The Undertaking Read Online Free PDF Page B

father’s forehead, not yet a shell. Then we went to work in the way our father had trained us.
    He was a cooperative body. Despite the arteriosclerosis, his circulatory system made the embalming easy. And having just stepped from the shower into his doom, he was clean andcleanlyshaven. He hadn’t been sick, in the hospice or intensive care sense of the word. So there were none of the bruises on him or tubes in him that medical science can inflict and install. He’d gotten the death he wanted, caught in full stride, quick and cleanly after a day strolling the beach picking sea shells for the grandchildren and maybe after a little bone bouncing with his condo-mate, though shenever said and we never asked and can only hope. And massaging his legs, his hands, his arms, to effect the proper distribution of fluid and drainage, watching the blue clear from his fingertips and heels as the fluid that would preserve him long enough for us to take our leave of him worked its way around his body, I had the sense that I was doing something for him even though, now dead, he wasbeyond my kindnesses or anyone’s. Likewise, his body bore a kind of history: the tattoo with my mother’s name on it he’d had done as an eighteen-year-old marine during World War II, the perfectly trimmed mustache I used to watch him darken with my mother’s mascara when he was younger than I am and I was younger than my children are. The scars from his quintuple bypass surgery, the A.A. medallionhe never removed, and the signet ring my mother gave him for his fortieth birthday, all of us saving money in a jar until fifty dollars was accumulated. Also there were the graying chest hairs, the hairless ankles, the male pattern baldness I see on the heads of men in the first-class section of airplanes and in the double mirrors in the barber’s shop. Embalming my father I was reminded of how webury our dead and then become them. In the end I had to say that maybe this is what I’m going to look like dead.
    Maybe it was at a Midwinter Conference my father first thought about what he did and why he did it. He always told us that embalming got to be, forgive me, de rigueur during the Civil War when, for the first time in our history, lots of people—mostly men, mostly soldiers—were dyingfar from home and the families that grieved them. Dismal traders worked in tents on the edge of the battlefields charging, one reckons, what the trafficwould bear to disinfect, preserve, and “restore” dead bodies—which is to say they closed mouths, sutured bullet holes, stitched limbs or parts of limbs back on, and sent the dead back home to wives and mothers, fathers and sons. All of this botherand expense was predicated on the notion that the dead need to be at their obsequies, or, more correctly, that the living need the dead to be there, so that the living can consign them to the field or fire after commending them to God or the gods or Whatever Is Out There. The presence and participation of the dead human body at its funeral is, as my father told it, every bit as important as thebride’s being at her wedding, the baby at its baptism.
    And so we brought our dead man home. Flew his body back, faxed the obits to the local papers, called the priests, the sexton, the florists and stonecutter. We act out things we cannot put in words.
    Back in ′63, I can remember my father saying that the reason we have funerals and open caskets was so that we might confront what he called “thereality of death.” I think he’d heard that at one of these conferences. Jessica Mitford had just sold a million copies of The American Way of Death , Evelyn Waugh had already weighed in with The Loved One , and talk had turned at cocktail parties to “barbaric rituals” and “morbid curiosities.” The mortuary associations were scrambling for some cover. Clergy and educators and psychologists—the newclergy—were assembled to say it served some purpose, after all, was emotionally