HOW THEY TOUCHED HER AS IF SHE WERE STILL ALIVE
Michael Kimball
I put my hand on her chest over her heart, but I couldn’t feel anything beating inside her anymore and when I leaned my ear down to her I couldn’t hear anything inside of her either. I pulled the blankets down off of her body to see if there were anything that I could do for her, but the blood inside of her seemed to be draining away from the front of her and down toward her back and into the backs of her legs. It made her face and arms look so pale, but the rest of her turned more purple and more red toward the bottom of her lying down.
Her skin seemed to fall down and away from her too. It pulled down and showed more of the shape of her face—the flat part of her forehead, the line of her jaw, and the angle of her cheekbones. It showed more of the bones around her collar and her shoulders and down her arms. It seemed to pull her mouth and her eyes open too, but she couldn’t see me or talk.
I pushed her mouth back up and pulled her eyelids back down and held them closed until they stayed shut. Her arms were still a little warm, but her hands felt cold. Her skin was a little wet and then it dried out. The rest of her body heat seemed to be leaving her body too, but I tried to keep her warm. I covered her back up with the blankets and I wrapped myself around her on the couch and held onto her too.
She seemed to feel a little warmer again, but that was probably just the body heat from me warming her skin back up. But then she started to feel colder again and heavy in my arms and it made me feel cold too. The hard smells and the gurgling sounds that were coming out of her and that she had always kept inside of her made me turn my face away. There wasn’t anything else that I could do to take any kind of care of her anymore.
I called the funeral home to see if they would come over to my home to take care of my wife for me. I told them that I couldn’t keep my wife warm enough anymore. I told them that I couldn’t lift her up off of the couch and that her legs buckled too much when I tried to help her to get up and that she couldn’t hold onto me with her arms. They told me that maybe I should wait in another room of our house somewhere away from her, but I had to arrange her on the couch before they came over to our house to get her.
I put her arms back down at her sides. I straightened her nightgown out and pulled the blankets back up to her neck. I brushed her hair out with her hairbrush and put her lipstick on her lips. I brushed some powder on her forehead and on her chin and on her nose. I brushed some color onto her cheeks for her.
I heard the engine of the funeral van drive up in front of our house and then I heard them turn the engine off so that I couldn’t hear it anymore. They walked up the front walk and they knocked on the front door with a soft knock. They came through the front door and into the living room with their metal gurney. They were going to take my wife away from me and our home and with them to their funeral home.
They spoke with soft voices. They called her by her name. One of them pulled her eyelids back up and checked to see if there were anything left inside her eyes, but they couldn’t see anything there. He listened for her heart through her chest, but he couldn’t hear it either. He took her temperature from her, but most of it was already gone. He cut through the side part of her nightgown so that they could see more of where her blood had pooled down into the bottom part of her body, but he didn’t know why she had died. He said that her heart had probably stopped, but it didn’t feel as if it had to me.
They moved her body slowly. They touched her as if she were still alive. They lifted her up and laid her back down on top of the metal gurney. They straightened her arms out and placed them along her sides. They covered her body up and her face up with a clean sheet. They pulled the sheet tight and tucked it in under the metal gurney and around her body so that it held onto the shape of her. They snapped the buttons of the gurney straps and they pulled the straps tight. They tried to do it in a quiet way, but it sounded loud to me.
They rolled the metal gurney and my wife out of our house. They rolled her down the front walk and up to the back of their funeral van. They opened the funeral van’s two back doors up and one of them pushed a button that made the metal gurney’s legs collapse under her. They lifted her up and rolled the metal gurney and her body into the back of the funeral van. They closed the funeral van’s two back doors back up, but I didn’t hear the latch click shut even though it must have made a sound.
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 and they didn’t turn on a siren or any flashing lights.
The funeral director called me at home to ask 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 you could see the way she smiled and her whole face. There was all of that water and so much sky behind her that it seemed as if we would always be alive and together back then.
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 bra and panties 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 wood 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 either way. 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 then. But the weight of the dirt pushing down on her inside a 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 of her for a longer time. I didn’t want all of 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 of 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.
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 were going to 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 again. 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 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.
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 to view her from 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 her 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 to carry her out of the viewing room and the funeral home and out to the hearse in the parking lot. They slid her casket and her over those rollers in the back of the hearse 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 of 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 the hearse 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 all of 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.
My grandfather said that his heart hurt. We thought that it was my grandmother who he was talking about, that she had died, and it probably was, but it was also that his physical heart, the muscle in his chest, hurt. Breathing had become difficult for him after she died. It was probably difficult for him before she died too, but none of us had noticed it, 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 to make breathing easier for him, to keep him alive, and to maybe help him to get his body and his heart strong enough again so that he wouldn’t die if they could do the heart voperation 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.
It was because of this that my mother hired a woman to help my grandfather out at home. The woman was supposed to come to his house for a few hours of each day. She was supposed to clean the house up, do the laundry, do the dishes, and do any other household chores that she could. She was supposed to make lunch and then make a dinner that my grandfather could warm up to eat later that night.
But my grandfather said that the woman didn’t clean right, that the food that she cooked tasted wrong, and that he wouldn’t let her come back to his house. He didn’t say that she didn’t do any of these things the way that my grandmother would have done them, or the way that he would do them if breathing were easier for him, but that was probably what he meant.
I think that it made my grandfather’s heart hurt more, that other woman doing those daily things in the house that he had shared with my grandmother for all of those days and for all of those years. My mother tried to hire another woman to help out, but my grandfather wouldn’t even let her come into the house. The woman said that he wouldn’t get up to come to the front door. She said that at first she thought that he was hurt, but that when she cupped her hands around the sides of her eyes and looked hard through the window that he was just sitting there in his chair looking at what looked like an old picture album. My grandfather was hurt, but none of us could get inside of him—not the doctor, not the pictures, not his sister or daughter or any of his grandchildren—to make it stop.
But my grandfather still couldn’t keep himself enough alive by himself then. He needed the oxygen tanks filled up and changed and he needed the food that other people made. My mother tried to help him when he would let her. She worked fulltime and also had her own house to keep up, but she would go over to his house every night after work after my grandmother had died. She would pick up a few things, make sure that my grandfather had something to eat, make more food for him to warm up, and make sure that there was enough oxygen for him inside his oxygen tank. My grandfather didn’t want my mother doing these things for him either, but she had keys to his house and could let herself in.
But this wasn’t just that my grandfather didn’t want other people doing these things for him. I think that he knew that he was going to die soon too. He didn’t think that he needed to keep the house clean anymore. He didn’t think that he was going to be alive long enough for it to get too dirty. He didn’t think that he needed to do the dishes anymore either. My grandmother and he had accumulated so many glasses and bowls and plates and so much silverware over the years that they had been married that he thought that it would be weeks before he didn’t have something clean to eat with or on.
My grandfather also wouldn’t buy any new clothes for himself. He put cardboard inside his shoes to cover up the holes in the soles of them and he wore two pairs of socks so that the holes in his socks didn’t show through either. There were places in the shoulders and the elbows of his dress shirts that had worn so thin that you could see his skin through the weave of the cloth. The shirt cuffs and the shirt collars were frayed. The cuffs of his suit jackets were frayed too and some of the pockets were missing or torn.
He sewed patches on the elbows on his suit jackets and on the knees of his suit pants that had holes in them there from when he had blacked out and fallen down. But my grandfather wouldn’t wear any of the new clothes that we bought for him. He left them inside their shopping bags with the price tags on them and somebody returned them to the store after he died.