A Black Monday

Sitting in the passenger seat, sipping coffee, I thought about my day working, but kept being interrupted by other thoughts. He’ll be there in a casket. Mark, who was driving, put his hand on mine. “I know this will be hard for you,” he said.

“Well, he was old. I mean it has to happen eventually. And I know he’s in heaven, and he had a good life.” I say this because it’s true, it’s not a tragedy. Still my words sound repetitive and annoying.

“Yea, but you’ve never really been to a funeral with a close family member.”

“I guess we weren’t that close . . . I mean I loved him, but I didn’t see him all that often.”

But with each new turn, I knew we were getting closer. I looked at the clock. Okay, forty minutes left, thirty minutes left, twenty minutes left. I braced my hands on the side of the car. Maybe the casket will be in a different room. Then I can just not go in there. My throat was tightening up. Hearing the car engine running made me think of the “click, click, click” sounds made while slowly going up the Wild Thing Rollercoaster. With each click I’d always think why can’t the wait just be over yet? Then I can go rushing down, yelling, rather than concentrating on the deep pit feeling in my stomach. It won’t be that bad; he’s 81-years-old; you’ve got to die someday. It’s no real tragedy. Remember the obits you use to write. And I recall a 24-year-old mom, who died in a car crash leaving two boys, and a husband behind, and the 19-year-old Iraq veteran who committed suicide, leaving one wife and a one-year-old boy behind. Those were tragedies.

Walking in to the visitation room, I’m greeted by my sister and cousin. They’re both smiling, and asking about the drive, and saying how long they’ve been there. Looking across the room, I see about thirty people scattered throughout the room in groups of two or three. Then there is the casket open. I can see Grandpa’s profile peeking out. I look at him, look away, look at him, look away. Every time I look away, I feel compelled to look again. I’m murmuring,  Oh, there he is. He’s there. Oh, he’s not suppose to be like this. Tears roll down my cheeks, and neck. I rub my sleeved arm across it as I sniffle. My cousin walks lightly away, returning in a moment with a pile of tissues to hand to me. “It’s so hard to see him this way.”

“Yes, I felt the same way when I saw him an hour ago,” my cousin said.

It’s as if just for being old, he received the punishment of a mass murderer. Life was stolen out of his body, and his body was jailed up in something so small.

“I wish we had spent more Christmases with them,” my cousin said, which is what I had been thinking earlier. Grandma and Grandpa were in Arizona about half the year, so we missed many of our celebrations with them. But yet at the same point, what did it matter? He was dead. Would I have kept those memories safely with me if I had experienced him being at Christmases, Thanksgivings, Birthday parties, and my Wedding? Or would it have been mucked up, blended with all those other blurred memories? Even if I had kept them real, it wouldn’t make him less dead. For once, my memories seemed stupid. Death seemed to overtake the importance of anything and anyone here.

Tears kept streaming down my face. (I’ve turned into an expert crier over the years.) Mom walks over to me. “You want to come see him?”

“No, it’s hard enough from over here.”

“Honey, come over and look at him.”

Walking over there, I stare down at him. It doesn’t even look like him. He’s much too thin, his face lost most his wrinkles, and he looks serious and tight lipped. The real him was always smiling, showing off gold teeth. The real him was chubby, and had wrinkle creases across his eyes and mouth. The real him always shouted out a hello when he saw me, followed by a hug and laugher. His soul—his personality—bubbled over with life, not his body. No wonder that’s what God would have wanted to take up, leaving that old body behind. God could put Grandpa’s eternal soul in a far better body suit to live in. His body was old and dense and dull now, reminding me of the waxed replicas of the Presidents at the Smithsonian Museum.  

Dad, Mom, and Caroline, and Caroline were all standing beside me. We put our arms around one another, swaying back and forth. All of us with tears in our eyes—all of us wanting the real him there. Dad said, “I wonder what he’s doing right now.”

Caroline said, “Bet he’s visiting his parents.”

Mom said, “He has a lot of siblings there too.”

“Probably having a picnic with them,” I said because that’s what I would want to do if I was there. He’d probably choose golfing instead.

Still I felt empty and icky. His dead body made it seem like he wasn’t anywhere. I thought loudly in prayer form. “Praise you dear God that he’s in Heaven. Thank you that he believed in Jesus, so he was saved.” I think it loudly, again, again until liquid warmness pours through me, starting above and behind my heart, and flooding all the way down me. Everything about that feeling was opposite from the black emptiness I felt walking into the room. I wish I could take a picture of it, just like Grandpa’s soul.  

“I’m so glad he was saved,” I whisper. Suddenly that’s the only thing that mattered, not that I didn’t visit him more, or that we missed holidays with him—although more time with him would have been nice. I was just so glad he went in the right direction—too bad I couldn’t just grab onto his soul’s hand and follow him there, escaping from all other funerals and dead bodies.