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Last Rites

Neil Connelly

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Breathing

In the movies when somebody dies, they always exhale, one long final sigh. But at my mother’s end, she just stopped. She inhaled and her chest rose up then froze. Still. For days, she had struggled to breath, wide-eyed and raspy, something wet and rattling stuck in her throat. My nine siblings and I stood vigil at the hospital bed in her bedroom, summoning the others over and over each time the end seemed near. I knelt at the head, watched her gazing straight into the ceiling, rarely blinking, sucking desperate gasps of air. She resembled something collapsed on the beach that belonged in the ocean.

At the time, I didn’t think of her scuba diving, which she took up after raising us. Decades later, the first sign of her brain cancer appeared at the YMCA, when she was teaching a class in her seventies. One of her students was surprised that she couldn’t recall Boyle’s Law. After she became more disoriented, they called an ambulance. Before then her exploits were legendary. She’d brought up a brass window frame from the wreck of the Andrea Doria, and her testimony helped convince Congress to allow diving on the U.S.S Monitor. Diminutive yet mighty, my mother had traveled the globe, explored murky quarries and coral reefs, helped excavate a sunken Phoenician seaport off the coast of Caesarea. She dove Belize, Truk Lagoon, Cozumel, St. Lucia, Antigua. All those breaths beneath the waves, where she’d carried with her all the oxygen she needed.

Eclipse

My occasionally surly teenager, Owen, complained when we told him we had to cancel our plans of a weekend with friends to attend a funeral. “I don’t even know who Uncle Bob is,” he protested. On the 8-hour drive south, he never removed his ear buds.

At the wake, he huddled with his cousins after briefly acknowledging the grieving widow. Susan, grey haired, bespectacled, put on a brave front for hours, beaming brightly near the closed casket. Animated, she clasped hands and laughed. But then the funeral director announced the wake would soon be ending, and he would allow one more opportunity for anyone who wished to say goodbye. With that, inexplicably, he raised the coffin’s lid.

By chance, we were all nearby in a side room with Susan. The color drained from the widow’s face. All three chambers our party occupied, so recently filled with shared memories of Bob’s raucous humor, fell stony silent. Susan shuffled in her seat, looked left, right, grinned painfully, stared at her hands grasped on her lap. Everyone could feel her drowning in her sorrow, and everyone froze.

Except Owen. On lanky legs, he rose up, strode through that noiseless air, and said, “So I heard that eclipse passed right over your house. Sounds pretty cool.”

Susan lifted her face, the rosy blush restored, and she told my son how shadowy scales appeared everywhere just before the darkness, like slivers of the moon. She beamed at Owen. “It was such a wonder to behold.”

Caretaker

I never once saw my father in a t-shirt. Every morning of my childhood, he emerged in a shirt with buttoned-down collars, showered, shaved, his thick black hair combed neat. As a dad and doctor, he carried himself with good humor and a quiet dignity. This simple visage was assaulted after the stroke, and though language returned, he couldn’t tend to himself, a task which fell to my eldest sister Ceil. A decade before, Ceil had nursed her own husband Doug through cancer to his own culmination, and now our father moved into her spare bedroom.

With a Velcro strap she’d fix the electric razor inside his weakened grip. Slowly he would maneuver it, buzzing the contours of cheeks and chin, Ceil’s guiding hand resting now and then atop his. He ate gripping utensils tucked into thick rubber tubes so he could haltingly lift applesauce or cereal to his chapped lips, often with Ceil’s assistance. Months passed and his capacity diminished. Ceil became responsible for not just his feeding but his dressing and undressing, his cleaning, his most basic needs.

At the wake, family and old patients shared love and adoration, traded tales of his time in WW2, the pharmacies he ran, his return to medical school, raising ten kids. While we wept and laughed, Ceil slipped off to the coffin, alone. She leaned over the open casket, withdrew a black comb from her pocket, and brushed back the stray hairs from his forehead, straightened his part one final time.

Testament

Being of sound mind, let this serve as my last will and final wishes. Give my Dad’s ring to Owen, and my Mom’s necklace to James. My organs should go to whoever needs them, if anyone can use them. Burn my body to ash if it suits you, or bury me next to the brother none of us had a chance to meet. At the wake, say some prayers, or not. Play some sad music, or not. Skip the flower thing—too many with allergies, and I fear there will be tissues enough. I’d love to set up a poker game, so the guys could throw cards, drink beer, blow cigar smoke and tell tales, but that won’t be allowed.

Maybe though, somebody could sneak in a box of my Legos. Clear a table of framed photos and set up a space where the kids can play, snap brick to brick, create airplanes and cars and robots to take home, a parting gift from Uncle Neil. Perhaps my lingering spirit will recall a childhood of creating castles, raising cities, and constructing space stations. And oh the impossible joy that came later, sitting crossed-legged with nieces and nephews, showing them how to fortify a wall, reinforce a wing, adjust the gears so the steering wheel worked. We’d bring pirates to the zoo, invite astronauts to a beach house. Yes, let me be guided across the River Styx by the sweet crunchy crackling of kids I love looking for the perfect piece.

Snippets of Dialogue to Be Used in a Story I’ll Never Write,

Mixed with Five Versions of that Story’s First Sentence

After the funeral director called to say the cemetery couldn’t dig in this snow, I had to tell my siblings the news that our mother’s wake needed to be postponed.

“I have Delta Miles!” (Mom’s last words to me, prompted by my sister asking how my flight from Louisiana was. Mom had snapped from a catatonic state, looked at me with absolute recognition.)

Because a historic snowstorm hit Allentown just days after my mother died, we couldn’t bury her when we planned. None of us knew what to do with this news, trapped in the house together.

“That’s more than she’s eaten for anybody. You’re feeding her now.” (From my sister, a nurse, nodding at the empty cup of vanilla pudding I was holding.)

Once I told my sisters that Mommy’s wake would have to be delayed because of the weather, my sister Beth stared at me blankly, then went to the closet and pulled down a feather duster.

“Mommy asked me to sing Amazing Grace at her funeral mass.” (Uttered by my sister Kayte, deeply medicated as a result of various addictions.)

While the blizzard that delayed my mother’s wake raged, Beth, my youngest sister, started dusting just to have something to do.

“Thank you.” (The last words I spoke to Mom as she died, surrounded in her bedroom by her ten children and her husband. Arguably the two best I ever chose.)

In the midst of the blizzard that delayed my mother’s wake, my sister Beth began to dust.

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Neil Connelly (class of ’96) was rejected by every writing program he applied to but McNeese, where he was initially accepted without an assistantship. Five years after graduation, he returned to take over the fiction workshop and later became the MFA program’s second director. He’s published dozens of short stories and eight books with Scholastic, LSU Press, and Simon & Schuster, among others. Currently he lives, teaches, and writes in his home state of Pennsylvania. 

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