My great aunt La Donna died in December. She and I were close, and the news hit me like a freight train. But it wasn’t necessarily unexpected. While La Donna was still as mentally sharp as she had always been, running her own business and leading an active social life, she was 95 and had some physical setbacks in recent years that served as a reminder to the rest of us of her mortality.
It was two years ago when La Donna first called me to let me know she had begun planning her funeral and had already picked out an assignment for me.
“Your father will conduct,” she said, in her usual acerbic and commanding tone that always suggested these things were not up for debate. “You will be playing the piano.”
I tried to stop her right there. “La Donna,” I interrupted. “My piano lessons from the early ‘90s were not quite the musical training I think you’re anticipating.”
“Nonsense,” she shouted back at me before reciting the various songs she had selected for the proceedings. “I’m giving you advanced notice so you can start practicing now.”
“OK, lady,” I told her. “But if you’re going to make me do this, you have to live for another 15 years because that’s how long I’ll need to prepare.”
“You don’t have that long,” she responded. “I could go any day now.”
When my husband, Skylar, and I started objecting to this dark talk, she cut us off and said, “Oh, boys, how many 93-year-olds do you see out roaming the streets?”
Meeting Skylar
When I started coming out as gay a decade ago, and subsequently began introducing Skylar to family and friends, I sometimes did so with a bit of trepidation. This was especially true with my more elderly family members, who I feared might have a harder time approaching this with grace.
Looking back, I don’t know why I ever worried about telling La Donna. When I brought Skylar to see her for the first time, she embraced him, sat him down, and talked his ear off for the better part of two hours, asking him every question she could conjure.
When we said goodbye that day, she pulled me aside and took both of my hands into hers. She was a hunched, small, fiery redheaded woman with glasses half the size of her face. I looked down at her as she smiled at me. Her voice broke a little when she squeezed my hands and said, “I love you and everything you are. I love you because of who you are.”
I remembered this moment a few months ago as I began practicing the piano, scolding La Donna in my mind for not holding out for at least another five years, knowing that I never would have started practicing until her body was cold anyway.
Although La Donna had not been an active Latter-day Saint for most of her life, she did start attending church in her final years. The first time Skylar visited her home, he asked me why there was a picture of Jesus right next to her full bar with quite an impressive collection of international liquors. On a side table sat a picture of her with Frank Sinatra, her former employer and close personal friend.
“This woman is an enigma,” I whispered. “And every fact about her is the best fact about her.”
La Donna had selected four Latter-day Saint hymns for her funeral. Three were to be sung by the congregation. One was expected to be performed as a musical number by my three aunts.
I spent an hour each day, fumbling through the sheet music on my home keyboard, like an 8-year-old forced into piano lessons. To help pass the time, I began singing along as I played, although I made up my own profane lyrics for each of the songs, prompting my husband at one point to stick his head into the room and scold me. “You better stop that,” he said. “You’re going to get those words stuck in your head and then start laughing when you remember them while playing at the funeral.”
I waved him away.
The funeral
My singing aunts grabbed my arm and pulled me into a practice room the moment we arrived at the funeral home on the big day. All three of them had lost their voices recently and otherwise told me they were quite out of practice. “Why did she want us to sing?” one of them asked. “We sound terrible.”
It occurred to me as we stumbled our way through one practice round that maybe La Donna had done all of this as some sort of hilarious prank.
Time had run out and my dad took to the podium to conduct and welcome my large extended family. Minutes later, I sat down at the piano and began my first of several shockingly bad performances.
Aunts, uncles, one cousin and my grandma each took turns speaking and sharing their favorite cherished and funny memories of this absolute force who had been so present in all our lives.
At the end of the service, I sat at the piano again and began playing the closing hymn, the profane lyrics I had sung during my practices running through my mind, forcing me to resist a smile. As I hit yet another wrong note, I suddenly remembered the last conversation I had with La Donna, just a couple of weeks before she died.
I had called her to check in. “Listen, honey,” she said to me after we exchanged some pleasantries. “I’m de-junking my home at the moment to make it easier on everyone when I finally kick the bucket, and I found some music books I think you may want. Sheet music for the piano.”
“I’ll take them,” I told her. “But you aren’t allowed to die yet because I’m not prepared to play the piano at your funeral.”
She laughed.
“I’m serious,” I said. “I am really bad at the piano these days.”
“Oh, honey,” her shaky voice came through the phone. “I didn’t ask you to play because you’re talented. I asked you to play because I love you.”
Tribune humor columnist Eli McCann.
Eli McCann is an attorney, writer and podcaster in Salt Lake City, where he lives with his husband and their two naughty (yet worshiped) dogs. You can find Eli on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @EliMcCann or at his personal website, www.itjustgetsstranger.com, where he tries to keep the swearing to a minimum so as not to upset his mother.
