The Countryman: If only I’d known

By Bob Neal

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you about getting old. You’re not going to be the first to die. Nor the second, fifth, eighth or perhaps even the 100th.

And that means that as you and the people you know age, there are more and more funerals and wakes to attend. Or to consider attending. As a young man, I didn’t hesitate to attend a funeral or wake for someone I had known, or a relative of someone I had known.

In my family, growing up, we had attended my father’s funeral when I was 10, my sister’s when I was 12. He had died at 49, she at 17. The large number of mourners gathered each time in the mortuary chapel had comforted my mother, the most deeply bereaved of our family, and the rest of us.

The friends and neighbors who brought food, gifts and, most important, themselves to sit and help absorb the gloom were crucial to our getting through the grief and beginning to figure out the new normal, first without a husband/father, then without one of the four daughters/sisters.

I made it a point to give back. When I was 25 and newly married, a co-worker was accidentally shot to death. It was my first open-casket funeral. A friend told me years later, after I had settled here, that the open casket is common in Maine because Maine people need to see with their own eyes. Not that we don’t believe the reports, but just because seeing is believing. And, if the guy owed you money or the return of a borrowed tool, seeing him there in the casket is your final notice. You aren’t going to get it back.

When I was 31, my father-in-law died of a second heart attack, and my job was to support my seven-months-pregnant wife. The pregnancy had been difficult. She couldn’t ride in buses or trains but we arranged a private flight to Oklahoma to her father’s bedside. I put aside my fear of flying to help get her there while her father was alive.

The son born of that pregnancy is 43.

Following my father-in-law’s funeral in 1972, I regularly attended funerals or wakes whenever I knew the deceased or a relative of the deceased. One friend asked for what office I was running because, he said, I attended funerals like a politician.

Once, I was asked to speak at a funeral of a leading resident of our town. Several times, I offered my two cents’ worth to the sharing period during or after a memorial service.

Eventually, my gold star for attendance began to tarnish. Then, it faded altogether. One funeral was on a Saturday morning. I got much of my living at farmers markets in southern Maine, and those are on Saturday morning. It was a tough choice, but I had to meet payroll each week, and if I missed market, I missed payroll. With tons of guilt, I missed that funeral. Then, again on a Saturday morning, I missed the funeral of the woman who had been for 70 years the musician for our New Sharon Congregational Church UCC.

Another was on a Saturday afternoon. I didn’t get back in time from market. Another was on a weeknight but 80 miles away in Orono on a stormy night in January.

More funerals, more wakes. To the point that a couple of years ago, when four people I knew died within a couple of weeks, I was overwhelmed and just could not attend all the wakes or funerals. As it turned out, I made it to two of the four observances. The emotional load even for those two was heavy. For the two I missed, even heavier.

Funerals, of course, are for those left behind, not for the one who has gone on. In an earthly sense, we can do nothing more for the departed. But we can offer support, love and energy to those most bereaved.

The editor of The Daily Bulldog would probably tell you that the obituaries are among the most, if not the most, clicked on item on her front page. Her computer counts the clicks.

A disconcerting trend is showing up in the death notices. More and more people, it seems, are directing their survivors to forego the wake and/or funeral. The dead person’s body will be cremated and the ashes given to the family and/or buried. Or the burial will be private, with no public memorial.

That’s a shame. Not that I enjoy funerals. I don’t. But the funeral, or at least the visitation, allows us to pay our respects to those left behind. It allows us to make a personal testimony to the survivors that this person was important enough to us, and that the survivors are important enough to us, that we will go out on a cold winter’s night or, even harder, on a warm summer’s evening to show that importance.

I’ve been to funerals that were almost deathly (pun intended) silent for the low attendance. My mother’s in Kennebunk was one. Only her children were there, along with a couple of nephews who lived closer to Kennebunk than did any of her four surviving children. And I’ve been to funerals that outdrew important sports events. The service at Old South for Richard Gould, who taught physics for 55 years at the high school and who early in life also managed a corn shop, was one. My younger son, who adored Mr. Gould as a teacher, put on a jacket and tie and joined me for that one.

More recently, the funeral for my banker (yes, banker!), Gordie Flint, packed Old South and pushed those of us who arrived barely in time up to the choir loft. Gordie’s family wouldn’t know that we were there or even who we were, but they would know that enough people loved Gordie Flint that they packed Old South as if it were Easter.

Perhaps the only good thing about this rising tide of funerals is that we can still attend them. Somehow, though, I wish someone had warned me that burying friends and family would come to take up more and more of my time. Until the day that black Cadillac will be reserved for me.

Bob Neal has retired after farming for 35 years in New Sharon. For 20 years, he was a journalist, much of that time helping to oversee editorial pages in Montreal and editing other papers. In 1980, he and his wife, Marilyn, and their two sons settled in Maine, which his mother’s forebears had left decades earlier to try to make a better living.