The Undertaking Read Online Free PDF

a teenager, dead of leukemia, to whom he’d tendered this counsel. “I’ll tell you when it’s ‘justa shell,’” the woman said. “For now and until I tell you otherwise, she’s my daughter.” She was asserting the longstandingright of the living to declare the dead dead. Just as we declare the living alive through baptisms, lovers in love by nuptials, funerals are the way we close the gap between the death that happens and the death that matters. It’s how we assign meaning to our little remarkable histories.
    And the rituals we devise to conduct the living and beloved and the dead from one status to another have lessto do with performance than with meaning. In a world where “dysfunctional” has become the operative adjective, a body that has ceased to work has, it would seem, few useful applications—its dysfunction more manifest than the sexual and familial forms that fill our tabloids and talk shows. But a body that doesn’t work is, in the early going, the evidence we have of a person who has ceased to be.And a person who has ceased to be is as compelling a prospect as it was when the Neanderthal first dug holes for his dead, shaping the questions we still shape in the face of death: “Is that all there is?” “What does it mean?” “Why is it cold?” “Can it happen to me?”
    So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is “just” anything rings as tinny in its attempt to minimalize asit would if we were to say it was “just” a bad hair day when the girl went bald from her chemotherapy. Or that our hope for heaven on her behalf was based on the belief that Christ raised “just” a body from dead. What if, rather than crucifixion, he’d opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than “just a shell,” he’d raised his personality, say, or The Idea ofHimself? Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that? Done the Crusades? Burned witches? Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures. If he’d raised anything less, of course, as Paul points out, the deacon and several others of us would be out of business or back to Saturday sabbaths, a sensible diet, and no more Christmases.
    The bodies of the newlydead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, withhonor.
    I had seen my father horizontal before. At the end it had been ICUs mostly, after his coronaries and bypasses. He’d been helpless, done unto. But before that there had been the man stretched out on the living room floor tossing one or the other of my younger siblings in the air; or napping in his office at the first funeral home in full uniform, black three-piece suit, striped tie, wingtips,clean shave; or in the bathtub singing “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” He had outbreaks of the malaria he’d gotten in the South Pacific. In my childhood he was, like every father on the block, invincible. That he would die had been a fiction in my teens, a fear in my twenties, a specter in my thirties and, in my forties, a fact.
    But seeing him, outstretched on the embalmingtable of the Anderson Mortuary in Ft. Myers with the cardiac blue in his ears and fingertips and along his distal regions, shoulders and lower ribs and buttocks and heels, I thought, this is what my father will look like when he’s dead. And then, like a door slammed shut behind you, the tense of it all shifted into the inescapable present of this is my father, dead. My brother and I hugged eachother, wept with each other and for each other and for our sisters and brothers home in Michigan. Then I kissed my