Penny Post #46: Soft Pedal

A fictional account of a funeral home director whose story is very loosely based on my great-grandfather.

I'm writing a book. I've never written a book, nor have I ever tried, but on March 28th, just over three weeks ago, I decided I was going to try. I was struck, as if by lightning, to write a book inspired by the events of my great-grandfather's life. John Donohue inherited the Donohue Family Funeral Home at 19 when his father passed. He was the sole director of the Funeral Home for the next 40 years before the family business was purchased and conglomerated by Frank E. Campbell, who went on to bury Judy Garland, John Lennon, and Jackie Kennedy, to name just a few. My great-grandfather's life dramatically changed after promising his mournful mother he would carry on the family business in his father's stead. This oath, upheld until his untimely death in 1963, planted him firmly and irrevocably in the face of death. A noble pursuit, no doubt, to carry on the dignity and bereavement of the dead. I couldn't help but think, from the naiveté of an outsider, what might that do to someone, to be so close - and yet so far - from death. I wonder what death, in turn, becomes when you promise to make a living of it. Especially when that death of which you've promised to make a living of takes three of your children within six months of each of their lives. In any case, John Donohue was tenured as long as people kept dying, and that, at least, didn't seem to have a foreseeable end.

I was curious about this man that I had never met. I wanted to get inside his head, try to understand who he was and deliver him to some publishable truth. Although my mother was extremely forthcoming in her interview despite never having met him, my grandmother (John's daughter) was less so. Privacy her virtue, I assured her my book was a fictional account of a funeral home director whose story was very loosely based on her father. Only then, when she understood that I was not intending to publish a tell-all memoir spectacularizing her family's tragedies, did she agree to talk to me. What she shared, although I'll save much of the detail for the book, astounded me.

Her and her younger sister Eileen took piano lessons as children on the floor above where wakes were held. They were careful to use the soft pedal so as to quiet the noise emitting from the instrument. She tapped her foot then, showing me how she used to. She was also overjoyed, much later in life, when she bought her own telephone. She was no longer interrupted by the house's one landline, which emitted much louder and more mournful noise than that of her piano. She tapped her foot once again though this time, she didn't notice.

My grandmother, now ninety-one, kept other matters private. It was a sin to gossip, after all. And if my grandmother was ruled by anything, she was ruled by the fear of God above, whose will, soon enough, found her father's grave excavated by her granddaugther's relentless curiosity and authorial ambitions. I, unlike my stoic and guarded grandmother, never learned to use a soft pedal.

When embarking on a project like this, you don't know what you might find. You figure you'll find something buried six feet under, but you're surprised when, unexpectedly, you find out more about what's aboveground instead. Roughly fifteen thousand words into this book, and with each one of those words comes a lesson, unexpected and jarring. If I'm to write fifty thousand words, one hundred thousand words, who knows what might unravel. Above all, though, I know language is the way in which I'm delivered to truth. Though my book is a fictional account of a funeral home director whose story is very loosely based on my great-grandfather, it is also a nonfictional account of the people who've come after him: his daughter Maureen, granddaughter Jeanne, and great-granddaughter Kiera.

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The both horrific and miraculous thing about writing a book (there are many) is that you're always thinking about what you haven't written in addition to what you have. I've only just barely started digging, and my shovel has already clashed with the bones of truth, though I know the discoveries extend far deeper. I don't know how far I'll go yet, for the shovel is heavy and the excavation is arduous, though I'll go as deep as this body will let me. I stick my shovel into the Earth once more, a clang echoing outward, and I can't help but think it sounds like the effusing of a piano's softened notes.