Tuesday, July 1, 2014

O, Death Where Is Thy Sting, etc.?

I was stopped in the novel I have been reading when the protagonist, a thirty something year old male of French Canadian descent living in New Hampshire, is urged by his wife and various friends to screw up his courage to look at the corpse of his brother lying in an open coffin at the wake.  It is clearly a Roman Catholic event, but I do not know if it is a religious obligation or simply part of the culture of this group to look into the face of the departed.  It started me remembering all the dead in my memory, starting with the body of my father whom we six children were brought to view in the grand entrance to our house where he lay in his casket.  I was six, still perplexed that days before he had kissed me goodbye in the morning and in the late afternoon was reported dead in an automobile accident.  Dead really did not mean anything to me; I thought he was asleep, although the tears and lamentation throughout the house signified something else. When I was twenty four they called me in Cambridge to say my mother had died, quite suddenly and surprisingly, my younger sister having just been married in the presence of our mother, who seemed to be glowing, only the previous week.  We six children converged, and the sobbing began.  Without a debate we stopped our grief long enough to upset the undertaker when we settled on the cheapest coffin obtainable, and firmly declined to view her remains.  I would say that having been raised by our widowed mother in a cult of her dead husband we instinctively chose to have nothing to do with it.  The following year my wife of four years died one Sunday afternoon quite by surprise.  She had asked me to call a doctor who was with her shortly thereafter when she gave a little groan and, well, just died.  What gave it reality for me was that our cat let out the most extraordinary cries just at that moment from the kitchen where she had been sequestered.  I stared at her body, thinking that like my father, she looked to be asleep on her bed, except that I was repulsed, as though a taboo had been broken.  She was a dead thing, and I did not want to touch her.  I have thought of this so often when watching the cinematic behavior of bereaved husbands who throw themselves upon the still warm corpse of their spouse.  I even refused the undertaker's offer to  see her laid out in the beautiful white suit she had worn as a bride.  Strange that refusal.  Since we had only just moved to the town where she died, it must have been myself at the request of the undertaker who chose the dress and brought it to him.  A few years later out in California where we were all living (I by then with my second wife, and many children), fate or some deity evened things out (paid me back?) when her mother died, after a grotesque struggle with stomach cancer where I had enough instinct for pietas to visit her nightly, although I had always found her a tiresome woman.  I, of course, wanted nothing to do with the woman dead, but still did indeed accompany her aged and incipiently quite senile husband, my once upon a time father-in-law, as he took the body by train back to the Mid West.  We were met in Des Moines by the very undertaker who had dealt with the ashes of my late wife when they arrived from the East Coast. This time there was a body and a coffin which he proposed to set out open for viewing.  "This is Iowa, Charlie, everybody expects an open coffin." he said in response to my anguished objections remembering how ravaged she had seemed at the end.  With that he threw open the lid, and there she was, dressed in her very best silk party dress, her face somehow covered in enough foundation cream to look quite credible.  And yet it was grotesque.  I stood transfixed with horror at the spectacle.  She was so dead.  "Here, Charlie, give me a hand," he  shouted out briskly, "she's slipped down in this box from all the movement of the train."  And then I had my hands under her shoulders giving the body a giant tug, pulling it just so, as the other guy pushed, and she was established in a more "life-like" sleeping position.  "Good job," he said smiling approvingly.

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