The Truth About Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

hour. It’s being done. Drive-through viewings too.”
    “That’s so California,” she said, “but it’s true, isn’t it? I mean about a funeral being a celebration of a person’s life.”
    “Yes, it’s true. But it’s not the whole truth, and it’s not wholly true. It’s too simple. Death is a mystery, not an excuse for a party. There’s a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, and you don’t want to get them mixed up. You don’t want people grieving at a baptism, do you?”
    “I agree, Pop, but don’t you think there’s more we could do? Make it possible for the families to help prep the body, for example.”
    “Let me explain something to you, darling daughter. People don’t want to help prep dead bodies. They want dead bodiesout of the house. Why do you think they pay me to collect dead bodies and prep them? Why do they call in the middle of the night instead of waiting till a decent hour?”
    “I know, Pop. But what I’m feeling right now … close to Grandpa Bart. Mr. Johansen too. Something important has happened, and we’re part of it. Not just spectators. Didn’t the family used to wash the body in the old days?”
    “Very old days. They had cooling boards too and gravity embalming. You’d have to carry buckets of blood out to the outhouse.”
    “Don’t you think it’s important? Don’t you think people would … I don’t know … feel it’s important? Don’t you think there’s a kind of communal memory about this sort of hands-on experience? Look at Mrs. Johansen. She wanted to clean up her husband, at least a little. She wanted to touch him, she wanted to put her hands on him.”
    “It’s messy,” Simon said. “Dead bodies don’t last very long. The insides … Never mind.”
    “I know it’s messy. That’s why it’s important. Life is messy. That’s why it’s better to get your hands dirty than to post a Facebook photo of the dead person for people to ‘like.’ ”
    “You’d put us out of business in a year! You want to bring someone who’s grieving into the prep room and hand them a suction trocar and say ‘Have at it’?”
    “Pop, you know that’s not what I mean. I mean help wash the body—that’s all. Touch it with their hands. Not be afraid of the dead. Help dress them. Embalming’s not really necessary anyway, is it? I mean Jews don’t get embalmed, do they? The Amish man didn’t get embalmed. Why not just let them help wash the body?”
    “And pack the orifices so they don’t leak?”
    “That too,” she said. “What did they used to do?”
    “The women took care of it.”
    “Figures.”
    Simon finished his beer. “How much did you win?” he asked.
    “About three dollars,” she said. “I forgot to remind Mrs. Johansen about Stormy and Salty. I wanted to tell her how Grandpa Bart and I used to ride them around the paddock. Or just sit on them and talk to each other.”
    “You’ll have another chance to talk to her.”
    “Do you think Nana will go to Rome?”
    “No idea. Do you want to go with her if she does?”
    “I want to stay here with you,” she said. “I just want to sit here and have another beer.”
    “We’ve got to get Mr. Johansen into the cooler.”
    “He’ll keep for a while, won’t he? One more beer?”
    “He’ll keep for a while, but not too long, not in this heat.”
    CHAPTER II: HILDI IN LOVE
    Hildi had been anxious to get on with her new life. Her new vocation. She’d been anxious to strengthen the bonds that bound her to her father and her mother, that bound her to a place where she’d been happy—the whole family living together in the funeral home. Two apartments. Upstairs divided. Grandpa Bart and Nana and her mother and father, and her brother too. A beautiful old house with seven working fireplaces. Now three working fireplaces. A carriage house in the back that had been converted into a garage. A paddock, not a parking lot, where she’d looked after Stormy and Salty.