Anna in the Afterlife

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  Now Gert was stroking the cheek of Anna’s handsome grandson, saying “Smooth, like a baby’s tushy.” Gert with her dirty mind—even at the side of a deathbed.

  Anna’s granddaughter, Bonnie, was holding Anna’s hand and singing to her, a beautiful song about white sands and gray sands. Danny, Janet’s husband, was standing over by the wall, reading the letter pasted up there from the mayor, congratulating Anna on reaching her ninetieth birthday. She noticed no one in the room was actually crying. Her family had no idea how long this death would take—it could test a person’s patience. Anna could see that her breath was coming in short, shallow gasps, with long intervals between. Her chest heaved, and then rested for many seconds. When the hospice nurse came in to check, she whispered to Anna’s family, “She’s having agonal breathing now.”

  Agonal, Anna thought. The last agony.

  But suddenly, Anna had a shock! The stage hands were wheeling in the tunnel, the famous tunnel she’d heard about on Oprah, the tunnel filled with all the people from the past who would be there to guide Anna into the next world. It looked a little like the Holland Tunnel, a long arc of white tiles (quite a few missing), and filled with stinking car exhaust. But it also had a McDonald’s in it, and a replica of P.S. 9, Anna’s elementary school, as well as the Ferris wheel from Coney Island. This was a major production. Anna was surprised anyone would go to so much trouble for her. She saw her first grade teacher wearing a big white feather in her hat (now maybe Anna could make up for an unforgivable grammatical error she had once made when meeting her teacher on the street), and there was her sister Ava carrying an Ebinger’s cake (to make up for all the unkindnesses she’d done Anna).

  That light at the end of the tunnel was too bright—and also in her eyes. But who was that tall figure with the unruly head of hair ambling toward her; who was that sweet-faced man, smiling that loving smile, holding out his hand to Anna? Her husband’s face materialized after all these lost years, his wonderful brow, his blue-green eyes, the smile that took her in and wrapped itself around her. She could feel her heart stopping at the sight of him.

  At her bedside, the nurse was urging her family to say goodbye and leave. A good idea—Anna had so many last-minute things to think about now.

  The nurse counseled them: “You know, the dying find it hard to die while the family is here. She feels your energy and that’s what’s holding her back. But hearing is the last sense to go—so you could all say a few words of farewell to her.”

  “Happy New Year, Mom-Mom,” her granddaughter whispered in her ear, shocking Anna with the news. New Year’s Eve! What a convenient night upon which to die! How fitting. How economical! She wouldn’t have to pay even for one minute of the new year, not one minute of the new month, in this hellhole. If she could exit before midnight, even her tax liability would end here.

  There was a flurry of all the heads of her beloved people bending over her bed, some tentatively stroking her good hand, her forehead. It was an ordeal for them, she understood this. She was wasted, emaciated, hollow, a bag of bones. Her eyes had rolled up into her head, her mouth hung open, her bony chest heaved with irregular gasps.

  Don’t worry, she wanted to say. I’m up here already, I have my beautiful auburn hair falling full down my back, all my fingers are ready for Mozart, my heart is open to Chopin. My beloved Abram is going to kiss me at the stroke of midnight. Go home, children. This is nothing at all, this getting of wings. Go home and live a while longer. Welcome the New Year. No one ever dies; it’s just a fairy tale.

  Desairology

  IN THE DAYS when Anna was still walking the earth, she picked up a magazine called “Finest Finger Nails” in her doctor’s waiting room and read an article called “Is Desairology for You?” A caution in red ink just under the title warned that desairology was an aspect of cosmetology that required a mature and courageous person. “Caring for the nails of the deceased can be a meaningful part of your career.” The desairology practitioner was advised to execute contracts with her living clients, having them stipulate (as was necessary in any important pre-need planning such as wills, trusts, and burial plots) the color of the polish they preferred in death. Sparkles and swirls were not recommended for so serious an occasion but false nails were acceptable for the sake of ultimate beauty.

  Anna hoped that someone would not soon be painting her dead fingernails. She expected they would go on having a life of their own. Hair and nails were reputed to grow for months, even years, after death.

  The article warned that even if one could overcome the natural repugnance of working on the nails of the dead, the desairologist must understand it was a physically dangerous vocation as well. Mortuaries usually required the practitioner to sign a waiver excusing the mortuary in case she contracted a disease during the service. She was urged to be immunized for tetanus, hepatitis B, and tuberculosis. For extra safety, the gloves and clothes she wore during the service should be sealed in a plastic bag until they could be decontaminated. “Don’t let the idea scare you,” said the article. “Your client never hurt you when she was living, she’s not going to hurt you after she’s passed on. Just be as cautious working on a corpse as you are on a living body.”

  Even though Anna herself had passed on, she cringed at the idea of being exposed to additional fatal diseases from a manicurist. She was aware her body could not defend itself: it was about to be turned over to unctuous funeral directors, hairdressers, and—God help her—desairologists. She would have nothing to say about it. Anna had formally died at 8:35 P.M. on New Year’s Eve; the mortuary guaranteed pickup within two hours. Her remains—a terrible ruin of loose skin and skeleton bones—were still on the bed in her room in the nursing home. A few things had been done to them—she didn’t pay much attention at the time; she had been listening to a great flock of wild parrots screaming in the trees outside her window, an impressive farewell recitative that she appreciated.

  The van had been summoned and should be there shortly to pick her up. Years before, she had given her daughter Janet a long list of absolute instructions about her funeral. No transients should be there, no flowery baloney in the newspaper, no treacly “adored wife, beloved mother, devoted daughter, cherished sister.” She wanted no strangers gawking at her, crying crocodile tears and then going back to Janet’s house to stuff themselves with food that cost a fortune, pretending they were heartbroken that Anna was dead. She most definitely did not want a rabbi who had never laid eyes on her and would make a big speech about how good and charitable she was, like the baby-faced rabbi who had done so for her husband Abram, so long ago it was in another lifetime. At the funeral, this boy who had barely grown a beard, this know-nothing about life, had called Abram “a boat whose journey is now over and is about to dock in the next world.” “Daddy is not a boat!” she had whispered to her daughters. They had warned her with dirty looks. “Shh!”

  So could she trust them now to do the right things for her funeral? To refuse the services of a desairologist? To allow no makeup to be applied to her sunken, sallow cheeks? To refuse to have her ravaged flesh dressed in fancy clothes—especially those with a high neck or a tight waistline? To insist that they lay not one finger on her? She understood that she’d have to be deposited in some refrigerated morgue, but no cosmetologists! No embalmers! No doveners!

  Her daughter Carol’s mad husband, Bard, after he had killed himself, had been cremated. His ashes were supposed to have been scattered from a small sailing yacht near Santa Barbara, floating off into the wind while a canon by Pachelbel was played over the loudspeaker. This image had so entranced Bard’s mother that she had flown down to LA to bring her dead husband’s ashes (saved all these many years) to be mixed with her son’s. As it turned out, the mortuary, named after a sea god, got rid of all their clients’’ ashes in a big garbage dumpster. No Pachelbel’s Canon, no sea breeze, no rose petals tossed upon the waves by sobbing widows, just a dumpster with some rotten hamburger meat in it, dirty baby diapers, and emp
ty milk cartons. The police got tipped off by a garbage collector, then the lawyers jumped in, then even Carol and her sons became part of a class-action wrongful death suit. One of these days they would each collect $500 for pain and suffering and for eternally knowing that the ashes of their beloved husband and father were not being strained through the baleen bristles of a great white whale or dusting the wings of a seagull, but instead were in a landfill combined with coffee grounds and discarded tampons.

  For all these reasons Anna had rejected the idea of cremation. Furthermore, Abram was already buried and she had every intention of inhabiting the plot next to his. In any case, ever since World War II, cremation wasn’t a good idea for Jews, not just because they didn’t believe in it but because enough Jews had been cremated by Hitler. Anna wasn’t going to sign up for entering the ovens as her last personal choice.

  Because the night that Anna died was New Year’s Eve, and because Janet and Danny had to eat somewhere after leaving Anna’s deathbed, and because Janet didn’t have the strength to cook, and didn’t want to go to a restaurant, she went to her New Year’s Eve party. Though Anna could see her daughter was torn by the very notion of going to a party while her mother’s agonal breathing was still in progress, it was clearly a practical solution to an unusual problem. This was a very small dinner party in the house of an artist friend of Janet’s where several couples gathered as a yearly event. None of them were Jews and their idea of a good meal was certainly not hers. Everything was brought in by a caterer. Next to each plate was a combination menu/place card (what you couldn’t do with computers these days!). The appetizers were smoked oysters on Norwegian crackers, red caviar on leaves of arugula, and tiny baked escargot with scallion soy butter. The main dish was a choice of either Peking duck with mango chutney and sun-dried Bing cherries or piccata of veal with fried capers and truffle sauce.

  Didn’t these people know from roast chicken and mashed potatoes? From brisket and kasha? From spaghetti and meatballs with Kraft Parmesan cheese? Why not something edible?

  Janet had no appetite, and no wonder, with her mother gasping her last in the nursing home. She toyed with spreading the pesto butter on the thirteen-grain organic wheat flour roll that, from the way Janet struggled to chew it, must have tasted like rubber galoshes. At least they would probably serve something her daughter could eat for dessert, something that would go down easily, like chocolate ice cream. But no: the caterer’s two serving girls, dressed in black tuxedos and bow ties, carried into the dining room some conflagration, a forest fire of crêpes suzette blazing with flaming cognac.

  From the fumes, Janet could hardly breathe. She covered her mouth with her napkin and fled to her host’s study and dialed the nursing home. It was then the nurse told her that her mother had passed on at 8:35 P.M. at which moment, outside in the trees, there was a great outcry from the wild parrots who daily screamed across the skies in pairs. “The birds know,” the nurse said. “So they cry for her soul.”

  Janet called those she had to tell: her sister Carol and her three daughters. She sat in her host’s study for twenty minutes, staring at the walls, at the portraits of nude women he was famous for painting, women without heads but with magnificent breasts and behinds. So much sex in the world and always on everyone’s minds. What was it all about? A sly trick of nature to guarantee that new babies got born to fill the void left by the old ones’ dying. A mechanical replacement system. What kind of nut had concocted this master plan, ruthless in its requirements that things continue, demanding there should always be someone being born and someone dying? And preferably—in every case—in anguish, torment, and pain.

  When Janet rejoined the party, her friends, though they had very strange tastes in food, understood, when she came back to the table trembling, that when a mother dies you don’t offer flaming fondue, you give a hug, you give many hugs, you hold on tight because the news of death is terrifying and the death of a mother seems like the end of the world no matter how old you are.

  Also because Janet’s friends were good people, they encouraged her to talk about Anna all the rest of the evening, now and then telling her how their mothers or fathers had died and stopping only at midnight to put on paper hats and to blow whistles and throw crepe paper snakes at the ceiling while everyone drank glasses of champagne.

  It turned out that the flu-bronchitis-pneumonia germ had been having a heyday. When Janet called the Burning Bush cemetery to arrange for her mother’s funeral, they told her Jews had been dying like flies after Christmas, there was only one slot left for a funeral, four days from now, on Sunday at one P.M., take it or leave it. Furthermore, she and Carol had to come in for a meeting on the Friday before the funeral to work out the details. “Bring the clothes you want your mother buried in and anything you want buried with her. Be on time. We’re under pressure here.”

  Just as Janet hung up the phone, it rang. Sammy Mishkin’s daughter was calling, inviting her to Sammy’s funeral, Friday, at noon. So Sammy had beat Anna to it! Was she going to be upstaged by an old boyfriend? She was much put out by this. Ten years older than Sammy, she expected to be around to see him shocked by her disappearance. Now he had died first. This would surely take some of the steam out of her funeral. Sammy’s daughter told Janet her father had died in bed, reading, his eyeglasses on his nose, a novel in his lap—a story about two men and a woman stranded on a fishing yacht. This seemed a death of the sort to be greatly desired. (But did his easy passing make up for his two heart bypass operations, his prostate removal, and his emergency abdominal surgery a month ago to keep an aneurysm from exploding?)

  If you live, you pay for it. That’s all there was to it. Sammy used to visit Anna in the nursing home, but when she could no longer wear her teeth, she refused to see him. Besides, she had grown tired of their conversations. He’d always say, “My doctor checked me out and said I’m good for another 40,000 miles.”

  “For me, even ten miles more is too much,” was Anna’s reply.

  “Not me, I’m in denial,” Sammy would reply.

  Anna gave him credit. A man whose parents were burned in Auschwitz had every right to play whatever game kept him going.

  An hour before Anna’s daughters had their appointment with the “grief counselor” to work out the details of Anna’s bodily entry into eternity, they took their seats in the Vale-of-Tears Chapel at the Burning Bush mortuary. Both of Anna’s girls nodded to Sammy Mishkin’s daughters, and also to his first wife, a Holocaust survivor like Sammy, who now took her comforts from plastic surgeons, hairdressers, and health spas. His second wife, a blonde beauty like his first, was dead of liver cancer. In the back row was Sammy’s latest lady friend, a pretty blonde—he had a terrible weakness for blondes—this one was at least thirty years his junior. The truth was, Anna had been a serious contender for the position of Sammy’s second wife. The reason it came to nothing was that Sammy was too cheap for Anna and Anna was too platonic for Sammy.

  His idea of a good time was to drive out to see the desert flowers in bloom with a packed lunch of a couple of hard boiled eggs in a paper bag, whereas Anna would have enjoyed a McDonald’s hamburger, a little carton of French fries, a cold root beer. Music they agreed on: to enjoy it didn’t require money or sex. Sammy used to stop into Anna’s store, Goldman’s Antiques, after Abram died and listen to Anna play Chopin on the upright piano she kept in the shop. She was young then, only fifty-eight, she had the world’s best legs and she knew it. Sammy was a good page turner. He sometimes leaned over her too close and pressed his stomach against her back. Anna understood he was giving a hint about the next stage, waiting for her invitation. Something rose up in her throat when she thought about this possibility, the postures, the movements, the smells, the whole rigmarole leading to what men seemed to want till their last breath. She had done it when she had to, the result being the birth of her two girls, well worth the trouble, but what was the point of it now? Huffing and puffing to blow the house down. She was past it.
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  The best thing that had come out of her thirty-year friendship with Sammy (they stayed friends even after he married the second wife) was the car accident they were in together, when, on one of his cheap excursions with her to see the ocean (his wife hated the ocean and was glad to pawn Sammy off on Anna for an afternoon) he turned left from the right lane of the highway and crashed into an oncoming car. Anna was flung forward into the dashboard, her hands out for protection. The impact crushed her left thumb, rendering it useless for piano playing and getting her into a lawsuit that—in the end—produced a document (from a fancy psychiatric clinic in Beverly Hills) that Anna cherished to the end of her days.

  Who could have guessed that an injury that prevented her (as she testified in the deposition) from opening windows, holding a newspaper, combing her hair, buttoning her blouse, kept her from cooking, slicing and dicing things (though she never cooked), that prevented her from filing her nails, turning on the tap water, washing dishes, and opening the mail, and most of all destroyed her life’s greatest joy, piano playing, should turn out to be the source of the single finest written testimony (which would be forever on file in the legal records of the land) to her superiority?

  When Sammy’s insurance company had offered her a mere $500 for her injuries, her orthopedist, who drove a Jaguar and thus knew about the ways of the world, told Anna her injury was worth at least $5000. His brother-in-law was a lawyer—he’d help her out. The lawyer had had Anna examined by the psychiatrist who, as an expert witness, testified in writing that Anna had suffered a severe disability, “a tremendous shock, jeopardy, and infringement of life’s enjoyment to her.”

  Anna wished this document could be buried with her at the coming interment. She could recall certain passages verbatim: