In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(44)
Some of Brian’s family come a little late and there is awkwardness over the seating, but everyone manages to be seated and our minister pulls us all together. I don’t have a minister, but this minister is our friend, who married Brian and me in 2007. She had been Brian’s minister during his Unitarian phase, and she was enough of a friend to me years ago to mention to me, when she heard he and I were serious about each other, that she thought Brian had a drinking problem and some wild ways. I didn’t mind her telling me and she didn’t mind marrying us a year later, so the friendship continued, and she gave a warm, affectionate, compassionate eulogy while gracefully introducing the speakers, and I kept thinking, as she spoke, Oh, darling, you would love this.
Allegro Ma Non Troppo
Life, you’re beautiful (I say)
you just couldn’t get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightingaley,
more anthillful or sproutsprouting.
I’m trying to court life’s favor,
to get into its good graces,
to anticipate its whims.
I’m always the first to bow,
always there where it can see me
with my humble, reverent face,
soaring on the wings of rapture,
falling under waves of wonder.
Oh how grassy is this hopper,
how this berry ripely rasps.
I would never have conceived it
if I weren’t conceived myself!
Life (I say) I’ve no idea
what I could compare you to.
No one else can make a pine cone
and then make the pine cone’s clone.
I praise your inventiveness,
bounty, sweep, exactitude,
sense of order—gifts that border
on witchcraft and wizardry.
I just don’t want to upset you,
tease or anger, vex or rile.
For millennia, I’ve been trying
to appease you with my smile.
I tug at life by its leaf hem:
will it stop for me, just once,
momentarily forgetting
to what end it runs and runs?
* * *
—
Three of his dearest friends speak about him. John Paul, his friend since the Seventies, evokes Brian the most for me. Their friendship transcended all kinds of differences, and their love of each other and of fishing bound them. John Paul speaks at length about Brian and their happy arguments and political discussions and at length about fishing, and even as part of me thinks, That’s a lot too much about fishing, really—the other part of me feels that my husband and his long, boring stories about fishing have been beautifully brought to life, and I am so grateful. His friend Mark talks about their wanderings around New Haven and their big meals. He says that he asked Brian if he had any regrets in life and Brian finally came up with one regret: that he’d given away his vinyl-record collection. Mark says he was astonished that Brian had only one regret and it was that. I think, That’s Alzheimer’s for you, and then I think, Maybe not—my husband did not regret much, and wasn’t that great?
His friend Tim talks about Brian’s best big-brotherly qualities, Brian even going to watch Tim coach his high school lacrosse players, and there is love visible in the room. My mother-in-law, who had not planned to speak, comes to the podium and introduces herself and says that she has learned a lot about Brian today, his adult life in Connecticut, and I think she recognizes this in a way that is both lovely and sad.
* * *
—
His family will hold a second memorial service for him, in the Philadelphia suburb most of them call home. My sister-in-law calls to tell me that the service will be held in a Unitarian Universalist church. I’m pretty sure that none of the Ameches have ever been in a UU church for a religious service, except for Brian, and he stopped going twenty years ago. I take this decision to be a tribute to Brian, to his erstwhile affection for Unitarians. I suspect it is not a tribute to his fierce aversion to Catholicism and, in either case, I don’t care. I am not as enthusiastic as my sister-in-law expects, I think, and it’s a quick, awkward conversation. Later there is another one, from the other sister-in-law, who explains to me that although their beloved Father Bob wanted nothing more than to accommodate the well-connected Ameches (in the Seventies, the Ameches met with the pope, and the girls wore lace mantillas longer than their skirts and the group photo is amazing), the Catholic Church higher-ups would not allow a memorial service for Brian in a church. I think that perhaps it was because he chose his death, but I am assured that the Church, if not all for suicide, no longer holds it against the dead person or their family and it’s not necessarily an impediment to Church burial. I wonder if it’s me, and my mother-in-law laughs a little and says, with some embarrassment, that although Father Bob himself had no objection, his boss did worry that other people—more extreme members of the Catholic Church—might read of Brian’s active support of Planned Parenthood and that those extreme people might behave badly. So, Unitarian Universalist church it will be, not as Brian would have wished (Yale Bowl, Sterling Library, the Trolley Trail near our house), but certainly nothing he would have objected to.
At the Pennsylvania service, almost all of the remarks are about Brian as a child and a teenager. Lots of love, as he said once on a trip home to Philly, but I’ve been long gone.