A change in plans

I’ve changed my funeral plans. It used to be that I wanted to be buried in a Catholic cemetery near Dermont, Kentucky.

Bishop Francis Cotton, the first Bishop of Owensboro (my hometown), was the first person buried in that cemetery. Both my parents are buried there along with several relatives.

Thank goodness I didn’t go ahead and buy a plot, though. I want to find another place.

The reason I’ve changed my mind about the Owensboro cemetery is because it’s one of those places where everybody has to have the same kind of tombstone.

These cemeteries came into vogue several years ago. They seemed to make sense. Everything was nice and even and Romanesque and easy to mow. Then I visited an old-fashioned, cluttered cemetery over Memorial Day weekend, and something snapped inside me.

This was the old kind of cemetery where there are a million different tombstones. No ugly, forbidding signs said: No artificial flowers allowed! There was no list of rules at the entrance telling all the things you couldn’t do. In fact, at this cemetery, you could do whatever you wanted. People had planted every kind of flower there, and marvelous trees of every description. Graves were adorned with shrubs.

The place was busy, owing to the holiday of course. But here were people expending tender loving care upon the final place for those they loved, instead of being forbidden to touch a thing.

As we visited, I became touched with the idea that graveyards are very much for the living. To visit a gravesite and to plant a rose bush, or trim a hedge or put in perennials – these things are purgative and helpful for those who so dearly miss the ones they have lost. These activities help the living spend time with the dead in a way somehow deeper than just putting down a bouquet.

I’ll not soon forget seeing one heavy-set man in his T-shirt as he stepped back from his gardening at the grave of his loved one. He had just stepped back and looked, his hands out from his sides and covered with dirt, like all people do when they have just planted something. The look on his face, however, went way beyond the flowers. His eyes were full of great love and great sorrow. He was an ordinary man, a simple man; but he was at a point of contact with all the meaning any life ever holds: the point at which one person loves another.

So give me one of those kinds of cemeteries, please, when I die – one construed for the benefit of the bereaved and not for the convenience of the caretakers.

Also, I’ve decided I don’t want the Dies Irae sung at my funeral. You remember that, don’t you? “O Day of Wrath, that dreadful day. The sins of man before the Maker lay – As David and the Sybil say.” I thought I wanted that, but now I’ve decided differently.

I don’t want to offend anybody, but now I want a funeral procession headed up by a New Orleans street band playing a little Dixieland jazz. I just pray I’ve made enough black friends by then to join the procession and help my stiff white friends let go a little and dance. Nothing puts me in a happier frame of mind than Dixieland, and I plan to be one happy dude the day I die.

What more glorious, happy, joyous, exciting thing could ever happen to a person than to go be with Jesus? –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on June 14th, 1987

Looking at life through my son John’s eyes

My father-in-law died not long ago, and one of the things we brought home with us from Detroit was a picture of my wife’s family when she and her sisters were little. Our children have been fascinated with it.

Our two youngest sit on the couch and stare at the picture in its frame and talk. I’ve never been able to pick up all their conversation. I gather what’s happening is that they’re internalizing that their mother came from a family, too. But there’s more that our children are aware of concerning this great mystery that is life.

When my wife was still a little girl, her mother died and she went to live with aunt and her uncle. Subsequently they adopted her. For our children, that has meant grandparents in Maine and grandpa in Detroit. Our children always have known that grandpa in Detroit was their mom’s “real” father, and that their Maine grandparents are the adoptive parents of their mother. I don’t suppose we see things, though, until we see them through a child’s eyes.

I passed by my youngest’s bedroom the other night after he had already been to bed for a while. I saw and heard that he was crying. I stepped in to see what was making John so sad.

Why are you crying John, I said, what’s the matter? Grandpa, he said, I miss grandpa. He was my favorite grandpa.

John is named after his grandpa. His middle name is Robert. We call him that a lot. We call him John Robert. He is six years old. I touched John’s hair and hugged him. I told him I understood that it was hard to lose his grandpa. Grandpa had died, I said, but he had gone to be with Jesus and that we would be with him again someday when we die and go to be with Jesus, too.

Grandpa was mom’s real dad, he said. That other grandpa and grandma in Maine are fakes. They’re fakes, he said, and you could tell he wasn’t happy about that at all. It made him mad that his other grandpa and grandma were fakes.

I said, they’re not fakes, John. They love your mother. They adopted her and took care of her. They provided her clothes and her food and gave her a home and sent her to school. They cared for her as one of their own and she really was, and still is, a member of their family.

No she’s not, John said. They’re fake. A lot of people say that, he said. If they’re not your real mom and dad, they’re fakes and that’s what they are.

People may say that, John, I said, but they are wrong. Your grandpa and grandma in Maine are your mom’s foster parents. Who was Jesus’ real father, John? He was God, wasn’t He?

John gave me one of those faraway, thoughtful looks through his moist eyes. Yes, he said.

Yet when Jesus came down to earth, He had to have a father to take care of Him, to love Him, to be His dad. That man was St. Joseph. St. Joseph was not Jesus’ real dad, but he wasn’t a fake. He was Jesus’ foster father. St. Joseph gave Jesus hugs, made sure He had food, taught Him how to do things.

People may say that grandpas and grandmas who are not real moms and dads are fakes, John. But that just isn’t true. They’re foster parents, just like St. Joseph was Jesus’ foster parent.

John Robert didn’t say anything. I love you, John, I said, and I grabbed him close to me. I know it’s hard to lose your grandpa, I said. I smoothed down his hair and he pulled the covers up around him. Very soon, he was asleep. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on April 5th, 1987