Grief in the COVID era: Praise music in the driveway

Dying in the era of COVID, you are not granted the privilege of having friends and family visiting, much less holding your hand and giving you a hug.

The people who love you might come to your house and leave flowers and balloons and trays of cookies. They stand on the porch and yell from a safe distance about how they are thinking of you and that they have been crying all day. The comforts and love and support of grief are lost to us.

My children can’t see their friends.

Even the funeral director apologized about how he could not meet me in person and warned me that no viewings were permitted and burials were restricted. A cremation might be advisable, he explained.

Pat had told me he wanted no priests, no speeches and no fuss, so part of me wondered if had timed his exit during the COVID crisis to slip out the back door.

But, it is also true, funerals are for the living, and even if Pat despised the idea of sentiment and weeping and people who did not like him being forced to say nice things about him, his children and I could not let him leave without doing something.

Despite his rejection of conventional funerals, Pat had a rather elaborate list of final requests.

No burial, he wanted to be cremated, and his ashes would go on several journeys.

One box would remain with his American family, another set of remains would go to his sisters and family in Ireland (and though he had a strict no priest rule for me, he was more lax with his sisters). He also wanted his ashes dispersed at Anfield, where Liverpool plays. Several of his friends explained to me that more than a few diehard Liverpool fans had asked family and friends to take the dead on one final pilgrimage. Before COVID, Liverpool was headed to win to this year’s league champions and Pat had purchased tickets to see the now cancelled games. Even in death, Pat was determined to see Liverpool win it all.

The fact that so many people did not get the chance to say goodbye in person resulted in some rather ingenious work-arounds. Several of his friends came down on Good Friday and stood in the cold to sing (quite badly). We christened the group The Traveling Scrubs as they tried to sing with face coverings. Their set list included Irish drinking songs and the anthem for Liverpool Football “You will never walk alone.” I let the son of a close friend sit at Pat’s beside to perform a special solo. Colleagues and friends sent videos of themselves singing songs in Pat’s honor including a haunting performance of John Hart’s “i carry your heart” which is based on the work of EE Cummings. One friend sent a video of the Avett Brothers performing “No Hard Feelings,” a song I have now played hundreds of times since it captured what it was like to watch Pat die. Pat and I had looked forward to see them perform this spring in Philadelphia— before COVID.

But, then the music stuff got a bit out of control.

Pat could only manage a few visitors a day and there were now dozens of people emailing songs and asking to serenade us. So when a group of my friends hired a band to perform outside our windows, I did not know how to explain Pat was not well enough to come down and hear the show. My son PJ pointed out that “there’s no way of stopping people” from doing what they needed to do. You just had to be grateful for the beautiful, if slightly off-the -mark gestures.

The band appeared in our driveway Saturday night with a sound system so loud that our neighbors at the end of the block could hear the music. A dozen people came out of their homes to sing and dance following social distancing rules. It was a wonderful moment to see people singing pop tunes. After a month on lockdown, a band playing in our yard was a welcomed distraction for the block, even if the reason was so very heartbreaking.

When the band asked permission to extend the set for a full hour, my son PJ and daughter Camille did not know how to say no. PJ requested two of my favorite songs, Van Morrison’s “Brown-eyed Girl” and John Denver’s “Country Roads.” But things started to go off the rails. When the singer started belting out Journey, my daughter Camille’s face soured “Dad hates them.”

Things got worse.

You see, the band started performing praise music. When the lead singer did a Christian cover of the Beatles “Let it Be” with the chorus changed to “Let it be Jesus,” at that point, the kids and I hid in the house. What the band and my friends had not realized was that Pat was fiery atheist and self-described “collapsed Catholic.”

For the first time in days, the kids and I were thankful Pat was too ill to come to the window and speak.

If he could have, Pat would have marched out of bed and yelled for the “fucking Trump-loving Jesus freaks to get off my property.”

Then, Pat would have turned his ire to me, “What did you not understand about no fuss. This is exactly what I told you NOT to do.”