The funeral home’s lush brown
carpet captured our six footsteps until the door creaked. Four heels clicked
and two soles squeaked on the greenish-gray linoleum squares in the room
protected by the windowless door. Closed to public view were gleaming silver sinks, water sprayers
and metal knives and stainless steel counters, fixed and
rolling. Our lips remained pressed silent.
“Did I make a good choice?” my
brother asked, his words light enough to drop to the floor within six feet.
“Dad would be pleased," I
whispered. There was nothing else for me to say. To fulfill my Dad’s request,
the gray cardboard coffin that speckled like a Broadway Play flat arrived via
special delivery. He had made us all promise that what had been ordered for Mother
would be good enough for him.
The special cremation coffin
number three on his list. He made us promise two other things: one, no
embalming; two, no official service or obituary. While we unanimously didn’t
agree with his reasoning, he presented a simple truth. He’d not been born in
this country and it contained no record of his birth so he deemed it fitting
and proper that no public record of his death need be created. Dad said that something with
no beginning also lacked an end. My brain cells sprouted no effective rebuttal.
My brother and sister agreed Dad lived his life in his manner. There were
neither roofs nor walls on his thoughts. His body would join them on the wind.
My brother had argued with Dad
stating that the government owed him a flag, a stars and stripes for his
military service. If so, Dad replied to us all, you decide who keeps it. Better
I not be planted in the ground, he said, beneath cloth, which in a season
becomes tattered and torn.
The funeral director lowered the
white sheet to my Dad’s shoulders. We all gasped. This was not our Dad. The
brown wavy hair could have been his, but this hollow face of a man—never!
The eyes we saw were clouded as
if Dad’s cataracts had regrown across his artificially implanted lenses. His
cheeks were sunken, water drops collected in the crevices as if the sun had
ducked behind a cloud and obscured the drying rays. The bluish hint of death knocked
from afar as if the funeral director had locked it into the rear of the hearse
parked outside.
My sister had rifled Dad’s closet
for a suit and the blackness hung draped across her arm.
“We don’t really don’t need
clothes if there’s to be no viewing,” the funeral director said. “Have you
changed your mind?”
“No,” I whispered.
“Then I’ll give you all a few
moments to say good-bye. The documents are all ready and the plane leaves this
afternoon.”
His words of “I miss Mother,”
swirled in my head. I did, too. Now, I’d miss them both.
