I’m no airline pilot, but the view through the cockpit window wasn’t filling me with confidence. It alternated:  landing strip/water landing strip/water landing strip/water in a way that was far too reminiscent of a roulette wheel, a far too real example of “gambling with my life.” I was captivated by having the same view as the pilots, but I sure hope it’ gave them more confidence in our safety than it gave me.  This was my first time flying alone. I was  flying down for a funeral, and for a moment or two, I wondered if it would be my own.

Aunt Cassie died days before my high school senior prom. The funeral was going to be that Monday and we kids already had plans to go visit Sean Barnhart‘s camp on Lake Ontario for the weekend after the dance. My parents were amazing, and freeing  me to continue my young life, bought me a plane ticket to fly down in time for the funeral.

The airports in Queens, New York are only 150 miles from Albany so the entire flight takes 45 minutes.  It’s done in one of those little rubber band wind up planes where you can’t put luggage anywhere, and in 1988, that meant they could even leave the cockpit door open for the flight. I sat no more than five rows back, and might easily have spent the trip yelling advice to the pilots. During the landing I strongly considered it. I honestly can’t remember what airport we landed at, and looking at Google maps tells me that they are both built out into water, so I don’t know if I was afraid of drowning in the East River or Jamaica Bay.

Cassie (my great aunt) lived with my dad‘s mom, my Nana, for all of my conscious life. My cousins MaryBeth, Brenda and Mike grew up sharing the house with them, and had the blessed good fortune to know them as complete people, as opposed to merely the neat old ladies who gave kisses, butterscotch candies, and money when you came for a visit. I will trust them to set me straight on details that matter, as they come up in future stories. 

I can’t separate her funeral from Nana’s, partially because they were so close together in time, but mostly because I compounded “Nana-and-Cassie” my whole life. I’m not sure at what age I could have explained, if asked, that Nana was my grandmother and Cassie was my dad’s aunt, her sister. They were “Nana and Cassie” until it became totemic, not descriptive. 

Both funerals were held at R.A., their church, where we went every Sunday I visited. It was the church my Dad served at altar growing up, and where my cousins took first communion. It was so much bigger and marbly-er, so much churchier than my own post-modern suburban church. It always filled me with awe. If the funeral really took place in the manner it does in my pocket-universe of memory, the Lamb of God at the mass was sung by the same wonderful black woman in the checkered plaid shirt who led singing for many years. She was the first saint I ever saw, if you define a saint as someone who loves God so much that they don’t seem like they are fully paying attention to this world as people. So whether she led the singing at Cassie’s funeral or not, she was present to ME, because her voice was a physical thing as real as the yellow-blonde wood pews, or stations of the cross. 

I still possess one of Cassie’s rosaries. I can not say that the rituals of the Catholic Church instill in me the peace they once did, and that they brought Nana and Cassie through their lives.  I can say that the rosary is still infused with the love that those women showered upon me as a boy, and has been a comfort to me on those occasions when the only choice is to kneel and grieve with others.