Sanctuary

I spent years of my childhood in an apartment above my father’s funeral home, a place where, during services, the sounds of gurgling toilets and the smell of cabbage wafting through the air were strictly prohibited. Instead, the quiet rooms usually smelled of flowers and coffee, and hints of perfume diluted by sweat.

We played at the funeral home, and whenever that included a neighborhood kickball game, the delivery entrance was first base and the casket room door served as third. Our sandbox, bucket, and shovel were kept in the northwest corner of the asphalt-covered parking lot, a spot that also provided us with an opportunity to tape baseball cards to the spokes of our bikes and then quickly spin our tires.

When we allowed ourselves to play hide-and-seek, our options were vast, and we pitied those who enjoyed the activity in a more coarse and orderly way. The funeral home consisted of four full levels from basement to attic, dotted with a delightful assortment of half stories, balconies, stairways, and cubicles, a joy for those who hid and sweet torture for those who had to find.

Faded photographs reminded us that this building once held even more complexities. The man who brought the mineral industry to the city of Lorain, Ohio, built it as his own private home at the turn of the century. In 1924, a tornado ripped over nearby Lake Erie. Deadly winds ripped the tower from the house (which was never repaired or replaced), and a photo from that day shows the skeleton of another house floating above the roof of the structure that would one day become our funeral home. While much of the neighborhood was destroyed during that tornado, this building survived the destruction to become a mourning house.

By the time we moved, all that was left of that horror were accounts in yellowing newspapers and memories of the aging survivors. Few remembered the gray-and-white house as anything more than an undertaker’s, and certainly no one my age had memories that contradicted it.

Classmates inevitably labeled me the “mortician girl.” They asked me whether or not I was sleeping in a coffin and howled in confusion when, tired of the interrogation, I informed them that the hole located at one end of the coffin (where a tool is inserted to close the lid) actually allowed the corpse. to keep breathing.

Eventually, the elementary school kids got used to the idea of ​​the funeral home, but then high school came along, accompanied by a whole new group of students, with their own taunts and questions. I remember attending an extracurricular event in seventh grade. While I was waiting to be picked up, a classmate offered me a ride home to his parents. “No,” I said cheerfully, not thinking how my answer could be misconstrued. “Someone will be here, as soon as my father’s funeral is over.” I still remember how wide her eyes opened, how pale her face, and how flushed her cheeks turned.

My sister and I would often show our friends our tattooed copy of a national detective magazine that contained a photograph of my father picking up a murder victim who had been stuffed in a trunk for two weeks in July. We would shudder to remember that his murderer turned out to be his wife, a woman who had wept at our funeral home. I remember her name as Becky. When I was older, the mother of one of my best friends shot and killed her husband in self-defense. Sensational headlines exploded and out of this drama emerged the defense against domestic violence in the state of Ohio. What I remember most is how my friend, her mother and I tried to have a normal conversation in front of the coffin of a once abusive and alcoholic husband and father, and how, in many ways, we succeeded.

Other startling deaths stirred the air in our community, and some even made national headlines. One day in May 1970, my father conducted the services of a young man killed at Kent State University during a demonstration against the Vietnam War. While Dad found enough chairs to accommodate the throng of mourners, my sister and I chased Sam, our half-blind dog, out of the range of the TV cameras. Bribing him with day-old bread, we managed to keep him out of the glare, and only a glimpse of his black fur made the evening news.

Although we moved into the adjoining property long before the Kent State tragedy, after the funeral home’s doorbell and phone connections were carefully wired to our home, the funeral home was still a big part of our lives. I remember when classmates would lose their mothers, fathers, or grandparents to death, and my understanding father would notice that no friends from school came to visit. In those cases, he would pick up the phone and mutter, “Put on a dress and come here.”

Occasionally we would send a tampon to someone visiting the funeral home, and I was always amazed at how much toilet paper, tissues, and light bulbs my father kept for the comfort of those still living. He stored those supplies in his basement, a place that smelled of citrus-scented disinfectant and contained rooms that were strictly off-limits.

An ambulance carrying remains crashed my Sweet Sixteen party. As the guests shifted uncomfortably, one of them suggested loudly that the newcomer be provided with a ketchup-laden hot dog and a bottle of soda. My mother once drove away from a cemetery not realizing that the body had not yet been removed from the vehicle, and she did not notice the screaming and waving arms as she left behind. During my senior year of high school, my father ran to a cemetery located in the middle of the Bowling Green State University campus. Before leaving, he asked me to find help to unload the coffin.

So, I called Lorain High School alumni now attending BGSU, only to find empty rooms or incredulous roommates. “Please,” I begged one of those roommates, “when Kevin gets back, tell him to go to the graveyard…immediately!” The roommate laughed and then said, “Yeah, sure. Sure.”

Fortunately, as soon as Kevin returned, his college roommate regaled him with an account of the unsophisticated sorority insider who tried, but failed, to fool him. “Moron!” Kevin yelled. “That wasn’t a joke!” Kevin then assembled a group of strong helpers, including his humble roommate, and my grateful father gave each of them a five-dollar bill, one dollar for every minute worked, a huge windfall for a young student. freshman thirsty in those days.

Once, when my father was out on some errands, he discovered a rough-looking black, white, and gray stray cat dozing in the backseat of his car. Rubbing the scarred head, my father noticed that the cat was missing a piece of its right ear, so he gave the homeless feline a few words of encouragement. After releasing him from the car, my father thought that he would never see the stray again.

The cat, however, had different ideas and started walking my father to the funeral home every morning and walking him home every night. During the day, this cat, now nicknamed Mr. Gray, would prowl the perimeter of the parking lot, keeping the asphalt clear of prowling cats, ugly bugs, and unruly squirrels. Mr. Gray also spent a considerable amount of time in the garage, where my father printed bereavement pamphlets on an authentic 1880s printing press. Perched on top of the press ledge, Mr. Gray peered intently at the placement of each em board and noted the removal of each en.

Mr. Gray also greeted the mourners. All the children and most adults were pleased with this element of comic relief, and my father added to the humor by introducing the cat by his name; to the few who were annoyed by the cat’s presence, my father simply called it the “neighborhood stray.” But he was not to remain a stray, as both he and my father knew.

The climax of this situation occurred when my father was elected president of the local Rotary Club and a newspaper reporter arrived to interview and photograph my father. Everything went well, but then the reporter called back to ask who else was in the photo. My father was about to reply, “Nobody,” but then he paused and asked if that “someone” was, in fact, a cranky-looking male cat. When that identity was confirmed, the reporter simply added Mr. Gray’s name to the caption, calling the cat a “mortician.”

As I headed off to college, Mr. Gray settled into his new home, and I thought my life at the undertaker was coming to an end. I finished college, fell in love, and then got married. I found a stable but low-paying job, bought and helped repair a century-old house, rejoiced in three pregnancies, and celebrated the birth of two children.

However, just a few years ago, just before Christmas, our furnace started spewing carbon monoxide fumes and we needed shelter. Returning to the now empty but still sparsely furnished apartment above the funeral home, we brought warm clothes and our fully decorated tree to resume our interrupted vacation.

Our little kids were worried Santa wouldn’t find them at a funeral home, but I assured them he would. And he did, giving them scavenger hunts so labyrinthine that they prayed the details would reach the ears of the Easter Bunny, so that the rabbit could best his rival! We scattered clues around the funeral home, leading to surprises, gifts, and candy, and we all declared this celebration “the best ever.”

Ryan and Adam were pleasantly surprised by this turn of events, but on second thought, I wasn’t. I worried about the oven, of course, and I worried about our boisterous presence taking over my father’s work. Still, that near-catastrophe proved what I’ve always known: that while our funeral home contains coffins of veined marble and frequently receives packages of cremains wrapped in brown paper, it also overflows with love and an incredible abundance of life.