At A Country Funeral

My paternal grandfather, George Swanson, died when I was four-years-old. Consequently,  my memories of him are severely limited. When I focus on the fog of what I can recollect about my early childhood, I remember a man sitting on a couch in his home, a green, plastic visor fitted around his head covering the eyes which disease and age had left nearly visionless. I remember an indistinguishable figure, an elderly man in a wheelchair being transported to a nursing home by his youngest son, my father, and myself. I remember a feeling of regret and being ill at ease, even at that tender age, that we were seemingly abandoning him to the care of others. And I remember that soon after his residency at the home, he died.

I do not remember his voice, how tall he was, the color of his eyes, or any of his features. In my attempts to flesh out this man who was my grandfather, I have been forced to rely on information passed down to me his legacy. My grandfather's name was George Edward but because there lived in the same small town another gentleman with the same name, Grandpa went by George X lest there be any confusion. He was a farmer who sold whatever he could to support his family, and like most families in his village of Woodhull, Illinois, the George and Anna Swanson family was poor. Grandpa raised raspberry bushes (which I remember), wove rugs out of colored plastic bread wrappers, and created small baskets from old, cut-up Christmas cards that he strung together and gave as gifts–a treasure which I possess.

Throughout the years I have stolen pictures of my Grandpa from vintage photo albums stashed in my father's closets; albums whose black pages inevitably rip despite my painstaking endeavors to leave the books intact. The photographs which most fascinate me or the ones from George Swanson's youth–his confirmation picture from 1908 which hangs on our bedroom wall, his cowboy shot striking a daring pose while costumed in chaps, hat, and gun, and the photo above with his friends George Ericson, Lawrence Swanson and Oscar Swanson that my Grandma Anna noted on the back was "a nice picture" and really it is.  George Edward Swanson lies in a grave in the village in which he lived. Our family remembers our departed and pays homage to them even though my memories of this man are dim. "What we owe the future" to quote from this Berry poem, "is the past, the long knowledge that is the potency of time to come."

At A Country Funeral

Wendell Berry

Now the old ways that have brought us   

farther than we remember sink out of sight   

as under the treading of many strangers   

ignorant of landmarks. Only once in a while   

they are cast clear again upon the mind   

as at a country funeral where, amid the soft

lights and hothouse flowers, the expensive   

solemnity of experts, notes of a polite musician,   

persist the usages of old neighborhood.

Friends and kinsmen come and stand and speak,   

knowing the extremity they have come to,   

one of their own bearing to the earth the last   

of his light, his darkness the sun’s definitive mark.

They stand and think as they stood and thought   

when even the gods were different.

And the organ music, though decorous   

as for somebody else’s grief, has its source

in the outcry of pain and hope in log churches,   

and on naked hillsides by the open grave,   

eastward in mountain passes, in tidelands,   

and across the sea. How long a time?   

Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide my   

self in Thee. They came, once in time,

in simple loyalty to their dead, and returned   

to the world. The fields and the work   

remained to be returned to. Now the entrance

of one of the old ones into the Rock

too often means a lifework perished from the land   

without inheritor, and the field goes wild   

and the house sits and stares. Or it passes   

at cash value into the hands of strangers.   

Now the old dead wait in the open coffin   

for the blood kin to gather, come home

for one last time, to hear old men

whose tongues bear an essential topography   

speak memories doomed to die.

But our memory of ourselves, hard earned,   

is one of the land’s seeds, as a seed

is the memory of the life of its kind in its place,   

to pass on into life the knowledge

of what has died. What we owe the future   

is not a new start, for we can only begin   

with what has happened. We owe the future   

the past, the long knowledge

that is the potency of time to come.

That makes of a man’s grave a rich furrow.

The community of knowing in common is the seed   

of our life in this place. There is not only   

no better possibility, there is no

other, except for chaos and darkness,   

the terrible ground of the only possible

new start. And so as the old die and the young   

depart, where shall a man go who keeps   

the memories of the dead, except home   

again, as one would go back after a burial,   

faithful to the fields, lest the dead die   

a second and more final death.

Poetry Wednesday