Preservations
In ancient Rome, a man sometimes dressed like the dead and followed
the funeral procession, mimicking the way the dead had walked and
playing scenes from the recently departed’s life.
1
The Italian restaurant, on a weekday night, was nearly empty, and those few customers looked to be around my father’s age, 77. If they were nostalgic, they’d likely share my father’s romance with big band tunes, but the ceiling speakers crooned a piped-in selection of doo-wop songs. My father ate with gusto, but I liked the music better than the mediocre Italian food. I owned hundreds of doo-wop records. My father, nearly deaf, was oblivious, but he told me three times how miraculous his open-heart surgery had been, how those doctors could fix anything these days. As I walked the bill to the register, the song that was playing was “High on a Hill” by Scott English. “I love this song,” the waitress said as she rang me up.
“Me, too,” I said, suddenly happy that someone else was paying attention to a song that had seldom been played anywhere else but on a few Pittsburgh radio stations. “It’s fantastic.”
My father had already wandered outside, but I lingered by the mints and toothpicks until the song ended. The waitress waited, too. When I finally stepped out beside him, my father asked, “There a problem with the check?”
“No, we’re good.”
He seemed distracted, suddenly anxious. “You like it, that place? Maybe not fancy enough for you? I come here with your sister. She always says she likes it.”
I let it go. I’d heard “High on a Hill” for the first time in years, and that made up for spaghetti with clam sauce dumped straight from a can. By the time I’d graduated from high school, doo-wop had become an oldies genre, a remnant that trailed behind my generation as it aged in the way Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington followed my father. Something to be preserved.
2
As various vegetables and fruits came into season, my mother preserved jars of them to store on shelves in the dank room she called the “root cellar.” She labored over tomatoes and peaches, green beans and beets. Steam filled the kitchen, a side effect of sterilizing to make certain none of us would be victims of botulism. By summers end, the shelves were packed with preserves, jars that disappeared one by one until another cycle of canning began. After she died, my father ate what remained except for two unlabeled and undated jars that sat on the otherwise emptied shelves for nearly ten years. Whatever she had preserved sometimes looked like a fetus or a jumble of organs, but always, it seemed something kept in formaldehyde.
3
Who isn’t taken by stories about extraordinary “keeping” like the one about M. Boulard, who owned seven houses, storing a hundred thousand books in each of them? Or Richard Heber, who believed he needed three copies of every published volume, eight houses in three countries necessary to hold them. Reading those numbers, who doesn’t decide there’s likely no limit for hoarders of books, someone like Sir Thomas Phillips, whose goal was to own every book in the world.
4
My neighbor, once, bought books by the thousands, clearing out sales from garages and front yards to fill his basement floor to ceiling, starting the year he invited me to admire what he kept, on rooms left vacant by his daughters grown and gone, arranging, by then, nearly a hundred thousand in chronological order to create, he said, the twentieth century of books.
Downstairs, I imagined fire beginning in the 40s or 50s; upstairs, collapse, his house imploded by a billion pages. I stood beside him in his younger daughter’s bedroom, the 90s surrounding us. In the adjoining bedroom, the 80s had swollen the space nearly shut. My neighbor swept his large hands apart as if he were showing me stars, the infinite sprawled and demanding to be seen. A second, then two, he held them wide until I managed, “It’s something,” before I left, stepping back into the driveway where his station wagon sat low and stacked, a boxcar promising the raw materials of archiving.
5
When I retired, the archivist at the university where I taught created an organized space for me. My old neighbor, dead by then for more than a decade, would have approved. What I had published was being preserved, no longer heirlooms on shelves or in boxes inside my house. Every published word, even the mostly embarrassing poems that appeared in mimeographed, stapled magazines in the 1970s. The boxes in the room slid out like mausoleum “storage.” I noticed ones labeled with the names of former presidents and trustees and professors. It felt like a specialized cemetery populated by strangers whose stories were already barely remembered.
6
Visiting what was called The Mermaid Cemetery, I immediately noticed that someone regularly tended every grave. Someone carried kelp and seaweed to vases brimmed with water I tested with fingertips, learning the salt. The pages of the brochure were so damp, they curled. Already, the photographs of the interred were smeared. I followed the mulched trail among headstones shaped like fish, wishing myself a mourner, someone willing to accept a measure of loss in order to be transformed, scales swallowing my flesh until my body, fused into the elusive beauty of myth, eased into water, impossible enough for worship.
7
In a cathedral in Florence, surrounded by icons, I heard a loud, recorded “Shhh” swirl from above. A single “Silencio” followed. Through ear buds I listened to the near-whisper of the guide. Soon, “Shhh,” warned twice more, “Silencio” seemed the voice of a striking clock. Beside a roped-off sarcophagus, the guide murmured that a famous saint was so selfless her body was shared by cathedrals in competing cities. Here, the thumb survived, preserved as saints often are, by goodness. A woman from our group dipped her fingers into an ornate basin and moved her dripping hand through the sign of the cross. The guide paused to bow her head, suddenly obedient in the ancient, natural light.
8
Once, when I arrived home for Thanksgiving during my freshman year in college, all of the drapes were open to flood my parents’ bedroom with natural light. My mother, 43, was trying on her older sister’s wigs. Modeling like a schoolgirl, she made me turn away, eyes closed, until she sported each shade, asking which one I liked better, whether she looked enough like herself to be seen in church without embarrassment. At last, her eyes met mine in the mirror when I stood behind her, three similarly-styled brown wigs waiting on the dresser, her nearly bald head exposed. “Which one,” she asked, “makes me look as if I’ll keep going?”
9
My father’s rotary telephone kept going for the entire 57 years he lived in the house where I grew up. When, at 90, he surrendered to senior care, I picked up the receiver and called my house, hearing the landline in the distant kitchen ringing. When voice mail asked me for a message, I could barely speak.
10
For ten years, each time I visited, my father spoke about how, though he was the oldest, he had outlasted his four siblings. What’s more, they had died in reverse order of their age. Throughout his 80s, he seemed stunned to be the survivor. After the last of four funerals, I drove him up the steep, cobblestoned street to his old neighborhood where the houses huddled like the elderly had at the grave. He watched the windows of his house as if expecting his sister and three brothers to wave.
When I was a boy, viewings of the family’s dead were held in the “parlor” of that house — an uncle, my grandmother, and finally, my grandfather, who was laid out three days in the deep gray suit he wore on Sundays. Knowing that the house would soon be sold, I explored before the funeral, 19 and opening drawers and closets before the coffin would be struggled down the steep steps to Ogrodnik’s sleek hearse. I climbed to the attic where, years before, it served as a barracks for those four brothers. I had seen a photo of them as teenage boys and young men arranged on cots as if already in basic training for the imminent war in which three of them would fight. I tried to enter my father’s life, kneeling to look through the one small window, trying to make out what he had witnessed in nineteen forty-one, in late November, his wedding a week away. I smeared a space and saw the abandoned steel mill at the base of the hill, the nearby hillside scarred when a bypass around the town had been constructed. I was sweating in my white shirt and blue tie, squinting while I wiped my brow with the back of my hand, unknowingly marking myself with dust, taking nothing downstairs to the viewing except a small sign of the stubborn past, wearing it with my one gray suit.
11
My father showed me his oldest dead brother’s suits, six of them he had hung in the guest closet. Like a clerk, he displayed them one by one, lifting each to the light for approval. Four were dark — black, gray, brown, navy blue — the others, sewn from lighter cloth, were tan and a pastel green. I remembered seeing my uncle in that suit. He had worn it with white shoes as if he’d brought Florida to dinner. “You’re about his size,” my father said, “and he bought only quality,” meaning he expected me to welcome them as an opportunity. When I hesitated, forming an excuse, he said, “Don’t worry. They’ll always be there. They’ll keep.”
12
A family, once, looked for skulls on their vacations and kept one of them to display in their home. If none were discovered, they substituted road kill that they buried in their yard until its coveted skull emerged. The family believed the skulls would carry the animal’s spirit and personality to their shelves and walls — rabbit and skunk, possum, raccoon, squirrel, fox. The father, eventually, declared he wanted to leave his skeleton to his children. Stop joking, his wife said, fearing her children were so crazy for skulls that they might home-exhibit his boiled bones like a relic, the domestic taboo passed down like a singular, mutant gene.
13
For decades, the John Wilkes Booth Mummy traveled the country, attracting paying customers with its taboo thrill. It arrived near Pittsburgh, my great-uncle told me, when he was 13. In the tent’s half-light, that body sported what was claimed to be the Ford’s Theater suit. “A nickel’s worth,” my great-uncle said, a man who kept World War I to himself, mothballing his uniform in a trunk except for dressing to walk among other veterans in Pittsburgh’s twice-a-year parades.
14
A woman fluttered among the visitors at the Angel Museum, glittery in her gold robe, keeping her white wings folded like a luminescent moth at rest. Some of the angels on display were constructed from stone. In all sizes, some were made of wood and gilt cardboard. Intricate ones shaped from paper were arranged on a series of full shelves. Just before closing, a bus idled in the parking lot. My wife and I were surrounded by the elderly, many, I was sure, younger than we were. They carried tiny angels they had created from ribbon and tissues and directions recited earlier by that angel. Eight canes rested in an umbrella stand just inside the door as a courtesy. Two of those tourists used walker. One rode in a wheelchair. There was so much imminence, so close, that the near future almost collapsed my knees. I felt shamed by my smile and flagrantly empty hands.
15
During the early weeks of the pandemic, my wife persuaded me to empty several sets of shelves of sports trophies I’d earned. There were a few softball and volleyball trophies, some old high school track medals, but the tennis trophies were the centerpiece of the what I placed on the carefully covered basement pool table. There were eighty-nine of them. I counted twice to be sure, hoping for ninety, disappointed. Then, just after my wife came downstairs to photograph them — her promise had been part of the deal I’d made to further our downsizing — she noticed one more trophy that was lying on its side on the top shelf, discovering it only because she climbed two steps on our three-step ladder to dust. I had her take photographs from three angles — it seemed important somehow — but after an hour on display like an embalmed, well-dressed body, they went into garbage bags, all of them fatalities, no exceptions.
16
The morning after our meal in the Italian restaurant, the first televised news story was a fatal shooting in a notorious section of Pittsburgh. “Always the same,” my father said, but the second story was about an explosion the night before that had destroyed that restaurant. The devastation had occurred around 9:30, four hours after we’d left and an hour and a half after it closed. My father was dumbfounded. “What are they talking about? We were just there.” I knew what he was thinking. The restaurant wasn’t in the city, let alone in a part of town where violence was commonplace. It didn’t have a bar that attracted the bad behavior he associated with those who “like their drink.” Insurance fraud, I thought. Some sketchy financing gone wrong. “That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “It sits right there in a nice place. You can see all around it, lots of space.”
I imagined the owner waiting for the restaurant to clear before he set things in motion. How he kept telling himself this extensive, financial surgery would fix his problems. Whether he listened to those overhead oldies while he worked. Whether he had labored in silence, intent upon getting the illusion of accident exactly right. Whether, before she’d left, he’d given that old-fashioned mix tape to the waitress who loved doo-wop so those songs would be stored in a safe place by someone who loved them.
Before I had to leave, I drove him, as always, to see the old places. On the way back, my father said, without prompting, “There’s what’s left of the house where I was born.”
I slowed and looked to my right, but there was nothing but vacant lots. He pointed, and I followed his finger to six concrete steps set into the hill that rose from the widened shoulder to the plateau of milkweed and sumac and wild berry tangled and brown from the summer before. “Right there where the steps go.” The enormous machinery of road construction sat a hundred yards away. Before too long, most likely within days, those steps would be gone as well, but right now they nearly shimmered with presence. “Like nothing was ever there,” my father said. By then we were turning, as always, at the Eat ‘n Park. Neither of us spoke while we drove up the hill to his house.
17
On the street just above ours, a house was rebuilt exactly the same as it was before a total-loss fire. The owner explained that she had cloned her house from photographs and blueprints that survived in a fireproof, padlocked box. After the house was filled with furniture, the owner’s mother, in her 90s, sat in the same model of chair in the identical spot in the living room to watch television whose volume was set at the same level of loudness as before the fire, one that allowed her to hear.
18
Sometimes the slender grace of extraordinary can be heard where tragedy seems inevitable. At extremely north latitudes, in winter, there are consequences from exposing even the smallest parts of the body to a moment of weather, but on the coldest of days, the breath expelled with a spoken sentence can be briefly suspended in ice, hovering until the whisper of stars is overheard, what Siberians call the tinkling crash of those frozen words, their delicate beauty provided by rare, yet bearable cold.
19
The story, each time the biologist told it, elicited laughter. Because January’s below zero days meant the English professor who named her pets after women writers could not open ground to bury Jane Austen, her latest dead cat, beside years of others in her backyard, she brought the boxed cat to his office. Caught off-guard, he’d agreed to store it inside his department’s freezer, donating a few months of preservation, but by April he had forgotten it and so had she, her elderly parents, who lived with her, both failing, her house a distraction of rescued dogs. Well, he would say, dramatically pausing, seven years passed. A new science building meant a move of specimens from freezer to freezer, and there was the cat, somewhat worse for wear, that woman, by then, about to retire, and he had flung it, still boxed, into the dumpster provided for transition’s casualties.
The last time I heard him tell that story, everyone listening knew that woman had lost her place in the world, her mind relocated near childish dependency. By then, though no one interrupted, a few of us wondered why he couldn’t have driven that coffin home, using some remote part of his own back yard for burial.
20
For years, perfectly preserved, Lenin’s unburied body has been a public icon in Russia. During World War II, it was moved from St. Petersburg and hidden in Tyumen. Germans were nearing St. Petersburg, but in Siberia, anything could be hidden — artwork, political prisoners, a tomb so successfully kept a secret for so long that there were nights when the guards, lonely for usefulness, drank themselves into sorrowful songs. While Lenin waited for worshippers, those men woke to a noon of half-light upon the long-winter landscape, pale and shallow like fog that will not break for days, as persistent as siege.
21
At Rocky Flats, where plutonium detonators were made, one chamber became so contaminated it was called The Infinity Room for how long the siege of its poison would last.
22
Thirty years ago, I learned that Silly Putty will last and last. “It’s indestructible,” an expert proclaimed, estimating that ten million pounds of that gunk lay in landfills, lakes, and the basements of abandoned houses. “Because the putty mimics the specific gravity of our flesh,” he said, “we empathize with the probable permanence of that toy.”
23
Vitrification is the term for how nearly permanent nuclear waste is melted with glass beads in furnaces and poured into steel boxes to become blocks of radioactive glass that need to be very carefully buried. Absolute necessity? Twenty feet wide, a space once opened in the roof of a Hanford tunnel where nuclear waste is stored, robots sent to test and repair, eight feet of soil prescribed to prevent an airborne radiological event escaping a tunnel that holds railroad cars of radioactive waste, literally, that summer, 75 years young, my mother’s phrase for the old, yet active, an age she did not reach to verify its truth.
24
My mother’s father, for the last 25 years of his life, created throw rugs from what seemed to be perfectly selected, colorful rags. Acquaintances at the charity home where he spent those years gave him old shirts and pants and even suits to cut up and weave. Everyone said he had a knack for how they went together, stitching up those remnants so nobody could even tell where one scrap started and another ended. “That’s about all that’s left of your grandfather,” my father would say, “that and all the stories about what the drink does to a man.”
A lifelong binge drinker, he’d lost jobs, wrecked a car, punched holes in the wall of his house, but what had made my grandmother throw him out for good was stealing the three silver dollars my mother had won in an eighth grade essay writing contest.
“The drink makes a fool out of people,” my father often repeated. “He only made these rugs after he ended up in the charity home with nothing but the shirt on his back.” The rug in my sister’s old room lay in place for half a century, a multi-colored whirlpool, including a swirl of patterns that must have originally been a woman’s dress or maybe some man’s Hawaiian shirt. Some small bit of what was no longer useful made valuable.
25
As if they had grown more valuable with time, my uncle’s suits were hung inside plastic bags when my father showed them to me again after ten years had passed. “Your boys are grown now,” he said. “Maybe they want them.”
“I’ll ask,” I said, using ambivalence for a placeholder.
“Do that,” he said. “You can see I’ve made sure they’re safe.”
26
In his overstuffed garage, my father kept a safe where he stored mementoes that he believed were so valuable they needed extra security. Once a year, he moved it — left, then right, then back again behind lawnmowers, screens, and four sets of hoses in the open vault of the crowded garage. The safe held Indian head pennies, buffalo nickels, and heavy silver dollars from the 19th century. There was a box of my mother’s old jewelry. Locks from my first haircut, bits of initial nail clippings, and a set of lost baby teeth, enough of my early childhood for retrospective voodoo, were sealed in plastic.
27
Sealed in a crypt of urns, I’ve learned, are the hearts of 22 long-dead popes. The latest popes are buried whole, their hearts admitting “eventually” and “inevitably” and the rest of the adverbs of impermanence, while in Rome, those 22 hearts, well-guarded, sing the patient song of stone.
28
“This takes patience,” my father said, “but it’s worth it.” We were in my sister’s old room, another of my visits nearly over. On a card table was a large wooden board with slots that held, by my quick multiplication of row and columns, eighty-one slides. “I’ve been looking through all these,” he said, pointing to the rest of the table’s surface where a pile of slides, no way to exactly count them, was sprawled wide enough to suggest five-hundred or more. “Here,” he said, “take a look. That’s you in this one when you were a Boy Scout.” Even held up to the light by the window, it was hard to make out what was in the tiny picture that seemed to cry out for magnification. “I used to watch these but the projector quit on me.”
“We had an old hand-viewer way back.”
“It’s nowhere. I looked and so did your sister.”
“It has to be here somewhere,” I said, but my father didn’t seem to hear. “It’s in the house, Dad. Nobody ever throws anything away here.”
“Your mother would know.” Which seemed to settle things. Because she was dead, finding the viewer was impossible, its location a secret she’d taken to the grave.
In the cellar, twenty minutes later, I found the viewer in a box labeled “Toys.” The light came on when I pressed the button. Upstairs again, I inserted a slide and handed the viewer to my father. “Push and look, Dad.”
“There you are in your uniform just like I said.” He laid the Scout slide back in place and inserted another, looking closely and at length before he handed it to me. “There we all are,” he said. It was a photo of my father and his three brothers taken, by the looks of the car parked nearby, in the early 1960s. He took it back and looked again. I waited to give him time, but he replaced the slide and laid the viewer on the table.
The sun came out as we traveled the familiar roads before I had to leave. It was warm enough to imagine that Christmas wasn’t five days away. Neither of us spoke until my father pointed at the windshield and said, “It’s all gone up ahead.”
“What?” I said, asking for clues.
“The mess they left behind at that Italian restaurant. It didn’t take long once they got around to it.”
My father stared straight ahead until we approached the site. There was nothing but patches of snow and mud. “See how it is?” my father said, sounding triumphant. “Like nothing was worth saving. Like it was never there.”
29
My mother saved the photos left behind by dead relatives in six hat-box sized cans that originally held syrup-soaked peaches, cherries, or apples for my father’s bakery pies. She accumulated thousands of formal poses or candid snapshots, the oldest become strangers, unidentified by aunts and uncles who knew those faces so well they never thought to caption them. For twenty-one years after she died, my father kept those cans buried in his basement like time capsules. When I opened them a few weeks before his move, at ninety, to a nursing home, he shook his head to the identity of every face, even my mother’s as a child.
30
As children, everyone, until recently, learned cursive writing. My mother, the secretary, could write perfectly in longhand and shorthand, loops and slants exactly the same from message to message. For decades, she kept the books for my father’s bakery, entering purchases in cursive so clear I could, years after her death and busy with investigating the past, identify every product like an auditor. Now, there are action groups for preserving cursive. Attending a meeting, I’ve watched a teacher write beautifully upon a blackboard. “Your handwriting reveals you to the world,” she said, and though I believe what reveals is the exact arrangement of the words you choose, I was astonished by the symmetry of her sample lines, her ease with what passes, by now, for calligraphy.
31
For 21 years, in calligraphy my sister paid for, my poem grounded in the recollection of my mother’s death hung framed and under glass in my father’s living room. Each time I visited, before he closed his eyes and faced away, he asked me to proofread while he recited the poem’s 31 lines, preserving what he considered perfection.
32
Our cremains will weigh from six to ten pounds, the preserved fragments white or gray, the largest pieces ground to sand-size for discretion and the ease of scattering.
Not comforting, this summary, but better, pre-need, than anticipating decomposition by traditional burial. Better yet, post-burning options have been created to lessen despair for the living — etched keepsake urns, ash-speckled cards, jewelry that carries cremains near the wrists, the throat or the heart.
Moreover, scattering the ashes is more romantic than burial. A multitude of sites have appeal — at sea, in a meadow, a favorite grove in a forest. Or, because height is often craved — off a cliff or the balcony of the dead’s high-rise apartment. From airplanes, from helicopters and hot-air balloons, even expelled from the raised barrel of a shotgun to ensure a high arc of dust. And lately, with fireworks, those ashes blown into rainbows to ooohs and aaahs from the living.
Now, the deceased can be launched into space, a years-long orbit until small meteors of ash plummet again into burning. And there are those who will pay for lift-off to the moon and Mars, or the infinite ride beyond solar system borders, escaping even the great scenario of ash, how the Earth, in a billion years, will become a planet of dust. How, finally, it will spiral into the huge, expanding sun, which, while dying, will scatter Earth, rendering all of our cremains to swirling in eternal memorial, perfecting grief, at last, because there’s never enough preserving, never enough remembering as we fling those we love in wide, then wider arcs, as if distance can resurrect the dead, create an image we’re able to see when we’re alone, concentrating on some speck of sky as we breathe the heavenly dust of the loved.