Us

by Michael Kimball

  They both walked back to the front of the funeral van and climbed back up into it. They didn’t look back at our house or back at me. They drove away from me with my wife. They didn’t turn on a siren or any flashing lights.

  The Picture of Her from When She Was Still Alive

  The funeral director called me at home and asked me to bring a picture of my wife to the funeral home. He wanted the picture of her to be from when she was still alive and before she got sick. He wanted to see what the color in her skin was and the way her face looked when she smiled.

  He asked me to bring some of the clothes that she liked to wear with me too. He said that they could be clothes that she would wear anywhere and every day, but that they were going to have to cut her clothes open in the back so that they could dress her up and lay her out in them.

  I picked out a picture of her from when we were on vacation one time. We were next to a lake and the wind was blowing her hair back away from her face so that it showed the way she smiled and her whole face. There was all that water and so much sky behind her that it seemed as if we would always be alive and be together.

  I found the red dress that she was wearing in that picture in some boxes of summer clothes that she had put away years ago and never worn again. It hadn’t been summer for us for years. I picked out a set of her underwear that matched, a pair of sandals that matched the dress, and a sweater that she could wear over the dress.

  I drove the picture of her and her clothes to the funeral home to give them to the funeral director. He thanked me for her things and said that there were some other last things that we needed to talk about. He said that my wife could have a wooden casket or a steel one. He said that the casket could be made out of bronze or copper or stainless steel or a regular steel that came in different kinds of thickness. He said that the casket could be made out of poplar or oak, out of cherry or maple or pine. He said that the casket could be made out of particle board or cardboard. He said that the casket could be made out of ash.

  He said that they could cremate her and put her ashes inside an urn or that they could put her body inside a casket and bury her in the ground. He said that they could embalm her so that there could be a viewing of her. He said that they could bury her ashes too or that I could take them home or take them somewhere else and spread them out somewhere she liked, like the lake in the picture of her.

  I didn’t know how to decide. She had always liked to put her feet in the dirt, but I didn’t want her to be buried in the ground so far down away from me. I wouldn’t be able to take her home with me. But the weight of the dirt pushing down on her casket didn’t seem as bad as her being burned up into little pieces of ash and bone and poured into an urn.

  The wood casket sounded more comfortable than the steel one or a ceramic urn, but I picked the steel casket out for her to keep the dirt and the rocks up off her for a longer time. I didn’t want all that weight pushing the top or the sides of the casket down or in on her.

  I picked out the padding for the casket that was thick and firm but soft. I decided on a lining for the casket that contrasted with the color of her dress, but that was going to match the color of her skin after they put the funeral make-up on her. I picked a pillow out that went with the color of her hair and that was also going to keep her neck from getting stiff.

  We had practiced for all this in those last days too. We had used the couch for how she wanted to be laid out inside her casket. She had wanted to get her body position right. She had wanted her hands at her sides and her right side showing out. We had propped her head up on the armrest of the couch so that we could smooth the wrinkles in her neck and her face out for her. She had picked out that red dress that she had wanted to wear from memory and I thought of the sweater that she had always liked to wear at home and that she could wear over the dress and that might help to keep her warm.

  How I Had Not Seen Her Since She Had Died

  I had not seen her since she had died and they had carried her out of our house and driven her away from me. But they let me see her again before they showed her to anybody else. They tried to make her look like she had looked. They put make-up on her face and her ears and her neck to replace the skin color that she used to have in those places. They wanted the color of her face inside the casket to match the color of her face in the picture by the lake.

  They asked me if they had the color and the style of her hair right. They had fixed her hair up and pulled it back away from her face, but it wasn’t the wind or anything natural that made her hair look that way this time. I told them that her hair wasn’t the right color anymore, so they colored more of her hair color back on for me with a hair crayon and sprayed more color on it with colored hair spray.

  The color of the skin on her neck was already coming off on the collar of her red dress and the sleeves of it cut into the make-up that they had put on her hands up to her wrists. They had drawn more eyebrows above her closed eyes with an eyebrow pencil and thickened her eyelashes up with some kind of mascara that made her look as if she weren’t going to open her eyes up again.

  They wanted to make a last picture of her for me so that I could think of her when she wasn’t sick or dying or dead. But her mouth looked wrong and they couldn’t really make her face look like her face looked. Her body wasn’t the right body shape anymore either. All of that made her look so different from herself and made her seem so far away from me.

  They laid her out inside the casket on a slant. They angled her front shoulder lower than her back shoulder so that she didn’t look so flat on her back inside the casket. It made it look as if her body were being lifted up. But they also had her laid down low enough so that the lid of the casket would still close over her without hitting her nose.

  They asked me if there were anything that I wanted to put inside the casket with her, but I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted her to take with her but me. A picture of me would not have been enough of me and the casket wasn’t big enough for both of us to get inside it.

  They put her casket and her on top of a table and rolled her out into the viewing room of the funeral home. They said that viewing the person dead was supposed to make it feel as if the person really were dead, but I don’t think that it could have felt any more real than it already did. That was my wife inside that casket who was all filled up with embalming fluid and covered up with funeral make-up and dressed up in clothes that didn’t look right without her standing up in them.

  The make-up and the hair color didn’t help. The red dress didn’t help and neither did the matching sandals or the sweater that she had liked to wear at home. There were sounds coming out of my mouth and I started to cry even though I didn’t think that there was anything else that could have come out of me.

  How I Wanted to Get Inside a Casket Too

  Everything inside the viewing room seemed or felt or looked or was dead. The shag carpet smelled musty and damp. The air smelled as if it were filled with exhaled breath. The frame of the chair that I was supposed to sit down on felt as if it were made out of soft and rotting wood.

  I got up out of that chair, walked up to her casket, and leaned in over her. I blew a little breath across her made-up and waxy face. Her slack cheek moved in against the wind and then back out. Her lips trembled a little bit and it made my lower lip tremble a little bit too. I held onto my chin to stop my mouth from moving up and down. I breathed deep breaths in until my chest went out and my shoulders went back and I didn’t feel as if I were trembling anymore.

  I lifted the back collar of her sweater up and tucked the care label in behind her neck. I reached inside her casket and held onto the hand that was closer to me. I held onto her hand with both of my hands. I leaned in to whisper into her ear. I told her that she was still my wife and her earlobe moved a little bit when I said it so that I knew that she could hear me. I placed her hand back inside the casket and at her side and let go of it. I turned away from her casket and moved away from her.

/>   The funeral director came forward and closed the lid of the casket and turned the screws for the lid down. He got a few other funeral workers to help him carry her out of the viewing room and the funeral home and out to the hearse in the parking lot. They slid her casket over those rollers and into the back of the hearse. I wanted to get inside a casket and have them carry me too. I wanted them to slide me into the back of the hearse with her too.

  They closed those two back doors to the hearse and we all got into the hearse. They all sat down in the front seat and in the first backseat of the hearse and I sat down in the last backseat that was closest to her. We drove out of the funeral home parking lot and onto the street. The hearse had those two flags at the front of the hood that made all the other cars out there pull over to the curb so that we could drive past them without slowing down.

  We drove through the cemetery gate and into the cemetery along those thin streets that only went one way. We drove out into the back of the cemetery where the new cemetery plots were. The funeral director parked next to a little hill and we all got out of the hearse.

  Two of the funeral workers opened the two back doors up sideways so that they could slide my wife and her casket back out of the hearse. They held onto the handles at the foot of her casket and two more of them held onto the handles at the head of her casket as they rolled it out of the hearse.

  They all lifted her up onto their shoulders and carried her up the little hill to her grave. They set her casket down on some wide straps that were up over her grave and set her down when they did that. I sat down along one of the long sides of her grave on a graveside chair. The funeral director sat down beside me and the other funeral workers stood behind us. There was a pile of dirt there beside us. They were going to fill my wife’s grave in with it after we left.

  The funeral director stood back up in front of my wife’s casket. He looked up over all of us and up into the sky. He said a few words that I couldn’t really hear or couldn’t understand. There was some kind of roaring sound inside my ears that kept me from hearing anything outside of me. The funeral director looked at me and then looked away and down. I looked down and away from them too. I kept looking at the empty chair sitting next to me and kept thinking about my wife sitting down on it.

  I think that the funeral director said something to me and that I was supposed to say something or do something. I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t get any words to come out of it or move my hands to say anything either.

  The funeral director looked back up at me and I think that I nodded at him and that he motioned two of the other funeral workers over to her grave where there were these two cranks. They each released a crank to lower my wife and her casket down into her grave. They stopped when her casket hit the bottom of the grave and made a noise and then they let the cranks go down a little bit more.

  I think that the funeral director asked me if I wanted to throw the first handful of dirt into her grave, but I couldn’t get myself to bend down or pick up any dirt to throw it on her casket. I couldn’t help to cover her up unless it was with a blanket and only if her face were still showing. So one of the other men threw the first handful of dirt into her grave and it made a dusty, splattering noise on top of her casket.

  They all waited for me to stand up and walk away from her grave and then they followed me back to the hearse. I could see a little ways off that there were two other men standing there with shovels. They were waiting for us to leave so that they could fill her grave in with that pile of dirt.

  We all got back into the hearse and drove out of and away from the cemetery. It was the first time that I was going to be away from my wife for such a long time.

  Thank You for Looking at Me for So Long

  Thank you for giving them the sweater for me to wear and for tucking the care label in for me. I didn’t want you to stop looking at me or holding onto my hand. I didn’t want them to close the casket.

  They were so gentle with me when they carried me and lowered me down into the grave. The dirt and the rocks sounded like a heavy rain falling down on top of the casket that would not let up. Then it sounded muffled and then hush and then it got quiet. But I could hear you driving away and I could hear you thinking about me. I wanted you to hear me back so that you didn’t miss me so much or for so long.

  PART SIX

  The Viewing Room of the Funeral Home

  There were three days of viewing at the funeral home before my Grandmother Oliver’s funeral and her burial. My Grandfather Oliver and the rest of the people in our family who were still alive stayed in the viewing room of the funeral home for all the viewing hours on all those viewing days. My grandfather sat up near the casket on a chair with a long back and one of the rest of us—my mother, my brother, my sister, his sister, or me—always sat with him.

  The people who my grandmother and my grandfather had known, all of them who weren’t already dead, they would walk into the viewing room, walk up to my grandmother’s casket, and look at her face and her hair and her hands. They would maybe touch the side of her casket, maybe say a prayer, and then turn away from her casket to walk over to my grandfather to say something to him.

  They would usually say something about what a wonderful or a generous or a kind and loving woman that my grandmother was and how lucky we all were to have known her for the time that we did. Any of this was true. She was. We were. But they would also usually say something about need, how if my grandfather needed anything, if there were anything that they could do for him, that he should let them know. But there wasn’t anything that he needed then except for his wife to be alive and back at home with him.

  I keep thinking about each of us sitting in the viewing room with my grandfather and how that must have been our family’s attempt to approximate my grandmother and how she sat with my grandfather for all the years that they were married—how they sat together at the kitchen table, the dining room table, and on the couch in front of the television in their living room.

  I keep thinking about how I watched all those people go up to my grandmother inside her casket to give her their last respects. I had given mine, but I couldn’t look at her inside that casket for very long. There wasn’t anything there that reminded me of my grandmother and how she was when she was alive, except for the dress with the flower print on it that she had made for herself and that they had dressed her body up with.

  Everything else seemed wrong—the unnatural color that her hair had become after she died, how her face and her neck and her hands were thick with that funeral make-up, the strange way that they had made her hair up so much curlier than it had ever been when she was alive, and even that she was even dead and laid out inside that casket inside a viewing room with all those other people looking at her. I didn’t want to remember any of it.

  This is why I am still surprised when I think about my grandfather taking pictures of my grandmother inside her casket inside that viewing room. My grandfather had gotten up out of his chair with the long back, walked up to the casket that held his wife inside it, and held his instant camera up to his face. He looked through the viewfinder of his instant camera for a long time before he took any pictures of her and I keep thinking about how the camera lens was turning her upside down and then right side up again and that that might have some how made her look and seem alive again through some trick of mirrors or perspective or light.

  Or maybe it was the way that a picture of her brightened in his hands after it came out of his instant camera, the way that she turned from some kind of filmy gray back into all of the colors that she had been. My grandfather held her in his hands. He blew on each fresh picture of her and waved it back and forth and waited for her to materialize before him.

  How His Heart Hurt

  My Grandfather Oliver said that his heart hurt. We thought that it was my grandmother who he was talking about and it probably was, but it was also that his physical heart, the muscle in his chest, hurt. Breathing had become difficult for h
im after she died. It was probably difficult for him before she died too, but none of us had noticed it then, and he hadn’t said anything about it or about any pain in his chest. I’m not sure that he had noticed it before either. We were all so focused on my grandmother back then. We could only pay attention to one dying person at a time.

  My grandfather went to the doctor and the doctor told him that his heart valves were clogged and weak, that there wasn’t enough blood being pumped out of his heart and through the rest of his body, that he needed to have a heart valve operation, but that he wasn’t strong enough to have the operation then. The doctor gave him an oxygen tank to help make breathing easier for him, to keep him alive, and to maybe help him get his body and his heart strong enough again so that he wouldn’t die if they could perform the heart valve operation on him.

  My grandfather’s heart had become weak. He had given everything in it away to my grandmother as she was dying. The lack of blood pumping into and out of his heart also meant that he would sometimes black out. His brain would stop when there wasn’t enough blood flowing through it and he would be dead for a little bit.

  He said that he would wake up again and try to remember where he was and what year it was. He said that his chest would hurt and that his head felt as if somebody were squeezing it and that he would try to remember where my grandmother was. I’m still not sure if my grandfather separated the physical and the emotional pain.