The Wake

It was a cold day in January 1995. There was a light dusting of snow on Jesus Green as we trudged through from our rooming house on Chesterton Road to rendezvous at the St. Radegund pub, where we all planned to meet before the funeral and afterward for the wake. There was a kind of eerie winter quiet. No words were spoken between us, just the sound of snow crunching beneath our feet.

My brother and I were conspicuous in the Cambridge crowd with our leather bomber jackets and brown, wide-brimmed fedoras. Although not much was said, I’m sure they noted we looked like the Yanks we were, but only our father’s closet friends knew we had actually born there.

All my father’s closest friends were there for his funeral: Mac Rutherford, Terry Kavanagh (who owned the Radegund) and Sammy Singh among others. We headed out to the mortuary where he was to be cremated. After a few words were said over his closed casket, our stepmother approached us and asked if we wanted see my father one last time. We both silently shook our heads. She turned back to the mortician with a nod and shortly after which a panel in the wall opened and the casket moved quietly into the crematorium’s oven. For a moment I was glad my sisters weren’t there. They might have insisted on seeing the body to verify that he was actually dead. The incineration of his body would of course preclude the need to drive a wooden stake through his heart,

As my brother and I shuffled out of the little chapel, my father’s tall Sikh friend, Sammy Singh, put his arms around our shoulders. He asked us if we wanted to watch the smoke coming from the chimney. With a glance backward and a quick, simultaneous, “No,” my brother and I headed to the car and back to the St. Radegund where the wake was to be held.

My father, Peter Vorzimmer, was just 57 when he died. Now that I’m that age myself, it seems kind of a young age to die, but then I think that if I hadn’t taken care of myself to this point—my father never did until it was apparently too late—I might be close to death myself. I calculated that I will be the same age as he was this year, on June 13. I hope I haven’t cursed myself in some way by figuring out that date. Like my father referring to himself as “The Living Legend”—yes, the appellation and hence the name of the blog comes from him, not me.

The Living Legend in the Pamplona Bullring

At the time, when I thought about the actual date of his death, I was reminded of a conversation I had had with him exactly fourteen years before. My grandmother—my mother’s mother—had just died on January 15, 1981. My father was trying to console me as best he could, which usually meant trying to divert my mind by some intellectual exercise or by pontificating on the subject, in this case death. He reflected for a moment on the date and pointed out that every year we pass a whole day, the day and month on which we will die sometime in some unknown year. It’s an unknown anniversary. Ironically that very day was his, on which he would die exactly 14 years later. I wonder now if had any premonition about that particular day and month.

Back at the St. Radegund, Terry served up pints of ale though it was not yet noon and on a weekday no less, it was a wake in the best Irish tradition—my father’s mother was Irish, his father was Jewish. It fell on the shoulders of my father’s friend Mac Rutherford to make the first toast to his memory. He began by addressing my father, first looking upward, hesitating, looking down at the floor, saying a few more words, looking up again and finally saying, “I’m not sure which direction he went.”

Those words seem to sum up the balance of my father’s legacy. If you’re one of the people who knew him, you too, might have wondered which direction he went. If you listed all my father’s accomplishments both noble and notorious, famous and infamous, you would be hard put yourself to make the call. Let’s hope, that if there is a Heaven and a Hell, that he at least got a chance to make his case in Purgatory. I pity the Archangel who had to make that determination on which way to send him.

There was a tradition started that day of the wake, of telling stories about my father. It continued with a wake held in the States later that year, again in Pamplona, Spain that summer and has continued at every family gathering over the last 21 years. It is the tradition of telling tales of the Living Legend I hope to keep alive with this blog. I remember my father once warning a friend, “Be good to your kids, they will be the steward’s of your legacy.” He should have heeded that advice himself.