Dead Man’s Rest

In which our Hero wears black and has a tickle in his throat that’s making him noisy as he breathes. And is played by James Earl Jones, kind of. And has completely failed to caption his entry

In the movie version of this story, I’d be played by James Earl Jones. He doesn’t look like me, but despite that failing, he’s got gravitas. But on the other hand, his stentorian tones would be too over-powering for the scene I want to set, so I’d take a page from the George Lucas book, and use Morgan Freeman to provide the voice. (Heck, Freeman is a magnificent actor and I’d totally cast him for the whole role, except I’d love to be played by James Earl Jones).

Actually, since this is my show, I’d use Morgan Freeman to narrate my semi-omniscient reflective perspective, and James Earl Jones could voice me in the moment. Yes, that’s how it would go.

Anyway, in the movie version of this story, Mr Jones, playing Serin, would be in somber dark clothes, quietly holding the doors for other people entering the funeral parlour, occasionally murmuring resonant greetings to folks he has not seen in a long, long time. The camera would be high up and wide, and after a moment or two, Mr Freeman’s reedier voice would come up over the rear channels like I was sitting just behind you and watching the scene along with you.

“It doesn’t matter how far you’ve gone before you find your end, because your end always seems to try to connect back to your beginning. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve left your beginning behind because someone else’s end can just pull you right back anyway.

“That’s me, right there.” The camera would cut close on Mr Jones gently serious face as he makes small talk with another group of people, sliding sideways in a grand arc that makes the other people in the frame even less significant as they slide on and off the frame. “That’s me, later tonight, at the viewing for a man I do not particularly like.”

“I don’t want to be there,” and as the people he’s talking to move away, there’s a tired look to Mr Jone’s face that’s easily mistaken for sympathy and grief but is really just plain boredom. “Not at all, and certainly not for the dead man. But there’s a connection there and I can’t seem to ignore it either.”

“His name doesn’t matter,” Mr Freeman would say. “So I won’t even mention it. But he grew up just down the street from my mother, which means that his family and my family are connected by hard times in the old country. I keep forgetting to ask about his wife, to find out if she was a classmate of my mother’s. I think she was, I think she was part of that startling group of young women who came to the comparative (and occasionally actual) arctic chill of the Great White North so long ago. And as they found husbands, she found herself the young man that my mother had grown up near.

“They were young together. Not kid-young, though that was also true. But also my parents and these two and a few others were adult-young together; buying their first homes, getting married, having children. They were isolated together, in this faraway land and so what they had was mostly each other. Which is all just a fancy way of saying that they were close and those connections have stood through time. It’s also a way of saying that this story goes back a fair ways even if there’s only a few parts that really matter.”

The camera would zoom into Mr Jones’ pupil, which would transition to a tinted view of the past while Mr Freeman continues.

“When I was a boy, I wasn’t the Oldest. For a while, within my family, I was the Youngest, and in this group of friends I was one boy amongst the pack, fiercely pretending spaceships and cars and cops and cowboys and whispering secret communications over the ducts to the other room.

“When I was a boy, the dead man’s two sons were erstwhile brothers. We were inseparable when we were together, and we frequently stayed at each other’s houses and argued about Star Destroyers and Constitution Class starships and the A-Team and Knight Rider.

“But sometime before or around high school, the dead man just up and decided he was done. He packed up his things, left his family behind and returned to the Old Country. And what do I know, I was a child at the time, and even so, every single thing I heard about this was the spun-for-me explanation from my parents of the spun-for-them stories that came from both of the now-divorced parents. I don’t know the truth so much, but I know that my parents were among those who tried to step in a little and make sure those boys knew they were loved and make sure they were cared for.

“And I know, gathered in bits and pieces, over the span of many years, and coloured by my own experiences with him, the dead man was not a nice man. Not a bad man either, not a villain, or a rogue. More just the man who didn’t deal well with real life and the fact that he wasn’t the star of the show anymore. Not a bad man, just a man who wasn’t willing or wasn’t prepared to do the work that is part of being an adult. Instead he seemed to cling to a past that never was, where in the Old Country, Men were free to do what they wanted and Women were supposed to do whatever work was necessary to make it so and then get out of the way to leave their Men free to just be. He wasn’t a bad person, just a selfish one, just a spoiled one, just a self-indulgent and somewhat self-deluded one.

“And that was the end of it. I grew up, his sons grew up. We grew apart as people do, to our own lives and we really haven’t crossed paths much since school ended. Once in a while, when I was in the Old Country, I’d pay my respects, more to his House than to him, but he was gone from my life. Except as gossip.

“Because he’s still the neighbor’s kid, over there, and so news still trickled back, in the gossip of others and the general braggadocio of the dead man, we kept up to pace. So I know that after a while he got married to his maid. And that after a year or two, she left, because she couldn’t put up with him. He grew estranged from his brothers, who I gather took a dim view of his quitting his first family. And that was that from him.

“Years later, because all of that is at least 10 years past, he decided that he wanted to see the Holy Land. He went on a pilgrimage. And last week, on a Thursday, he died.

“He’d communicated his wishes that he be buried in the Old Country. Makes sense, really, it’s been his home for all but the few years he left to start a family in a distant country. But wait, it turns out he changed to Canadian citizenship when he was here. And he never changed back because he had some disability benefit Here that paid enough to let him live large there. And There won’t let him in because he’s a citizen here and he seems to have never gotten the paperwork to actually legally be home for as long as he has. So his body has to come back to Canada.

“Except that still requires documentation. Which his brothers, estranged, remember, went to get from his house. Where they found the house servant, the maid, as it were. Who made clear that, at least from her point of view, she wasn’t just the maid but the lady of the house. And that knowing that her husband was furious with his brothers, she wasn’t about to give them his passport and papers.

“Add the complication that it wasclose of the Friday, in Israel. Which means Shabat, the sabbath, and offices closed from Friday afternoon to Monday morning. So nobody to ask questions of, just two boys walking the globe to collect the father they loved, regardless of however much he may or may not have lived them.

At this point, in the movie version of this story, James Earl Jones is awkwardly expressing sympathy to the dead man’s sons.

“His body is here now,” Mr Freeman would say, “and tonight there is a viewing, and tomorrow, there is a funeral. I’ll be at that viewing tonight, paying my respects to a man I feel none for, for the sake of the boys I have not known since we were teenagers, and their mother whose feelings on this I cannot comprehend. It is absurd and it fails the test that I have a good reason to go at all. But the woman was nice to me. And the men were briefly my brothers. And I have a duty to my childhood connection and my mother’s shared past.

“It’s not the same as care, which is my normal standard for whether or not I go to an event. I have no care for this man. I can’t entirely say I have care for his survivors. But I have care for something in this because I can’t come to peace with the idea of not going. And so that’s why I’ll be there, later on tonight.

“They can’t find enough pall bearers, it seems. For the funeral, tomorrow. They can’t find people to carry him to his rest. That makes me a little sad. I don’t know if it’s because people aren’t willing, or people aren’t able. I started to offer but my father stopped me. You don’t have a black suit, he says. Which is true, but only because he’s borrowed it. Because they asked him to be a pall bearer. Of course they asked my father. Of course he said yes.

“The job will get be done. The forms will be observed. The dead man will be buried. And then he’ll be half-forgotten, largely ignored, except for the occasional story that starts with the word Remember, and the quest for self-identity in the men he leaves behind.”