9:49 a.m. - 2005-06-14
Eulogy Rant
I came to know Matthew's parents. Strangely, we communicated by mail although we could easily have met for coffee. Matthew's mother called one day and, in hushed tones, assured me that she was not crazy. Not knowing what I was about to hear, I readily confirmed her plea of sanity. "You are the only one who might understand", she spoke shyly. "Matthew was not allowed to smoke in our house. My husband has asthma and it's just a rule we've always enforced. Maybe it was mean, but ...", she continued. "Matthew used to stand outside, even on the coldest days, puffing away on his Marlboro's. He never complained, but I don't think he much liked it". I didn't yet see the point, but was grateful to be hearing from her and especially to be taken into her confidence. "The other day, I walked into the kitchen to put away groceries and the room was filled with smoke. Familiar smelling smoke. Marlboro smoke. There was no one there", she said matter of factly. "Matthew's dad was at work. No one else has the key to our home. It was Matthew. It had to be". And I had to admit that it was something he would do. It was so in his character to get the last laugh out of a situation. "Oh yeah? Think you can keep me from smoking in the house?" And who's to say that Matthew's humor was not an intrinsic part of his soul, following him smack into heaven? Who's to say that God didn't need that kind of mischief to keep things interesting? Who's to say that Matthew hadn't mustered his last ounce of strength to comfort his loved ones with sophmoric humor and defiance? Who's to say? And so I told her, and I meant it, "I believe". A secret unspoken pact formed between us. She began to send me a chronicle of Matthew's short life, no doubt ripped from scrapbooks and musty boxes. I stood by the mailbox as a chubby baby with eyes some unearthly shade of blue stared back at me. A boy with shaggy black hair, a baseball bat and a grin that spanned eternity. An adolescent looking out of his element in rented prom attire, holding onto an anonymous gawky girl for dear life. There he was, growing up before my eyes while I awaited the results of his autopsy. The photos were so startling that I wondered how we had expected one so out of step with the rhythm of this world to meet with an ordinary end at eighty something. It was painfully obvious in black and white with dog-eared corners that Matthew had been on loan from God from the beginning. It was audacious of us to request an extention, to presume some prior claim than his intended stay. Like a library book that none of us had bothered to finish, we clamored too late for the opportunity to skim just one more amazing chapter. But he had been returned to his source and was out of our mortal reach. Before I received the more recent photos from his mom, the long anticipated autopsy report came suddently too soon. His mother read the document as though it were a third page newspaper article. It was, by then, an afterthought. An unwelcome infusion of reality into the tales we were furiously spinning like crazy, heartbroken spiders with each new day. The legends that tended to surround the dead like the coarsening layers of a cocoon impatient to be flung open on the other side, where Matthew would emerge triumphant in an indestructibly weightless grin. The document had no bearing on the hole that widened by the day in the lives of all who knew him. It would not bring him back. Still, it was necessary for what has become casually known as 'closure', that mason jar lid one seals on feelings too painful to experience but that subtly taint the rest of life with inopportune leaks. Although I remained convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the depths of my own heart, it seems that Matthew had died of an aneurism. A blood clot from a high school football injury had broken loose and travelled to his brain, unceremoniously ushering him home. Peacefully, we were told. There in the damp, summer grass behind the theater while children ate popcorn and shivered vicariously in the dark as some scary movie flickered onscreen. While I ate Tom's "four day spaghetti sauce" and watched him watch the wrestlers challeging one another with explatives and spit. While the moon became round as porcelin dish above the crime scene. While crickets chirped and birds found rest in eucalyptus boughs and all of creation did what it is was designed to do. In that delicate balance that I do not pretend to understand, on that drowsy summer night, Matthew obeyed some call meant only for his ears. As was his way, he left us looking up.
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