Mourning a loss

Watching the post-game interview with UCLA's head coach after Memphis defeated his team in the semi-final for the NCAA Championship on Saturday, I was reminded of another sports media absurdity: the interview with the losers. What with the somber tone, the long faces, and the bent heads that losing coaches and players affect (I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that much of it is an act because, as we all know, if you lose in America today and don't go into deep mourning, people will assume there is something wrong with you) and the similarly ridiculous manner in which they are interviewed (the interviewer must sound like a policeman informing the next of kin of a murder), you would think that the team had just died in some horrible tragedy instead of merely losing a game. I guess all that talk about "sportsmanship" and being "a good sport" goes right out the window after a big game and everyone is required to act like immature babies. It's pathetic. Just once, I would love to see Jake Byrd from the Jimmy Kimmel show giving the business to some losing coach (Bill Belichick would have been ideal!).

Speaking of death and mourning, my father doesn't seem to be up to the task of informing me when someone I know (or don't know) dies. In the past, my mother would be on the phone before the body had cooled (btw, this is one of the reasons I don't have a cell phone--how would you like to be sitting on a bus or strolling down the street when you got the news that someone you knew or loved died? Inappropriate, right? Which is why I prefer to keep private matters private). Anyway, a couple weeks ago, my father called me at home (a rare enough event in itself) to inform me that his Aunt Mary had died in Bayonne. As far as I can tell, I have never met this person before in my life. My father wanted to know if I would like to go to her wake with him (in the middle of a weekday, no less). This was kind of a surprise to me because I've never thought of myself as someone who goes out of his way to attend wakes. And I think my father knows this about me (as a kid, I found my grandfather's wake, the first I had ever attended, very upsetting; I couldn't understand why a group of people would gather together to gab and laugh it up with a dead body in the same room). I have lightened up somewhat regarding wakes over the years, but I think I'm still too young to look to wakes and funerals as social events the way some senior citizens do. I quickly informed him that I would have to take a pass on his offer. My brother accompanied him to the wake of the elderly woman I did not know and who I'm sure my father hadn't seen or heard from in decades.

This past weekend I learned (a week after the fact!) that the woman who had lived across the street from the house I had grown up in, and known since I was a child, had died. She had been in a nursing home for many years (I can't even remember the last time I saw her--it must have been close to twenty years). Her sons and my brothers and I were constant companions when we were growing up. Thinking back on it, it almost seems like we spent more time in her house than our own. Their backyard was the setting for endless wiffleball games in the summer (we even kept home run stats!). Her basement was where one of her sons, inspired by the movie "Rocky," set up an improvised boxing ring and where I was almost knocked out by the unexpected opening of a laundry room door by her daughter. Their garage was the site of indoor basketball games that rattled their house (once, when I impaled my hand on a protruding nail, I was convinced I had lockjaw as a result of the tetanus I had contracted) and the testing ground for a new sport we had invented called "Tenocky" (basically, hockey played with a tennis ball and rackets). Mrs. B had a gruff side and was a screamer (the sound of her voice screaming her sons names will be forever imprinted in my brain). And although we did have a couple family squabbles (one of her sons tackled my brother in the street once when he tried to make off with a basketball and he required stitches in his knee), my mother and Mrs. B remained friends for many years (they lost touch when Mrs. B entered the nursing home). I fondly remember one afternoon around Christmas when the two moms cut loose with some wine (a singular event which is probably why I remember it) and we bounced from house to house running wild and having a ball. I also recall Mrs. B being so charmed by my tales of Jersey City (for a couple years, my family had set up a summer exchange program with cousins in Jersey City; we loved the city, my cousins hated the suburbs) that she had me repeat the stories for her older daughter.

I don't think I would have attended this woman's wake if my father had informed me in a timely manner (again, I don't go out of my way to attend wakes), but I think my father should have at least realized that this woman's passing was more meaningful to me than an aunt of his that I had never met. To shout the news to me as I walked down the stairs of his house a week after the fact didn't seem quite right. My mother wouldn't have bungled it so badly.