Chapter 1

Countdown to  9-11

The man laid out in the casket doesn’t look at all like my dad. The navy blue pinstriped suit belongs to Dad, the maroon tie, the rosary beads wrapped around his fingers, the scapular tucked inside his pocket.  The face doesn’t belong to him, waxen features, too perfectly composed and serene.  What happened to the furrows across his forehead, the twinkle in his pale blue eyes, the Cheshire cat smile?

            We buried Dad on September 11, 2001.

            Friday, September 7th, four days before the attack on America: I awoke from a strange dream. Dad sat on the glider of our old cement porch in Pittsburgh and held a newborn infant in his hands.

            As I pondered the meaning of the dream, I noticed my answering machine blinking with a message.

            My sister Dorothy’s voice quavered as she told me Dad had passed away early that morning. She said my youngest sister, Bobbi, flew in from Minnesota the night Dad died. Dorothy didn’t call me because she knew it was my first week of school. Besides, Dad had had so many false alarms.

He died from bone cancer ten days after his seventy-fourth birthday.

Did Dad come to me in the dream to tell me he was gone? Was this his way of saying good-bye? Did he want me to know that even though he was gone, hope for the future goes on?

            Dad left behind June, his wife and soul-mate,  and eight children.

            Aged 54, the oldest child, I lived the farthest away in San Diego, California. Three thousand miles separated me from my family members in southwestern Pennsylvania.

            A month before he passed away, my father told me, “You’re the most like me.”

            He bequeathed to me his brown hair, dimples, high forehead, and youthful appearance. We are both adventurous and sensitive. He gave me confidence that I could accomplish whatever I wanted to do, that I was just as good as anyone else.

            Dorothy, aged 52, came next—the first of many invaders who stole my parents’ attention.

            We both agreed that Mum spoiled our brother, John, now 51. He was the only one she breast-fed.

            Patrick would have been in his late forties if he had survived. He died a few days after his birth.

            Phillip, aged 46, had a hard act to follow—his brother in heaven. By then Mum had turned mean, moody, and unpredictable. My grandmother called Phillip a holy terror. He barged around leaving a path of destruction in his wake. Once he jumped on the drain faucet of the water heater to see what would happen. Surveying the flooded cellar, Dad snarled at him. “Can’t you do anything right?”

            Alice, aged 43, my favorite sister, tried to keep peace in the family—an impossible task.

            Mark, aged 42, had pointy ears like the devil and often acted like one. He told me when he was a kid, he waited until his sister, Roberta, now aged 41, fell asleep. Then he poked her in the bum with a pin.

            We called her Bobbi. Her two front teeth stuck out. Before he died, Dad told me, “If I could do it all over again, I would get Bobbi’s teeth fixed.”

            Eddie, aged 35, surprised my mother, coming along five years after her previous child. Out came the crib and the diaper pail again.

            Mum surprised her mother, also, in the wee hours after the Fourth of July. “They thought I was a tumor. I only weighed five pounds. They carried me downstairs and told my sister, Bernice, ‘We have a surprise for you.’ They dressed me in clothes they took off the baby dolls.”

            At the age of two, Mum lost her mother to “cancer of the womb.” Her father died after she turned twelve, leaving her an orphan. Mamie, her oldest sister, dropped out of school to take care of her.

***

            When Dorothy told me Dad died, I felt like an orphan, too. Shock and numbness hit me in a heavy wave. I dialed the phone numbers like a robot, reserving an early flight to Pittsburgh for the next morning and arranging for a substitute teacher to cover my fourth grade class until I returned.

The full impact of my loss didn’t hit me until the afternoon. As soon as my students left, I crumbled over the reading table and howled out my grief and pain, sobbing and gasping until I couldn’t breathe. Numbness returned.

            My friend, Diane, who taught third grade in the room next to me, heard me sob and scream. Twenty minutes later, I opened her door. She hugged me. “I heard you crying,” she said, “I figured that’s what you needed to do right now.”

            Back in my classroom, I gathered up the wads of wet tissue strewn across the table and stumbled home to pack for an early morning flight.

            Saturday, September 8th, three days before the attacks: Dorothy and her husband, George, picked me up at the Pittsburgh Airport at 6AM. After breakfast, groceries, and a nap at their house, George drove me to Alice’s house in the rich farmlands of Greene County, while Dorothy went to the beauty shop. 

            My sister, Alice, and her husband Mark, lived just down the road from Mum and Dad. We hugged long and hard.

            Alice’s neighbor, Suzie, carried in a tray of cold cuts, pickles and lettuce, the first of many.

            Alice recommended I stay in her craft shop instead with Mum and my brother, Mark. She knew how much I hated cigarette smoke. “Lots of people will be smoking up there. The shop has air conditioning, too. I can take up a cot, later.”

“Thanks Alice. How are you doing?”

“I’m holding up okay, still in shock. How about you? Our brothers and my Mark are all down at the cemetery digging a grave for Daddy.”

“Do you think they would let me help?”

“I think it’s a guy thing.

My shoulders slumped as I wheeled my suitcase up the ramp to the craft shop Dad  built for Alice during his last good year before the bone cancer stole his energy. They worked together on several projects. Dad did the woodwork. Alice painted.

* * *

I thought of the care package they sent me the Christmas I turned fifty and suicidal. A huge box arrived during that bleak week before New Year’s Day while panic attacked, and medication side effects threatened to do me in. For nearly an hour, I unpacked craft items wrapped in newspaper, a welcome distraction from my mood disorder. My brother, Mark, made a huge wooden Noah’s Ark box with several nooks and crannies for the wooden animals Dad carved. Dad also made wooden train cars with wooden wheels that rolled. I had to smile in spite of my distraught state of mind. My students will love spending their bonus bucks on them next week. My second graders earn the bucks for good behavior and study habits. I still have the wooden whale and snake, a colorful jigsaw puzzle of marine animals, and one train car, next to Dad’s picture on a special shelf at home. My grandfather operated a crane at P&LE, Pennsylvania and Lake Erie Railroad Line. Dad took me there once when I was four years old. My brother, John, got upset years later when he read the words to a song I had written about the experience. He never got a chance to see Grandpa at the train station.

I remember my visit.

* * *

“Get dressed, Betty. We’re going to the train yard to see Grandpa at work today.” Dad kissed me on the cheek and returned to the kitchen.

I jumped into my navy blue pedal pushers, white sailor blouse with red trim, and pulled on my black pointy toed cowboy boots.

Mummy fixed me a bowl of oatmeal. “Have fun!”

“Why aren’t you coming?”

“Dottie and Johnny are too little to go.” She put six glass baby bottles in a pan of boiling water to sterilize, for one year old Johnny. Two year old Dottie sat on the floor and banged two aluminum pans together.

Dad and I climbed into the old blue Buick. As he drove us to the train yard, we sang, “I’ve been working on the railroad, all the livelong day.” We passed by all the passenger trains into a noisy yard in back with freight cars full of coal and other heavy items. Stinky black smoke belched from a locomotive. Coal rattled as the engineer stoked the engine. Metal pipes clanged. Men shouted and hammered.

“There’s your grandpa.” Dad pointed up in the air to a man in the tiny cab of a huge crane.

“Wow.” I tilted my neck to see him, shivering just thinking about how high he was.

Grandpa waved and pulled a lever inside the cab. Like a prehistoric monster, the jaws of the crane opened and poised over a stack of steel rails from J & L Mill. They picked up a long girder and swung it over to the top of an empty freight car. Slowly Grandpa lowered it into the car and released the mighty jaws as gently as a cat carries a kitten in her mouth without leaving a mark. After he filled the car, Grandpa climbed down out of the cab, took off his pale blue railroad cap, and wiped the sweat from his face.

“How are you doing, little Betty? Come give Grandpa a kiss.” He picked me up, hugged me, tossed me into the air, and gently set me down. “Would you like to come up into the cab with me?”

My eyes widened. He took my hand and we climbed up. I sat on his lap and touched each button and lever, imagining I could control the huge beast.

A loud whistle blew. All the racket of the rail yard stopped. “Lunch time.” Grandpa grabbed his black metal lunch box and unlatched it. He pulled out a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. Two thick slices of buttered homemade bread held a slab of ham, slices of tomato from Grandma’s garden, and iceberg lettuce. “Your grandma put in some extra oatmeal cookies for you, Betty.”

Dad opened a small brown paper bag with two sandwiches made with white Wonder Bread, baloney, oleo, and Heinz ketchup. We wolfed them down, devoured the Hostess Twinkies and crunched on shiny red apples. I saved Grandma’s cookies until last, savoring every morsel, licking the crumbs from my fingers.

I felt so proud of Grandpa operating such a powerful machine, proud to be old enough to visit him, proud to be the “apple of my dad’s eyes,” and the center of attention. This was soon to change as our family grew and I had to settle for whatever attention I could grab. 

***

            Now Grandpa was gone and so was Dad. I put my suitcase down next to the workbench in Alice’s craft shop. A layer of dust covered her tools. She and my brother, Mark, had spent all of their time caring for Dad during his final six months—no time for sawing, hammering, or painting. No time for her family, no time for herself.

            Alice told me later, “He was my best friend. My husband knew I had to do it.”

            As I left the shop, my brother, Mark, pulled up in a white pick-up. “Hi Betty, we’re down at the graveyard digging Daddy’s grave. Would you like to join us?”

            He told me Sam had offered to dig the grave for him. “What kind of son would I be if I didn’t help dig my own father’s grave?” he joked. And so all the brothers came along.

            As I grabbed my daypack, water, and a snack, sunbonnet, and jacket, I didn’t know what I expected to find at the Braddock Cemetery. Perhaps a heavy air of sadness as we shoveled the moist black Pennsylvania dirt into a mound? Tears? Sad stories? Long faces? But I had forgotten the dark humor of my family, humor that helped them survive the bad times. Like the month before when I called home and asked Mum how Dad was doing.

            “He’s down at the graveyard supervising your brother, Mark, and his friend Sam digging a new grave. I told him not to fall in.” She giggled.

            My sisters and mother played a card game of Crazy Eights on the couch next to Dad’s bed the night he headed to his Maker. He didn’t want anyone to make a fuss. They hoped Dad could hear them and take comfort in the warmth of their laughter and jokes.

            After he retired from delivering mail for the Post Office in Pittsburgh, Dad became involved with the tiny Graysville community where he and Mum purchased an old farm several years before. Mrs. Fletcher, down the road, recruited him to take her place as the school bus driver. Then he took over the job of sexton in charge of the cemetery.

            Moving to the country had a positive effect on Mum’s mood swings, and so did the hormones she took. Once Dad confided to me on a trip home from the airport, “I know what it means to love my wife again.” 

            These thoughts went through my mind as Mark drove me a mile and a quarter down the gravel country lane, the day after Dad died. We passed the wooden sign Dad made several years ago, “Braddock Cemetery”  He once showed me old documents for the graveyard with some of the  inhabitants dating back to Civil War days. Now the inscriptions on the  marble tombstones are gone, washed smooth from air pollution, keeping their secrets of the past.

            When Mark’s truck stopped by a set of pebbly steps with a rusty handrail, I thought I had arrived at a party instead of a somber grave digging. The door to Sam’s truck stood wide open. Country music blared from the radio. Lawn chairs circled the rectangular hole in the ground. All my brothers were there, John, Phillip, Mark, and Eddie. Alice’s husband, also named Mark, had taken over Dad’s job of sexton. A red cooler held sandwiches, soft drinks, and sweet snacks. The guys laughed and talked.

            Phillip, an engineer, stood down in the six foot hole, muttering about the corners of the grave. “If I don’t make them perfect, Dad will come back and haunt me.”

            I climbed down to join my brother. “They look great to me, Phil.”

            He smiled and handed me a shovel. With my foot on top of the blade, I pressed down into the earth. I had watched Dad dig, dozens of times, preparing soil for a spring garden. We grew vegetables alongside our house in Pittsburgh. Dad shoved red bricks into the ground along the perimeter of the plot to hold in the soil. Each day I ran out to see how high the feathery tops of the carrots had grown. Dad showed me how to dig deep with the trowel to get out the whole root. The radishes burned my tongue, but I liked their curly leaves, rosy red skins, and crisp white interiors.

            The smooth wooden shaft of the shovel slid through my hands as I dumped the earth from Dad’s grave into a corrugated iron bucket. Pebbles plunked into the pail. The second shovelful landed with a dull thud. After the tenth, I stopped and climbed up the cold metal rungs of the ladder, the ladder I would have shunned in my rock climbing days. My spirit wanted to continue, but I heeded my doctor’s advice to avoid repetitive movements to prevent another fibromyalgia flare.

            There was something profoundly healing about digging Dad’s grave. My sore shoulders, and blisters on my hand, after my token ten shovelfuls, allowed me to feel connected to my father in a way that is hard to explain. As if I were doing one last thing for him. As if he were sitting on a branch in the nearby elm tree, red baseball cap covering his short white hair. Sitting there and pointing and giving suggestions, smiling, and approving of our efforts. As if in a dream, I shoveled the dirt into the bucket, going back in time like the layers of soil, clay, rocks, and pebbles, each with a story to tell. Soon my father would be part of this earth, as in the Ash Wednesday ceremonies of my childhood.

            In today’s mechanized, sanitized funerals, we miss an opportunity for a sacred ritual. A few years before, I had stayed behind and sat in my car after the service of a friend, to keep watch on the burial. I expected to see men come out and lower her coffin  by hand, and dump shovelfuls of soil into her grave. Instead, I was shocked to see a garish yellow crane lower her casket amid puffs of foul black smoke. An orange bulldozer pushed the mound of dirt unceremoniously into the hole.

            “Remember man, that thou art dust, and into dust thou shall return.”

***

            After we finished digging Dad’s grave, we drove back to Alice’s for supper. Mum, Bobbie, Phil, Mark, Alice, her Mark, and I had pork sausage made from Alice’s pig. She told me the plan for the next few days. Tomorrow and Monday, Dad would be laid out at the funeral home. Tuesday would be the funeral mass and service at the cemetery.

            I remember Dad asking me about it in early August, about a month before. “Do you think two days will be enough time for the viewing?” We had relatives scattered all over the country.

            I was surprised the way Dad managed his impending death. He propped himself up on a chair and went over the chart listing all the medications from the Hospice nurse, asking my sister, Alice, questions about dosage or time. If I were in Dad’s shoes, knowing I was dying, I would feel so hopeless, I wouldn’t give a damn about the medication schedule. He seemed to take an interest in all the details, choosing the coffin, the burial plot, the mortuary, as if he were planning a party and wanted everything to go right.

            Sunday, September 9th, two days before the attacks: When I arrived at the funeral home Sunday afternoon, with my mother and seven siblings for the immediate family viewing, I almost expected Dad to sit up in the coffin and start joking with us. When I mentioned this to Alice, she told me she had a dream about him doing just that the night before.

            Dad had been very busy the night he died. Like my grandmother years ago, he came to me in a dream. He sat on the metal glider on the cement back porch of our old Pittsburgh house. In his arms he held a newborn baby swaddled in blankets.

            He also came to Dorothy’s husband, George, in a dream. George stood on one side of a busy highway and my dad on the other.

            Tears ran down the cheeks of my brother, Philip. “Dad would be ashamed of me, crying in public like a baby.”

            “Phil, Dad told me he cried when his own father died. He wouldn’t be ashamed of you. You made the corners of his grave perfect squares when we were out there digging yesterday. He would be proud of you.”

            Comforted but not convinced, Philip blew his nose into a rumpled white handkerchief. “I knew he would come back and haunt me if I didn’t make them just right.”

I excused myself, fled into the restroom, and dried some tears of my own. When I came out, my brother, John, took me aside. 

“What’s wrong with me, Betty?  I thought I would cry my heart out when Dad died. I haven’t shed a tear. I must be a bad son.”

“No you’re not, John. You helped dig Dad’s grave yesterday. You’re probably in shock. It’s part of the grieving process . You’re a good son.”

            We stood there, all eight children, making sick jokes and forcing laughs. Betty, Dorothy, Johnny, Philip, Mark, Alice, Roberta, and Eddie. Showing emotion was not our way of dealing with loss.

            Alice’s five-year-old grandson, Noah, had no such compunction. He headed straight for the coffin and tried to climb in and talk to “Pap-Pap.”

            I could feel Dad’s strong presence in the room, but not in the casket—the cold, ashen-faced, embalmed husk of what used to be my father. Yet I think he would have approved of the mortician’s work.          When Dad delivered mail for the post office years before, he often had lunch with Mr. Jones at the mortuary across the street from St. George Church in Pittsburgh. Sometimes he helped him hoist a body onto the slab. He freaked out Alice’s son, Zack, with stories about the embalming process. So at Dad’s casket,  Zack had to ask the mortician, “Did you sew his lips together?”

            “No. We do it different these days.”

            We laughed.

            Besides spending time on the kneeler next to Dad’s coffin, I perused the stand with the guest registry and holy cards. I chose one of St. Francis with birds and animals, reminding me of how much my dad enjoyed nature.           

            After the awkward two hour family viewing, we went to Alice’s house and devoured all the potato salad, coleslaw, cold cuts, buns, potato chips, soft drinks, and desserts the neighbors had left us.

Audrey, Ed’s wife, and I did the dishes. Still jet lagged, I retreated to Alice’s bed to rest, Sleep evaded me. The murmur of voices brought me comfort.

            In the evening, we returned to the mortuary for two more hours to greet mourners—Dad’s friends from Pittsburgh and Graysville and a few relatives.

            I felt embarrassed by my mother’s white  pantsuit. Doesn’t she know you’re supposed to wear dark colors? She smiled and greeted people as if she were at a party. Reclusive, she doesn’t go out much, and soaked up all the attention.

            I wore a long cotton dress of pale aqua, the color of the sea, and a necklace of worry dolls. My friend, Barbara, put them around my neck one night at a music group and said, “This are yours if you promise to wear it.” 

            She had bought it on a trip to South America. The satin strands matched my blouse with my favorite colors of lavender, navy blue, and light blue. A trio of three inch long dolls dressed in cotton blouses and skirts, hung at the center. Colorful beads and ribbons were woven into the rest of the necklace. I doubted if I could break my long time habit of not wearing any jewelry. To my surprise, they gave me comfort and strength. I called them my little friends and put them around my neck whenever I faced situations where I felt nervous or insecure.

            People were shocked when they saw my blue eyes, high forehead, and Cheshire cat smile, the spittin’ image of my father. I barely needed to introduce myself. “I’m Betty, the oldest, from California.”

            For such a humble man, he had a huge turnout of people to pay their last respects, express condolences, and share anecdotes with us.

            In many ways Dad was kinder to strangers than to his own family but we had made our amends during this last year of his life. Happy to have the closeness and acceptance I had always wanted, I tried to let go of the sadness and anger of days past and to cherish the last six months we had together. I treasured the stories of his life, his pride in the family, his readiness to let go of life and move on to another realm. I guess death has a way of  giving us a different perspective on life.

            One night he said, “I’m sorry you have to see me like this. I want you to remember me the way I was.”

            “Dad, you taught me how to live. Now you’re teaching me how to die.”

            My last image of Dad alive was hoisting himself up beside his wheel-chair, standing proud, with his big grin, waving his arm from side to side like a windshield wiper from the elbow up.

            He had just told a morphine-muddled joke about an elephant. Dorothy’s husband, George, drove me down the gravel road from the farm to the airport. That night a massive thunder and lighting storm cleared the sultry air.

            Raindrops mingled with my tears.

***     

            We left the mortuary around nine. My brother, Mark, drove me up to Ed and Audrey’s house where my brother, John, from New York, and his family were staying. His daughter, Hannah, and Alice’s son, Zach joined us. We gathered in the living room and admired Audrey’s collection of animal skulls on the wall. Mama Cat curled up on my lap and soothed my spirit with her soft purr and silky fur.

            Outside, we ate hot dogs and toasted marshmallows around the campfire. Rose, their dog, cuddled next to me looking for a handout. Petting her eased my sadness.

            Beer flowed freely during our Irish wake, as we laughed and shared stories from our life with Dad.

***

            Hours later, back in the craft shop, sleep did not come easily. When I finally drifted off, a thunderstorm woke me. Bolts of lightning split the night sky. Thunder crashed and smashed in the heavens. It rained so hard I peed on the wooden porch instead of out in the field. The next morning I told Alice and asked her for a bucket.

            Monday, September 10th, the day before 911: We went to the mortuary after lunch. I was so happy to  see Aunt Edna  and Uncle Johnny—Dad’s two surviving siblings. I hadn’t seen them for years, maybe even decades since I moved to San Diego.

            Dad came from a family of eight children—William, Francis, Betty, Thomas, John, Edna, Dad, Richard, and Paul. Thomas and Betty had died at birth. Aunt Edna told me “It’s hard to have your only sister an angel in heaven.”

            Everyone called my dad, Bud, instead of his given name, Robert.

            Uncle Johnny, Aunt Edna, and her husband, Uncle Arky came back  with us to Audrey and Ed’s house for dinner. I sat near them at a long table.

            Ed served some of his home brew. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow . . .

            I gorged on Audrey’s homemade lasagna. With pineapple upside down cake and cinnamon cake for dessert. At home I don’t eat meat, white noodles or anything with sugar. Here, I craved camaraderie and comfort food more than nutrition.

            The warmth of all the bodies around the huge table, the clatter of  dishes, knives, forks, doors opening, people talking, and laughing through their tears soothed me. Wonderful aromas wafting from the warm cakes, and faint fragrances of body lotions eased my grief. Even the cigarette smoke from my siblings didn’t bother me today. In the past I would have fled the room in rage.

Mortuary Tales

Hi! I'm writing a memoir and learning how to make a blog. I'm starting a writing group on Mount Laguna. The first meeting will be on Sunday, July 24, from 1PM to 3PM. RSVP at bettyjunek@yahoo.com.