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Saying Good-Bye: A Father's Cremation

By William S. Bailey

I was raised a Roman Catholic, but turned my back on all Western organized religion in college, after years of rote memorization of capsulized theology in the Baltimore cathechism, e.g., "Who made us?", "God made us." After years of regular church attendance orchestrated by my mother, I found very little to keep me in the Catholic fold as I entered adult life. As I looked back, it had been a joyless endeavor which had only worsened all my childhood fears. It had brought neither comfort or meaning into my life.

While still as spiritual as I ever was, in fact much more so, there is no longer a convenient place for me to lodge this part of me. A sudden existential chill came over me when I realized that I did not have a church or an organized institutional set of religious beliefs to call upon when my father died in November, 1995. Suddenly, I found myself reaching back in time, hoping to reclaim some measure of the long discarded "I'm going to heaven when I die" certainty that I once possessed as a child. If there was ever a time that I wanted to believe in life after death, it was now. I desperately wanted to believe that I would see my father again some day in some variation of the heaven that had been a regular part of my nightly prayers. Perhaps this belief could be resurrected in my hour of need. But it couldn't.

Around 5:00 p.m. on Wednesday evening, November 29, 1995 , I sat in the office of my law partner Steve Fury. It was a happy occasion, we had just recently concluded some extended unpleasant litigation with our former law firm. This burden lifted, we had a very pleasant free ranging conversation about our futures, how much longer would we continue to do this work, what other things might we do. I discussed my desire to teach high school and write. We discussed Steve's dream of living in other countries and work at some point, just as he and his wife, Nancy, had done in a refugee camp in Thailand in the late 1980's. Steve said, "I love to travel, but not in the usual American sort of way. Within a week of being in Paris a few months ago, I had eaten in all the fancy restaurants I could tolerate. But actually living in a place for a time is a fascinating prospect." Then I went home to make a 6:30 p.m. tennis game with my son Rob.

Upon our return at 7:45 p.m., my daughter, Mimy, opened the side entry door to the garage and stuck her head out with a quizzical look on her face, "Uncle Jim's on the phone and he sounds . . . well, weird. He didn't even say "Hi" like he usually does, but only "Is your father home?" in an ultra serious way." As soon as this hit the air, I knew what had happened. The telephone call that I had long feared, but knew would ultimately come, was waiting for me. Dad was dead. It was supremely ironic as I sat in Steve's office and talked so hopefully about the future, my father had abruptly collapsed and was breathing his last in the place he loved most, his garden. He went out the way we all hoped for when our time comes, suddenly, painlessly. Dad never knew what hit him, just like Vito Correleone's sudden heart attack in the garden in the movie, The Godfather .