We the Living

Tonight we the living gather to meditate on death—while eating hamburger sliders, in fact, and pumpernickel crackers spread with pâté, plus celery and carrots and various berries and wine that comes in a box but is not that tacky college kind. The spread is part of the funeral home’s Life Well Lived package, which also includes the hearse parked out back, the white lilies on every available flat surface, and the rosewood coffin where Papa now lies, prim and gauzy and altogether unlike he ever was in life.

Two of our siblings, estranged now for years, lock eyes over the coffin and try tight-lipped smiles.

“Did you ever see him in this suit?” Here is our sister, the youngest one, tense and poised.

Our brother shakes his head. “He must have been saving it for the occasion.”

Her mouth loosens, and she begins to resemble that brother, who is about to say something else. But just then, someone from the old days sidles up, slider in hand, and says: “Isn’t it strange how life goes on?” As our children check their phones in the mahogany chairs by the door and the funeral director says the time we’ve bought with our father’s body is almost up, we the living are forced to reflect that it is indeed strange how life goes on. For instance: After we’ve consumed all the finger food and wine and packed our children into the rental cars, some of us have to stop for gas on the way to dinner, and we have an actual debate in the car about whether to go to Shell or Mobil. One of us remarks on how cheap gas is around here, and we launch into a discussion about the long-term environmental effects of shale-gas fracking, which continues until we remember that we’re gathered here to meditate on our father’s life and death, at which point we fall into a chastened silence that lasts for several minutes, until one of us puts on, of all things, a Bob Marley mix CD his buddy Todd made him. “Is This Love” plays until we reach the restaurant, an Italian American casual dining chain restaurant that exists nearly everywhere and therefore feels like nowhere at all. Olive Garden was Papa’s favorite, even though we all avoid the place in our everyday lives, which are continuing on as the restaurant’s signature garlic breadsticks arrive, robed in napkins and drenched in what we all hope is olive oil.

Tonight we gather, gobbling breadstick after breadstick, to meditate on the death of a man some of us struggled to love—a man who believed primarily in the supremacy of American Motor Vehicles and in the birth, death, and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ; a man who thought his neighbors were sacrificing goats because they sometimes played electronic music after 10:00 p.m.; a man who put us on a plane and brought us here (first to the United States, when we were children, and later to this particular Olive Garden in Flagstaff, Arizona). We raise our glasses to the man who made us change our names from Luisa to Louise, Patricio to Patrick, Rosa to Rosie, Marcial to Marshall, María to Mary, José to Joseph, because he’d lost his faith in Argentina (where Juan Perón was president and the communists were winning) and placed it instead in America—in the capital-A America of mown lawns and proper motor vehicles and suburban sprawl, the America of Eisenhower, the America of Senator Joseph McCarthy and lax gun laws, the sepia-toned America that America Herself would frame and put on Her mantelpiece in old age and infirmity if She were a living breathing woman instead of a collectively imagined union of semiautonomous states held together by a legacy of slavery and aggressive foreign intervention, the extraction and sale of fossil fuels, a large and mounting foreign deficit, the underpaid or unpaid labor of the world’s largest incarcerated population, and the underpaid or unpaid labor of Chinese, Thai, Indian, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Ecuadorian, Bolivian, Bangladeshi, Mexican, and, yes, even sometimes Argentinean men and women; a union held together, also, by something called the Financial Services Industry, by televised sports, casua dining chain restaurants, and a staggeringly seductive dream of plurality and prosperity that is still, unlike Papa, alive today.

Here’s the plan: we will watch the Arizona Cardinals game and avoid all topics of any conceivable emotional, social, or cultural consequence. Some of us live in regions and communities where football is an entrenched part of the social fabric; some of us don’t. Some of us believe in the birth, death, and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ; some of us don’t. Four of us live near the coast, drink on the weekends, and talk about our privilege, while the eldest two siblings live in the middle of the country, attend antiabortion rallies on the weekends, and speak, from time to time, in tongues. Some among us may even think the others shouldn’t be getting an equal share of Papa’s money, for reasons that include (but are not limited to) godlessness. So we will watch the Cardinals and eat our breadsticks.

The Cardinals are losing, and nobody cares. The waitress clears the oil-soaked appetizer plates as the background music changes from “Tiny Dancer” to “Piano Man.” We the living order another round of drinks, because why not. Some of us go for an old-fashioned this time, Papa’s favorite. The drink is bitter and strong, like Papa himself, though nobody says this out loud. Some of us get the fettuccine Alfredo. Some of us get the house salad (no dressing). The Cardinals start winning, and nobody cares.

Finally—tired, perhaps, of talking about nothing—our eldest sister lays her fork down and addresses us all. “Remember the time Papa told us Santa Claus wasn’t real and proved it by blocking the chimney with all that insulation? He was so proud.”

A smile spreads around the table: at least we can all agree on how much Papa hated the commercialization of Christmas. Our eldest brother laughs and recounts the time Papa tried to throw a punch at a man in a Santa suit at the mall because the Santa man would not answer when Papa asked him if he was really a believer in his heart. Our youngest sister reminds us of the time Papa sent her ten-year-old son a very large book called Rock and Roll, Consumer Culture, and the End of Human Dignity for Christmas (the card read, “Praying for you, little one!”). Soon, the stories about Papa are storming out of us. Our children yawn and turn to their phones, bored by the past, but the six of us are rapt; our eyes shine like the olive oil on our fingers. We return together to our first apartment in Detroit, on Bishop Street, where on the first day of spring we saw gray creatures scurrying through the branches of the elm trees, and screamed “Rats, rats, rats” until Papa came into our bedrooms and told us they were American squirrels. And we can still recall the afternoon—in another, bigger house—when he brought a Cadillac home from his job at General Motors and told us to get in, and we recall the habit he had of sending us birthday cards adorned with his anatomically perfect drawings of yellow-billed cuckoos and bald eagles, and we recall the times when he called to check up on us in spite of (or because of) our godlessness. We also remember the time when he and Mama packed all six of us into a Chevy van and drove to the Rockies, where some of us, never having seen mountains before, had the sensation that everything was new and bright and wonderful, including the pounding of tent stakes into dry dirt, the building and lighting and crackling of the campfire, the particular cleanliness of alpine lakes, and the sight of two moose standing at the water’s edge at dawn, shrouded in mist. Was it then, we wonder aloud, that Papa and Mama began to dream of moving west, then that the idea of a light-filled home away from the noise of Detroit began to take shape in their hearts? How can we possibly know? We move on to events that none of us witnessed—Papa’s first apprenticeship at a mechanic’s shop; Mama’s first trip to Buenos Aires; the years when she was young and went out to the nightclubs in her blue gown; and the morning Papa and Mama met on the front steps of the engineering college, he in a turtleneck later described by Mama as ill fitting, she with a lily in her hair, back when Mama was the only woman who studied engineering in all of Rosario, back in the ’40s, back in Argentina, before Perón and the dream of America, before everything.

“Maybe if Mama had been able to work in the US,” our eldest sister says, apropos of nothing, “she would have been happier here.”

“Maybe if Papa had let her work, you mean,” our youngest sister says.

“That wasn’t how it happened,” our eldest brother puts in, tightening his tie as he speaks. “Women didn’t work then.”

When Mama died, in a hospital room in Phoenix with the AC on so high that we were shivering, Papa swore he’d never get on a plane again, unless he was on his way to heaven to meet her. True to his word, he lived out the rest of his life in Sedona, alone, in an airy mansion of his own design at the end of a long driveway lined with cacti. Those were the years when he believed himself surrounded by young goat-sacrificers and bead-wearing people who believed in the healing power of crystals and energy vortices but not in the birth, death, or resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ; the years when his eyesight went and his mind began to lose its frightening precision; the years when he drove and drove through the red desert all night—to the Olive Garden, to the Hilton lobby bar for an old-fashioned, to the top of the mesa, alone, always alone, telling no one—until his neighbor, the only one Papa liked, saw him swerve off his own driveway and skid down the hill, crushing several cacti and a young desert willow. It was then that the neighbor, a retired CIA agent who collected porcelain turtles, decided it was time to give us a call.

Two of us flew across the country, rented a U-Haul, and drove it up that long driveway, past the cacti that Papa’s car had flattened. We packed his most valued possessions—a gold-plated model of a Cadillac, say, a frayed photograph of Mama in a cashmere coat—into the back of the truck and drove them and him to an assisted-living facility high in the foothills north of Flagstaff. Neither of us can forget the way he suffered when we put him in the passenger seat of the U-Haul and he began to pound his brittle knees and scream. And none of us, of course, can forget the winter’s night when we found out that Papa had sneaked out of his tiny flowered-wallpaper cell, stolen the night nurse’s car keys thinking they were his own, and gone out into the parking lot in his linen bedclothes. Barefoot in the snow for God knows how long, yelling into the night about Juan Perón and the fucking communists, he’d searched up and down for his car until the cook found him shivering by the outer gate and carried him in.

When the news reached us, we the living came running, bailing on dinners and drinks and antiabortion rallies. Some of us took red-eye flights; some of us drove all night through the cold gray desert. At the nursing home, we found Papa by the window, looking out at the dirt-streaked snow on the red cliffs.

“Your children are here to see you,” the orderly told him.

“Children?” Papa said. He kneaded the pleather armrest of his chair.

We told him our American names, touched his shoulders. We called him Papa.

“Ah,” he said, gazing at our middle-aged faces. “But these are not children.”

He stared out the window then, tapped his fingers on the frosted glass, didn’t remember.

When we asked him how he was, he said that he hated the television, and he hated the food they served in this place, and everything was going to hell. The communists had won, he said. They were throwing orgies in the neighbors’ gardens now, sacrificing goats in droves. They were throwing orgies in the White House; where was their sense of decency? And Mama had died—even though she’d prayed every day, even though she’d loved him through everything in a country where she knew no one and couldn’t speak the language, even though she had once been the only female engineering student in all of Rosario, even though she’d once worn lilies in her hair—she had died, just like that, and now all he wanted was to drive his car, would somebody please bring him his car? When we told him we’d sold the car years ago in Sedona, he remembered all of our names at once, and he screamed them at us in the Spanish he’d forsaken, Luisa Patricio Rosa Marcial María José. He told us that he’d never forgive us. That he wished we hadn’t come, and he wished he hadn’t come all the way to this country just to watch his children sell his car and leave him to die with his feet hanging off the edge of this short bed. “I could’ve stayed home for that,” he said. “Perdóname, Papa,” we cried, in the voices we’d used as children. “Perdónanos.”

When we came back the next day, he’d forgotten he ever owned a car.

Social custom dictates that we the living must stop crying long enough to decide if we want dessert. But none of us can remember which of Olive Garden’s Famous Desserts Papa favored. Should we order the Pumpkin Cheesecake or the White-Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake? The Dark-Chocolate Caramel-Cream Piccoli Dolci or the mysterious Zeppoli? Did Papa ever even order dessert at Olive Garden? No one knows. We argue bitterly about what a Piccoli Dolci is, about whether we’ll go to church tomorrow, about the ways we’re raising our children. As our voices crescendo, the waitress retreats to the bar. Two of our children, taller now than we ever dreamed they’d be, step out for a cigarette.

Our eldest brother accuses several of us of betraying the family, of leading our children away from the light of God and into sin and sorrow. Life without the Lord, he tells us, is an empty plain, and he is sad for them—our children, who are huddled together at the other end of the table, texting, trying desperately to pretend they aren’t here. Our youngest sister, color rising in her cheeks, brings up that morning, long ago, when she visited our eldest brother in Michigan and their children played together in the yard. With a journalist’s eye for detail, she recalls how her brother’s son tackled her boy (who was just playing around, for Christ’s sake), and how her sweet little boy stumbled backward and tripped on a root, and his delicate elbow bones broke all at once with this unnatural clicking sound while his cousin looked on and laughed. Raising a finger at her brother, she tells us that in response to her son’s screams, her fully grown adult brother, for all his self-righteous holiness, had merely said: “What’s the big deal, kiddo?”

Clearing his throat, her brother replies that, frankly, it served the boy right for introducing his cousins to video games and pornographic magazines and celebrity culture, not to mention the more insidious but less describable damage he’d done to them over the years just by being the little unbaptized problem child that he was, thanks to his ungrateful mother—of whom Papa, our brother was careful to add, had always been ashamed.

Our youngest sister stands up, all thoughts of Zeppoli forgotten. She more-than-insinuates that her brother and his family are partially to blame for the rising carbon emissions and the rising seas and the resurgence of the KKK and the endless pointless wars that we are somehow still fighting, even if nobody, she shouts, seems to talk about it around here. “If God were real,” she says, “he’d definitely smite you first.” With that, she snatches her handbag off the table and goes outside to bum a cigarette from her son.

The door makes a gentle sucking sound as it closes. In the hush that follows, “Piano Man” comes on for the second time in an hour, and some of us put our heads down on the shiny wooden table like the children we once were. The waitress stares on from the coffee station like a worried deer. Our eldest sister, who has been quietly stirring her old-fashioned this entire time, takes mercy on her. She beckons her over and says, “Just bring us fifteen tiramisus and the check.”

We the living, fathers and mothers now ourselves, don’t talk much on the way back to Sedona. Our children and spouses drive us past the signs for a water park called Big Water Park, past the signs for KFC and Sonic and In-N-Out Burger, past the turnoff for Phoenix, while we cry quiet tears in our American motor vehicles, in the last of the summer sun, in the early years of the third millennium after Our Lord, assaulted by memories of alpine lakes, full of shame. We drive past the turnoff for Papa’s old neighborhood, past the trailers on the edge of town, all the way through the gorgeous reddest part of the country, to the Holiday Inn—

We try to sleep, or don’t. Cars whoosh by in the night, signifying something that none of us can name. Some of us, perhaps, watch infomercials and crack beers from the minifridge. And one of us, of course, is the youngest brother, the baby of the family. I am wide awake in the dark, on top of the patterned covers, imagining my brothers and sisters as they move, or don’t move, around their identical, separate rooms. Tonight I feel closer to them than I have in decades. It’s almost like we are back in that first apartment on Bishop Street, where my brothers and I shared a single room and I could not fall asleep or wake up without hearing the soft huff of their breath. In those days there seemed to be no space between us at all.

I have spent so much of my life trying to get that feeling back.

Tonight I can see my eldest brother reading the Gideons Bible by the light of a clip-on book lamp while his wife and son sleep. And I can see my youngest sister—his enemy, my lifelong friend—in her own room, alone like me, her children asleep down the hall. She is pacing with the lights off, clawing at the synthetic carpet with her toes, thinking, thinking—

What was it the priest said at the funeral? Something like, “We the living are gathered here today to meditate on death.” I can no longer tell where his words end and my own thoughts begin, where my sister ends and I begin.

In the dark, perhaps, my youngest sister reaches for the hotel phone. She lifts the receiver to her ear, glances at a handwritten list of names and room numbers, and hesitates. Outside, a coyote howls. In another room our brother is startled out of his reading of the Gospel of John by the phone. He slowly lays the Bible down on the pillow. He goes to the desk, lifts the receiver from its cradle, inhales—and whispers, in his smallest voice: “Hello?”

Read more from Issue 16.2.