~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I have returned to Greene County many times in the spring to the tidy repetition of planted rows of corn barely discernible in the sloping, rolling, wet black earth; to the lowing skies full of rain; to the barely leafed but fully blossoming flowers of crab trees; to the possibility of snow when one thinks winter is truly over; to the funerals. . . .
The first year my husband and I returned after 40 years away, to stay, to plant ourselves back from whence we came, we attended three funerals within three weeks. We had not been to a funeral outside our families in many years. We came back that spring and wound up attending memorial masses, benedictions, celebrations of parents of our friends. Jim and I had left at 18 and been gone a long time; the ritual of Midwest funeral was indeed something we’d known growing up; it was not something that happened in the West, however. Did no one ever die on the Pacific coast? Really, I don’t know where the cemeteries were out there in San Diego. No one we knew ever died. If our friends had parents dying, none of the ritual or panoply was there for us to help our new friends bury their dead. Like us, they must have had to go home to become again a part of the needed good-byes of their lives.
The West was not the Midwest. As soon as we returned to live in our ancestral prairie, we re-entered the life of life and death.
It was oddly renewing, as if there was indeed life after death, because, really, all the friends of ours were there, in the church or the funeral home or at the cemetery, still alive, sad to see their parents or grandparents go, but in all truth, knowing this was the way of things, and soon, we’d all be there in the cemetery. But in the meantime, before our children planted us, we were together in the hall eating hamballs and jello and telling wild or calm or loving or hilarious stories of the recently departed.
Or, asking each other questions — “Who are you?” “Oh, yes, it IS you Esmira! Now, are we third cousins or are we not even related?”
This year I returned to my beloved sod close in on the inner city of Jefferson and within four days attended a funeral of a parent of a friend. We–the sad daughter and I (possibly a mere third or fourth cousin) do have the same name of “Day,” back a generation for her, at least two generations for me. The connections never quit if one lives in or is from the Midwest. Attending a funeral in Greene County makes one thick in a familyness among us all…not incestuous by any means — but really, we are all related here in this few square miles of prairie.
Dying in a small town where one has lived most of her life is a good place to lay life at rest. If all one’s friends are dead, one’s children’s friends will attend your funeral — it is the polite thing to do, the kind thing; it is a good place to be as a friend or a friend of a daughter . . . so many people come to lay to rest the dead in little towns in Iowa. And if you go to help, to honor, to sing this soul to heaven, you get to also talk to the family, to friends and relatives you haven’t seen since third grade and may never see again. It’s a truly comforting way — to oneself and to a family — to spend a morning of one’s life, attending a funeral in Jefferson, Iowa, in the middle of the prairie.
I salute and honor the good and very pretty woman and relative I knew, Nora Garrity, who died at 97, right here on her native Iowa soil. That I could attend her funeral? A blessing. I hope it happens to me someday, this kind of party, on the way to wherever it is I go.
