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“There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton terribly restless.” ~ Wilson Misner
For a long time, I believed that skeletons were ghosts, kind of like an unwanted family inheritance better left hidden away in some forgotten closet. But closets, if left untended, can become very crowded places.
In truth, how often are the sins of one parent passed on from one generation to the next until some brave family member finally steps in and frees the skeleton from its closet and teaches it how to dance?
Our family had a big skeleton in the person of Grandpa Jack McCoy. But we were lucky. My brave brother Kevin stepped in and released old Jack from his closet and taught him how to dance.
Here’s that story…
Grandpa Jack was my mother’s father. He had been a successful restaurant owner in Denver but lost everything with the onslaught of the Great Depression.
After several failed attempts at dry farming in Wyoming he slipped into a deep depression and chronic alcoholism.
My grandmother was forced to take a job outside the home, leaving my adolescent mother to look after her five younger siblings.
It was nightmarish existence.
Grandpa Jack ultimately abandoned the family after his youngest child and namesake died of cancer at age 16.
He wandered around, to only God knows where, and became an unspoken fixture in the family closet.
Then something happened in 1957 to change all that.
The family got word that Jack’s body had been found in an irrigation ditch.
There wasn’t much to identify him but some broken bones and dental records.
I vividly remember his funeral — no one cried.
Then, suddenly, the skeleton of Jack McCoy jumped out of the closet.
Here’s how the Seattle Times covered THAT story:
YAKIMA – Jack McCoy was buried in April 1957, after his body was found in the intake of an irrigation canal outside Wapato.
The body had been in the water for months, a clear case of drowning, the county coroner said.
McCoy’s 4-year-old grandson, Kevin Moriarty, remembers his grandfather’s death. At the Yakima funeral, the little boy from Seattle discovered family members he never had seen before.
But Moriarty has an even sharper recollection of the day a month later when he opened his front door to find his grandfather standing there.
That’s when he heard his father swear and his mother utter a sentence that would bring her a moment of humiliation in the national news:
“You’re supposed to be dead.”
That was the first McCoy had heard of his own death.
The wire services got hold of the story and it made it all the way to the Huntley Brinkley Report on NBC.
The skeleton of the man who had been Jack McCoy had been
- resurrected,
- sobered up, and
- reunited with his family.
He happily lived out his remaining days with Grandma Frances in a little house in Ballard. He did finally die in 1963 and his second funeral was much different than the first — tears flowed freely.
Later, Kevin taught those bones to dance in a play he wrote about the man who was supposed to be dead:
A Rose for Danny
With the invaluable help of my high school classmates Tucker McHugh and Jerry Toner, the play was mounted in 2014 as part of Irish Heritage Festival. (I’ve included a link to the play at the bottom of this post.)
The lesson I took from A Rose for Danny is a simple one:
- Skeletons ought never be hidden.
- They best be brought out of the closet and taught to dance.
- Their stories are both sweet and savory, and
- Add much to the lore of a family.
“One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.” ― G.K. Chesterton,
Just a thought…
Pat
TO ENJOY THE VIDEO IN TODAY’S POST, PLEASE CLICK THE LINK ABOVE IN YOUR EMAIL, OR click here.
Here is a link to A Rose for Danny, a play by Kevin Moriarty. The video runs one hour, 37 minutes. If you’re looking for some good entertainment sometime, check it out.