Farewell, my brother

[resqgeek]

After spending Mother’s Day weekend in Chicago visiting my brother, for the final time as it turned out, I guess it was fitting that I would spend Father’s Day weekend at my parents’ home for his funeral. Because his final medical crisis and death occurred during a business trip, the funeral was delayed by several weeks to allow for the cremation and shipping of his remains. Perhaps it was this extra time that allowed me to absorb the impact, or maybe it was because we weren’t particularly close, having only recently begun to heal a long estrangement, but either way, I was a little surprised that my emotional reaction was fairly subdued. Which is not to say that I didn’t feel any emotion, but this wasn’t, for me, the crushing loss it clearly was for my parents (among others).

My parents had delegated the responsibility of collecting photos of my brother to display at the wake and funeral. I collected photos from various people by e-mail, and looked through our photo albums for others. I scanned and printed, and ended up with almost 60 photos that we were able to display for those who joined us to remember my brother’s life.

On Friday, I met the parents of my brother’s girlfriend, who had travelled from the NYC area to pay their respects and to support their daughter. We ate dinner early so we could be at the funeral home early for a brief prayer service before the wake opened to the public. When the visitors began to arrive, I was able to chat with a number of people that I hadn’t seen in years (or decades in some cases). There were members of the extended family that I don’t get to see very often, and a number of people that my brothers and I grew up with. But I think the biggest surprise for me was the arrival of Sister Annette, who was the principal of our high school when my brothers and I attended. I think I was told that she is now 95 years old (which means she was in her mid- and late 60s when we were students), and seemed to be in great health. As a student, I don’t remember having had much interaction with her, but somehow it was still deeply touching that she made the effort to pay her respects.

The parish church we attended as children has been closed, so the funeral mass was held at my parents’ current parish, in the next town. While the pastor knows my parents, he doesn’t know me or my brothers, but in spite of that, he managed to collect enough stories about my brother to provide an appropriate homily. The hymn selections included a couple of songs that threaten to bring tears to my eyes in the best of times, so those were perhaps my roughest moments, emotionally.

My parents had discovered that there were available burial sites next to my grandparents in the cemetery where much of my mother’s family is laid to rest, so my brother was interred there, next to our grandparents and great-grandparents. My parents also purchased sufficient space so that they could be laid to rest there as well, eventually. Only the family came to the cemetery for the final interment, which was a very brief service before the urn with his ashes was placed in the ground.
The rest of the day on Saturday was spent visiting with friends and family, and I think the final visitors left my parents’ house about 9pm. I headed to bed shortly afterwards, and headed home fairly early on Sunday morning. I’ll be back up there in three weeks for the family reunion, and we’ll be able to visit some more.

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