Family Voices

Two months ago, my grandfather died. At his funeral, we sat in stunned silence. Four generations of story-tellers, talkers, entertainers, singers, writers, even a one-time auctioneer among us—moved beyond mere words by the giant footprint that one man had left upon our souls. We, collectively so proud of our birthright, “the gift of gab”—our verbal prowess had abandoned us, leaving us lost, unable to fill the gaps between us in the manner we always had. No family event had ever passed without at least one speech, usually more. But that day, with our initial silence, we stubbornly denied our grief, stifling our voices and our pain in tissues and whispers.

After the service, guests filed past the family, hugging and whispering to my grandmother, my father, his siblings . . . so sorry . . . such a good man. I wondered what it would be like to lose a parent, a spouse, and could not grasp it. One man spoke to my grandmother and when he turned away, his face collapsed upon itself, his left hand raised in a feeble fist, shaking in silent frustration as if to strike out at the unseen forces that had caused his pain. An absolute stranger to me, my grandfather’s friend, someone who would miss him dearly. The impact my grandfather had on this man’s life would never be known to me. Our loved ones are out there every day doing amazing things and we never know.

After the guests had filed out, after the prayers, after the playing of Taps, the salutes, the neatly folded flag laid in my grandmother’s outstretched hands, we still sat in silence—the Family. We had never been to a funeral together, this particular mix of us. There was no precedent. There never is, no matter how many funerals you attend. Death robs us of our social grace.

Then one of us stood up to speak, a younger cousin. With her words, she gave to all of us the voices we had somehow misplaced that morning. The sound of a single voice that belonged to us soothed and calmed. The minister’s voice had been nice, but it was not Us. Her speech was precisely what it needed to be, what we needed it to be, rending our hearts with imagery and calling forth the questions of what it means to be a father and a husband, what it means to lose a father, and to then find comfort in the greatest Father of all.

Another younger cousin, a father himself, looking like a big kid in his nice shirt and tie, approached our grandmother. He bent over her frail frame, to hug her, to give solace, but ended up on his knees, weeping with his head in her lap, weeping as we had all done in her presence as children, clinging to the comfort she always offered. He gave voice to all of the sorrow in the room at once, sobs wrenched from the pit of pain we all sat mired in together. His suffering was Our suffering. He became the child we all wanted to be on that day, grateful that our Patriarch was spared more suffering, yet still selfishly wishing him back into the fold, wishing away the illness that robbed him of peace in his last days. With a wordless expression of anguish, and with softly spoken words of loss and comfort, two among us had managed to speak for us all. And it was enough.