At Least My Feet Didn't Hurt
I went to my grandfather's funeral last week.
It was in many ways a really lovely event. The church (the main building built in 1919--soaring whitewashed walls with dark beams; burnished wooden pews) was full, despite its being a Tuesday afternoon in what is still, in northern Minnesota, full-on winter, snowflakes whirling outside. A minister, Reverend Brandt, who had been moved a couple of years earlier to a church in Iowa, but who had known my grandfather well, returned to do the service. His words were personal, fond, and, by all evidence, deeply heartfelt. He spoke in superlatives and invoked the Prayer of St. Francis as genuinely describing my grandfather's life. He talked of my grandfather saying "I love you" freely and always seeming to turn up to offer support whenever he (Rev. Brandt) was feeling particularly down.
Rev. Brandt went around with a microphone, and some in attendance talked about their memories of Carl Bonner. He ran a men's clothing store in town, and apparently gave great encouragement and marriage advice to young men in to get their wedding tuxedos. He approached church newcomers and welcomed them and made them feel at home. He and my grandmother, church members for 67 years, had helped to found the church's "Calling and Caring Committee." He never had an unkind word. One man in his 90s struggled slowly through his testimony, perservering though his speech was halting and nearly unintelligible because of some apparently neurological ailment. My grandfather's physician took the mic to tell us how much himself he was to the very end, joking self-deprecatingly and taking an interest in the well-being of others.
The whole place sang "How Great Thou Art" and recited the 23rd Psalm. My grandfather's physician also turned out to be the featured solo soprano and sang something called "Because He Lives" in a beautiful, strong, soaring voice. The congregation said the Lord's Prayer in unison ("debts," not "trespasses," in case you were wondering--I guessed wrong) and sang "Abide with Me." Toward the end, a man played an infectious, swinging, joyful version of "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" on the clarinet, accompanied by his wife on piano. My dad's sister Linda had done a great job with the central flower arrangement, and there were other nice bouquets besides. There was no body--my grandfather had chosen to be cremated. Afterwards, we all went down to the (spacious and windowed) church basement, where there were ham salad sandwiches on white rolls and frosted cupcakes and homemade donuts, plus a choice of coffee or ice water.
It was, all in all, pretty much a funeral best-case scenario. Well, Minnesota Protestant version, anyway. Had I been there accidentally, a random out-of-town visitor brought along, say, by a cousin in the congregation, I think that I would have found the occasion moving and beautiful. I might have found myself inspired by the descriptions of a life lived with such grace and care. Most of what was said sounded quite genuine to my ears, and didn't have that tinny ring of empty post-mortem platitudes. It made me think about the complexity of a life.
As a child, we visited my dad's parents once or twice a year (Christmas or summer or both), and I knew my grandfather as a vaguely friendly but somehow neither comfortable nor particularly interesting presence. As I grew older, I began to form an image of him as straitlaced and moralistic, uptight and maybe not very nice. I began to know how much my mother (married to my father for ten years before separating when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade) disliked my grandfather. (Ten years after her marriage to my dad ended, she told me she still occasionally had nightmares about ol' Carl Bonner.) I knew that he favored my brother, and memorably gave him a green leather box full of old silver coins that he had saved for his first grandson (my cousins and I, all older than Eric, were girls and therefore unsuitable recipients).
Then came the mystery banishment. A school friend, Ellie, and I stayed with my grandparents after a month at French camp the summer I was 12. After that, my grandfather cut off all contact with me without ever issuing a statement as to why. I still don't know. There were two things I can remember from that visit that could possibly explain my condemnation. One was that my grandfather drove Ellie and me to a local shopping mall and dropped us off so that we could see The Empire Strikes Back, which had just been released. Unfortunately, the 7:00 show was sold out, and the 9:00 show was going fast. Ellie and I stayed in line and bought tickets for the 9:00 show, and then went to a pay phone to call and explain the situation. (I had at that time no idea that anyone went to bed before 11:00. In my inexperience, I thought that was just the default adult bedtime.) My aunt Liz, who was staying with my grandparents then too, came to get us when the later movie let out and gave us a stern lecture in the car about how my grandparents went to bed at 10, and about the (apparently) terrible and thoughtless thing we'd done. The other transgression that I can think of that might account for the bad feelings was that in the privacy of the room I shared with Ellie, with the door closed, downstairs from my grandparents' bedroom, I waxed indignant to Ellie, and I specifically remember telling her that my grandparents had "sticks up their asses." If this had been overheard, which I certainly didn't think it would be, I suppose that could have been my hanging offense as well.
And so I had nearly no contact with my dad's parents for nearly 20 years. I saw them at my brother's wedding, where they sat stiffly at a corner table looking miserable, and I overheard an uncomfortable and syrup-covered comment from them about how nice it was that Eric had so many Black friends there (they might have actually even said "colored"--I have to admit I don't remember). I saw them by accident once at the Minneapolis airport--I was passing through the concourse on my way to Christmas with my mom and her mother. My Bonner grandparents were sitting at a gate, and I went up and greeted them warmly, as if nothing were weird. They looked uncomfortable and said very little--just made some strained, patently insincere exclamation about how nice it was to see me--and I moved on pretty quickly.
In recent years, I've also learned more about my dad's childhood. This has been from Susan, my dad's wife, and not from my father himself. Ol' Carl was apparently an abusive, violent father and husband. He beat his wife and all his children, though my Aunt Liz, the eldest, bore the brunt as a particular target of his bitter verbal scorn. (This is a role she has played ever since--Susan says she has witnessed numerous occasions of my grandfather belittling the grown-up Liz in recent years. Liz herself maintained a kind of slavish devotion to the self-righteous tyrant.)
I've also become aware, as the years have gone by, of how damaged all four of Carl Bonner's children have been. My father and his siblings all have troubles in their dealings with other people, though they've manifested in very different ways. When they're all in the same place, the combined social awkwardness just about sucks all of the air out of the room. None of them is at all easy in his or her own skin. Liz embodies some mid-century notion of spinster librarian (both of which she in fact is)--sanctimonious, churchy, gossipy, grudge-holding, bitter. My dad, the second-born and family peace-maker, rejected religion and became a staunch atheist, a thoughtful and knowledgeable, deeply principled man, but with an absolute tin-ear for the predictable irrationalities of human behavior. Dad's little sister Linda was the golden-haired, pretty, wild thing in her youth, was then born again, and became a sugary Christian stay-at-home mom and Avon lady. (Susan tells me that Linda has also in the past decade or so "recovered memories" of her and older sister Liz being sexually abused by her father as children; Liz denies this happened; my husband Pete points out that even if the recovered memories are not literally factual, they could have a certain emotional truth--"you don't have to be molested to be f**ked.") And baby of the family Tom moved to Alaska, never married, and is currently a financially struggling massage therapist. (To be fair, he at least seems pretty content, in an introverted, odd-duck kind of way.)
And so there we all were, at this lovely, touching memorial service for a man I had long assumed was basically a bad and/or sick person. Of course, one conclusion might be that the service was false, the product of some combination of deception, self-delusion, and reluctance to speak ill of the dead--that Carl Bonner was a thoroughgoing sonofabitch, and that's it. I suspect that the truth is more complicated than that, though. I think maybe it's all true. I think maybe he was a domestic tyrant and a real pillar of the community. He was a devoted and an abusive husband. He was petty and vindictive and welcoming and generous. He was thoughtful of others and deeply judgmental of their shortcomings.
Reverend Brandt actually told a story in his eulogy that struck me because it seemed to be so three-dimensional, and to catch my grandfather being both how I saw him and how his fellow churchgoers saw him at once. The anecdote was intended to illustrate Carl Bonner's "vision" for the church and the town, his drive to make things better. Reverend Brandt said there was a time in the history of Vernon Hills when a regional private power company (let's call it 10,000 Lakes Power) was negotiating the possibility of locating in town. The mayor, however, was reluctant to sell Vernon Hills Municipal Power to 10,000 Lakes Power Company, which 10,000 Lakes insisted upon, and the deal was stalled. At some point during the stand-off, the mayor went to Mankato on business for a couple days, whereupon my grandfather called an emergency session of the Town Council, called a vote on the sale of VH Municipal Power to 10,000 Lakes, and got it passed. The minister's conclusion was that the economic well-being of the town was saved, and it was a happy ending. (In fact, when I had asked my cousin earlier in the day about the sources of employment in Vernon Hills, she said the big two were 10,000 Lakes Power and the regional medical center.) So you could certainly say that my grandfather was being clearheaded and responsible, taking it upon himself to do what it took to ensure that the right thing happened for the community. You could, of course, also say that he was being a power-hungry asshole who found a devious way to steamroll legitimate resistance to his own agenda. And maybe both are true.
Meanwhile, we, the family, were there in our front pews, caught between the worlds. The result was a strange kind of nonchalance, a sort of matter-of-fact cheerfulness in all of us but my grandmother (who looked drawn, exhausted, and really terribly sad). My aunts and cousins complained about their aching feet (all of them wore fashionable pointed-toe pumps--I myself was decidedly behind the times in square-toed black boots from several seasons ago). We behaved ourselves during the service, naturally, keeping our faces somber and our voices low murmurs. And I suppose I can't know what depths of feeling lay hidden in my aunts and uncle, my cousins, my brother, my dad. But my sense is that any emotional connection to the deceased Carl Bonner was so stunted and shriveled by his behavior in his lifetime that there wasn't much left to bleed when he was finally gone.
It makes me think of a moment at my grandfather's 90th birthday party a few years ago. My aunt Liz had gotten this godawful tacky ice cream cake with blue and white icing, and "Happy Birthday Carl" in that transparent color gel they use for personalizing cheap cakes. Everyone had gathered, including my reluctant aunt Linda, who since her recovered memories tried not to be in the same room with her father but also kind of tried not to be too obvious about it. My grandfather was sitting at the large, dark wood dining room table with all the leaves put in (this was before their move to an assisted living facility--they were still in their house on the lake). There still wasn't quite room for everyone to sit, so nobody besides my grandfather was sitting, instead all standing uncomfortably around the margins of the room. A candle was lit; we all sang Happy Birthday. My grandfather blew out his candle, and then launched into a sentimental speech about how special it was that we were all there, and how grateful he was, and how proud he was of such a wonderful family, during the course of which he actually started to cry. Not just moist eyes. He was weeping. He couldn't even keep talking and just sat there and cried. And his family, this family that he loved so well, they all stood around silently, looking uncomfortable. Nobody was within 6 feet of him. Finally, I just couldn't take it and went over and stood by him and patted his arm. With his long history of cruelty and anger, repression and sanctimony, he'd starved his relationships with his family to the point where tearful confessions of love were just not enough.
I'm glad I went to the funeral. I'm glad to have gotten that glimpse into the layers of complexity in what you might even call a tragic life. I'm grateful to have spent that time with my dad's family, and to have been there in some small way for my grandmother. I'm also glad I wore my dowdy square-toed boots.
It was in many ways a really lovely event. The church (the main building built in 1919--soaring whitewashed walls with dark beams; burnished wooden pews) was full, despite its being a Tuesday afternoon in what is still, in northern Minnesota, full-on winter, snowflakes whirling outside. A minister, Reverend Brandt, who had been moved a couple of years earlier to a church in Iowa, but who had known my grandfather well, returned to do the service. His words were personal, fond, and, by all evidence, deeply heartfelt. He spoke in superlatives and invoked the Prayer of St. Francis as genuinely describing my grandfather's life. He talked of my grandfather saying "I love you" freely and always seeming to turn up to offer support whenever he (Rev. Brandt) was feeling particularly down.
Rev. Brandt went around with a microphone, and some in attendance talked about their memories of Carl Bonner. He ran a men's clothing store in town, and apparently gave great encouragement and marriage advice to young men in to get their wedding tuxedos. He approached church newcomers and welcomed them and made them feel at home. He and my grandmother, church members for 67 years, had helped to found the church's "Calling and Caring Committee." He never had an unkind word. One man in his 90s struggled slowly through his testimony, perservering though his speech was halting and nearly unintelligible because of some apparently neurological ailment. My grandfather's physician took the mic to tell us how much himself he was to the very end, joking self-deprecatingly and taking an interest in the well-being of others.
The whole place sang "How Great Thou Art" and recited the 23rd Psalm. My grandfather's physician also turned out to be the featured solo soprano and sang something called "Because He Lives" in a beautiful, strong, soaring voice. The congregation said the Lord's Prayer in unison ("debts," not "trespasses," in case you were wondering--I guessed wrong) and sang "Abide with Me." Toward the end, a man played an infectious, swinging, joyful version of "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" on the clarinet, accompanied by his wife on piano. My dad's sister Linda had done a great job with the central flower arrangement, and there were other nice bouquets besides. There was no body--my grandfather had chosen to be cremated. Afterwards, we all went down to the (spacious and windowed) church basement, where there were ham salad sandwiches on white rolls and frosted cupcakes and homemade donuts, plus a choice of coffee or ice water.
It was, all in all, pretty much a funeral best-case scenario. Well, Minnesota Protestant version, anyway. Had I been there accidentally, a random out-of-town visitor brought along, say, by a cousin in the congregation, I think that I would have found the occasion moving and beautiful. I might have found myself inspired by the descriptions of a life lived with such grace and care. Most of what was said sounded quite genuine to my ears, and didn't have that tinny ring of empty post-mortem platitudes. It made me think about the complexity of a life.
As a child, we visited my dad's parents once or twice a year (Christmas or summer or both), and I knew my grandfather as a vaguely friendly but somehow neither comfortable nor particularly interesting presence. As I grew older, I began to form an image of him as straitlaced and moralistic, uptight and maybe not very nice. I began to know how much my mother (married to my father for ten years before separating when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade) disliked my grandfather. (Ten years after her marriage to my dad ended, she told me she still occasionally had nightmares about ol' Carl Bonner.) I knew that he favored my brother, and memorably gave him a green leather box full of old silver coins that he had saved for his first grandson (my cousins and I, all older than Eric, were girls and therefore unsuitable recipients).
Then came the mystery banishment. A school friend, Ellie, and I stayed with my grandparents after a month at French camp the summer I was 12. After that, my grandfather cut off all contact with me without ever issuing a statement as to why. I still don't know. There were two things I can remember from that visit that could possibly explain my condemnation. One was that my grandfather drove Ellie and me to a local shopping mall and dropped us off so that we could see The Empire Strikes Back, which had just been released. Unfortunately, the 7:00 show was sold out, and the 9:00 show was going fast. Ellie and I stayed in line and bought tickets for the 9:00 show, and then went to a pay phone to call and explain the situation. (I had at that time no idea that anyone went to bed before 11:00. In my inexperience, I thought that was just the default adult bedtime.) My aunt Liz, who was staying with my grandparents then too, came to get us when the later movie let out and gave us a stern lecture in the car about how my grandparents went to bed at 10, and about the (apparently) terrible and thoughtless thing we'd done. The other transgression that I can think of that might account for the bad feelings was that in the privacy of the room I shared with Ellie, with the door closed, downstairs from my grandparents' bedroom, I waxed indignant to Ellie, and I specifically remember telling her that my grandparents had "sticks up their asses." If this had been overheard, which I certainly didn't think it would be, I suppose that could have been my hanging offense as well.
And so I had nearly no contact with my dad's parents for nearly 20 years. I saw them at my brother's wedding, where they sat stiffly at a corner table looking miserable, and I overheard an uncomfortable and syrup-covered comment from them about how nice it was that Eric had so many Black friends there (they might have actually even said "colored"--I have to admit I don't remember). I saw them by accident once at the Minneapolis airport--I was passing through the concourse on my way to Christmas with my mom and her mother. My Bonner grandparents were sitting at a gate, and I went up and greeted them warmly, as if nothing were weird. They looked uncomfortable and said very little--just made some strained, patently insincere exclamation about how nice it was to see me--and I moved on pretty quickly.
In recent years, I've also learned more about my dad's childhood. This has been from Susan, my dad's wife, and not from my father himself. Ol' Carl was apparently an abusive, violent father and husband. He beat his wife and all his children, though my Aunt Liz, the eldest, bore the brunt as a particular target of his bitter verbal scorn. (This is a role she has played ever since--Susan says she has witnessed numerous occasions of my grandfather belittling the grown-up Liz in recent years. Liz herself maintained a kind of slavish devotion to the self-righteous tyrant.)
I've also become aware, as the years have gone by, of how damaged all four of Carl Bonner's children have been. My father and his siblings all have troubles in their dealings with other people, though they've manifested in very different ways. When they're all in the same place, the combined social awkwardness just about sucks all of the air out of the room. None of them is at all easy in his or her own skin. Liz embodies some mid-century notion of spinster librarian (both of which she in fact is)--sanctimonious, churchy, gossipy, grudge-holding, bitter. My dad, the second-born and family peace-maker, rejected religion and became a staunch atheist, a thoughtful and knowledgeable, deeply principled man, but with an absolute tin-ear for the predictable irrationalities of human behavior. Dad's little sister Linda was the golden-haired, pretty, wild thing in her youth, was then born again, and became a sugary Christian stay-at-home mom and Avon lady. (Susan tells me that Linda has also in the past decade or so "recovered memories" of her and older sister Liz being sexually abused by her father as children; Liz denies this happened; my husband Pete points out that even if the recovered memories are not literally factual, they could have a certain emotional truth--"you don't have to be molested to be f**ked.") And baby of the family Tom moved to Alaska, never married, and is currently a financially struggling massage therapist. (To be fair, he at least seems pretty content, in an introverted, odd-duck kind of way.)
And so there we all were, at this lovely, touching memorial service for a man I had long assumed was basically a bad and/or sick person. Of course, one conclusion might be that the service was false, the product of some combination of deception, self-delusion, and reluctance to speak ill of the dead--that Carl Bonner was a thoroughgoing sonofabitch, and that's it. I suspect that the truth is more complicated than that, though. I think maybe it's all true. I think maybe he was a domestic tyrant and a real pillar of the community. He was a devoted and an abusive husband. He was petty and vindictive and welcoming and generous. He was thoughtful of others and deeply judgmental of their shortcomings.
Reverend Brandt actually told a story in his eulogy that struck me because it seemed to be so three-dimensional, and to catch my grandfather being both how I saw him and how his fellow churchgoers saw him at once. The anecdote was intended to illustrate Carl Bonner's "vision" for the church and the town, his drive to make things better. Reverend Brandt said there was a time in the history of Vernon Hills when a regional private power company (let's call it 10,000 Lakes Power) was negotiating the possibility of locating in town. The mayor, however, was reluctant to sell Vernon Hills Municipal Power to 10,000 Lakes Power Company, which 10,000 Lakes insisted upon, and the deal was stalled. At some point during the stand-off, the mayor went to Mankato on business for a couple days, whereupon my grandfather called an emergency session of the Town Council, called a vote on the sale of VH Municipal Power to 10,000 Lakes, and got it passed. The minister's conclusion was that the economic well-being of the town was saved, and it was a happy ending. (In fact, when I had asked my cousin earlier in the day about the sources of employment in Vernon Hills, she said the big two were 10,000 Lakes Power and the regional medical center.) So you could certainly say that my grandfather was being clearheaded and responsible, taking it upon himself to do what it took to ensure that the right thing happened for the community. You could, of course, also say that he was being a power-hungry asshole who found a devious way to steamroll legitimate resistance to his own agenda. And maybe both are true.
Meanwhile, we, the family, were there in our front pews, caught between the worlds. The result was a strange kind of nonchalance, a sort of matter-of-fact cheerfulness in all of us but my grandmother (who looked drawn, exhausted, and really terribly sad). My aunts and cousins complained about their aching feet (all of them wore fashionable pointed-toe pumps--I myself was decidedly behind the times in square-toed black boots from several seasons ago). We behaved ourselves during the service, naturally, keeping our faces somber and our voices low murmurs. And I suppose I can't know what depths of feeling lay hidden in my aunts and uncle, my cousins, my brother, my dad. But my sense is that any emotional connection to the deceased Carl Bonner was so stunted and shriveled by his behavior in his lifetime that there wasn't much left to bleed when he was finally gone.
It makes me think of a moment at my grandfather's 90th birthday party a few years ago. My aunt Liz had gotten this godawful tacky ice cream cake with blue and white icing, and "Happy Birthday Carl" in that transparent color gel they use for personalizing cheap cakes. Everyone had gathered, including my reluctant aunt Linda, who since her recovered memories tried not to be in the same room with her father but also kind of tried not to be too obvious about it. My grandfather was sitting at the large, dark wood dining room table with all the leaves put in (this was before their move to an assisted living facility--they were still in their house on the lake). There still wasn't quite room for everyone to sit, so nobody besides my grandfather was sitting, instead all standing uncomfortably around the margins of the room. A candle was lit; we all sang Happy Birthday. My grandfather blew out his candle, and then launched into a sentimental speech about how special it was that we were all there, and how grateful he was, and how proud he was of such a wonderful family, during the course of which he actually started to cry. Not just moist eyes. He was weeping. He couldn't even keep talking and just sat there and cried. And his family, this family that he loved so well, they all stood around silently, looking uncomfortable. Nobody was within 6 feet of him. Finally, I just couldn't take it and went over and stood by him and patted his arm. With his long history of cruelty and anger, repression and sanctimony, he'd starved his relationships with his family to the point where tearful confessions of love were just not enough.
I'm glad I went to the funeral. I'm glad to have gotten that glimpse into the layers of complexity in what you might even call a tragic life. I'm grateful to have spent that time with my dad's family, and to have been there in some small way for my grandmother. I'm also glad I wore my dowdy square-toed boots.
posted by Rosie Bonner at 4:24 PM
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