It was neither a particularly good day nor a particularly bad day for a funeral. April in southeast Wisconsin discourages rigid expectations about the weather. In one spot, the sun shines, the air is calm, and summer is within reach. A few yards away, the ground is shielded by the edge of a cloud, a wind gust penetrates with its chill, and winter petulantly refuses to exit the stage. It is a liminal time, a moment of instability and transition. The grass in the graveyard at Nashotah House, a theological seminary of the Episcopal Church thirty miles due west of Milwaukee, had only turned green—virtually overnight, as it is wont to do—a few days earlier, serendipitously coordinated with the arrival of Easter. The burial took place on the afternoon of the Friday following.
There had been some anxiety among the seminary’s maintenance crew members about whether the ground was sufficiently thawed beneath the surface for their backhoe to penetrate the earth deeply enough; it had been an unusually frigid winter. People tend not to consider such potential problems when they die. The crewmen were relieved when they were able to prepare the site without incident. Since the 150-year old institution was in the burial business on only an occasional basis, the protocol was conservative, even archaic—which is to say, there was no effort to disguise the nature of the day’s work: the burial of the mortal remains of a human being. There was no blanket of artificial turf to conceal the mound of soil that would shortly be used to close the grave.
After the appointed scripture verses from the committal service in the Book of Common Prayer were read, the six pallbearers secured both ends of three lengths of heavy rope that lay underneath the coffin while maintenance workers removed the two-by-fours that had been holding it in place above the hole. The pallbearers then slowly lowered the casket into the concrete casing that had already been placed at the bottom. The Right Reverend Edward Chase Landry, bishop of the Episcopal Church’s Chicago diocese, in a flat tone which masked the true intensity of his emotions, continued with the liturgical rite.
“In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our sister Sharon, and we commit her body to the ground.” Here the bishop, standing at the head of the grave, paused, turned to his rear, and bent over to scoop a handful of soil from the adjacent pile. A wind gust momentarily delayed the completion of this ritual chore, holding the edge of his white, gold, and red cope against his right hand as he tried to extend it outward. For an instant, he feared his miter might blow off his head, and instinctively steadied it with his left hand. The gust spent itself even before its presence was registered in anyone’s conscious attention. Bishop Landry disposed of the contents of his right hand into the grave, where it struck the lid of the plain wooden coffin with a sound somewhere between a thud and rattle. For those who loved Sharon Marie Daley Coverdale, the sound was an aural sign and seal of the bitter concreteness of what was being accomplished.
“…earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless her and keep her, the Lord make his face to shine upon her and be gracious to her, the Lord lift up his countenance upon her and give her peace.” There were only some twenty-odd voices to offer the “Amen.” Standing next to the bishop was Father Frank Craig, the dean of the seminary. At the other end of the grave were three seminarians who had been arbitrarily impressed into service as acolytes. Vested in plain white albs, girded at the waist, one held a processional crucifix, while his colleagues flanked him on either side with their torches (or so they are called, though really only ordinary candles mounted on four-foot wooden rods and protected from the wind by hurricane globes). The rest of the small company of mourners was composed of Sharon’s immediate family and a few close friends. The public funeral itself, a Requiem Mass, had taken place several hours earlier at St Alban’s Church in Grove Lake, Illinois, eighty miles to the south. The nucleus of those gathered at the graveside that Friday afternoon were the ones whose lives would be most deeply affected by Sharon’s passing—her two barely-grown children, her still actively retired parents, and her husband, Miles. Miles was a distinguished alumnus of the House from twenty-five years earlier, and it was the long-standing policy of the seminary to provide burial space for alumni and their immediate family members. He was also the rector, for the twelve years prior, of St Alban’s Church. The Coverdales had always planned on someday occupying adjacent sites in that peaceful cemetery, but certainly not before either one of them had yet turned fifty. Sharon was forty-eight when she died; Miles was just approaching the midpoint of his fiftieth year.
Sharon’s first awareness of a symptom took place during a solo shopping expedition the day after the previous Thanksgiving. She became cripplingly dizzy in the mall and had to have a security guard call Miles, who brought their twenty-one year old son, Brian, with him to drive Sharon’s car home. She never did quite feel like herself again. The headaches began the following week. Sharon had been remarkably healthy her whole life. She tended not to get the usual winter colds and flu, was only twelve pounds heavier than the day she was married, and was not even allergic to anything. Against this backdrop, her sudden malaise was compellingly visible, in stark relief. The standard sequence of diagnostic events ensued. The CT scan was the final arrow to point in the same direction—Sharon had inoperable brain cancer. Christmas in the Coverdale rectory was celebrated under a cloud. By the time Glen and Mary Daley returned glumly to Florida early in January after their hastily arranged visit to their daughter, Sharon’s face was already marked like a map for the radiation therapy.
The Coverdale family had no template, no collective memory, to steer it through the straits of such an adversity. Miles and Sharon had negotiated the all too normal vicissitudes of their married life with a tacit agreement that it rarely served a useful purpose to confront a problem directly. They were reinforced in this attitude by the fact that it remained largely untested. Finances had never been problematic. Neither encountered more than momentary career frustration. The children never had as much as a broken bone, and were both bright, personable, well-educated, and Rachel well-married at age twenty-three. Both the elder Coverdales and the Daleys were alive, in good health, and in intact marriages. Terminal illness is always uncharted territory for the person who experiences it, but it was especially so for Sharon and those closest to her. She and Miles coped with it the only way they knew—by not talking about it.
“I know,” Miles replied flatly, and then, when he could think of nothing more profound to say, he simply repeated himself. “I know.”
Rachel and Brian, however, having no tools other than the family tradition of silence, and being less adept than their parents at employing even this questionably valuable device, found themselves in more of an emotional free fall.
The severe mercy of Sharon’s final illness was its brevity. Hers was an orderly death. There was time enough to prepare, but no agonizing lingering. By Ash Wednesday, it became clear—though the doctors had never held out much hope anyway—that the radiation treatment was going to be of no avail. Sharon checked out of the hospital for the final time and settled into a hospital-style bed in the family room of the rectory. Bishop Landry was a weekly visitor. The Daleys moved into one guest room for the duration. Howard and Joan Coverdale spent that first week of Lent in the other bedroom that had been vacated by their now grown grandchildren and took proper leave of their daughter-in-law. Miles presided at one Mass each Sunday, but turned all the preaching and other liturgical duties over to his curate, Justin Hooker. Lance Kemper, the senior warden of St Alban’s, and Donna Lessing, the office manager, quietly took care of the most pressing administrative chores. On Easter Sunday, Sharon received her viaticum—final Holy Communion—from her husband’s own hand, was anointed with oil by the Bishop, and was alert for the formal reading of the Prayers for the Dying, the official last rites of the Episcopal Church. The next day, Monday in Easter Week, Sharon lost any meaningful semblance of consciousness. Fluids continued to be administered intravenously, but as she had long since ordered that no feeding tube be inserted, she was no longer able to take nourishment. She stopped breathing just before midnight Tuesday. Everyone else was asleep at that precise moment. Miles roused himself a few minutes later when the hall clock struck the hour. He quietly offered the Prayer of Commendation, as he had for so many others so many times before, disconnected the IV line, straightened his wife’s hair, and placed her arms in the traditional crossed position. He then went and woke the others, first his children, then Sharon’s parents. Only as dawn approached did he place a call to the funeral home so they could come and remove the body.
The end of a graveside rite is an awkward moment under any circumstances, but even moreso on this occasion. There was no dark-suited mortician to direct the pallbearers to place their boutonnieres on the casket as they file by, and to announce, “This concludes the service.” The seminarian acolytes, having the smallest emotional investment, were the first to break ranks. Dean Craig discreetly stepped over to whisper his thanks before they retired with their paraphernalia several hundred yards across the campus to the sacristy of St Mary’s Chapel. Miles was momentarily frozen, disoriented by having to act in a familiar play on a familiar stage, but having been cast in the wrong role. The Nashotah graveyard was home territory for him—he had honed his craft as a preacher two and a half decades before by using a conveniently-sized headstone as a pulpit and preaching to the dead (half hoping, at times, for a response, which would confirm that he was following his true call). Funerals, of course, were part of the substance of his vocation, but always with himself in the familiar (dare he say even comfortable?) role of presider. He had never buried his wife before. He was like an experienced shortstop being suddenly asked to play left field; he could describe the duties of the job, but they were not yet instinctive, reflexive. Miles knew that the proper action at this moment was to hug his children, but which one first? Rachel was to his left, Brian to his right, and he was paralyzed by a decision that was probably entirely without consequences. Bishop Landry faced no such dilemma, and was therefore able to solve Miles’s—two long strides and outstretched arms put Rachel Coverdale DeFronzo in his embrace, with her husband Greg’s hand never leaving her shoulder. Miles instantly recognized his deliverance, and turned to wordlessly hug his son.
Even as he did so, his own father’s hand was gently on Miles’s shoulder. No one would have ever described Howard Coverdale as a demonstrative man, so a hand on a shoulder was not a minimal gesture. He had, after all, spent more than four decades as an accountant, and had a personality that did nothing to belie the stereotype borne by his profession. Both the personality and the profession occupied prominent places in the family gene pool. Howard’s own father had been a financial officer for Cunard Lines—in its day the premier carrier of trans-Atlantic passenger traffic—until he got off the proverbial boat one day in New York and never saw fit to report for the return voyage to England, choosing instead to purvey his analytical and financial skills in the American market. Charles Coverdale eventually found a niche in the accounting offices of the Monongahela Valley, Pennsylvania steel industry. He never quite made what one would call a fortune, but he did sustain his family in a modicum of comfort through the years of the Great Depression, which was no mean feat. He even managed to marshall the resources to send Howard, his only child, to Marquette University in Milwaukee. Howard’s education was permanently interrupted, however, by Adolf Hitler, against whom he fought as a tail gunner in several dozen bombing runs from England over Germany. He was sent home wounded in the winter before the Normandy invasion—wounded not by an enemy round but by a freak fall on an unanticipated and invisible patch of ice outside his barracks. There was no promising football career for his torn knee ligaments to wreck, but they did end his obligation to the United States Army Air Corps. Howard paid due respects to his family in Pennsylvania, but returned quickly to Milwaukee, not to resume his education, but to rekindle what had been a nascent romance with Joan Grisham, the daughter of a reasonably prosperous retailer of women’s apparel. He was successful not only in that endeavor, but in stumbling upon a position as a bookkeeper with a farm implements manufacturer on the west side of the city, from which he retired forty five years later as chief financial officer. He and Joan, now retired for nearly a decade in Sarasota, had raised Miles in the comfortably affluent, but not ostentatious, suburb of Wauwatosa, barely a twenty minute drive eastward on Interstate 94 from where they were now offering their only son their inadequate support—which is the only kind of support anyone can offer at such a time—at the nodal moment of beginning life as a widower.
The English Coverdales had always been members of the established church of that land, which meant, in America, that they were Episcopalians. No one would have ever suggested aloud that it was an affiliation sustained more by heredity and habit than by conviction and choice, but such a characterization does not miss the mark by much. The truth is, it has never been an unduly arduous task to be both an Episcopalian and relatively unreligious. This capacity for unreflective churchmanship explains how, when it came time for Howard and Joan to name their son, they chose the name Miles almost arbitrarily, just because it appealed to them at the moment. They had not the slightest inkling that they were naming him after a distinguished, even controversial, Anglican bishop of the sixteenth century. The proto-Coverdale had been an Augustinian friar early in the volatile—particularly for monastic orders—early years of Henry VIII’s reign, but renounced that association after falling under the influence of the Protestant reformers on the continent, and went into self-imposed exile there. His consuming interest was the translation of the Bible into English, and he was a partner in the production of the first such completed effort, the Great Bible of 1535. His rendering of the Psalms found its way into the Book of Common Prayer, and thereby into the hearts and imaginations and memories of hundreds of thousands of English speaking Christians who never heard his name. Under Henry’s sickly successor, the boy king Edward VI, Coverdale was made Bishop of Exeter in 1551, but was forced back into exile when Edward’s half-sister, Bloody Mary, assumed the throne two years later. Upon the return of stability to the British monarchy under Elizabeth in 1558, Bishop Coverdale returned permanently to his homeland and championed the Puritan cause in the ecclesiastical politics of the Church of England. His late twentieth century namesake, now in mourning, had never even heard of the good bishop until he studied church history as a college student. The latter-day Miles Coverdale viewed this random connection with some pride, but also as an amusing irony, as his own predilection was solidly toward the Catholic, rather than the Protestant, polarity within the Anglican spectrum.
Miles began to settle into his role as husband-of-the-deceased with a bit more self-assurance. It occurred to him that no one expected him to say or do anything; they were all too pre-occupied with what to say and do themselves. Actually, there was not much to say. Anything profound had already been said. All that remained were platitudes and practicalities. Howard Coverdale opted for the latter.
“Look…uh…we’ll just see you back at your place. I mean, rather than caravan. Your mother hasn’t eaten all day. I’m just gonna take her now and get her fed. We’ll see you in Grove Lake. You’ll probably beat us there.”
“That’s fine, Dad. I’ll see you there.” Miles’s parents had flown up from Florida the day after Sharon died, and had return reservations the next Monday. They drove their rented Ford Taurus from Grove Lake to Nashotah in convoy behind Chase Landry after the service at St Alban’s, along with Rachel and Greg in their Honda Accord, and Brian behind the wheel of the family sedan, with his father in the passenger seat. It was an almost new charcoal gray Mercury Marquis, a symbol of comfortably established middle age that Miles had long resisted in favor of the various incarnations of Volkswagen he had driven since his college days. Sharon had talked him into making the switch—actually, it was more like giving permission than any form of coercion. His protests about it being a sign of conspicuous comsumption unbecoming to a member of the clergy were not convincing, even to himself.
While Howard and Joan were negotiating the slope—too steep to be gentle and too gentle to be steep—from the cemetery grounds to their car parked along the narrow campus road, Fred Craig came alongside Miles.
“Please rest a little while before you hit the road again. I know I can make some tea and I’m sure I can scrounge up some cookies or something to go with it.” Before Miles could answer, Chase Landry was by his other side.
“Miles, I’m going to insist that you take up Fred on his invitation. We’ve practically just gotten here, you know. The traffic’s going to be a mess no matter when we leave, so we might as well get a little break. Brian, you don’t mind, do you?”
“Not at all, Bishop. Father Craig, this is very kind of you. We’d be glad to stop by.” Everyone had correctly intuited that Miles’s inclination would be to avoid any unnecessary delay in returning home, once the official business was completed. The combined pressure of the dean, the bishop, and his son, however, quashed in advance any resistance he may have offered. Realizing he was cornered, Miles tried, not quite convincingly, to sound cheerful about it.
“Sure…absolutely. Tea sounds good.” With that surrender, it was Rachel who then felt the need to be extricated. The company of three black-suited clergymen and her brother was singularly unappealing to her at the moment. Truthfully, anyone’s company was unappealing to her at the moment—even, strangely and unaccountably, her own husband’s, but Greg was her ride home.
“Dad, I think Greg and I are just going to slip away and take our chances with rush hour on the the tollway. Bishop, we’ll clear a path for you.” Rachel spoke from her knowledge that Chase Landry’s destination that afternoon was also the near north side of Chicago. She embraced the still vested bishop once again. “And thank-you. Thank-you so much. You’ve been wonderful to us. I don’t know what we would have done.”
The bishop grasped both her shoulders and looked her squarely in the eyes. “You know I love you all, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she replied through a wan but unaffected smile. “I know. Dad, I’ll call you tonight, OK?”
“I’d love it, sweetheart, but don’t feel like you have to. I’ll be fine.” Miles meant precisely what he said. He hugged Greg in silence and sent them on their way. Chase Landry excused himself to remove his vestments and stow them in the trunk of his care; he would join them in the deanery directly. Fred Craig, not personally close either to the Coverdales or to Bishop Landry, and wishing to be hospitable but not imposing, discreetly walked a few paces ahead, ensuring that he would arrive at his own front door before his guests; the deanery was only a few yards away from the row of cars that were in various stages in the process of departure. Once inside, he quickly put water on to boil, then returned to the living room and bade his company be seated.
“Miles, I know the worst thing to say at a time like this is, ‘I know how you feel.’ But I’m widowed myself, you know—I lost Diane six years ago—so I have an inkling, at least. My heart goes out to you.”
Miles sighed. “Thank-you, Fred. I didn’t know.” The dean had occupied his position only a year and half earlier, and Miles, though he had once served a term on the Nashotah House board of trustees, had not been closely involved in the search process, and was not familiar with that detail of Father Craig’s biography.
“So you’re here by yourself? Do you have any other family around?” Miles was so habituated to the role of an empathetic pastor that he slipped into it quite without any premeditation. His being and his doing were so integrated, in fact, that it was seldom possible to delineate between “Miles” and “Father Coverdale.”
“Three sons, but they’re all in California. One in college, one in law school, one looking for jobs acting in commercials and hoping to get discovered.”
Father Coverdale smiled. “It sounds like they’re all turning out well. That’s a great comfort for a parent. Sharon and I have been lucky in that department. I’m glad she was around long enough to see them turn into respectable human beings.” Miles looked playfully toward Brian, seated in a wing back chair in the corner of the room, with this last remark.
Brian grinned back. “Thanks, Dad. I’m glad you approve.” A shrill sound emanating from the kitchen gave notice that the water was ready for the tea, and Dean Craig retired there to do his duty. When he returned, the four men drank their tea and ate their store-bought cookies and got on decently well. The conversation could not be described as animated, but neither was it awkward. Fred Craig’s anxiety about everything turning morose was thus allayed. He had been an academic his entire ordained ministry, and found—largely to his chagrin—that his pastoral instincts in a crisis were not well-honed. Chase Landry, by contrast, was the consummate sensitive pastor, and put the group at ease with what northerners invariably attribute to southern charm—though Bishop of Chicago, he was a native and proud son of southeast Louisiana. The fact was, Miles needed little in the way of comforting. The circumstances of Sharon’s passing had afforded him ample opportunity to face and come to terms with his grief. Brian was composed and pleasant, but taciturn.
Another ten minutes and it was time to leave. Miles was the first to rise, but this time everyone seconded his motion.
“Fred, thank-you. This is exactly what we needed.”
“Oh, you’re absolutely welcome,” the dean replied. “I wish we could have met under happier circumstances. You’re part of the oral tradition here from your time on the board, and even from your student days—I feel like I’ve met something of a celebrity.”
Miles laughed. “Well, I don’t know about that. But it’s kind of you to say so.” He then turned to his bishop, and judged the situation to be sufficiently private and informal to address his old friend by his first name.
“Chase, thanks again for everything. You’ve been the proverbial tower of strength. I know the work must be piling up on your desk.”
“Which means it will still all be there when I get back to it. But I’m not through with you yet. My meeting in New York this weekend got canceled, and I know Justin is overworked covering for you. I talked to him this morning and he told me he hasn’t written a sermon yet. So, with your permission, I’ll come to St Alban’s this Sunday and preach and celebrate and remind them how they need to be treating you.”
“I’m certainly not going to argue with that.” Miles’s gratitude was genuine. He knew it would be both wise and therapeutic to get back deeply involved in his work, but a breather of a few days would be welcome. “We’ll look forward to having you.”
By this time, the three departees had reached the deanery foyer, took proper leave of their host, and stepped out into what was at that moment bright sunlight, bringing the newly verdant carpet of Nashotah’s spacious rolling acreage the more vividly to life for its late-in-the-day low angle. Miles and Brian approached the Mercury.
“Do you want me to drive again, Dad?”
“Absolutely. It’s not often that I get to be chauffered. Home, Jeeves.”
To drive from Nashotah, Wisconsin to Grove Lake, Illinois presents a dilemma. It is only eighty miles as the crow flies, but it is a difficult eighty miles of two-lane state highways, full of twists, turns, small towns, and speed traps. That is the route the caravan had taken earlier in the day, leaving Grove Lake at noon, but not arriving at Nashotah until almost three. The alternative is to make a big letter ‘C’, heading east into Milwaukee, following Interstate 94 south until it becomes a tollway at the Illinois border, then backtracking both west and a little north into the ring of exurbs-cum-suburbs that includes the Village of Grove Lake. Without consulting his father, but receiving no argument, Brian opted for this longer mileage/equal time alternative.
Both men were silent. Miles was simply mentally exhausted. Brian was grappling with demons whose names had not yet been spoken. As they entered Illinois, darkness and rain fell simultaneously. Miles offered no resistance when his imagination offered him a glimpse of the enormity of all that had happened. There was no question of comprehending it just yet, only glimpsing. His ruminations paused on the Proper Preface of the Requiem Mass—”…and to your faithful people, Lord, life is changed, not ended.” Those words, of course, refer to the changed existence of the decedent. But surely they speak of his own life, too. In that moment of reflection, he may even have been bold enough to speculate that his own life would change as radically as had Sharon’s. It was a time of flux, a time-in between. His physical crossing of the Wisconsin-Illinois border was a sacramental sign and seal of a much more substantial border, but he knew the territory of northern Illinois much more intimately than he knew the territory of his changed, not ended, life. Exploring that territory would require effort—more effort than he was up to at the moment. It was a labor that would confront him soon enough.
