June 22, 1997 contents

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One wedding and a funeral

The death of a grandparent underscores the importance of family and the joy of a new connection.

The bleakest thing I've ever seen I saw this winter: a group of people who stood shivering, huddled over an open grave, a mere smudge on the landscape of a snowy prairie. It was bone-hard cold, and even the wind keened as it blew over us and through us, shrill-voiced, thrusting icy fingers, brittle as claws, deep inside our collars. It was my grandmother's funeral, and it was January in Nebraska.

We stood graveside at the St. Wenceslaus Cemetery - that is to say, the Catholic one in town, the Czech one, more or less - where one side of my family is buried. Later that day, my father would drive us a few miles down the road, to Sunrise Cemetery - that would be the Protestant, German one - to visit the graves of my paternal grandparents, Karl and Claire, who died before and not long after I was born. There, my father leaned down over the flat, black stone and brushed the snow away with one leather-gloved hand. His breath was frost, and I could hear him thinking: My parents never knew my children. And my children did not know them.

My maternal grandmother, Anna, had five children. Her husband, my grandfather, died when I was 3. My siblings and I never lived in Nebraska, and we never really knew him. Or her, for that matter. So what I mourned on the day of her funeral was not so much a loss as an absence. It was sort of a hole where my grandparents were supposed to be.

Maybe because of this, or maybe because of 101 other factors, most of which were way beyond my control, I've always had ambivalent feelings about the importance of family. I have been both attracted to and repelled by the prospect of marriage, children, commitment, the whole thing. I always wondered how Anna lived without her husband for 30 years, after he was dead, and

I've wondered even more often how other members of my family have lived with one another.

This may sound strange to someone raised in, say, an Irish clan in Boston - all those Foleys and Sullivans cavorting together - but my many relatives are widely scattered; in the Boston phone book (or New York's), I would be the only Hengen, if I were in it.

I have 50 first cousins, but I don't know them very well. My parents migrated from the Midwest at age 20. By now, they may regret having yanked themselves from their roots, or maybe not, but I, for one, have had a lot of time to consider where I'll end up, and how I'll get there, and what is home.

Recently, though, I decided to go for the golden ring. This time, when someone requested my presence in a marriage, I surprised myself by saying yes. And I discovered that I was rather looking forward to the package: a cozy home with two cats in the yard, neighbors and dogs and dinner to fix.

This I had decided. But it was strange when, on the day after my grandmother's funeral, my sister dragged me into a dress shop on the tiny Main Street of that tiny town in Nebraska. The whole day had a slightly surreal quality, and at first it didn't seem quite respectful to be out, just ... shopping. But I tried to get into the spirit, and pretty soon it seemed extremely right. And it dawned on me that, once in a while, coincidence folds in upon opportunity, the future asserts itself, and history layers itself beneath symbol, memory, myth. This time was one of those, and so I bought a wedding dress.

I took it back to my grandmother's house, which was being dismantled by my mother and my aunts. I knew it was the last time I would be there, among her things, and I sifted through them, carefully, looking for some remnant, some souvenir, to prove I'd been there.

Later, in Anna's bedroom, I tried on the dress again. And as my mother and aunts smiled through tears, I twirled solemnly, slowly, before them, studying the woman in my grandmother's mirror.