Resurrecting my Aunt Lilly

There’s a cruel dictum attributed to Ernest Hemingway about a person’s worth when measured against the eternal flow of time; it says, “Every man has two deaths: When he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name.”  

It’s not because I’m turning 84 next month (and on my way out) that I’m thinking about post-mortem anonymity because my philosophical self has entertained such thoughts since first reading the work of my favorite Roman poet, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, commonly known as Horace. 

To some extent he scooped Hemingway by two-thousand years in his oft-quoted Ode 30 in Book 3 of his “Odes” which appeared in 23 B.C.

The first line of the poem reads, “Exegi monumentum aere perennius” which translates to, “I have made a monument that will last longer than brass.” Of course, Horace is speaking about his work.

Then he gets bolder, “regalique situ pyramidum altius.” Which means, “And that work will have more staying power than the pyramids of kings.”

In lines six and seven he boasts even more, “Non omnis moriar multaque pars mei vitabit Libitinam” which is “I will not fully die; a big part of me will escape Death.”  

Add 23 B.C. to 2024 A.D. and, 2047 years later, we see Horace was right. On the Internet there’s an endless parade of pictures of pyramids — built two-thousand years before Horace was born — but here we are still talking about Horace, which puts him right up there with the pyramid-making kings of Egypt. Mirabile dictu.

And, for all the propaganda religionists spout about people not dying because of the eternal joy they will receive through the resurrection of the body — see “The Treatise on the Resurrection” found at Nag Hammadi — what Hemingway said is true: There is no resurrection, there is no eternal life for someone fallen from memory, when not a single soul has incorporated you.

The ideas of being forgotten and bodily resurrection were reignited yesterday during a conversation I had with a clerk in the vital records office of Smithtown, New York about an official document.

It was the death certificate of a member of my family — a Sullivan who died in 1944 — and I think I’m safe in saying that the Sullivans of my generation have all but forgotten her. Her monumentum has had the staying power of wilting lettuce.

I’m here today to unwilt that lettuce, if you will, through a resurrection of my own, hoping to bring that Sullivan back from the grave so she can say with Horace, “Non omnis moriar.”

The name of the Sullivan on the certificate is Elizabeth Lillian, my father’s older sister by five years and called by the family Lilly or Lill. I used to ask the adults when I was growing up why we heard so little of Lill.   

A short eight-page memoir my aunt Catherine (Cass), put together during our Bicentennial year, provides an answer that in some way brings Lill back to life. (Cass was Lill’s younger sister by six years.)

She says the family got multi-socked by Sorrow. First, there was the death of a sister, “Baby Barbara,” who died at seven months. Then in 1926, the backbone of the family, her mother, Barbara — after a two-year illness — left this world, leaving the family in disarray.

Lill had been the caretaker of her mother while she was sick and after she died, Lill became the mother of the house — which seems to have been too much to handle.

That is, Cass says: “Either because of the strain of my mother’s two years’ illness and death or the responsibility afterwards or for some other unknown reason, [Lill] suffered a complete nervous breakdown about 1927.”

Thus, the Sullivans were now Sorrow’s favored friend: They lost Baby Barbara, then Barbara the mother died, then Lill went to pieces.

I do not know who decided where Lill should go to patch herself together but she wound up in Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, a massive, other-worldly panopticon complex Oliver Twist wouldn’t be caught dead in.

The family did everything to keep Lill’s soul alive. Cass says, “My father and even my stepmother were very faithful to her and visited her often. I did occasionally as did my brothers Neal and John … It was a very traumatic experience for me every time I went to see her because I saw the pretty young girl in such dreadful surroundings.”  

During the 1930s and early 1940s Creedmoor was Lill’s home, though listed as an “inmate.” 

I was talking to the clerk at Smithtown because Lill did not die at Creedmoor in Queens (New York City) but in Suffolk County; between April 1940 and her death four years later, she was moved to Kings Park Psychiatric Center located in Smithtown, Suffolk County — and the vital records officer in the town had information about how Lill died.   

When my mother was about the age I am now, I asked her to tell me the “Lill story” one last time — and she did, and added something new.

She said Lill was a pious soul and had a “close” relationship with — and this is the new part — Father John B. Snyder the priest in the parish where Lill went to Mass, confessed her sins, and sought pastoral counseling.

Father Snyder died in January 1934, ten years before Lill; The Herald Statesman of Yonkers for Monday, Jan. 22, 1934 revealed he “had been seriously ill with a nervous breakdown for a long time and several months ago had been relieved of his duties as assistant to the Rev. Michael, J. Tighe at the Staten Island [St. Mary’s] church.”

Two nervous breakdowns, though in the priest’s case, the Statesman added: “Secrecy was thrown about the circumstances attending death by members of the family.” 

But a headline in The New York Times the following day (the Jan. 23 edition) uncovered the secret: “Rev. J. B. Snyder of Staten Island Hangs Self While Visiting Brother.”

Cass, too, said Lill was pious; my mother said she was “close” to the parish priest, and the paper said he too had a breakdown to which he added a suicide.

By saying my mother used the word “close” I am in no way implying something was “going on.” That generation of Sullivans — Cass, my father, their brother Neal, and both their parents were straight-laced — personable people but imbued, like many Irish, with a deep sense of modesty.

I see Lill and Father John as Pyramus and Thisbe whom Ovid and Shakespeare wrote about: The couple, forbidden to marry — even to see each other — were forced to speak through a chink in the wall between their houses.   

But the walls at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center had no chinks. And we have no idea if the priest ever saw his parishioner in confinement.

Stymied by Fate, Pyramus and Thisbe decide not to have breakdowns but to elope, agreeing to meet at a mulberry tree with white berries. 

While waiting for her lover, Thisbe is accosted by a lion and flees, leaving her cloak spread across the ground. 

When Pyramus arrives and sees the empty cloak, he thinks a lion has eaten his bride-to-be and in despair takes his life, his blood turning the berries of the mulberry tree red. 

Thisbe, returning to the meeting spot after escaping the lion, sees her lover’s body spread across the ground and, overcome by despair, takes her life as well.   

To commemorate the blood the dear-hearts shed for love, the fruit of mulberry trees remains red to this day. 

Eighty years ago this month — July 16, 1944 — Lill died and I cannot shake her. Is that what is meant by resurrection of the body? 

As long as I live, Lill will have, like Horace, the staying power of a pyramid; deep down I hear a voice saying “Non omnis moriar.”