Pat’s Ashes

It was a terrible week. Even worse than the week in June when a tree fell on the house and we lost power and the house sustained $25,000 in damage. It was not as bad as the week Pat died, but it was getting dangerously close.

The first thing that happened was that Liverpool won the League championship. The second thing that happened was that I found a letter written by Pat right around Valentine’s Day: More on the letter later.

Lots of people who knew and loved Pat toasted him while they celebrated Liverpool’s big win after a 30 year drought. “How pleased Pat would have been,” so many of you wrote, or texted or emailed to say.

But, I am afraid you are wrong. Pat would have been enraged, furious that the team earned this championship and he died just seventy days before it happened. Pat had purchased tickets to see the match and gambled that he would be well enough to make the trip with PJ. The big game was originally scheduled to take place in March and would be cancelled because of the covid-19 pandemic crisis. But, by March, it was clear Pat would be too ill to travel. Though, knowing Pat, if covid had not suspended the season, he might have tried to take the trip even if he was suffering some mysterious internal bleed none of his doctors could find.

Liverpool was the other great love of his life and it seemed to me I spent a good deal of my marriage jealous of his adored Pool. He built a basement lair -dubbed Little Anfield -as a shrine to the team. Our contractor Manny could not hide his disgust at the oxblood rug Pat selected for the room to match the team’s bright red jerseys. Pat had gone to every carpet store in Montgomery and Delaware Counties to find just the right color.

Little Anfield is decorated with signed photos, posters, and Liverpool memorabilia. It was his refuge when the cancer relapsed two years ago. He would eat dinner down there and we would watch The Walking Dead or Schitt’s Creek and not talk about how terrified we both were that he was not going to beat the cancer again.

And of course, he would spend hours watching matches. The children would come up and warn me if Dad was going to be in a good or bad mood depending on the team’s performance. Pat was always yelling at the television, even if the team was winning.

Given the fact that Liverpool was sort of this tragic team that had not won the championship in 30 years, since 1990 when Pat had nearly died on a mountain, he felt a spiritual connection. It was as if their fates were linked.

As Pat was dying, and I would spend hours in bed with him, he would always ask to watch Liverpool. It would make my heart ache when I had to remind him how the season had been cancelled and that there was no games. He would take in this information silently and then fall back asleep. He did not want to talk to me about the kids or our lives, he just wanted to watch Liverpool. These rituals were a comfort to him.

Then, two months after Pat died, right after Father’s Day and our wedding anniversary, I found the letter. I was clearing out Pat’s things and then I discovered this unmarked, sealed envelope. I realized it was from Pat instantly. My first thought was here I was going to read the words Pat could not say while he was alive. This would be Pat sharing the intimate, emotional things I had waited for him to say in the months and weeks before his death.

But, I was wrong.

The first line warned me where the letter was headed: “Hello, whoever is reading this. So I suppose I’m dead now.”

In the next two pages is a rather detailed list of final requests and even an obituary he had written for himself.

Be assured, the one my friend Al Lubrano wrote for the Inquirer was much better.

Among his exhaustive to-do list, Pat had asked his cousin Ambrose to smuggle his ashes into Anfield and disperse them right at the tip off when fans sing: “You will never walk alone.” Pat described this as a perfect moment of hope and possibility, “one of the most amazing things in sports.” But, as Pat’s friend Deirdre pointed out, Liverpool fans would not take kindly to having their big day out, much less their trays of chips and pints of beer, ruined with a dusting of a dead Irishman’s ashes.

This is just one of the many problems with Pat’s “no fuss” final requests.

The other ashes were to go to Colorado to make peace with the mountain where he had nearly died in 1990 (the last time Pool won the League). His sisters Caroline and Barbara would get his ashes and return them home to Ireland, and then some ashes would remain with me here in Bala Cynwyd. Though he had detailed and lyrical prose about why Anfield, Colorado, and Ireland were important to him, leaving his ashes for me appeared to be an afterthought. His only instructions for my share of the remains were that they were not to stay in the house since he thought it was depressing to keep him around. Pat did not ask to go to Maine or Martha’s Vineyard, places that had great meaning to us both. Rather, Pat suggested mixing his ashes with the compost and putting him in the garden. Upon hearing this, John McComonomy, the farmer who provides the organic compost for Pat’s award-winning garden, was horrified. “Human remains,” John explained -not sure if I intended to follow through with Pat’s request- “should not be in compost.” Pat was trying to be funny, but in death, like so many times in life, his humor missed the mark

I could not decide what made me more furious, the idea that Pat thought he belonged in the compost heap or that he would think that I, his wife of 25 years, would compost him alongside a moldy onion. I was also more than a little peeved that Liverpool had been such a big part of his trip to the great beyond and I was mentioned in his poorly written obituary as “one of the loves of his life.” I had to be grateful I was discussed at all. But most of all, what left me so disconsolate was Pat seemed to think he would manage his own fear of death by micromanaging how the rest of us felt about going on in a world without him.

To be sure, it had taken a day or two to get used to having Pat’s ashes around the house (understandably, there is a shock in accepting how this person you adore has been transformed into bags of dust). But now, I have grown fond of keeping him close. I actually talk to Pat’s ashes pretty regularly, and the discovery of his letter resulted in a one-sided argument that I could soundly win. I told Pat that he had wounded me, and that for someone who did not “want a fuss” he was rather demanding about transporting his ashes to two continents and three countries. More than that: “How dare you tell your friends, the kids and me how to feel?” And, why, in God’s name, had he addressed this letter to “whoever reads this” when he knew I would discover it.

The letter included some other real jewels.

No one is to name anything after him. No rooms or awards at Rutgers since he didn’t want some kid to get a plaque with his name on it, and the student would have to smile and be grateful about some award for some person she never met. It was pure hubris - and more than a bit presumptuous- to assume people would name anything after him, and very ungrateful to decline such an honor before it had been granted.

His final list of requests also mandated no Masses or Mass cards, since he did not want people to prop up “that corrupt, craven institution” known as the Catholic church.

His beautiful garden was to be allowed to “return to nature” because it was too much trouble and expense to keep it going.

He even planned a party in his honor for “the people he liked.” He requested that the music be provided by a good DJ or his band MARS. He even picked out the menu: we were to serve food from Carlino’s and beer from Zed’s. At said celebration, and let me quote Pat here, my husband did not want people “lionizing my memory” or “co-opting the narrative of my life.” Indeed, guests were only permitted to discuss Pat “in private conversations among themselves,” with absolutely “no speeches” or eulogizing.

I had hoped for weeks to find some letter from Pat, and now my wish had been granted, and if Pat were not already dead I would have killed him myself. He was being a real jerk.

Camille read the letter and declared it hysterical and wanted to share it with the family. I had a different interpretation.

To me, the letter was proof that Pat could not share his feelings about what was happening to him and that he was suffering on his own in the final months and weeks of his life. I had failed him somehow. He just couldn’t let me in. It didn’t help that he barely mentioned me in the letter and that the Pool and the Catholic Church got so many more words.

Even though Pat and I were married for 25 years, there were things about him that remained a mystery. I knew he loved us so very much, he proved his devotion to his family every moment of the day. In the end, when I longed for him to tell me goodbye and that he loved us, he never did, or, more precisely, he just could not.

But, it was his friends - especially the wise and wonderful Deirdre McKenna and Richard Peel - who talked me off a ledge about the letter.

Deirdre was furious with her friend, but she also made me laugh when she pointed out that the letter was Pat raging at the world and if he were here she would have “kicked him in the arse” for behaving so badly. But Richie’s words offered an explanation, that was both painful and a salve. Richie wrote: “Irish/English lads of our generation were raised by the silent generation who never spoke about feelings and love or anything of much importance at all. We had no models other than taciturn, absent parents who were all functioning alcoholics. Pat and I were essentially feral creatures raised by our packs,” Richie explained. “Pat loved you guys more than life itself (anyone could see that in the way he looked at you). I know because I too have a brainy dark haired girl that I worship - and how he literally lived and died for his kids.”

Richie’s concise and excruciatingly honest words eased my pain and grief over the letter and this final misunderstanding between Pat and me.

When I told Richie that I had made peace with Pat’s great love -Liverpool - and even decided celebrate it with my plans to get, “You will never walk alone” (Liverpool’s motto) tattooed on my wrist. Richie wrote back to say,”I love that.” Richie admitted to getting a bit emotional at such a tribute.

I hope Pat would have appreciated it too. After all, this newly acquired affection for Liverpool is just a reflection of my love for him.