Tag Archives: funeral

Safety, and Pins

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1052164_10200887414020653_139717713_oSunday, March 27, 2011 was an exceptionally cold and bitter day in Athens.  I remember it vividly–that was the day a kind stranger gave me this large gold safety pin.  I rediscovered it this weekend in my car’s console.

G and I drove the kids up to Broad Street that afternoon and parked in an empty bank parking lot.  Carlos was just 3 months old.  I swaddled him in the Moby wrap then buckled my coat over both of us.  We walked up to the grassy verge of the road and waited.  Hundreds of people waited along with us, everyone whispering and looking east to the top of the hill.  Vivi was bundled in a coat and hat, but the cold wind cut right through them.  She whined about the cold.  I held her close to my leg and rubbed her back.  We waited.

“Mommy?  Where is the sad parade?”

Earlier that week, Senior Officer Elmer “Buddy” Christian had been murdered in the line of duty.  Vivi heard us discussing it and I had to explain to her what had happened.  I stuck to the basics:  a police officer died when a bad man shot him with a gun.  When we decided to take the family to the funeral procession, I explained what she could expect to see.  People stand quietly and watch the hearse and the police cars go by to say “thank you” to officers who help us stay safe.  Her clever mind turned those concepts into “sad parade.”

buddy christian“It will be along in a little while.”  G took her back to the car to wait.  But she wanted to see the road herself.  The view was blocked as more and more people came to pay respects by the side of the highway.  Vivi took the baby blanket from the car and wrapped it around herself so that she could come back out in the cold and the quiet.

We waited.  There wasn’t much talking.  Quiet minutes crept by.  I cried as Carlos slept against my heartbeat.  Every time Vivi wiggled, the blanket slipped off her shoulders.  I tried tying it around her neck but it was too short.  I tried holding her and the blanket still but she grew frustrated.  I was growing tired myself and couldn’t think of a way to make it work–paying respects while keeping an infant and a three year old warm in that brutal cold.

“Would this help?”  A small, silver-haired woman who had been standing next to us offered me this large safety pin from her purse.  Her purse was one of those magically sturdy Grandma purses that yield whatever a moment might need.  We both breathed a sigh of relief that stopped just before a laugh.  I tucked the blanket around Vivi’s neck and the kind stranger pinned it closed.  She gripped Vivi gently by the shoulders and whispered, “A magic cape for you!”

The sad parade rolled by.  We watched in silence for an hour.  We turned and went home.  I unpinned the blanket before putting Vivi in her car seat.  I stowed the very useful safety pin in the console and it waited there until this weekend.

That summer of 2011, Vivi took swimming lessons at the Y.  One little blonde girl in her age group looked very familiar to me, but I couldn’t place her.  It came to me later, when her mother came into the pool area to pick her up–she was Officer Christian’s daughter, the same age as my girl.

The next day, I was the only mom tromping through the dressing room with the girls as they collected their towels and shoes after lessons.  One girl couldn’t find her flip flops.  Her.  I called to her, “Callie?  Your shoes are right over here honey.”  I pointed to them and she smiled and said, “Thanks!”  I patted her head in blessing as she walked by.

She looked at me funny because I had said her name.  For a split second, she looked like she was trying to place me.  She knew I wasn’t a family friend.  Then she paused and I think the knowledge flickered across her face–that reason why strangers know her.  So many people know her name and her father’s name.  I hope it’s the reason that people are kind to her for the rest of her life.  Why we all want to keep her and her little brother safe.

My Mourning Jacket

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My Mourning Jacket

My Mourning Jacket

While I was digging around in my closet to find the Cancer Pants, this silk jacket tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I might be so kind as to share its story, too.  It’s a story that goes all the way back to Berlin in World War II.  Then it rushes forward to one of the saddest moments of my life.

I’m not much for Church with a capital C, but I do enjoy old churches, especially quiet ones.  In the center of bustling Berlin, smack in the middle of its busiest shopping street–Kurfürstendamm–stands the ruin of a church.  It’s the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, built in 1892 and destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943.  The shattered tower of the original church still stands as a memorial to the war and its losses.  Next to the old tower, a new modernistic column rises from the traffic.  From the outside, I found this new tower repugnant–like a silo.  Berliners aren’t all fond of the design–it’s often called “The Lipstick and the Powder Box.”

Berlin-Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedaechtniskirche-1-a19772025

But inside…oh inside there is peace and joy and beauty, all built pane by pane from the pain left to Germany after the war.  The walls are made of honeycomb concrete to keep out the noise from the street.  Suspended inside the honeycomb are over 21,000 panes of glass, mostly blue, but shot through with red, green and gold.  Like those beads that I talked about after the Boston Marathon bombings.

Richard and I visited there on a sunny spring afternoon.  Stepping inside was like walking inside a kaleidoscope.  I sat on one of the simple pews and let the peace enter my heart.  In that same week, we had been to Prague, where my heart was broken in the Jewish Quarter, then on to Dresden, where I faced the reality of what American firebombs had done to that beautiful city, then on to Berlin with Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate, and the Reich-stag.  The lime blossoms along Unter den Linden.  The pilfered archaeological treasures at the Pergamon Museum.  Everything that week was related to war and my heart had grown heavy with trying to take it all in.  This broken church gave me sanctuary.

Glass designed by Gabriel Loire

Glass designed by Gabriel Loire

It might be my imagination, but I think I recall that some of the glass from the bombed Kaiser Wilhelm Church was collected from the ruins and incorporated in the new windows.  Even it it’s not true, it should be.  

A few months after that trip to Germany, I found the “stained glass” silk jacket.  It reminded me of the blue windows in Berlin.  

Richard died on March 16, 2005, at about 6:30 in the evening.   I slept on the couch that night because I couldn’t sleep in our bed.  My cousin, Annette, came across the street, gathered up the sheets and washed them for me that night.  She knew what to do.  

After his parents woke early, I retreated to our room and closed the door.  I crawled up in the rented hospital bed, curled into a tight ball, and cried myself back to sleep.  There over the place where his heart had stopped beating.  I slept so soundly and woke rested after only two hours.  His father knocked on the door to tell me it was time to go to the funeral home and see to arrangements.  I asked if he could go without me but I had to be there–because we had married, I was his next of kin.  His own father couldn’t sign the papers.  I had to.  

I put on my stained glass jacket.  Ever since then, I think of that day, those papers, when I see that beautiful jacket.  How my hand shook and hesitated over the cremation request. The moment when I had to commit the body I had loved so well to oblivion.  How his father steadied me with the idea that this fire, this final fire, would be the thing to clear his body of the cancer he had fought so bravely.  Like a child, I wiped my tears on the sleeve of that silk jacket, and they blended with the blue, the red, the green, the gold.