RIP Mary

Friday July 13, 2007 would have been my great aunt Mary's 90th birthday. Instead it was the day of her funeral, so most of my family gathered in her home town of Providence, Rhode Island. A far as deaths go, Mary's was the good kind. Her body really should have stopped working 7 months ago, but she was a stubborn woman and hung on too long. Her death spared her further suffering. But her funeral was tragic.

When Mary's sister Agnes died in May, a few days before her memorial service, I wrote the following.

...religion tends to steal the deceased's thunder at the memorial service. I don't know what the plans are yet for Agnes' memorial, but she wasn't a religious person and I hope I don't have to sit through a bunch of Catholic crap just because her family is religious. She considered herself an agnostic ("I don't say there's no god. I just say that I don't know, because I don't."), but I would call her an atheist because she lived life without any belief in god. For a woman from her era, coming from her ultraconservative and ultraCatholic family, hers is a pretty impressive position by any name. The worst thing about religious funerals is how they manage to spend so much time talking about god and reciting ancient text passages instead of talking about the person that died. I don't want to be numbed into submission by boring chants and the empty consolation of "God's purpose." Agnes had an interesting life and I hope we take the opportunity to talk about her and not try to force the occasion into a belief system she rejected.

I got exactly what I hoped for for Agnes. Her family and friends gathered and talked about her, free of religious distraction. I realized that while Agnes and Mary had been around my whole life and I had gotten to know them in terms of their personalities, I really didn't know much about their lives. It was really special to hear people talk about what Agnes meant to them, and to learn about the work she had done. We shared memories for a couple hours, then shared a wonderful meal. I left it feeling very good about the occasion, with a tinge of sadness that it took her death to learn so much about her, and with a renewed general appreciation of life.

Mary's funeral was everything I hoped Agnes' wouldn't be, and worse. We sat through a Catholic funeral mass, then a brief blessing at the cemetery, then a reception. None of her friends or family stood to speak about her at any point. The only words delivered about her were in a homily delivered by a priest of whom Mary was quite fond. I found his message bizarre and despicable. As priorities go, remembering Mary was clearly a distant second behind bolstering Catholic dogma and tribalism. And his remembrances were tasteless by any standards, even in the context of his first priority. It was just really weird and sad.

He opened by reflecting on the gospel reading, which was from some letter of Paul to somebody, the Corinthians or Thessalonians or the Czechoslovakians maybe. The priest reflected fondly on how Paul's letter included an extended taunt towards some anthropomorphism of "death". You see, for "all of us believers," everything changed 2,000 years ago thanks to Jesus, and death could no longer end our lives. Thus, Mary's death was a happy occasion because she's passed on through the portal of death to a happy afterlife.

The priest was just getting warmed up. He moved on to a discussion of how important religion was to Mary. He spoke of how she came to him for confession (a Catholic ritual where people tell the priest their sins and the priest offers them forgiveness), but first she told him that her girl-friends giggled at the idea of going to confession. The priest proceeded to chide any of Mary's girl-friends who were in attendance for such crass impertinence. He then told how Mary's health problems started when she was hit by a car while walking to church. And he spoke about how in her last few months she voiced concerns that "she was in the wrong line," meaning that she was worried about going to go to hell when she died. He assured us that he has no doubts that Mary is in heaven and hoped that she was saving him a seat.

Here I'd like to take a moment here to tell the story of Mary's last few years as I understand them. Mary was walking across a street, and was hit by a car driven by an old woman. After that accident she never fully recovered, which isn't especially surprising for a woman in her late 80's even though she had been in fairly good health. She had a suffered a series of falls and other health setbacks until she ended up in an assisted living facility following several severe heart attacks. The last time I saw her she was in a bed, weighing probably 80 pounds, and too weak to lift her own arms. In spite of the rather severe physical trauma she endured, I never heard her, or heard of her, complain about bodily pain. But I know that she lived her last months in complete terror that she was going to hell. I watched her break down in tears at the certain doom that awaited her as my mother and aunt and uncle reassured her that she was bound for heaven.

So to recap the priest's homily:

• Death is so powerless to defeat us.
• It is one thing to use the mythology of an afterlife to offer comfort to the bereaved (I don't approve of making up lies, but I at least understand it), but to go on and on about what an impotent loser "death" is was just pathetic. Actually pathetic isn't the right word. It would have been pathetic if he was right - if "death" actually had been vanquished and he was going off on his defeated foe. But death had very clearly just won a battle, so I don't even know what word to for someone talking shit after they get their ass kicked . Insane? Delusional? (...Catholic.) Thanks asshole, but the abstract concept you're taunting just pwned this nice old lady. He's in ur base killin ur d00dz.
• And by the way, only believers don't have to worry about death. (The rest of you can rot in hell!)
• I'm sure it was wonderful for those in my family who know that I'm an atheist to be forcefully reminded that all the victories over death and happy eternal life don't apply to me. The only possible positive aspect (and I'm pretty sure it isn't a good thing, but for now I'll just concede that it could be) of their baseless belief system is that it might offer some deluded comfort at a time of death. The priest made sure to neutralize that positive aspect by emphasizing that all the happy heavenly flowers and kittens are only for people made eligible by their uncritical acceptance of preposterous fairy tales as complete truth. Did it never occur to him that there might be non-Catholics at Mary's funeral? If not, he's a thoughtless rube. If so, he's an insensitive prick. I don't see any other options.
  
• Trying to get to church is what killed Mary.
• I'm not saying Mary died because of religion (yet). I realize she could just as easily have been walking to the store or to a library or whatever. But the way I see it, she had no business walking around alone. Everyone talks about how the driver who hit her was to blame (and she certainly bears plenty of blame), but there's a reason why people help old ladies cross the street. An able and alert person might have been able to avoid getting hit. Mary was a stubborn woman and cared passionately about her Church, and it was that pride that was her tragic downfall. She needed to get to Church and she was going to go. From my point of view, it was pretty tasteless of the priest to mention this the way he did. Given that he was addressing a congregation of Mary's family and friends, he might not have proudly mentioned that she was recklessly risking life and limb to go see him. And given that his unstated but obvious top priority was to put more asses in the pews on Sundays, I'm not sure that this was a great selling point. "Come to Church and get blindsided by moving vehicles!"
  
• And what's with Mary's jackass friends who didn't encourage her to go tell her darkest secrets to a wonderful man like me!? Aren't they a bunch of losers! Oh and if you're here, make sure you start coming to see me too!
  
• Again, this is just totally classless both from a perspective of common decency in a time of loss, and from the perspective of someone trying to take advantage of a cynical recruitment opportunity. What on earth was wrong with this guy?

Needless to say everyone at the funeral sat there mouth-agape as this deranged lunatic delivered his diatribe. At the reception afterwards, we clustered around the more sensitive people, consoling them, all of us mutually assuring each other that he was a lunatic to be ignored. Some angrily denounced him and threatened to boycott his services.

Oh wait, it was the exact opposite of that. Everyone loved it. They all thought he was wonderful (with my baby sister the only exception I'm aware of) and "definitely understood now why Mary loved that priest!" I'm left to assume that within the rickety mental framework of the Catholic mindset, that kind of unfounded, insufferable condescension is inspirational.

As reception was winding down, my grandfather (Mary's brother) told us that "Mary certainly enjoyed this day." Setting aside my quibble over verb tense, the reality is that Mary (just like Agnes) planned her own services ahead of time, so that was the way she wanted it to happen. She must have requested that mean old priest specifically. She might have even specified that she didn't want anyone to deliver a eulogy, perhaps because she was so convinced she was going to hell that she didn't think anyone had anything good to say about her. So, maybe everyone thought the day was so wonderful because it was what Mary really would have wanted. But that it was Mary's wishes doesn't make me think more highly of the homily or the whole affair; it makes me sad that she would have wanted such an awful memorial.

So this is where I say that religion might well have ruined Mary's life. She was a wonderful, thoughtful and caring lady who was completely taken in by religion. Despite being a very attractive in her youth and very sociable, she never married. There's nothing at all wrong with being single, but in her case I strongly suspect that misplaced notions of Catholic virtue kept her from a more happy life. And maybe she had various personality characteristics that would have manifested themselves in other negative ways if not for the prodding from religion. Maybe something other than confession would have alienated her from her friends. Maybe some other cause would have given her stubborn reason to cross the street on her own. Maybe something other than Catholic mythology rendered abusive tirades from celibate old men an irresistible point of attraction. Maybe or maybe not. I can't firmly conclude that religion ruined her life. But it certainly ruined her death. Her last months were filled with needless anguish, and her funeral was a lifeless train wreck of her own design. Given her intense fear of the end, it is ironic that only death finally offered her relief from the religious madness driving that fear.

Rest in peace, Mary.