3 TOGETHER SEPARATELY

Adrienne never could resist a small dig at me, I suppose. She may well have bantered similarly with John during their near six years of courtship and blissful matrimony. “Your room has been prepared. We are so pleased you could both come on the night before the ... ceremony, and attend our traditional pre wake.”

Adrienne is treating us, John's parents, as a normal couple. She wasn't to know that when Pauline and I met up in the departure lounge of the previous to last airport, Pauline had announced to me that she was both resigning her ministry and filing for divorce from our marriage on grounds of my abandonment of her. 

Since I had been appointed Bishop of Sandburg nine years ago, we had indeed lived apart, me in my bishop’s palace in downtown Sandburg, and Pauline in her curacy in our small home town of Tanglewood, for a period before the appointment to her own ministry in Otterborne City. 

I had actually been mortified by her announcement of the ending of our long marriage and found I couldn't find a single word to comment in return. How could she spring this announcement on me between hearing of our son’s death and while we were en route to his funeral? 

Thus, the final leg of our journey here had been a quiet one, each side of our broken partnership enveloped in a whirlwind of thoughts and considerations, with sadness piled upon sorrow.

“You fast as part of your tradition?” I ask, referring to Adrienne’s fast imposed during this Pre Wake period.

“Yes, tradition is everything in my family,” she nods, “by following a known and practiced procedure or a ritual exactly to the letter, makes dealing with what had happened and later how we adjust to carry on … somehow easier to face.”

I nod in reply. I understood ritual. Why we do things a certain way, why religious services are carried out now as they have evolved over a thousand years and beyond, such as why an ambitious bishop moves on hoping a lowly curate would change her mind and follow him in her own good time. Ritual is all part of coping with what curve balls life throws at us.

“So, please tell me more about the tradition?” I ask, genuinely interested.

“Yes, of course, Robert. My guests did not have as far as you to come and are already here in their glad rags and getting themselves into party mood, and they do this because they love John, not just because he married into the family, but because they got to know the marvellous person he is so very well. They are intoxicated by the occasion, as I said before, we do not eat or drink during the Pre Wake. John's the best of men and he touched all our lives. Everyone in my family agrees that losing him to the insidious cancer that was eating him up from within was not the end that we would wish for the man I love more than I do my own self. But I owe you an explanation, because I know our Pre Wake tradition appears strange to those who have not experienced anything like it before.”

“So, have you had to go through many Pre Wakes?” Pauline asks, pouring milk into both tea cups. Almost out of habit my wife is taking care of my tea, even though she has already determined that we are completely broken as a married couple and she is taking steps to render our separation irrevocably permanent.

“No, very rarely. As you know, my parents are still very much alive, as are all my aunts and uncles, but those that have attended Pre Wakes have always insisted that outsiders make our tradition to party away the night before interment … well, awkward.”

“So you considered not telling us about it,” I say bluntly, “and holding this ritual among yourselves?”

“No, never, absolutely never! The thought never entered our heads or hearts,” Adrienne insists, “you have every right to be here and, in fact, we needed you both—”

“But you could have just invited us to the funeral tomorrow?” Pauline says, her voice falling away to a whisper, “you could have ... spared us this additional ... ritual.”

Adrienne embraces Pauline again, “Polly, Bishop, you are both of you a second Mother and Father to me. And how would John have felt if you had been deflected from taking full part in his last ceremony of passage in his mortal existence? He is a part of my family too and he wouldn't have wanted to feel left out of it at say, my uncle’s Pre Wake for example, because he loves my Uncle Toby almost as much as I do.”

“Loved,” I say.

“What?”

“You said John loves your Uncle, only it should be ‘loved’.”

“Yes, of course,” she forces back a tiny tear, then put one hand on her heart and the other on her new bump, “but in here, and here, John is very much alive and as long as he is loved, he will always remain alive to me.”

She slumps back into one of the library’s easy chairs, and Pauline follows her, taking her hand and holding it in her lap as she perches on the arm of her chair.

“Come, Addy, tells us what this tradition is and we will see if we can join in this ... party.” Pauline speaks cheerfully, but glares at me, and I take the hint.

“Yes, Adrienne, please tell all. I do want to understand it. And, if we understand the thoughts and motives behind the ritual, it would be better to be a part of it than skulking away from your ceremony here in the library.”

"Right." Adrienne sat up. “First of all the body must remain in the house where he died, or brought back to his loving home as soon as possible if it had been removed, say to a morgue or hospital. Only in extremis would the lying in state take place anywhere else but here at home. There are to be no harsh lights shining during the three days before the eve of the funeral. As you see, we have turned the electric power off from most of the house except the kitchens, and that is only for the safety of the staff who are presently preparing the post mid-night feast. As I said before, we have fasted today from dawn and that will end at the middle of the night. As for the lighting, that is why it is candles only for the whole of the three days and nights. The … body ... is first stripped, washed and anointed with aromatic oils, then redressed in the clothes he or she liked best, much in the same way as mankind has done for millennia. It is all about our respect for them as they were when they were ... mortal.”

“And through our love for them,” suggests Pauline. She has that faraway look in her eyes and I could imagine her mind full of images of John growing up as a child and young man and being cute at every stage of his development. Oh, yes, John was always the cutest and the handsomest boy around, in whatever company he found himself.

“Of course, love, lots of love. Nobody loved John like I do …” Adrienne glances up at me, “…did.” She holds up a hand as Pauline opens her mouth to say something, continuing, “While a mother loves her children unreservedly, and I am starting to understand that motherly love growing more and more with every passing day, the love between John and I was at such a physical and emotional level that it transcended every other feeling I have ever experienced or even imagined experiencing in my wildest dreams. Think back to the first five years of your own marriage, when you made your baby John so soon into your own relationship.”

cPauline and I quickly exchange glances, but I am unable to read her response, while I hope that she cannot read mine.

With no further comment from us, Adrienne continues, “The undertaker makes the … box ... and John is carefully, reverently, placed within it. He is then put in a quiet place, with the lid open if possible … and sometimes that isn’t possible, of course, but it is in John's case. He is so beautiful, my dear John, even in death.” She pauses, continuing, looking at Pauline, “Polly, sweetheart, you have to see him, see him as he is, and you will see him just as he was.”

Pauline sniffs, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “It was all so sudden, only a week ago he told us that he had cancer, and that it was virulent, a terrible terminal illness, and just a few days later he was … gone.”

“He had known for months, Polly, and had spent time finding out about the treatments, the likely outcomes, the pain and lingering at the end, before he even admitted that he had a serious problem, not just to you, but he held back for a month or two in the early days to me too, the one person he should never keep secrets from.”

“Is that why? …” I point at her bump. She colors crimson prettily, nodding slightly, enough for us to know Pauline has assumed correctly.

“The original prognosis gave John an incentive in bringing forward most of our life plan, so this essential part of our bucket list just got bumped up the priority list.”

“So what you are saying is that John had virtually used up his life expectancy before getting around to telling us, his mother and father?” I ask as neutrally as I could force myself to make it sound. Now was not the time for rows or recriminations. They could come later if there was any residue of resentment.

“You could say that,” Adrienne admits, continuing, “so we now gather our little clan together. All of us in my side of our family know him well and love him for who he is, a person special to us all. And, rather like his Irish cousins who celebrate with a Wake after having said goodbye at the graveside, we have a party while he is still here with us and we can celebrate his existence rather than mourn his passing. It is a subtle difference but for many generations we in my family have found this to be the best way for us to handle such a rite of passage of a particularly well loved one. Well, my close family will see John in the middle of the night and I hope you will want to as well.”

“Yes, Addy, I-I would like to see him one more time ... one last time.” Pauline sounds hesitant, but resolved, “Is he in the ballroom?”

“No, he’s in an ante chamber beside the ballroom, somewhere quiet so he can be at rest, yet near at hand for all to pay their respects as privately as they may wish. I’ll come with you if you want. Then perhaps you could go to your room to freshen up. Maybe even join us in the ballroom when you feel able.”

I picked up earlier that Adrienne had assumed we would be sharing a bedroom tonight. I suppose up until three hours ago I had also assumed the very same thing. Sure, we had not formerly lived permanently under the same roof since I moved to the Bishop’s Palace at Sandburg, but we had got together for annual holidays, the public holidays, birthdays and anniversaries as well as regular Fridays and Saturdays at every other weekend. It may only be 45 to 50 nights a year, but for those nights I was expected to perform as a husband should and I made sure that I always rose to the occasion. 

This last year, now that I came to think of it, Pauline had cried off on her birthday, for some reason I had now long forgotten, and John had cancelled two invitations in the last four months for reasons of ill health that were now proved to be the case in the worst possible way.

“I think we should freshen up first,” I suggest. “To come to the party in our travel clothes and then disappear to get into the glad rags that you insisted we bring with us, sends the wrong message about us and our feelings towards our son to everyone here.” 

I move from where I stood by the side table to where Adrienne sat and take her free hand in mine. “Six years ago, when our John introduced you to us as the woman he wanted to marry, I was certain then, and even more certain now, that it was a bond made in heaven. In a way, he moved away from our family a little and threw himself headlong into yours. Here, with you, who I am proud to regard as my dearest daughter, he committed himself wholeheartedly. Here he lived enwrapped in love, a love that I believe will be eternal, through into the glorious afterlife in Paradise to come. Through our grandchildren…” I rested my left hand gently on her bump, touching as close as possible to those lives that were to come, “we will be coming closer to you and your family. We are passing the baton of our futures into your hands, Adrienne, so your traditions must therefore take precedence over ours.”

Adrienne squeezes my hand in response. She has a strong grip and makes me wince. I recalled the night that John was born and Pauline held my hand so tightly during her throes of labor, that I had to dictate my sermon that Sunday onto cassette tape and laboriously type it up using one-finger of only one hand.

The same little housemaid is waiting outside the library door and we are led up the grand staircase to a large airy bedroom that I recognise we had shared a couple of times before. We showered separately, each of us full of our thoughts and anxieties.