Each year as Columbus Day rolls around, I recall Mrs. Tkac. Mrs. Tkac was a childhood neighbor whose funeral I attended on Columbus Day 1968. They say that childhood impressions last longest and, I have to say, in this case, it’s true. I didn’t know Mrs. Tkac personally; I was eight when she died. That’s why, among all the elements here, the one of which I am least certain is her last name. Let it be.

Mrs. Tkac was something of a legend. From what I remember, the story goes that she was walking home down Johnstone Street, the street on which I grew up. The other end of the street back then terminated in bushes and railroad freight tracks, across which people took short cuts including, apparently, Mrs. Tkac. She was supposedly coming home one day when a guy jumped out of the bushes and told her, “I want your pocketbook!” As a hardworking immigrant woman, she wasn’t to be intimidated. She told him, “You want my pocketbook? I give you my pocketbook!” and proceeded to beat the guy over the head with her rather heavy bag. He ran off and she came home with her pocketbook.

To all those folks from whom I later heard claims that immigrant women of that era lacked “agency,” I replied: “Bunk. You didn’t hear about Mrs. Tkac!” (I was also told that men of this pre-liberation era were insensitive and that the sign of “partnering masculinity” was if a man washed the dishes. I never understood how this constituted “liberation” — or what kind of slobs apparently some other guys were — because as a child I always remember either my mother washing and my father drying the dishes or vice versa. Nobody in our neighborhood thought this was anything more than how you got clean dishes. But back to Mrs. Tkac.)

Mrs. Tkac died in early October 1968 and her funeral was on October 12. I remember that because, back then, this fourth grader had the day off as New Jersey observed Columbus Day on the day Christopher actually landed in the Americas. Because it was a neighbor’s funeral and attending the funeral was customary for those neighbors who could (which was usually the mothers), this eight-year-old was taken in tow to the funeral Mass and burial. I had been to funerals before but didn’t have memories of the cemetery service. Those were still the days when, according to the ritual, Msgr. Michael Churak took a trowel of earth and put it atop the coffin, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” while my mother reminded me that was kind of what the priest says on Ash Wednesday.

I have to say I was intrigued by the burial. How were they going to get this coffin into the ground? As I asked those questions, my mother decided to let me tarry after the official service was over. She wasn’t planning on going to the post-cemetery lunch that was traditional in our town. So, once the priest and the people were gone, I got to watch the grave crew do their job. The fake green carpet disappeared, the flowers were pushed away. A metal device with straps mechanically lowered the casket into the ground — more precisely, into the stone box thing I’d seen for the first time, which they called a “vault.” How would they get the straps out from under the coffin? One guy balanced in the grave, detached the strap, and pulled it out. Now they would drop the vault’s lid.

Imagining that closing this box was probably closing it until the day the angels would reopen it, this pushy little kid decided he’d leave his own marker to find: I pushed a carnation lying on the ground into the grave to fall atop the casket. I saw it lying there as the men decisively closed the lid with a thump.

Ours is a sacramental religion, which means that visible signs and sensory impressions — the thump of the vault, the sound of earth as it’s shoveled back into the grave over the buried coffin — speak beyond themselves.

(As another aside, when I was a little kid — again probably sometime in the mid-1960s — there was an outdoor movie theater in South Amboy, the next town over. What was unusual was that it abutted Route 35, which connected to my hometown, Perth Amboy, via a drawbridge over the Raritan River. When the drawbridge opened, traffic sat on Rt 35, waiting for the sailboat to pass, so you got to see some of the movie. One night, as we were sitting there, they showed the opening scenes of “Dr. Zhivago,” where the boy Yuriy witnesses the burial of his mother. Director David Lean alternates shots of the men shoveling earth back into the grave with an image of the deceased mother in her closed coffin, the sound of the dirt on its lid. While I remember being frightened by that image on the screen, it later made Mrs. Tkac’s funeral intelligible. And, to this day, at many funerals in Poland the mourners remain at the graveside until it is filled in — the sound of earth covering the remains a distinctive impression.)

Decades later, as October rolls around, I think of that October day and about the now desiccated carnation sealed in her vault, a space now undisturbed in 56 years. When you stop and think how transitory and mobile our society is, five-and-a-half decades of fixedness across summer days and winter nights gives you some sense of the shortness of our span and the length of mortality.

I know that there are parents who shield their children from funerals — even those of, say, grandparents — because they think it “traumatic.” I have to disagree, especially in an age when funerals are “scheduled” as “memorial services” at the attendees’ convenience rather than the deceased’s death. Death is a part of life and coming to think about and ponder it should not be something alien to people as, in many contemporary instances, it is. Nor should we shortchange the chance for children in their own ways to have some experience of those “existential questions” about which even a child’s mind might want to ponder and reflect.

My grandmother was still at home back then, and my mother could have easily left me downstairs with Grandma that Columbus Day in 1968. I’m glad she didn’t.

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen!