At my father’s funeral, I sat with my arm around my mother and the feeling of holding her near is almost all that remains of the service in my mind. Now I wish I had spoken, even though I had little to say. I had never before been to a funeral and didn’t know what happened at them, except vaguely – there was a Mass, I understood, but what prayers or rituals were added in I didn’t know. I was unaware that family members often spoke. I had no knowledge of burials except for cinematic ones, where people circled a hole in the ground dressed in black, weeping. This seemed unlikely to happen given that my father would be cremated, and also because I had never noticed anything but small historical graveyards in Manhattan.
I remind myself of these things in a bid to let my teenage self off the hook, to excuse the fact that I did not speak: as a middle-aged parent of teenagers, I want the girl I was no longer to feel badly about it, or to feel that it was her responsibility somehow shirked.
The reality was that I could only have said the most generic of things, deployed usual sentiments as a cover for the complexity of feelings that I had. Like a Hallmark card, I would have spoken in powdered-sugar form, or so broadly that it could have been any funeral. I think I could have done that. But to have come up with something truer and kinder to my father himself, to say something that reflected the intense love that he had for me and for my mother, would have been utterly beyond me.
It was an era of overwhelmed feelings and the struggle to articulate them: and also a time of grappling with what I was allowed or able to say. What I had learned from movies was that funerals were for the performance of truisms. But, pushing away from my teens as my father died, I rebelled against this: I wanted to be able to say what I thought was the truth, and if that was unacceptable, or if I did not have the ability to express my feelings with words, I would say nothing, nothing at all.
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We had found ways to negotiate an inability to speak. Countless times as a child I read lines with him while he was learning or relearning a part – disappearing into A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the diningroom table, The Plough and the Stars, The Bald Soprano. If at times in his life he did not know how to talk to me, felt he could share nothing of himself without the risk of breaking down, the necessity of being off-book by the time rehearsals started provided a way of communicating: here was a script we could follow. I was Titania, sometimes Puck, other times Juno or Captain Boyle; I was Nell to his Nagg, or a series of Chekhov characters if he was going into a season of repertory. I read and he performed. The dozens of still photographs used to promote the plays he was in are a reminder of those days when my only role was to cue, occasionally to prompt.
One of the first songs that I learned, aged three (there is a recording), was Give My Regards to Broadway. My father believed there was power in the world of the stage. To inhabit a space dedicated to the ability of mind and language to take us elsewhere, beyond ourselves: this was important to him. Some seasons he spent more time as Joxer or Lear than himself, something that seemed tragic to me when I was entering my teens and at my angriest with him: I was acutely aware that he lived in those performances, that in some ways he felt homeless without a role. As both his body and his performances began to suffer the effects of alcoholism, though, he was offered less theatre work.
He was forced, as I saw it, to be more and more himself, which no doubt initially, though I hope not finally, seemed tragic to him. It was far more complex than what I thought then, of course; he was many and multiple as we all are – there was no pure, refined self that I could have gotten to know even if he hadn’t been drinking. When drunk and bereft, he was, perhaps, ever that nine-year-old boy whose mother and sister died so swiftly and for whom he had not known how, or been allowed, to grieve. I have come to believe that we were most ourselves when I played prompter, when we met over words on a page.
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Surprisingly, following a quieting of theatre roles, my father continued to work and stay sober, leaving the house early each morning to meet a colleague for coffee and the companionship of the New York Times crossword before the day began.
What sort of eulogy could integrate those various points of view without descending into a series of anecdotes or the recitation of moments? I didn’t know
We didn’t know of this routine until his funeral, when the workmate, a single man around the same age, told my mother and I how much he’d appreciated that time with my dad, how much he enjoyed hearing about us. I was surprised at the detail he knew about my mom and I; he told my mother that he only wished he’d heard her sing on stage. He talked about you every morning, he said. With this late friendship, my dad had the opportunity to be a proud father and husband, to express his love for us to someone who knew nothing about his alcoholism and the way in which it had corroded his relationship with us. Sober, ageing and stricken with a cancer that was gradually announcing itself, my father told his friend about my graduation from high school, about my first years in college. He was proud of my brightness, my American-ness, the fact that I was interested in theatre and literature but not in performance. He loved my mother still: her loyalty, goodness, kindness. He hardly spoke of Ireland, except to say that my mother or I were planning to visit or were away.
All of a sudden I saw the father who had been either oblivious in his drinking or overly attentive in his sobriety in companionable quiet over coffee each morning: each man doing the crossword and sharing elements of their lives before they started the work day. I was once more outside my own perspective, the resulting image something unsteady and steady, dependent on multiple points of view.
That half hour of early-morning weekday conversation in an Upper East Side diner stood in contrast to the countless stories I’d absorbed about my father in pubs, theatres, restaurants and hotels that involved many people, much alcohol. Other narratives, other perspectives, were suddenly available; I was young enough that this fell on me with weight, particularly given that the illumination came from a person who, had he not attended the funeral, we would never have known of except vaguely as a colleague. How many people carried such information silently along with them, keeping it to themselves, not ever realising the value of their insights? This moment marked, in a sense, my starting to think about what a eulogy could be because here, after the official ceremony, my father’s friend had handed me a way of proceeding to think of my dad anew.
What sort of eulogy could integrate those various points of view without descending into a series of anecdotes or the recitation of moments? I didn’t know. My father’s friend might have had more to say, more insight into my father than I had, with my head still turned by teenage concerns. Would a truer eulogy require multiple speakers, a Quaker circle of voices each contributing a vector, or were such attempts vainly searching for a wholeness of person and self that was merely notional? How many people speaking would it take to articulate any human being? Such questions overwhelmed me.
When you’re on your own, it’s nice to hear about family life, my father’s friend told me. We were near the exit of the church where my mother sang in New York. Built in the late 1960s after a fire destroyed the 19th-century iteration, the church was grey brick with slate floors, rectangular light fixtures and stained- glass windows that shimmered coloured light on to the floors in mirroring columns of 20, 30, even 40 feet, depending on the angle of the sun. Despite being irreligious, I had always enjoyed spending time in this building, associating it with my mother and her singing. Its difference from traditional churches felt both stylised and austere. I loved the windows, which eschewed complex rosettes in favour of shards of glass fitted together in uncertain ways.
We were standing near a column as my father’s friend spoke to us, the colours glowing and fading and glowing and fading like breath, like an irregular heartbeat. It was as if we could all be charged by dancing light. That seemed to me to be the allure of stained glass: the desire to enter into illumination. It was what I had wanted when I had gone to the Magritte exhibit at the Met two months earlier, and what I’d described to my father: the urge to be inside light.
This is an edited extract from This Interim Time by Oona Frawley, which is published by Lilliput Press. Frawley lectures in the Department of English at Maynooth University
