Rites of Passage – an essay

Rites of Passage

The following is based on true events. All the names have been changed.

I remember being afraid as I walked along the gravel road with my dad. We were going to see a dead person. I was ten years old. I had never seen a dead person before.

At twilight, the chirping of crickets followed us down the road. With farm chores done for the day, the fields were quiet. The big-sky reds, oranges, and pinks of another summer sunset were fading fast.

My dad and I walked slowly to Joe and Elizabeth’s house. Joe was my great-uncle and Elizabeth, my great-aunt, recently deceased. They were our closest neighbors, a quarter-mile from our farm. Joe had stopped by our place earlier to make sure we were coming to the wake.

“Yes,” my dad said. “After the milking is done.”

I didn’t know what to expect at the wake. I wondered what would it be like to be in the same room as a dead person. I was afraid that an adult might ask me to touch my aunt. Maybe in our religion kissing a dead person was a sign of respect and no one had bothered to tell me.

I thought about the times when my dad and I would stop by Joe and Elizabeth’s place. Elizabeth always treated me to sticky pieces of hard candy—wavy ribbons with glossy green and red stripes. She was a kind lady. But she had been in bad health in her later years. I hoped she hadn’t suffered before she passed. I was going to be afraid—and sad—to see her in a casket.

Before that evening, I had already seen death in the form of dead animals: a dog run over by a milk truck; a deer struck by a car on the road; featherless baby sparrows scattered dead under an elm tree after a bad storm.

One time on our farm, I came upon the body of a newborn calf lying in a field, alone in the snow. Much of the carcass had been eaten by some wild animal. But its head was all there with its eyes wide open, staring and frightened. It seemed wrong for a dead calf to be left that way, but I accepted that it could not be buried in the frozen ground.

I did not want to see Elizabeth’s eyes open in the casket.

I figured my dad had probably seen dead people before. His own father had died when he was a teenager. Before that, there was a baby sister who lived less than three hours.

When my dad’s older brother was killed during the Second World War, my dad told me the Army sent the body home in a closed casket which was not opened before they buried him.

I had never seen my dad cry. I wondered if he would cry at Elizabeth’s wake. Once he told me the story of when a door slammed hard on the tip of his little finger when he was a boy. It pinched his fingertip right off. He must have howled in pain. It made me sad to think of him hurting like that.

I wondered if I would cry at Elizabeth’s wake because of fear or sadness.

When we arrived at Joe and Elizabeth’s house, my dad opened the front door and we stepped inside onto the green linoleum. The open casket was in the front room. Elizabeth, lying so still, wore a dark-print dress with tiny flowers. Her rosary rested over the backs of her crossed hands. Tidy pin curls framed her peaceful face.

Wearing his church clothes, Uncle Joe, tall next to his daughter Bess and her husband, stood quiet and close by the casket. Earlier, the priest had come to give Elizabeth communion when they knew the end was near.

I felt much affection for my older cousin Bess. Four years earlier—coming home after my first day of school—the school bus driver drove right past my house, forgetting to let me off. Bess called out to the driver, “Hey, what about this little girl?” The bus driver braked and reversed to let me off the bus. I had been too afraid to say a word. If not for Bess speaking up for me, I might have ended up crying quietly alone, unnoticed at the back of the bus, riding the seven miles back into town.

My dad and I knelt by the casket to pray. I wondered if Elizabeth could sense that we were there. Did dying mean that after the body was used up, the mind still existed somewhere apart?

In the front room, the light was growing dim. The darkness outside made the white lace curtains that hung at the windows look whiter.

Hearing low voices praying was soothing and sad. I wanted to keep looking at Elizabeth, trying to understand the stillness of a dead person. But I also wanted to go home.

My dad and I walked home in the dark, back to my mom and three younger siblings. A million-billion stars packed the black sky. Was Elizabeth’s soul up there somewhere? As we walked, I might have looked for the brightest star, the one that would be carrying her to heaven.

“Dad, where is heaven? Is it all over the sky? Or just in one part?”

After the wake, I don’t think any adult asked me about it, as in “You saw a dead person for the first time. Were you afraid?”

No, there was none of that. To handle hardships and deaths, we kept on with living.

Remembering it now as an adult, Elizabeth’s wake seems like a rite of passage. At the age of ten, I saw what human death looked like. I moved a step further from childhood, a step closer to adulthood.

Sixty-three years have come and gone since Elizabeth died. In that time, fear—and sadness—have visited my life every so often, as they do.

This year my dad passed away—another rite of passage. While sadness burrowed in deep at first, memories of his joy in living help ease my sorrow as time passes. To savor life is to honor the ones who have gone before us.

~ THE END ~