Daniel Callahan
The Song of the Devil is Hallelujah: A Eulogy for Linda Vares
It goes like this
Kes ei täna vähese eest, ei täna ka palju eest was painted above the entryway of her dining room. When my parents dropped me off, she sat me at the head of the table and instructed me to stay there. This saying, translated as He who does not give thanks for little, does not give thanks for much, watched me as I waited. Each umlaut an extension of Linda’s own eyes.
I want to say, Thank you, Aunt Linda, for dying.
There’s a blaze of light in every word
To express gratitude is an act of radical transformation. It refocuses our gaze and desires from absence—what we don’t have, in this case, Linda Vares—towards presence—what we do have. Look around, this is a reunion of a family that hasn’t celebrated since Steve passed. This gathering here today is a miracle. Today is a celebration of Linda: grandmother, stepmother, sister, step-sister, and educator.
How to shoot at someone who outdrew you
I was forty-two when my father and I went to Steve’s funeral. My mother stayed home to prepare for her surgery. Linda was at the funeral. She was seated in the first seat of the first aisle.
Steven Andrew Vares passed anticlimactically. A neighbor complained about his smoke alarms. The landlord found him three days later with a pretzel stuck in his throat.
I remember the call when my father found out. To this day, every phone call is as if someone has died until they’re resurrected when the receiver clicks. I am losing years of my life to the rings of telemarketers.
So, when we arrived at the front of the church, Linda chastised my father and I for arriving on time. It didn’t matter when Linda said there was no room for us. We gladly accepted her motion towards the back of the church—where my father is today.
Hey, Dad.
In the back of the church, there is no presumption. There are no eyes behind you inspecting the cleanliness of your collar, judging the timeliness of your last haircut, and there is no warm breath reminding you to grieve normally. In the back of the church, you always said, Dad, It’s only you and God. And you can leave without a scene.
From the back, I watched my father as he made his way to the front to deliver Steve’s eulogy. At seventy-two, and a quarter of the day’s names missing from his week, he caught himself on the shoulder of each person capping their pew, as if to remind them that he was still there, to bless them, or to draw attention to the generosity of Linda, I don’t know.
You remember how you began the eulogy about our visit to Steve’s, Dad?
When I was eleven or twelve, you and I went to visit Steve at his cabin in New York, in the Adirondacks, where he lived off illegally caught deer. Sometimes, Steve ate bear, you said, your father used to take you all hunting as kids. Left Linda at home with your mother, as the boys went out to become men.
I remember Linda’s restlessness during Steve’s eulogy, her squirms as my father implicated her in it. Her face kept turning back, looking for whoever was looking at her. She succumbed to the pressure of being named, of sitting in front. I also see some of you looking towards the back, as if unsure if you can laugh or not during a funeral, as if you expect my father to be here. He’s not.
You’re not really there, are you, Dad?
And my father wanted me to become a man when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen. He wanted me to taste a little bit of bear.
Bang.
My father shot me with this finger gun and smacked my sternum before boarding the plane to see Steve. I never tasted bear on that trip and we never ventured into the woods. I never became a man. Instead, we listened to Steve tell stories about his hunts and how he killed a bear with his bare hands.
How does a man, who killed a bear with his hands, die choking on a pretzel my father asked the church.
I stand before the Lord of Song
Steve’s eulogy ended with a message about how eulogies are meant to uplift, reframe tragedy as inspiration. Steve’s joined a long list of my father’s eulogies I envied as I scribbled another set of waves on the back of a check envelope meant for collection. Each of his passages ebbed and flowed like a building swell until the end crashed ashore. What always impressed me, Dad, was how you infused a different type of hope into each eulogy. How you remained optimistic as death drew closer, as it lay beside you.
The flicker of hope, like a candle in a desert, can be seen from twenty, thirty miles away, he said as he stepped down from the pulpit.
And from my father, I learned not to cry.
To remain true to my opening message of gratitude, I am grateful to be here before all of you today. Although my father, who’d delivered the eulogy at every funeral he and I attended, was meant to deliver this as well, has forgotten who she was, so I am thankful for this opportunity to succeed him as the family’s eulogist.
The baffled king composing—
A few years ago, Linda approached my father at Thanksgiving.
I was watching the Dolphins-Cowboys game with you Tony, remember. You always wear that puffy Dolphins Starter jacket to family events. Where’s it today? I was hoping to see a bit of blue and orange in the crowd.
We were eating your classic mashed potatoes, Shirley, and your Mezcal-basted turkey, Ken. We had your gravy with bacon bits, Laurel, and your HoneyBaked ham, Margarette. And for dessert, as always, Linda’s 7-Up salad. My, was it gross. And every year it became increasingly inedible. It’s okay to laugh. She’s dead.
I saw her pull my father aside, watched as they talked away from everyone. On the ride home, my father confided in us that Linda asked him to say her eulogy. Her only requirement was that he make it long, the rest was up to him. Looking back, I believe that Thanksgiving aided in my father’s decline. My father loved being the eulogist. For the first time in his life, he was tasked with delivering a eulogy for someone he loathed.
My father has Alzheimer’s. For those who may have been unaware or hypothesizing why he isn’t up here. The tremors picked up that December as if his hands shook with rage hunched over his writing desk attempting to draft a eulogy for his sister Linda. He was the only other person who knew. He was in a race against his decline to not forget. So, he only forgot faster.
In the car ride home from Thanksgiving, he said, Linda apologized. That she wanted to make things right before her passing.
My father lost that race. Resigned to sit in the back of the church, listening to his son say the final words, although inferior to his, I hope you’re proud of me, Dad.
It doesn’t matter which you heard
Hunched over my desk writing this, I realized I could’ve saved my father, and he’d be up here speaking far more eloquent words to you today.
Had I eaten a little bit of bear at Uncle Steve’s and become a man, I would’ve been a man of my word and when, at fourteen, I told my father I was going to kill myself, I’d’ve actually done it.
It was fifty-eight degrees outside. Winter was coming to an end. You could hear the neighbor’s TV. I screamed at my father.
He closed the door and said—.
Or when I was sixteen. I told my father, I’m going to open this door and jump. We were driving along the 101.
He didn’t stop, and said—.
That was the thing with my father, he always said the right thing. I didn’t open the car door because I wasn’t a man yet. Forever captive to my boyhood.
I know this room, I’ve walked this floor
At twenty-six or twenty-three, I realized my father, unlike me, had the agency to kill himself.
I recalled my friend, whose Americanized name was John, telling us the story of his Uncle Ambrose, during morning recess on the blacktop in sixth grade. John’s family found Ambrose hanging in the attic. It was Easter, and there was no resurrection. It’s been 22, 23, 24, 25 years.
My father could’ve been an Ambrose.
My mother never believed me when I said the moon was different shades of grey.
But you needed proof
When I was 18, my mother, Linda, and I spent a weekend in Cayucos.
Linda used to replace my father whenever he was busy teaching or conferencing. He was a temporal man. Linda and my mother got along. They enjoyed the same music. They even went to concerts together whenever someone worthwhile came to town.
That trip we listened to Leonard Cohen, alternating between my mother’s favorite song, Suzanne, and Linda’s, Hallelujah.
In her obtuse sunhat that blocked my view from the backseat through the front window, was Linda. Linda and her fucking sunhat. On that drive, in her hat, she asked my mother about my father’s youth—the period after he left home, moved away from Wisconsin, out to California, and the family lost correspondence. He went ghost. She always asked about the buildup: how my mother stole and consumed all his attention. Linda always wanted to know about that period of his life when it became his own. She was obsessed with my parents’ meeting, with their act of falling in love. Who doesn’t enjoy a good love story? The real ones, a glimmer of hope that love is possible for anyone, even the—. Even Linda.
On this trip, my mother told Linda a different story. It was a story about a trip my mother and I took up to Dillon. Dillon was my mother and father’s favorite beach. It was November 1995. She watched from the dunes as I played alone on the beach where they first kissed, where my father proposed. She couldn’t believe how life was so circular. My mother watched as I collected sand dollars—the exchange rate then could buy a kid the world—dug deep holes to nowhere and built sandcastles. I scooped out moats around the castles to protect them after I left.
I used to believe Linda loved those stories of my youth my mother told her.
I ruined my pants in the sand and salt water. My mother left them in a dumpster. We drove home listening to Joshua Tree and I stared at my beige with salt and sand and pee-stained chonies the whole way back. She told Linda I was so worried teenagers would come and crush my castle; I didn’t stop crying.
As a child, I knew all sandcastles were sacred. They were built by children who tucked their dreams and past lives away in the minarets. Even the ocean knows this: how it gently reclaims, washing over the castles like a baptism. It’s the tired who’ve forgotten. With boots soled in destruction. Perhaps, my mother had forgotten, and my worry to her was funny.
—though it all went wrong
My mother told Linda and I another story about my father and her.
They first met in ’76, ’77, ’78. Linda reminded her it was 1977. My mother continued. He asked her if she’d ever been surfing. They were in college and in love. She told my father, No. And so, they went and learned together.
So romantic, Linda added.
That was Linda, always adding. Always filling in the color.
In Cayucos, the three of us spent the weekend in a small motel that smelled like bleach. The front door opened to the parking lot field with beat-down, rusted cars. The air conditioner rattled in the window the entire night as I cursed my father for not teaching me how to surf. How a girl would never deem me cool. I imagined my father, suave, so cool—a surfer.
I think my father left me to fend for myself. Like Johnny Cash’s father who named his son Sue.
I just wanted to be you, Dad.
I’ve heard there was a secret chord
In high school, Linda called to make sure I went to prom. She had the dances marked on her calendar and called the week before to see who I asked, what they looked like, how they walked, and what they were named. She treated it like marriage: a big deal. So, when I always replied, I haven’t, yet. She’d tell me to burn a CD, make a playlist of love songs. The first song had to be Hallelujah. Who says no to Leonard Cohen?
Looking through my father’s office for blank CDs, I found, at sixteen, my father’s finished writings: poems, stories, and essays. And they were good. My father wrote about his obsessions: the California landscape, memory, and the end. It was the second time I stumbled across his work.
The first time I read his work, I was ten or twelve, nine or eleven, and I was looking through my parents’ drawers for their book filled with intercourse illustrations when I found my father’s chicken scratch on the back of crumpled up receipts beneath his folded socks—he never hung one’s neck by another. I read his poems and forgot about the sex drawings. When I heard him return from work, I neatly folded his socks and buried the poems. I returned to these receipt poems whenever I had a chance, the way a teenager waits for their parents to leave to jerk off.
Linda scolded the girls who rejected my invitations to prom I made up so she’d leave me alone. She couldn’t believe they’d said no to a boy like me. She called me things like handsome and enough, smart and charming.
I was always more interested in my father.
In his shadow, I worked to become a member of the cult of the word despite a lack of talent. I still can’t explain one of his poems to you, deduce what all the fragmented lines mean in conjunction with one another. Neither can he. Their meaning lost.
But they still remind me of all we did as a family. We lived those poems. On road trips, he used to ask if we could pull over. He’d walk around neglected turnouts and abandoned roads. He took pictures of the mountains and tractors “farming the soot,” as he once wrote. He asked my mom and I to smile. My mother worried about nails and broken glass, delayed trips, and flat tires. I worried someone from the freeway would see my tinkler if I peed.
What’s really going on below
Two or three years before Cayucos—when I was sixteen or fourteen, and when Linda used to still call to ask about prom—my entire summer was spent entertaining Linda. She always knew how to overstay.
Show of hands if she ever phoned any of you, asked to stay for a weekend, an evening, and turned it into a week.
And back then, summer was sacred. It was a reward for school, sports, bus rides, studying, and homework. A reprieve from struggle.
Instead, I spent that summer looking at old photographs—the special ones she kept in her handbag, the well-kept ones she took everywhere with her.
I think quite a few of them are on the posterboard to my left. When you come up to see her, you’ll see some of the photos. And before I forget, the photograph the invitation asked you to bring on her behalf, that will be a good time to pin it to the posterboard wherever there is space.
That summer we looked at her photos. And, not to speak for Linda, but I believe those photos were a stand-in for the life she always wanted. Each photo an opportunity to embellish, fictionalize moments based on truths, and the photographs assured their authenticity. Her immortality board, the posterboard full of photographs she lays dead next to, is her last trick to convince us, she’s still alive.
The stories from that summer and those well-kept photographs only created an illusion of Linda the following years disparaged. She had to have known it was an illusion, but her brain couldn’t split fiction from truth despite having lived it. The hand-me-downs of fictitious narratives, through repetition, have become Linda’s lore, and these memories of her solidify them as fact.
All I’ve ever seemed to learn from love
Linda told me about Paris. Told me about the cafes she sat in front of, looking for a Parisian man to ask for her hand in marriage. She never wanted to leave. She described her favorite meals, all involving a form of potato: fried, baked, boiled—the Wisconsin staples she couldn’t escape—and all the desserts. A macaroon, to her, was how she believed my first kiss was. She intertwined her tales with the French she picked up during her travels from baristas, barkeeps, and lovers whom she called étoile mourante. Linda attended lectures on Rodin, Cézanne, and Flaubert. She explored the city on foot—too afraid to take the metro. You all know why. She blamed the system’s pure confusion, said it wasn’t worth sacrificing exercise for. She saw the Arc de Triumph and imagined Hitler, World War II, and an occupied city. It all seemed so distant in elementary and high school textbooks, she said.
She went to every church, Sacré-Cœur, her favorite photograph of the trip—the over-exposure, she claimed, was like Christ everywhere.
And she reminisced about the blisters. On walks, forty, fifty years later, I still hear her cursing those blisters. I never learned how to speak French. Just recognize the curses. If she spent that summer actually teaching me some of the language she picked up, it might’ve helped with my prom struggles, my bland American romance.
You say I took the name in vain
However, she did teach me, Ja me pel—it means, My name is. No one asks, What is your name anymore. Our names follow us everywhere. At every meeting our names are labeled beneath our pictures. My name is auto-attached to every email—“Thanks, Charles.” Should I include my last name or not. I am afraid they’d come across too serious as if they might assume I think my emails are actually important. We can’t escape these names assigned to us at birth. Names we have no say in. It’s everywhere. Look: Capital One, Charles Michael Vares; California DMV, Charles Michael Vares, black hair, brown eyes, 5’10”; Farmers Insurance, Charles Vares; Visa, Charles M Vares; AAA, Mr. Charles Vares; even the receipt in my pocket: C Vares. Look! It’s stitched to the lapel of this jacket. It’s printed in flowery letters on construction paper stuck to my seat in the pew. Our names are etched in gold on our caskets. Look, goddammit—
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
That summer, Linda followed up her Parisian tales with stories about my grandfather. She showed me a few photos she took of him. She was the designated family photographer because of her nimble fingers, uncalloused and clean. She told me that him letting her take them was his way of showing affection. She spent the next month lecturing me on the power of the camera, the only thing that can rival a gun. She pointed out the language: shoot. She pointed out the shape: held up a finger pistol. She said, The eye behind the scope is the last and only person to see the moment between life and immortality. I never figured out what she meant. But it was so profound and it was small moments like that where I thought she could’ve been someone else entirely.
Her summer visit finally came to an end after Labor Day. It was the first of the road trips with my mother and Linda. My mother wanted to see some of her college friends who’d moved to Southern California. My father was at a conference, so I had to tag along. I remember all the American flags staked along the freeway offramps and even more draped from the overpasses. We listened to Cohen, to Bono, to Sting, to Bruce. There was a man in the back seat beside me, my mother said, He was part of the group.
I remember Linda, how the man pushed me over so he could sit behind my mother, and I, behind Linda. I remember how she rolled down her window. The ungraceful exhale, her spit. It flew out the window and, as if Linda and I magnetically bound—the entirety of California for Linda’s spit to land—it flew in through my window and hit me. I said nothing. How we misconstrue small acts of violence as love. I rolled up my window and watched the spit collect on my reflection’s chin and its stringy descent to the floor.
With nothing on our tongue
Like the spit I couldn’t escape, we can’t escape the word. We scribble words on the backs of photographs to help us remember. We underline, cross out, and rewrite them for eighty-two years, if we’re lucky like Linda Vares.
We hang words in our homes, above doorways and living rooms. We fill up bookcases with words in various positions. We tuck them away in nightstand drawers for later. We’re gathered here today to listen to my word.
The Word as miracle.
The Word as curse.
And for that dichotomy, I do believe we should be grateful we are not left to wander this world without language. Like Moses without the Commandments. Like Moses without Hope. For what are we without stories? Without Song? Without: I love yous?
Moonlight overthrew you
My entire life has been spent watching my father forget his Words.
His opening lecture at university was on what Miłosz coined, The cult of the word. My father implicated his students as the newest members each semester. And the requirement: writing as a daily practice in remembering.
And still, he’s forgotten despite his eighty years of daily practice.
First, the proverbs he used to remedy my problems at school: bullies, bad grades, and broken hearts.
Then went the names. He stripped them from Hellos and Goodbyes. Deconstructed weeks into Today and Yesterday.
Then his letters lost their sound.
You must’ve been so lonely with mom and I.
Love is not a victory march
I’m fifty now.
Three years older than my mother when I heard her weeping for the first time. It’s raining outside like it was then.
You can only laugh at coincidence.
It’s raining now!
She wept knowing her son of fourteen wanted to die.
I was such a bastard.
I’m sorry.
I’m not some pilgrim who’s seen the light
The day after I told my parents I wanted to die, my mother woke me up. She pulled out an ocher photo album. Between forgotten photographs and repeated words that bled into stories I’d find out were misremembered, my mother tried to convince me of a childhood I couldn’t, and still can’t, remember. It was her attempt to bind me to this world. As if to say, this possession of memories means you can’t leave yet.
I believe, partly, why we have to suffer from Dementia and Alzheimer’s is so we can leave peacefully—all our memories have moved on without us. How my father is just sitting there in the back, waiting to die.
My mother began with the story of my baptism.
She showed me a photograph of my father with my grandfather. My father is on the steps of the cathedral, he’s holding a swaddled baby in his arms. She told me, That’s you.
My grandfather is behind us with his hands clamped to my father’s shoulders, inches from his neck—like hands moments before necking a chicken. The men stare straight ahead. Strips of palm litter the steps behind them. I imagine it smells like spring since I cannot remember being that baby. And the photographer was allergic, they sneezed, blurring the photo, leaving behind my headless grandfather.
It was the penultimate photo in the ocher album. Number 532 foreshadowed my grandfather’s death.
That morning, my mother pulled out a second album, a red one with gilded edges. This, she said, was all me. She pulled out a photo of a toddler without hair that looked nothing like me. She told me—as many of you here will verify in fact—I didn’t have hair until I was almost ten or eleven. But like any great conspiracy, maybe all of you are in on it, except me. We go through this world as singular outcasts from the greatest conspiracy of all, our own childhoods. She said I was such a happy, bald, fat Buddha baby. She asked me, Where did it all go wrong?
My mom didn’t want answers. Too pressed to convince me of this conspiracy—the happiest days of my life I cannot remember no matter how hard I try.
She showed me another photograph. In it, I am seven, nine, or ten, with short tufts of hair. I’m playing with another boy—whom my mother calls Jacob—who lived down the block. She told me he was my best friend. She compared us to Superman and Batman, both special—in different ways—and neither second fiddle. She loved watching us play. She continued to tell me the story she’s told you all countless times—and, again, that you’ll confirm as true—one summer afternoon when it was hot; he and I peed on each other, thinking our pee was like the hose our parents sprayed us down with when the air conditioning went out.
My mother believed that if I left that room and went on with my day unconvinced of the stories tethering me here, it was going to be the last time she spent with her only son.
She continued to flip through the red album. Until we reached a photo I couldn’t see myself in at all. It’s my mom and my dad. They looked so different when I was younger. She pointed to the corner of the photo, said I’m there with Aunt Linda. Told me of the holidays she’d come out and visit us. She and I used to track Santa Claus together until I was thirteen or fourteen.
Yet, it’s the only photograph I remember. And I remember you stopped spending time around her after I told you, Dad, that I saw her standing outside my room with the door ajar. Her beady eyes peered through. That she hummed Hallelujah as she watched me. And, all you said, Dad, was that you loved me.
It’s been forty-something years, forty-one or two, and I still don’t want to be here. But, I think it’s the shame—why I’m still here.
How could you still love me?
The broken Hallelujah!
I’d like to revise my eulogy for Linda.
Looking down at her now. As I run my hands across her formaldehyde skin, I realize: Death isn’t about gratitude, giving thanks, and being grateful. Death isn’t about words or the Word, either. A eulogy is about shame—each of you here is thinking about yourself, and are too ashamed to admit it. You’re thinking about what words will be spoken over you at your funeral. You’re wondering who will say them, what light they’ll paint you in, what embellishments they’ll make on your better half. You’re thinking about who will show up and who will mourn the most. You’re dying to know who will cry over you and how long they’ll grieve. You want to see all who’ll come to your forgotten grave on the outskirts of an already dead town. You’re wondering if your guidance and protection will ever be invoked in a rosary. You’re asking yourself if friends will tell stories of you over cake or drinks. You want to know what those stories will be. Who will make the last toast in your name. And it’s those lurking thoughts screaming at you in the back of your skulls, demanding an answer that you’re so fucking ashamed of and too scared to admit it. You fidget, you cry over Linda, you blow your nose to signal to your pew. I am sad about Linda. A funeral is never—and has never—been about gratitude.
The shame is all I remember of my life. Like a conscience, it’s made my every decision.
And I know when it all began. And it would’ve been lost to this world had I killed myself at fourteen and had my father—the only one I ever told who’s forgotten but spared—been the one to deliver this eulogy; Linda would’ve been laid to rest and no one knowing she continued to hum that song as she slid into bed, as I pretended to sleep.
Here, as she requested, is my photo of her for her immortality board.
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
I don’t think it matters what words are verified or whether or not they have a source. Rather, it’s the words we choose to believe. We named it faith to hide our shame. These histories—this history of my life, my mother told me and verified with photographs, the person who lived this life that my father still loved—I can, we can choose to conspire in or not. That’s why everyone here is going to heaven even though you should be ashamed no one knows who came after Azor in the genealogy of Christ.
Thank you.
The photographs used throughout this piece were acquired from an antiques/estate dealer.
Daniel Dias Callahan is a writer from Sacramento, California. He received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of San Francisco and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of San Diego. His work has appeared in California Quarterly, Sonora Review, and Thin Air Magazine, among other publications. He is a former Poetry Editor for the online journal, Invisible City.