Double Wake

The Angel of Revelation by William Blake

— And everyone said that Billy was going to heaven.

— Who do you mean by “everyone”?

— The family, the priests....

— The priests said that? Wow, that’s unbelievable. I mean, after everything Billy did, I wouldn’t think that most Catholic priests would say something like that....

I had started the conversation by asking Paul about Patty. He told me that Patty worked for him as a bookkeeper for about four years, and he described her as a cheerful, irreverent, working-class woman, intensely Catholic, with a strong Boston accent and a loud infectious laugh, which he heard many a time through the steel elevator door. A part-time Estee Lauder makeup artist, she was always well put together, and her brother later said of her, “Patty had a touch of the royal in her.”

As her direct boss, Paul never had lunch with Patty outside the office, but he often talked with her about her home life. She told him she was worried about her husband’s drinking problems and his frequent unemployment (Billy’s work was seasonal as he operated a snow plow in the winters and did paving work during the summers), and that when she got home from work, she often found him drinking with his friends. She never said anything about physical abuse, but she did say that Billy told their daughter’s boyfriend, “If you don’t treat her right, I’ll find you and kill you.” At one point, she had moved out for a year and lived with her daughter because Billy just wouldn’t stop drinking, but when he was finally able to give up the alcohol, she went back to him. She still loved him—and felt responsible for him—after all, they’d been married 30 years and had been sweethearts since high school.

After Paul heard the news about Patty and Billy from his partner, Dave, he felt so desperate to find out more about what had happened to the family that he tracked down an old friend of Patty’s and she agreed to meet with him. It turned out she and two other women had spent the previous weekend with Patty at a Catholic retreat. Billy was drinking again, the friend said, and since Patty was now earning enough money to take over the mortgage all by herself, her friends encouraged her to ask Billy to leave the house this time. When they dropped her off on that Sunday night, it was the last time any of them saw her alive. And it was Patty’s friend who told Paul about how both sides of the family (Patty and Billy both came from large working-class clans in Dedham) had come up with the plan for the wake. It was the only way, they felt, that the family and the community could make sense of the tragedy and carry forward.

So then Paul not only had to wrap his head around the fact that a woman he’d worked with for four years had been murdered by her husband, but also that her wake—which he obviously needed to attend—was going to be a double wake for her and for the man who had murdered her.

But the double wake was a remarkable and fascinating event, Paul said. Over one thousand people attended—the whole town of Dedham it seemed—and there were 25 family members from both families in the receiving line. Photographs of Billy and Patty as a pair, along with individual photographs of them as children, were displayed around the church. Billy and Patty, Patty and Billy—to all those people they were still a couple, a unit, a fixture. Paul began to understand that the two religious, working-class families had bravely worked together to come to the stance that at the end Billy had been in terrible trouble—depressed and suicidal—but that was not who he had always been. And Paul realized that the purpose of the double wake was to allow the two families to bring everyone else along with them to same stance, to reach the same feelings of acceptance that they had been able to achieve. Afterward it seemed to Paul that everyone left the church feeling very differently than they had when they had come in. For him personally, the double wake—and the family’s subtle, nuanced approach to religion, morality, and forgiveness—allowed him to let go and then to turn away.

— And Deidre? The daughter he shot? What happened to her?

— She’s alive, and recovering. As a matter of fact, her injury was very similar to Gabrielle Gifford’s.

— What a story....

— Oh, and Billy was illiterate. Imagine how humiliated he must have felt knowing that without Patty to take care of his paperwork, he would never be able to manage....