Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [174]
Seated at the rear of the chapel, Louise Abbot found herself distracted from the somber atmosphere as she glanced out a nearby window at “a crape myrtle in full fuchsia bloom . . . tossing and blowing in a sudden breeze, catching the sunlight and sending shadows rippling down the louvered blinds.” Her attention was captured, too, by the woman sitting in front of her, whom she believes was Betty Hester: “She sits like a child being punished, her head down as far as it will go, her shoulders sagging, her hands heavy on her lap. An aura of the solitary surrounds her. Her grief exerts an almost magnetic force. . . . During the service the monks have a look of joyous detachment. The woman in front of us shakes with sobs. She tries and is unable to control herself.”
Although Monsignor Cassidy had been rector at Sacred Heart during Flannery’s first year of college, when she was a member of the Newman Club that he advised, the family inexplicably requested that he give no eulogy. Chafing a bit under the restriction, he made a few general remarks in tribute, including the phrase, “When a person has been and has done what can never be forgotten . . .” At the conclusion, flanked by acolytes, he processed around the gray casket, an incense vessel swinging from his left hand, thick smoke swirling up in a large cloud. The casket was then moved slowly up the aisle. Regina rose, genuflected, and followed close behind, as she and her daughter had once walked behind Edward’s casket. The rest of the family paused to allow her space before following. Privately, Regina spoke of not blaming God for her daughter’s early death, but of being grateful for their extra years together. She had lived much longer than expected.
The burial service immediately afterward at Memory Hill Cemetery was brief. A prayer was offered by the elegant, white-haired orator Monsignor Patrick O’Connor, who was a stage actor before entering the seminary and whom Flannery had seen for the first time in thirty years at Conyers. She had been happy to know again this cousin of her father’s, with whom she had a rapport, and they had talked enthusiastically of his memories of the family. The prayer that he offered at her graveside included the words “and if by reason of sin she may have forfeited eternal life in heaven,” yet he rendered the word “may” with such lack of conviction as to make the phrase superfluous. Flannery O’Connor was then laid to rest beside her beloved father, the gravel spot eventually marked with a flat stone of Georgia marble, like the cover of a book, engraved with a cross.
BECAUSE THE FUNERAL had taken place within a single day of her dying, in her hometown, none of Flannery’s friends up north had even a chance to attend. Most of them found out the news when they opened the New York Times that Tuesday morning and felt the shock of seeing her picture staring out at them, the obituary cautiously labeling her as “one of the nation’s most promising writers.” With Everything That Rises Must Converge still in piles on her editor’s desk, the newspaper revived some of the controversies over The Violent Bear It Away. For friends closer to home, the Atlanta Constitution told of a writer “most highly regarded in Europe . . . so quietly did she live among us.”
Her old roommate from Iowa City, Barbara Tunnicliff Hamilton, did not learn of O’Connor’s death until her eyes fell on the “Milestones” page of Time magazine the following week. “Flannery had made it,” she wrote, of her first reaction. “The people who knew about such things valued her as those of us who lived with her and cared about her when she was young had hoped they would.” As one of those who cared about her early on, as well as a prime example of “people who knew about such things,” Robert Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop immediately on hearing the news, “I think the cards seemed heavily stacked against