Dominoes

by Donna Schoenkopf

I sit here in the last pew at the funeral home. Neighbor Jim sits next to me.

We are all facing the blond brick walls and deep red flowers that flank a small, beautiful pine box that contains the ashes of our neighbor, “Randy.”

His widow and four children sit in the front row. His daughter is crying uncontrollably. Her loss is intense and so sorrowful that I find tears welling up in my eyes as I hear her mourning the loss of her daddy. I know how she feels because it happened to me, too. I know how scared she is about how the family will survive and how much pain there is when you know you will never, ever see him again. She is drenched in tears. She is inconsolable.

Her mother cries, too. They hold each other in their arms. The boys are stalwart, no tears there.

Neighbor Jim tells me that he made that beautiful box and did I want to see it? I feel shy and hesitate. He asks if I want him to go up with me. I say yes. So the two of us go up to the front of the room and there is the box. There is a small brass plaque on it. Jim made the box with his usual woodworking perfection. He says it took practically no time at all.

Neighbor Jim is the same person who helped to clean up Randy’s house and pulled the bloody mattress out. He does what needs to be done.

We go to a huge picture frame on an easel. There are pictures of the family and Randy. He looks happy. His family is in almost every shot. He holds his children, he watches his wife in labor, he poses, with his sleeves rolled up, for his official portrait for the grocery store he worked for. He’s a man who looks like life has been good to him.

But we know that he had pain that was insurmountable for him and that made him take his own life. That makes all the pictures deeply touching.

Neighbor Jim and I return to our seats and then our other neighbors join us. There are now four of us from our little community sitting in the back pew. These neighbors have had sorrow crushing them, too. They had just come from a memorial for their best friends, a husband and a wife, who had been murdered by an escaped prisoner and his cousin/girlfriend. You may have seen it on the news. These best friends had all retired at the same time and they had spent time hunting and fishing together. Best, best friends.

But not only that sorrow is with us. My neighbors are the owners of the trailer where Randy and his family lived across the street. And, agonizingly, they had lost their own dear and beautiful son there in that same trailer a few years back. One of my first conversations with my neighbor was about how we had both lost our sons. He told me then how his son had died in his wife’s arms.

Tangled, painful experiences wash over us as we sit in that pew.

We sit as music wells up. It is a country western song, with the fiddles playing as mournfully as any bagpipe. I love country western music. It is like rap—the poetry of the people. Don’t get me wrong, I do not subscribe to some of the sentiments, but most of it is about the common thread that binds us humans together. And heartache is one of those experiences that country music does really, really well.

We sit quietly. The young woman on my right, holding a sweet little toddler on her lap, begins to cry. I wonder if she’s thinking of someone she loved who has died or if she is thinking of Randy.

The song ends and the reverend, a big and kind man, walks up to the lectern and begins his talk.

It’s about God. And being saved. And pain. This is a subtle reference to Randy’s suicide. And then he quotes the Bible about “judging not.”

Three rows up I see a man nodding his head, just slightly, as those words are spoken. Has he been judged? Has he had things happen that caused people to point fingers at him, talk about him, shun him, look at him with a judgmental eye? Or does he know Randy well enough to realize that life’s problems were just too much for him to handle and that we all break sometimes from the weight of the pain and we should not feel superior in any way to someone who does?

I see a chubby preteen boy, two rows up, who cries, and whose mother wraps her arms around him and draws him close.

The reverend goes on. He tells us that Randy had accepted the Lord, Jesus Christ, and that he was saved. He quotes the Bible, saying that if the Lord is with us, who can be against us? He knows that Randy is in heaven now. And he again makes reference to the fact that we cannot know what was in Randy’s heart. And we must not judge.

The reverend is a gentle man. He never raises his voice. It’s a talk that is meant to be consoling but also thought provoking. It’s meant to apply balm to the wounds that the family is feeling. It’s meant to keep Randy from being put outside the flock.

He talks about not analyzing, and that analyzing leads to paralyzing. I find myself shaking my head “no” to that. It smacks too much of having faith which requires belief without proof or questioning.

The reverend, in his loving way, is trying to convert us all to Christianity and its rewards ... like eternal heaven with God the Father and his Son. Most people in the room are already convinced, but there are a few of us who don’t go for it.

He steps from the lectern and two more songs play. Both are mournful and speak of heaven and life after death.

The reverend returns and cannot seem to wind up his sermon. Four times he says that he’ll say just one more thing before he closes. It’s like the final movement of a classical piece of music that has an ending that goes on for a long, long time.

But finish he does.

He invites us to come forward to show our love and respect to the family.

I go up with my neighbor’s wife, the woman who held her son in her arms as he died. The men hang back. This is women’s work, I guess. We two women join the rest of the mourners. I hug the sorrowful widow and say nothing, just hug her, and then I lean in to the inconsolable daughter and tell her I know how she feels and I say to the older son who isn’t showing any emotion that I hope he comes to my pond to fish.

And then it’s over.

We congregate in the foyer. Randy’s pictures play on a video in the corner. People stop to watch for a while. We neighbors stand together, a community of four.

Nothing left to do or say, so we walk out of the building, into the 104 degree parking lot. Neighbor Jim walks me to my car. He tells me how he resents being preached to. I tell him I don’t resent it because I know the reverend does it out of love and concern for our souls, but that I, personally, had lost my belief in a loving God who protects me.

We agree that our funerals won’t have any of that.

Our conversation leads me to tell him that after my son died I thought about why it happened. I thought about it for three years, reaching back and back through causes and effects until finally I got back to the beginning of the universe and the Big Bang. I realized that everything was like an infinite set of dominoes, toppling each other in patterns that ran in all directions, affecting one thing and then another, and that my son’s death had been coming, with those particular circumstances, since the beginning of time.

Neighbor Jim nods and agrees. It’s just the way it is. And there’s nothing you can do about it. The luck of the draw.

And as I climb into the smothering furnace of my car, I think that maybe I would like a country western song at my funeral, like the one that played today. That song had helped us cry. We sat together in that room and bid a fond farewell to our dearly departed and cried.

It was real purdy.

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