Life, Death, and Funerals

 

By Ralph Karow

 

Last week I found out that I share joint power of attorney with my sister for my 88-year-old mother. They both live out in Colorado. I had sole POA while she lived in New York, and I assumed that when my mother moved out there in 2019, a new POA was signed, making my sister sole POA. I thought everything had been squared away when she left, and I no longer had to concern myself with her material situation, so my first reaction to this news was that classic Al Pacino line: Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.

           

It is odd when you think about it. I live 1800 miles away in a monastery, with no direct phone access. And I don’t have a driver’s license, so I couldn’t rent a car and get there to do anything even if I were to fly out. Realistically, my sister is the only one who can act directly as our mother’s agent. At least in the material world. God’s world is different.

 

I’m sure it was not my mother’s intention, but in making me co-POA, she brought an eternal perspective into play. She’s at a point where she needs extensive care and eventual hospice care, and she will need to go on Medicaid at some point. There’s nothing I can do to pick out facilities, and nothing anybody can do as far as transferring or positioning assets so that they don’t get dissolved to cover medical expenses, but I am uniquely qualified to explore an item exempt from the Medicaid “look back”: irrevocable prepaid funeral and burial plans—of any value.

 

Now, rather than being named co-POA seeming odd, it begins to seem vital for them and is certainly a wakeup call for me. Despite being a devout Catholic, my mother would not go for an elaborate funeral service. She’d be on the fence for something small and private, mainly because she’d rather the money go to her family than to the church. “They have enough money,” she’d say. And she also doesn’t think that anyone would want to attend. A small family gathering in a catering hall is all the send-off she thinks she needs: “It’s really just so the family has some closure.” At first glance, this may seem at odds with her being a devout Catholic. When you consider, however, that she grew up in a church that only spoke Latin, which she didn’t understand, and private devotions were the norm for the laity, it begins to make more sense. She went to mass as a weekly duty, but her real relationship with God happened in the privacy of her home with a breviary in her native language. In her mind, the passage into eternity is something you do alone.

 

My father was a nonpracticing Protestant. He believed there was a God, but that God was so far beyond his capacity to understand, or relate to, that he dared not even try. Oddly, though, he had faith that if he lived modestly and was “a good person,” God would take care of him when he died. He didn’t want anything but to have his ashes scattered at sea.

Given both their attitudes, my looking into funeral plans may seem way off base. If it’s not something they want or wanted, what business do I have imposing it on them? Well ... to quote the Rolling Stones: you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need. And what our dearly departed need is not to be remembered for who they were and what they meant to us, but our prayers for who and what they will become in eternity. This is not to say that our remembrances and reflections aren’t a sort of prayer in and of themselves. Of course they are, but I’m thinking of prayer explicitly directed to the afterlife. The prayer we find in the Lity and Requiem Mass. Those of us in religious life or laity, actively practicing the faith through the liturgy, are already engaged in these two forms of prayer.

Speaking only from personal experience, my family and friends are not oriented toward the liturgy. The formalized church is only something they come in contact with occasionally or as a news item. I think it’s fair to say, though, that this is more typical than atypical in today’s world. They will go to church weddings, baptisms, or funerals out of respect for the individuals involved, but not out of an inner longing for what the Church (institutional) offers, or out of a sense of belonging to the Church (body of the faithful). If I arrange for a funeral service, some of them will come; many of them will not. The fact that I’d do this at a parish in Manhattan rather than one that’s easier to drive to gives some a convenient excuse for not attending. It’s this last item that’s given me an entirely different outlook on what a service for my parents would need to entail. Not to slight Al, Mick, and Keith, but I’ve got to call on scripture to bring out the point of what I’m being led to. Matthew 22 tells of a king inviting guests to a wedding feast for his son. When the guests don’t show, he has the hall filled with anyone and everyone that his servants can find ... good and bad. What’s more, he provides a wedding garment that each guest needs to wear. For us lowly human beings, a wedding feast and a funeral are two entirely different things. But are they really? The person who dies leaves this earth, and we mourn that at a funeral. At the same time, however, that person enters the kingdom of God, which is celebrated in heaven as a wedding feast. A solemn service precedes a wedding feast, which is not to say that a person needs a funeral before entering heaven. The end of a human’s chronos time marks its transition to kairos time and is not dependent on human intervention. Our prayers are only intercessions, and their effect falls outside of the bounds of time. What matters in one’s petition isn’t its elegance, length, or persuasiveness but its sincerity and intensity. It is our inner yearning for God and the deceased that will carry our prayer and affect the Most High.

I’ll be continuing this article next month, since it’s already longer than I intended. Before ending, though, I’d like to step back and leave you with one thought. When my mother does pass away, hopefully years from now, she will not have to wait for prayers coming to her aid from any preplanned service. We’ll have a Lity for her right here, and I’m sure the mutual love I share with the monastics and people I’ve come to know in the parish community will be just as effective as anything that may come afterward.