bad, we had to put her in a nursing home, and my father went to see her every day. He went back and back and back to see his wife, who couldn’t even look at him or say his name, and after a few years of it, and by God, he changed. He started to love life. He became a happy man, and then the man called “Resurrection” came for him, just before Easter, just as the COVID lockdown began.

Sometimes Resurrection looks like getting your beloved brother Lazarus back; sometimes Resurrection looks like the death of both your parents, at least from the outside, at least for now. You never know what will happen when the Lord comes near. 

When Martha said, “Lord if you had been here, my brother would not have died!” she was right. Sometimes he draws near, and then draws away, for reasons of his own. I do believe in the power of baptism. I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting, eventually. I do believe in the man called “Resurrection.” I don’t care for his methods, but I believe in him. When he wants me to know more, he will come and tell me.

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Image: Resurrection of Lazarus, Workshop of Daniel Chorny and Andrey Rublev, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The day Tony Soprano will not open his eyes

It’s one big memento mori, “The Sopranos.” You don’t realize it while you’re watching the series at first, because the show is so drenched in sex and food, gore and comedy, violence and pathos and banality. But death is there from the very beginning, and it’s telling you something: Just wait. It will happen to you.

The series has recently gained a whole new audience, almost 15 years after its finale on HBO. This is obviously in large part because of the recent release of “The Many Saints of Newark,” a feature film purporting to fill in some of the backstory of the lives of Tony Soprano and his kin. But the comeback is also due to something else: As the New York Times’s Willy Staley posited, younger audiences see themselves in Tony Soprano’s “combination of privilege and self-loathing,” or they see today’s America in the show’s portrayal of the ’90s era of decline and fall.

Staley says the show was prescient in a way that sheds light on our specific timeline. But I think it deals with a theme that never stopped being relevant, namely, salvation. And did I mention death?

In the very first episode, Carmela Soprano, Tony’s wife, steps into the room where Tony is getting an MRI, hoping to find the source of his inexplicable collapses. In eight lines of dialogue that provide a primer to their marriage, Tony mawkishly offers a nostalgic olive branch, and Carmela quickly escalates: “What’s different between you and me is you’re going to hell when you die!” Then Tony’s body, covered only by a hospital gown, is fed into the machine.

Carmela later retracts her furious words. But where Tony is going from Episode One on—and Carmela, too—really is the central question of the show.

It is not explicitly a religious question. The church appears mainly as a cultural and aesthetic force in the lives of the show’s characters. Sin and virtue are treated as a curiosity, and even the priests are willing to help that world view limp along unchallenged, as long as they get their manigot.

In a sense, the most Catholic parts of the show are not the explicitly Catholic parts. Whether it’s the Holy Spirit (in the guise of that numinous wind that moves throughout the series) or something more amorphous, a moral force does press on the lives of the various characters, demanding their attention.

They are all constantly presented with choices: What matters more, business and efficiency or loyalty and family? When we identify what was wrong with the past, do we reject everything about it? If we see what was good about the past, may we hope to retain any of it? Once we understand why we do things, how culpable are we, and how capable are we of change? Once we realize we are wrong, how much must we give up to make things right? Anything?

Carmela is given perhaps the starkest moral choice of any of the characters (except for maybe Paulie Walnuts, with his cataclysmic vision of the Virgin Mary at the stripper’s pole): The almost prophetic psychiatrist Dr. Krakower tells Carmela, plainly and without pity, that she must leave Tony, must take no more blood money, must be an accomplice no longer.

“One thing you can never say: that you haven’t been told,” he intones.

You could see this scene as the show leaving a small marker, bobbing on the surface of the water, reminding the viewer: Don’t forget, wrong is still wrong. We may be humanizing murderers in every episode, showing them eating their sloppy pepper sandwiches and struggling with their teenagers just like anyone else, but murder is still murder. Death is still death.

Carmela leaves Dr. Krakower’s office stricken. She huddles on the couch at home, pondering these things in her heart. And then she finds a priest, a good priest, who gives her a softer message. He tells her that she should find a way to live off only the legitimate parts of her husband’s income, and that is how she will find her way. But soon enough, despite some dramatic side journeys, she makes her way back into the same old patterns.

Carmela is almost an inverse of the Lady of Sorrows, who endures so many awful indignities: Carmela takes away no good from her anguish; she only suffers. She feeds everyone and cares for everyone, and everyone comes to her for comfort. She listens to everyone, and with her deep, hollow eyes she sees through everyone, and she always tells people the truth about themselves. But when it comes down to it, she has her price, and can be had for presents and jewelry.

Carmela’s insight also goes dim when there is something she doesn’t want to know. It has been her life’s work not to see that Tony was capable of killing people—including his own loved ones and relatives. Carmela’s brittle manicure and spraddle-legged gait betray the terrible tension of keeping so much horror in check within her.

Her dalliance with real estate is more than just a way to build a nest egg. It is her answer to Tony’s impending, inevitable death: to pile up money for herself and her children. She knows that throughout her whole life, she has been building with rotten materials. But she also knows she can make the sale if she keeps pushing hard enough. It’s not just the house she’s building as her own project to sell, it’s everything.

And this is how the show draws us in. It gives us the same choice: How will you hold all this knowledge in check? We’re going to show you so many things about what people are like. What will you do with the knowledge? How will you accommodate it?

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

Image: Tony on the Subway by Alan Turkus via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Wrestling w skeleton thoughts

The other day, I was feeling a little low. One of my children suggested I go out and buy myself a nice new skeleton. She was right; it would have cheered me up.

I love skeletons. Lots of people do, and why not? They grin so cheerfully, and they’re so accommodating: You can bend them and tote them around them and make them do whatever you want. This year I set up a skeleton climbing a ladder up the side of the house, and one lounging in a chair by the mailbox, waving to traffic. It’s amazing what you can make them do with zip ties.

The novelist Joyce Carol Oates made herself look a little silly on Twitter a few weeks ago, responding to a photo of a house similarly decorated for Halloween.  She tweeted, “(you can always recognize a place in which no one is feeling much or any grief for a lost loved one & death, dying, & everyone you love decomposing to bones is just a joke).”

Several people hooted in response, “No one tell her about Mexico!” Other readers with a longer memory pointed out that Oates had in fact written a story based on the death of an actual specific human being, and when the friends of the dead man complained at her callous co-opting of his personal life, she was dismissive.  And a few folks felt a moment of pity, pity for the poor old bat. Someone named “JustLuisa” said kindly, “My 5 am hot take is that people should be nice to Joyce Carol Oates about the skeleton thing. She’s a freakin’ octogenarian; why are we making fun of the old lady wrestling w skeleton thoughts.”

Why indeed. This year, when I hauled my plastic skeletons out of the attic, I had a bad time for a few minutes. They really weren’t funny, for a few minutes. What are you smiling about! Effing skeletons, what’s so funny? How many times had I pictured my own father and my own mother with their hollow eyes down in the ground, on their way to being just bones, of all things. You think you know these things, but it turns out you weren’t quite there yet. You believe in the resurrection of the body, but still. There is that time, under the ground. It’s a bad time. 

“Nobody tell her about Mexico,” some people said. I have heard about some cultures, in Mexico and elsewhere, that not only celebrate and remember the dead, and skelly it up with sugar cookies and masks and paper banners, but they actually go and dig them up. They wait three years, or seven years, and they dig the corpses up, clean them off, dress them, and have a little party.

I wonder what that does to the living, knowing this day is coming. You wouldn’t be able to just walk away in a straight line, after somebody dies. You couldn’t just progress neatly through the stages of grief, getting further and further away from their death as the date wanes into the past. You couldn’t just say goodbye and have that be the end of it.

That’s a joke, of course. You can’t do that anyway, with or without the corpse party. Even if you go full-on American, and pump your loved one full of preservatives, seal them up in airtight caskets that look like tiny little posh hotel rooms, and expect them to stay there forever, there are no straight lines away from death. There’s a lot of staggering and slumping and backtracking involved, believe me. Look at poor Joyce, 83 years old and still struggling with skeletons, and it’s not because she hasn’t had a chance to think about it.

Every so often, I have the urge to write about my dead parents. I always wonder if I’m doing it too often, and I always wonder if what I’m doing is remembering them, or exploiting them. Is it for them, or for me? I pray for them, of course, but the writing is for me, assuredly. But for what purpose? Why am I dragging them out of the attic again? You look at the calendar, you see it’s the season for memento mori again, so you dig the old folks up, brush them off, and get 800 words out of it. 

Not that my parents would mind. It doesn’t do them any harm. But I do try not to tote them around too much, or pose them in any ways that would be too foreign to who they were, as I knew them. Which is only as my parents, which is by no means all of who they were. And bones is not who they are now.

But still. I try not to make the zip ties too tight if I can help it, when I set them up for another pose. I can’t seem to help wrestling with skeletons every so often, but I try to be gentle. And I’m sure I’ll be back again, because there is not a straight line away from death.