Holding On to the Dead

                My father’s and mother’s deaths couldn’t have been more different.  Pop was 53 and died in his sleep of a massive heart attack.  His children found him the next morning on the pull-out couch in the rental cottage at Indian Lake, deep in the Adirondack Mountains of New York state.  No time to say goodbye.  While I answered the coroner’s questions, his body was taken somewhere, and my brothers and sisters and I never saw him again.  Closed casket.  Mom, on the other hand, was 88 and in a slow decline after a hip break.  Pneumonia after pneumonia had weakened her, and her body gave out.  Even though we had time to let go, time to say goodbye; and even though I was with her when she died and had hours afterward to sit with her expired body and talk to her and talk about her with others, it was still over too soon.  I wanted to keep her.  I wanted to help prepare her, so I pulled off her socks and helped to wash her body.  I wanted to witness all the people that cared about her speaking in loving ways.  I wanted the song the tattooed aide, Jean, played on her cell phone, “What does it Look Like in Heaven,” to go on forever.  But I participated even in the parts of the ritual I didn't want:  I walked behind the gurney, I rode the “cargo” elevator down to the back entrance, and I let them slide Mom’s body, zipped in a bag, into the transport vehicle.  I let them take my prized possession, my world, my mother.  Our close and complicated relationship was over too soon even though she was 88.  

Tending to a long dead relative, the Torjans are comfortable touching and interacting with the expired human body.

                The nursing home staff graciously gave us time to be with our mother.  This was a pleasant surprise because I’d heard Mom complain that the staff at these facilities covered up death.  “They don’t even tell us.”  Because they don’t want to upset people whose own deaths are imminent.  But Lois, my mother’s roommate, was kind.  “Is she still with us?” asked Lois, pulling back the divider curtain on the morning Mom died.  Lois was kind and compassionate throughout Mom’s dying.  She’d been married to a man who ran a funeral home in Argyle and had told me once before that she enjoyed helping people through their grief.  A dozen or so old people in wheelchairs and on foot came into the room to pay their respects to my mother, lying gaunt in her bed with her stuffed newfie on her sunken chest.  Being loved even in death is reassuring to everyone, no matter their age.  Hiding death is terrifying.  Ironically, it was the Catholic priest who rushed us at the grave—“I have to cut this short … I have a very important meeting to attend to discuss how to cope with the shortage of priests.”  I wondered silently how this grieving family would cope with his shortage of compassion.  We stood there beside the casket at a loss.  Someone laid a bough from Mom’s crabapple tree on the wooden box.  Someone else balanced a Kool cigarette on the center molding, carefully so it wouldn’t fall into the hole.  Mom hated to waste a good cigarette or even part of one.  We took turns kneeling and touching the wood as if it was her like the way we kiss the wooden feet of the wooden cross on Good Friday.  She was our Jesus now.  Goodbye priest; we don’t need you.  “O.k.  now we must let the cemetery people do their work,” interrupted Sarah, the waxy-faced director from the funeral home.  We were not allowed to watch them lower my mother into the dark.  We were not allowed to see dirt.  The gravediggers were not even called gravediggers but “cemetery people.”  The social tarp was pulled over the Act 5 ending of our family’s life together.  We left feeling dissatisfied.  We left angry.  None of us were ready for life—the common life we shared through Mom—to be over.

                Moving on after death.  How is it possible?  When Pop died, I felt nothing but anger at the gatherings of well-meaning relatives and neighbors who would tell funny stories, who smiled and laughed.  I wasn’t ready for any of that.  I hated the fact that we were expected to just go on with life, forgetting about his death, ignoring the obvious and utter change.  Years later when I was writing a dissertation on complaint, I read books on elegy and despised the Freudian theory that to complete the work of mourning, the bereaved had to find a compensatory object for the lost loved one.  In the wake of Mom’s death, searching online for connection and comfort, I found an anthropologist talking about a culture in Indonesia—the people are called Torajans—who literally live with their dead relatives for long periods of time.  If grandfather dies, his body is rubbed with leaves or injected with formalin, and he is laid out in the family home and allowed to metamorphose.  His clothes and bedding are changed periodically, and he is taken out for a “walk” around the village.  Family members bring him food, drink, and cigarettes once a day.  When a guest enters and asks about grandfather, his daughter may say, “he is still sleeping,” or “he is sick.”   The anthropologist acknowledged that this may seem gruesome to western people, but that the Torajans had a “relational” perspective on death, understood it as a “social process.”  The years with decaying grandfather in the living room gave the family time to transition, to develop a new relationship to him as a revered ancestor instead of a living family member.  The process of dying wasn’t over until the family could throw a lavish funeral for their family member—a party for the village that involved the sacrifice of many buffaloes, which are the spirit animal that is thought to carry the soul to the afterlife.  The blond anthropologist was evidently taken with this culture because she married a Torajan man, who has happy memories of playing with his dead grandfather.  “If we could expand our definition of death to encompass life,” she suggests, “we could experience death as part of life and perhaps face death with something other than fear.”  We have much to learn from peoples like the Torajans.

Corpse of Torajan woman, Tana, going out for a walk

                In the long history of western societies, there have been peoples who have kept the dead with them.  I think of the 7^th century Anglo-Saxon monks, who carried the body of Cuthbert around northern England at the time of the Viking invasions.  Before they placed Cuthbert in his final resting place, the monks opened the box and found that his body was “incorrupt.”  That means that it hadn’t decayed, was fresh and flexible, as if he were just sleeping.  This was one of the many miracles that established the cult of Saint Cuthbert.  Research suggests that holy men and women were frequently exhumed by the faithful, who still searched for confirming signs that there was a spiritual life beyond death.  The dead were seen as persons, medieval historian, Peter Brown, explains.  "Indeed the cult of the saints in sixth-century Europe is an illustration of the ancient and poignant theme--the quest for the Ideal Companion.  The saints, said Ambrose (made bishop of Milan in 374), were the only relatives that you were free to choose. Their protection had the intimacy of a surrogate kinsman.

                It seems to me that in our world, because of the dominance of scientific positivism, we need practices that recognize, mark, and honor major losses, and we need desperately new understandings of death, informed by the lifeways of peoples in other places and other times.  My own mother used to tell and re-tell the story of Grampy being laid out at home.  I never asked her how many days he lay in her Aunt Ruth’s parlor, but she said she talked to him and bumped into him when she had to run the vacuum.  

                My neighbor Lark, who works at an elder-care facility, lost her mother in 1994.  “It’s still hard,” she admits, but at least once a year, Lark says that she has a weirdly comforting dream.  “Me and my sisters go and dig Mom up and we take her out for a car ride.”  Whenever I have this dream, I am just so excited to really see her.  I guess it’s kind of weird that we have to dig her up, but it’s still wonderful to see her and talk to her.”  I’ve been praying, really praying, to have such a reassuring dream.  I want to see and feel my mother’s presence.  I want her in any form.  I want her death to be part of my life.

                “It isn’t over.  Death doesn’t mean the relationship is over.  Of course, death makes the person no longer accessible in the same way, but you hold on to them by remembering.  That is how you grieve.”  My current therapist thinks that the panic I feel at losing my mother stems from the fact that my father’s death was so sudden.  He did disappear.  I’m not satisfied with the cliché that “you have your memories.”  We lose memories, all too easily as well.  No … I want to hold my mother’s hand.  I want to light her cigarette.  I want to see her toothless smile.  I realize that none of us can know, but rather than rely on psychological or even religious truisms, I’d rather trust my feelings.  And I feel that my mother and I are on some kind of journey together.  I know this because every night since she died I sleep a restless sleep searching for her.  I don’t have vivid or colorful dreams; what happens as night feels more like “dream thoughts.” The first week after her death, my dreaming mind was full of my effort to get to where she is … to help her somehow.  Now, the third week, I sleep more deeply and have dreams with situations in which we talk things over:  the tiresome nursing home people, whether her boyfriend can live with us, whether she likes clown-suited nurses.  Weird things like that.  But at least we are talking.  My friend, Lark, tells me to end the day with a cup of tea and a talk with Mom.  I am trying to do that, too.  When I see something on my daily walks that reminds me of her, I try to remember to talk to her about them.  If I am more assertive, if I complete my sentences, if I am courageous, then maybe I can even improve my relationship with Mom.

                I still think of her eyes when they looked at me for the last time.  Close to death, they were still so blue.  The blue of longed for things that are always far away:  mountains, the ocean, a city on the horizon line.  The world is blue at its edges and in its depths.  Essayist Rebecca Solnit explains that blue is the color of light that got lost.  “Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us.  It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. … This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.”  My blue-eyed Mom was always a little bit distant.  Not a hugger.  Emotionally cool.  Leaving her babies asleep at the foot of the mountain to ride to the top and ski down.  When she opened those eyes and looked at me in her last moments of life, she tinged with blue my solitude, grief, and longing, setting me on the road that leads (perhaps) to the conclusion that some things we have only as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant. 

Offerings of cigarettes to the dead continue in Indonesia