The Undertaking Read Online Free PDF Page A

firstheard about Gladstone at one of these Midwinter Conferences and lately I’ve been thinking how right they were—Gladstone, my father.
    M y fatherdied three years ago tomorrow on an island off the Gulf Coast of Florida. He wasn’t exactly on a Midwinter Conference. He’d quit going to those years before, after my mother had died. But he was sharing a condo with a woman friend who always overestimated the remedial powers of sexual aerobics. Or maybe she only underestimated the progress of his heart disease. We all knew it was coming. In thefirst year of his widowhood, he sat in his chair, heartsore, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Then he started going out with women. The brothers were glad for him. The sisters rolled their eyes a lot. I think they call these “gender issues.” In the two years of consortium that followed, he’d had a major—which is to say a chest ripping, down for the count—heart attack every six months like clockwork.He survived all but one. “Three out of four” I can hear him saying. “You’re still dead when its over.” He’d had enough. Even now I think of that final scene in David Lean’s old film when Zhivago’s heart is described as “paper thin.” He thinks he sees Lara turning a corner in Moscow. He struggles to get off the bus, loosens his tie, finally makes it to the sidewalk where, after two steps, hedrops dead. Dead chasing love, the thing we would die for. That was my father—stepping not off a bus but out of a shower in his timeshare condo, not in Moscow but on Boca Grande, but chasing, just as certainly, love. Chasing it to death.
    When we got the call from his woman friend, we knew what to do. My brother and I had done the drill in our heads before. We had a travelling kit of embalmingsupplies: gloves, fluids, needles, odds and ends. We had to explain to the security people at the airlines who scrutinized the contents of the bag, wondering how we might make a bomb out of DodgePermaglo or overtake the cabin crew with a box marked “Slaughter Surgical Supplies” full of stainless steel oddities they’d never seen before. When we got to the funeral home they had taken him to, takenhis body to, the undertaker there asked if we were sure we wanted to do this—our own father, after all?—he’d be happy to call in one of his own embalmers. We assured him it would be OK. He showed us into the prep room, that familiar decor of porcelain and tile and florescent light—a tidy scientific venue for the witless horror of mortality, for how easily we slip from is to isn’t.
    It was somethingwe had always promised him, though I can’t now, for the life of me, remember the context in which it was made—the promise that when he died his sons would embalm him, dress him, pick out a casket, lay him out, prepare the obits, contact the priests, manage the flowers, the casseroles, the wake and procession, the Mass and burial. Maybe it was just understood. His was a funeral he would not haveto direct. It was ours to do; and though he’d directed thousands of them, he had never made mention of his own preferences. Whenever he was pressed on the matter he would only say, “You’ll know what to do.” We did.
    There’s this “just a shell” theory of how we ought to relate to dead bodies. You hear a lot of it from young clergy, old family friends, well-intentioned in-laws—folks who are unsettledby the fresh grief of others. You hear it when you bring a mother and a father in for the first sight of their dead daughter, killed in a car wreck or left out to rot by some mannish violence. It is proffered as comfort in the teeth of what is a comfortless situation, consolation to the inconsolable. Right between the inhale and exhale of the bonewracking sob such hurts produce, some frightenedand well-meaning ignoramus is bound to give out with “It’s OK, that’s not her, it’s just a shell.” I once saw an Episcopalian deacon nearly decked by the swift slap of the mother of