Always Plan for Death and Other Events

Note:  This story describes a Catholic wake and funeral.  We writers always hear, “Write what you know.”  Being a Catholic church singer, I know Catholic funerals very well.

My name is Eunice O’Neill, and I died in a car crash five days ago.  Why am I still hanging around, you ask?  I don’t know.  I went through the whole thing:  the tunnel; the light; seeing all my dead relatives, two departed dogs and a hamster; everything.  Then they told me I would have to spend some more time down here because this is my Purgatory.  Eventually, they’ll let me in up there, but I don’t know how long that will take.  In the meantime, we have to make the best of things, so I decided to haunt my wake and my funeral.

One of the nice things about being dead is that you don’t have to walk around anymore because you can float!  Floating is fun, especially when you float right through someone because you can see all their insides when you do that.  I know that doesn’t sound like fun, but when you’re a ghost, you have to take what you can get.

I floated into my wake early, out of habit.  I forgot that there was no need to get a good seat because I don’t get tired anymore.  Of course, nobody was there yet, so I took some time to check everything out.  Hmmm.  Big wreath of flowers from Uncle Joe and Aunt Kate.  One, two, three, four ... twelve Mass cards.  All those Masses should cut down some of my Purgatory time.  Guestbook, holy cards ... right where they should be.  Some nice pictures of me from fifteen years ago.  So far, everything was in order.

I put off the most important thing until last because I didn’t want to face it:  how I looked in my coffin.  The coffin was fine.  It didn’t scream “cheap,” but it wasn’t extravagant, either.  It was somewhere in the middle, just like my family.

I had to know if I looked presentable, so I took a peek at myself.  If a ghost could scream, I would have done it.  There I was, wearing the one dress that I hated, and a pageboy wig that looked like the Dutch Boy on an old paint can.  It wasn’t even the right color.  My real hair was light auburn; the wig was dark auburn.  My sister Alice must have picked it out.  She never had an eye for color, but she was Mom’s favorite.  So, of course, who else should be in charge of my hair?

Tammy Faye Bakker must have done my makeup.  I looked like a $10 hooker.

You can imagine how I felt later when my sister Alice and her husband passed by my coffin.  Alice was crying, and she said, “She looks so peaceful and nice,” meaning me.  That idiot brother-in-law of mine answered with, “Yeah, she looks better than she did when she was alive.”  If I still had legs, I would have kicked that bastard right where it would hurt the most.

The funeral Mass the next morning was okay.  Only the family and a few friends came, but almost everyone I knew had been at the wake the night before, so that was okay.  Cousin Lizzie, who insists on singing at every family function, even though she has a voice like a foghorn in a hurricane, butchered the “Ave Maria.”  The organist managed to keep up with Lizzie, who doesn’t read music and can’t count, but I could see he was suffering through the whole number.  The regular church singer sang everything else, and he has an awesome set of pipes, so it wasn’t a total loss.

A lot of people said they would miss me because I was a lot of fun.  Maybe I’ll use my time here on earth haunting them.  It’s only right.

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Inspired by a prompt posted by author Rachel Christiansen on Facebook’s Writing Prompts Group on June 8, 2018:

Write about a funeral from the dead person’s viewpoint.

A Dilly of a Dildo

Dear Mother Hildegard:

As a good Catholic alum of your school, and according to the penance imposed on me by Father Riley in Confession on Saturday, I apologize for my behavior to your sister nuns last Wednesday.  I acknowledge that my actions put them in the occasion of sin by tempting them to impure thoughts that should never enter into the mind of any good Catholic woman, especially a nun.  Father Riley also made me say two Rosaries.  He did this after he was finished laughing so hard his nose was running.

In my defense, I would like to explain why I was walking down the street in front of the school on Wednesday carrying a huge inflatable penis.

 

To begin with, It never occurred to me that a nun would even know what that thing I carried represented.  I forgot that Sister Mary Eloise teaches biology, that she used to be an exotic dancer and that she likes to talk.

So okay, it all started on Wednesday morning when Angie Ricciardone and Lourdes Valdez decided at the last minute to give Mary Frances McBride a bachelorette party that night.  Mary Frances married Johnny Burke on Thursday.  The reason they didn’t get married on Saturday was that they could get a catering hall cheaper in the middle of the week.  Mary Frances and Johnny are both cheap as a $2 dress.  Mary Frances even wore her mother’s old wedding gown, which I have to admit did look pretty good after forty years of lying in a box in the closet.  Knowing Mary Frances, she’ll preserve it until it’s almost petrified then pass it on to the next female in the family who gets married.

Angie and I put ourselves in charge of decorations.  One of the places we hit was Eros’ Lair, which sells (excuse me for saying this to you, a nun) sex toys and other erotic paraphernalia.  I only knew about the place because other people had told me about it.  To this, I can swear.  We bought a few items, which I won’t mention to a nun, including the thing I mentioned earlier, which I had to tell you about because this whole story is about it.

I asked the clerk behind the counter how big it would be when inflated.  To show us, he took it out of its package, brought an air pump up from behind the counter and inflated it right there.  Holy Moly, that thing was HUGE!  Of course, we bought it.

By the way, if you’re worried about the effect of a giant you-know-what on Mary Frances, don’t.  She and Johnny have been going at each other for a year now, and he wasn’t her first by any means.  She knows what a man looks like.  It’s okay now, though.  She’s gone to Confession, and she got married in St. Brendan’s church, wearing white, figuring that if she wore white nobody would guess what a tramp she had been in former days.

Angie and I figured we had better bring the inflated hoo-hah out of the store as it was because none of us had an air pump and we weren’t about to blow that thing up ourselves.  We were in a hurry, so we took a shortcut.  That’s how we ended up on the corner across from the school with me carrying the big piece of junk and a group of startled nuns across the street.

Again, I apologize.  I have now done my entire penance, so it looks like I am forgiven, even though I smiled and waved at the group of nuns just for the fun of it, to make sure they saw me.  It was all a big joke, and I’m sorry I made Sister Bernadette faint.

Yours truly,

Annie McNeely

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Inspired by a picture prompt posted by Audrie Michelle on the Writing Prompts Group page on Facebook.

The (Ir)reverent Churchgoer

Have you ever had an urge to laugh when you are supposed to be quiet, thoughtful and well-behaved?  What about those times when something that is supposed to be serious and solemn goes wrong and, even though it wasn’t funny at the time, it’s hilarious when you think about it later?

Easter Vigil Mass in France.

A great place for things to go wrong, especially for Catholics, is at church, especially during a service that only comes once a year or so.  If that service contains a procession, watch out.  Processions are flubs waiting to happen.

Anything involving large crosses, books, flowers, statues, holy water or incense usually goes without a hitch.  The priests are pros at this.  Altar servers, readers, deacons and Eucharistic ministers just have to carry whatever they are supposed to carry and go where they are told, which usually means the same direction the priests are heading in.  No problem here.

The worst procession destroyers are lit candles and choir members.

Humankind first mastered fire over 1 million years ago.  Fire has enabled us to cook, keep ourselves warm, and make gold jewelry and swords and Crêpes Suzettes and all kinds of stuff.  It also burns everything, including us.  Nobody knows when humans began to make music.  The oldest musical instruments discovered by archaeologists are about 35,000 years old.  People had to sing a cappella before then, I guess.  Approximately 10 percent of our population is tone-deaf, but you don’t have to be Pavarotti to join an amateur church choir.  If you can sing the same pitches as the person standing next to you and hit most of the notes in your voice range, you’re in.

The easiest procession for a choir to demolish is the one that comes at the end of the evening service on Holy Thursday (Maundy Thursday to you Episcopalians).  This involves the choir chanting the old hymn Pange Lingua, either in Latin or in English, while processing out of the church and into a smaller church or chapel, often down a flight of stairs.  The choir is followed by the priests, deacons, readers, Eucharistic ministers, altar servers and congregation members.

Have you ever tried to walk down a flight of stairs while reading Latin words in a hymnal and singing at the same time?  If you don’t have to do it, don’t.  In addition, if your voice is the strongest one in the choir, don’t stop singing, even if you are about to tumble down the stairs and land on your face.  If you stop singing, everyone else will stop, too, even if you have warned them ahead of time not to stop singing if you do.  I know this from experience.  Being a former opera singer, I have a voice that can take the paint off the walls in every building within a two-block radius.  At age 70, I also have a hard time keeping my balance on stairwells.  Inevitably, I have to stop singing during the Holy Thursday procession downstairs.  Inevitably, the choir stops singing, too, because nobody else wants to take the lead.  When I start again, they do, too.

That should give me a sense of power, but it doesn’t.  It gives a sense of wanting to shoot all the choir members with paint balls.  You can’t do that in church, though.

See that guy second to the right who is staring at the woman?  He's the one who's tone-deaf.

Last year’s Holy Thursday procession was even more discombobulated.  As usual, I tried to lead the choir out the front door of the church and downstairs.  After I had gotten all the way down the stairs and halfway to the destination, I turned around and noticed that only one or two others had followed me.  I started wildly gesticulating and shouting for people to come.  Somebody went back upstairs, then came back down and told me that we had to go back upstairs because Father K____, the pastor, wanted us to go another way.  We went back upstairs, and there was Father K_____, gesturing and hissing in a stage whisper that we were processing UP THE AISLE instead!  We began the Pange Lingua again, walked up the aisle, turned left, then went through the SIDE door, downstairs and into the smaller basement church.  This would have been fine, except that I was walking right in front of Father K____, who wasn’t prepared for my usual hesitation on the steps and bumped into my back.

AWKWARD!

This year I stayed upstairs and the organist led the choir members in the procession.  By this time the route was established, with the organist being a younger guy who can still run up and down stairs, so everything worked.

Lit candles are rarely dangerous when confined to the people walking down the aisle.  They know to be careful.  If you set a priest on fire, however accidental it might be, you will never live it down.  Like Cain in the Bible, you will carry a mark for the rest of your life, or at least until you move out of the parish.  It gets interesting, though, during services such as the Easter Vigil Mass, where everyone in the church has a candle, and they are lit, one by one.  It’s a really cool sight, because the church is dark when this is going on.

There was a lot of excitement in our church last year, when someone in one of the pews set fire to another congregant’s hair.  Maybe there was a story there, maybe not.  Most likely, the amateur arsonist was just an absent-minded clod.  Nobody was hurt, but it put a damper on the proceedings.

Then there was the time, many years ago, when someone sitting near me during an Easter Vigil Mass dripped candle wax onto my raincoat.  I guess I should have appreciated the effort to improve my wardrobe, but I didn’t.  I was up in the choir loft with the rest of the choir, and I didn’t notice the mess until later, or it would have been a memorable Easter for the soprano section that year.

Tranquility, at last!

Ten Signs that You are a Catholic of "A Certain Age"

1.  While saying the Rosary, your mind wanders and you get mixed up counting the prayers on the beads.  You say an extra Hail Mary at the end of the decade, just to make sure you got all ten of them in.

2.  You once told a priest what you thought was a pretty big sin in the confessional and were both relieved and surprised when he only gave you a penance of five Our Fathers and didn’t tell you that you were going to burn in hell for what you did, which is what your mother said when she caught you at it.

3.  You still have your old First Communion picture but you never show it to anyone because people laugh at it.

4.  You express exasperation by raising your eyes and hands to the ceiling and making the Sign of the Cross.  If you are Italian, you accompany this by saying, “Madonna Mia!”

5.  You bring your dog to the blessing of the animals on the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi and pray that he'll behave (the dog, not St. Francis).

6.  You have a go-to saint for just about anything:  St. Francis of Assisi for your pet(s); St. Anthony of Padua for finding lost items; St. Jude for impossible cases; etc.  You carry little prayer cards around in case you have a sudden urgent need for help from a heavenly specialist.

7.  You had a little glow-in-the-dark angel statue in your bedroom when you were a kid, and another little statue of the Infant of Prague.  You prayed to your guardian angel every night before getting into bed, and you gave your guardian angel a name.  (Mine was "Nina.")

8.  You can still remember, word for word, some of the questions and answers from the Baltimore Catechism.

9.  You can sing “O Salutaris Hostia,” “Tantum Ergo,” “Ave Verum Corpus,” “Panis Angelicus” and an entire Gregorian mass in flawless Latin, but you have a sketchy idea, at best, of what the words mean.

10. You still wonder if the nuns who taught you in school had to shave their heads.

 

And she's really tired of being asked that question.

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Have you ever thought about opera and wondered if it could actually be entertaining?

No?

Well, if you want some good laughs at the art of opera and the world of the people who perform it, there is my new book, Opera for People Who Don't Like It.

Life in My Corner

When most people think of The Bronx, they picture rundown, dangerous neighborhoods with drug dealers, junkies and gangs shooting at each other and hitting everyone else, in between selling crack to first graders, beating up old ladies and scaring the hell out of everyone.  They picture a borough populated with thugs and hookers and dropouts, with a few terrified normal working class people here and there.

Remember The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe?  If you've read the book, you'll know to what I am referring.  If you have not read it, please do.  It's a great novel. 

Okay.  There are some areas of The Bronx that are not so fine, but the same can be said for almost everywhere else on earth.  Why should The Bronx be any different?

Oh, but we have our nice areas, too.  Yes, we do.  I ought to know.

A Friendly Neighborhood

I live in a section of The Bronx called Kingsbridge.  It used to be an Irish neighborhood, and some of the Irish are still around, most of them older people.  Now it is heavily Hispanic, mostly Dominican.  It's a friendly neighborhood.  I am used to being called “Mami” by everyone from church choir members to the man who sells flavored ices on the street on hot summer days.  I’m one of his steady customers.

There are only a few Italians in the neighborhood and, in true Italian fashion, most of them live almost next door to each other, on the same two streets.

Someone once told me that New York City cops love to be assigned to our local precinct because so little happens here.  No, we are not completely crime free, but we're pretty close to it, as big city neighborhoods go.  I suspect that one reason for this might be the two huge churches, one Anglican Episcopalian and one Roman Catholic, that stand on the same block on Kingsbridge Avenue, reminding potential evildoers of where they will end up if they rob a corner grocery store and get killed right afterward before they get a chance to repent.  To add strength to the message, the Catholic church has pre-recorded bells that ring at certain times.  If the sight of two giant churches doesn't put the fear of God into a sinner, those bells will.

The neighborhood is mostly Roman Catholic, which isn't surprising in a Latino/Irish neighborhood.  The result is that the Catholic church, The Church of St. John/Visitation, has a huge congregation, most of whom don't know each other, although you'd never know that because of the size of the crowd and the volume of the chatter on the sidewalk in front of the church after mass.

Sunset on Kingsbridge Avenue.  Notice the two churches.

Catholics are required to go to mass on Sundays and special Holy Days.  Those are the rules.  A lot of Catholics don't pay attention to the rules, especially when they involve getting up early on a Sunday morning.  Special days like Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, Easter and Christmas are an exception.  Many Catholics who never open the doors of a church at any other time will show up religiously on those occasions.  The population inside the church grows exponentially on those days, as does the crowd on the sidewalk after mass.  I have tried to walk through that crowd.  The uncharitable thoughts that run through my mind when it takes me five minutes to walk a few feet, including trying to avoid photobombing several people, are not the kind that a person should be thinking in front of a church.

​

The Anglican/Episcopal church, two doors over from St. John/Visitation, is the Church of the Mediator.  Being an Episcopal parish in a working class Roman Catholic neighborhood means that their congregation is small and they don't have much money.  They have to raise money in other ways beside the usual collection baskets, raffles, bake sales and flea markets.  As a result, there is always something going on over there.  They have a farmer's market on Sundays.  They host martial arts classes, concerts and plays.  Their basement is the local voting precinct.  These things give the Catholics from two doors over plenty of reason to visit the Episcopal church and spend their money, which makes the Episcopalians happy.​

A few years back, the Church of the Mediator sold a chunk of their property to a real estate developer, who built some luxury condos.  Apparently, nobody told the developer that building expensive luxury housing in a Dominican neighborhood, next door to a church, two blocks from a noisy elevated subway line and an easy walk to corner bodegas, a couple of donut shops, several dollar stores, a couple of Dunkin Donuts, a McDonald's, a couple of gas stations, three diners, at least two Caribbean restaurants, a Korean greengrocer, who knows how many hair salons and manicure places and a couple of Chinese variety stores -- places that sort of scream "working class ethnic neighborhood" -- would not be a good idea.  So who moved in?  A clinic, a medical imaging place, etc.

The neighborhood is temporarily saved from being gentrified, which is fine with me.

View of the Elevated Subway Tracks