When the end is just the beginning, it's time for Poe

I remember the metallic click of the casket closing tight, a sound I probably wasn’t meant to hear but did.

And ever since, I’ve been unable to unhear it.

I kinda, sorta blame Edgar Allan Poe, whose tales of the macabre fascinated me as a young teen. Stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Premature Burial” planted the seed of fear based on the possibility that a person could be buried alive.

That was some scary stuff.

Poe was an absolute original, a writer who rode the most bizarre trains of thought, conjuring realistic narratives that kept readers spellbound, even as they imagined something entirely fantastical, figments of a master storyteller’s opium-fueled imagination.

A collection of his stories was never far from my bed stand, and many was the night I’d treat myself to a few pages of “A Cask of Amontillado” or “The Tell-Tale Heart” before turning out the lamp and falling into a dream-troubled slumber.

My younger brother, with whom I shared a bedroom for many years, also was a voracious reader, though his taste tended more toward the Hardy Boys and the Mad Scientists’ Club.

When I think back on the house in which we grew up, I can’t remember a single room where there weren’t books on display.

Dad was a gifted man, capable of making a sewing machine sing and turning a picnic table into a surface for playing Ping-Pong, but perhaps his greatest skill was building bookshelves. You wouldn’t find many college professors who could measure and cut that well.

I mean, I can barely hang photos so they don’t lean to one side.

And I also have doubts as to Poe’s woodworking abilities, but that’s OK. His life was devoted to much more ephemeral endeavors, and what he built over his 40 years has endured.

My ninth grade English teacher — a saintly woman whose influence continues to impact many of those lucky enough to have sat in her classroom — had a tradition of assigning her students the task of reading a memorable biography and then presenting a book report while dressed as the subject whose life was detailed.

Even though I was new to the public school environment, its relaxed dress code and sundry other regulations, I was no stranger to performing in costume. Having experienced eight years on the parochial side of life, I had been a faithful altar boy and knew few things were as ornate and ceremonial as a Catholic high Mass.

Priests in their vestments, nuns in their habits, servers in their cassocks and surplices … the whole thing was a presentation.

When it became known I had a gift for memorization, I had the privilege of dressing up as Abraham Lincoln, down to the broom-bristle beard and a stovetop hat, and going from classroom to classroom reciting "The Gettysburg Address." That little stunt got my picture in the local newspaper, a clipping I still have.

A year later, when my assignment was to find a suitable subject for a biography report, I knew immediately who it would be.

The thing about Edgar Allan Poe I understood right away was how effectively easy it would be to set the proper atmosphere. All I needed, really, were five or six candles, a pack of matches and permission to lower the blinds in the third-floor classroom.

Looking back, I’m always surprised I got away with that.

But “He Played with Fire” might one day be my gravestone epithet.

Which brings us back to the fear of being buried alive.

The proper medical term is “taphophobia,” from the Greek word for tomb, and it was fairly common in the mid-19th century, a time when Poe was spinning his phantasmagorical tales for an audience keenly interested in such diabolically frightening goings-on.

Spiritualism and the occult were fertile fields for a writer of his caliber to cultivate, and as I stood in front of my classmates, wearing a flowing bowtie, a black vest and a crisp white shirt, my hair greased back, I could feel the power of suggestion taking hold.

When you’re 14 or 15 years old, your brain is still quite malleable, largely unformed, which makes junior high a minefield for social missteps and romantic crash landings, especially for a Catholic boy.

In grade school we began each day with Mass, which, for the uninitiated, is a ritual rife with regret for doing wrong. “Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault” was the refrain, and it was symbolic as well as pragmatic. Sin abounded, and to even think of doing wrong was as bad as doing the deed.

Hence, we didn’t learn a lot about, well, the birds and the bees.

We could spell “antidisestablishmentarianism” and “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” but we had very little idea how to talk gracefully with someone of the opposite gender.

Or at least, I didn’t.

It became a matter of trial and horror, of — to lift a line from Lou Reed — growing up in public, and there were occasional successes.

One thing Catholics were very good at was death and dying. The entire religion was built on the promise of eternal life, the notion that once you had breathed your last, you would be judged by God himself and, if you had died in the state of grace — meaning no mortal sins on your soul — you would do your time in Purgatory and then be elevated to Heaven, where you’d be forever and ever.

This thought, far more than that of death itself, scared me a lot.

I couldn’t conceive of a world without end, amen. My mind simply wouldn’t compute eternity, a state of consciousness that stretched beyond anything I’d ever tried to imagine. I would do mental exercises like this one: think of the longest time ever — say a million years — then multiply it by the value of infinity … and after all those eons, you’d still be only beginning the rest of your being.

As an altar boy, I volunteered to serve every funeral service I could.

Most of my friends avoided them because, unlike weddings, no one ever slipped you $5 when it was all over. Funerals didn’t pay.

It was fascinating for me, lighting the ceremonial candles on either side of the coffin as it rested in the center aisle, covered in a cloth, and the way the priest would swing the censer, spreading incense.

Decades later, after my father died, I was standing near the funeral home exit, waiting for the casket to be loaded into the hearse, when I heard that metallic click, the one with which I began this essay.

I smiled ever so slightly, remembering Edgar Allan Poe, taphophobia and ninth grade English class, thinking, “If Dad’s still alive in there, he’ll figure a way to get out. I have faith in that.”

Then it was out to the graveyard in the cold February sunlight.

Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where reading and writing often quietly collide.