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Apr. 23, 2005 I watched as family and friends shed their winter wraps when they entered the funeral home doors. The stoic look on their faces was a Grimes characteristic. No one smiled much in our family. Life had not been that pleasant for them. I could tell family from friends. Our family’s somber approach to life presented itself in squinting eyes and chiseled faces. My brother’s death brought people I hadn’t seen in years; funerals do that sometimes. Death draws families together. Families that haven’t united for years suddenly find themselves entwined even if it is for a moment. A moment is many things to many people. Death is a moment, though brief. The small viewing room was crowded. I was embarrassed for my brother lying in repose, pale and placid. He would not have enjoyed the idea that all eyes were focused on his corpse. Some call it “closure,” I call it morbid curiosity. But, it’s a tradition impossible to buck against. However, it is an odd happening in my mind. We cried as the box was lowered into a hole, a dark hole surrounded by a white shroud of snow. It was a contrast of sorts, the dark hole of death surrounded by a white purity of what supposedly occurs after death. After the preacher proclaims the sanctity of the moment, cars move sluggishly out of the cemetery. Even the automobiles seemed frozen with finality as they traveled to our house for a wake. Odd I think that we have a wake after such a sobering event. We eat and laugh, talk about the old days…some even have a few drinks (in secret of course). Mom begins to bang away at the piano some hymn that doesn’t fit the death of her eldest. My aunts begin to sing out of key and my uncles are beginning to get giddy with liquor. A funny thing is this ritual of ours. An Irish friend of mine once told me that his family would get rip-roaring drunk after a funeral. He said his brother was arrested for drunk driving after their mother’s death. Seems he hit a tree when he swerved for a crossing deer. The problem? He was in the city. My friend’s brother spent the night after his mother’s funeral at the local jail, waking up the next day with one helluva hangover. Death brings tears and intoxication. It creates a vacuum and fills a hole, another contrast I guess. In New Orleans, you’re bound to hear some great jazz while watching or marching in a funeral procession. At the Vatican, you’ll see the Pope lying in repose for days on end. The Russians have looked at Lenin’s corpse for what, eighty years? In Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh’s body has been on display since the seventies. Such curiosity we have with death.
We buy a beautiful coffin, embalm the
corpse, and spend a bundle on flowers only to
bury it all beneath six feet of earth. After
who-knows-how-many years, the body rots, the
coffin loses its beauty, and Carbon is loosed
back to Mother Earth. It is a strange practice,
this death of ours.
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