My Year with Eleanor (29 page)

Not knowing what to say, I said nothing. I felt incredibly guilty for stirring up such a painful memory. We stood in silence for a long time after that. An hour and a half and four gallons of embalming fluid later, Sean poked the woman's arm with his finger and gave an appraising nod.

“She's firming up real nice.” He turned off the machine. While he sutured her neck, I gingerly touched her arm. She felt, as I'd anticipated, cold and stiff.
This wasn't so bad,
I thought, exhaling with relief.

“Hey, what's that?” I asked.

Sean held up an ominous-looking tool attached to a suction hose. It was a hollow metal rod about two feet in length, but sharp on one end like a spear. “This is a trocar. It's time to aspirate.”

Before I could respond, he plunged the spear into the woman's abdomen. Startled, I jumped back a little and watched in horror as he proceeded to empty her of any blood left behind. This was the moment I started thinking seriously about cremation.

A few minutes later he extracted the trocar and popped a plastic plug into the hole in her abdomen. Then he pulled out a fat tub of moisturizer and a hardware-store paintbrush and dabbed the cream on her face and hands to keep her skin from drying out.

“I think she came out pretty good myself,” he said with obvious pride. “You came out pretty good too. You could be a funeral director.”

I smiled weakly. That night Chris called and relayed a story about something funny that had happened at work. I was grateful for a distraction from the events of the day. Just before we hung up, I asked, “What do you think happens when you die?”

He was quiet for a second. “I have a very vivid memory of being maybe nine years old and sitting in the back of my parents' car as we were driving somewhere in rural Maine,” he said. “It was a time in my childhood that I was really afraid of dying. I was looking out the window at the trees as they went by. Since it was so dark, you could only see them in front of and alongside the car. But as they slipped past the headlights, right beside my window, they would just wink out and I couldn't see them anymore. And I remember thinking that death was like that. Suddenly you were gone and there was nothing.”

T
he next morning I woke up feeling better, knowing that the worst was over. When I arrived at the funeral home, I heard voices coming from the prep room and slipped inside. The room was full of people. Not just the three dead bodies lain out on the stainless steel tables, but also Sean, Lucas, and a handsome Italian-looking guy who was built like a fire hydrant.

“Noelle, this is my partner, Antonio,” Sean said. “We operate a funeral home together in Columbus.”

“I'm not your
partner,
” Antonio countered. “I'm not gay like you.”

“Gay, am I?” Sean guffawed. “Gay with a wife and seven children?”

“Overcompensating,” Antonio said with a smirk.

“How's your divorce going, by the way?” Sean asked. Then he turned and gave me a wink.

Antonio's smirk disappeared. “Lorraine and I are in
counseling,
” he said huffily. “That's not the same as divorce.”

While they quibbled I checked out the body Sean had been working on when I got in. He was extremely thin with brown hair and a matching beard framing his haggard face.

“Um, is it just me or does this guy look exactly like Abraham Lincoln?” I asked.

“Totally!” Lucas called out from across the room. “That's what I said when he came in.”

“Have all of these bodies been embalmed already?” I asked Sean.

“They have. Now we're preparing them. Makeup and such.”

“And such” turned out to include plunging a disturbingly long needle into the man's eye socket and injecting it with pink gel.

“After people die, their face changes immediately,” Sean explained. “It sinks in. We had to build the tissue back out.” He inserted the needle into the side of the man's face and his hollowed cheekbones rose up like baking bread. Sure enough, he looked almost . . . alive at the end. My mind went back to the stuffed birds at Springwood that Franklin shot as a boy, which had been posed to look as though they were flying. It was slightly unsettling but I felt okay.

Justin appeared behind us. “It's open casket. Here's what he asked to be dressed in during the service.” He handed me a pair of folded khakis and an orange and brown shirt.

“Is this a . . . Cleveland Browns jersey?” I asked in a disbelieving voice.

Sean shook his head. “It's bizarre what people want to be dressed in.”

I helped Sean awkwardly maneuver Abe's cold rigid limbs into the clothes. “Do you know where he stands on tucked in versus out?” I asked. “Because it really sets the tone for the whole outfit.”

He left the decision to me and turned to his next customer, a Hispanic guy in his late forties. He pulled off the sheet, revealing the man's naked body. “Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph!” he exclaimed.

I whirled around and was faced with the biggest penis I'd ever seen.

Antonio came over and squinted at it. “Was this guy related to a horse?” he asked. “Can you imagine how big that thing was when it was standing at attention?”

“He's got
my
attention,” Sean said.

“See, I knew you were gay!” Antonio crowed, and Sean rolled his eyes.

“What did he die of?” I asked.

“Leukemia,” Lucas said. “Picked him up from the hospice yesterday morning. Name's Ortiz.”

I'd overheard Terry talking about him yesterday. There had been a problem with the death certificate. They hadn't been able to fill it out because no one knew Ortiz's birthday. He had no family or friends, and the nurses were trying to scrounge money together for a funeral service. How sad, no one knowing your birthday, I'd thought. A few years ago, my friend Rob's parents died, and though he was in his forties, he felt like an orphan. It was strange, he said, that there was no one left in the world who'd known him all his life.

“Lucas, your girl looks like shit!” Antonio shouted from the other side of the room. “What the fuck did you do to her?”

Sean and I abandoned Ortiz to see what he was yelling about. We crowded around the table. Sean let out a low whistle.

The “girl” Antonio had been referring to was a sixtysomething African American woman weighing around four hundred pounds. The trademark Y incision of an autopsy stretched from her shoulders to her abdomen, the oversized stitching reminiscent of a baseball. What really stood out was how bloated she was—not her body but her skin. Water was oozing out of her very pores. Large wobbly blisters were bubbling up all over her body.

“That, my dear, is called edema,” Sean told me. “When you're in the hospital and there's nothing they can do for you, they just pump you full of fluids to make you comfortable. And all that water has to go somewhere.”

“How do you make it stop?” I asked.

“Usually embalming takes care of it,” Sean answered.

“Are you sure you embalmed her, Lucas?” Antonio asked. “Because if so, you did a crappy job.”

“She was autopsied!” Lucas said defensively. “You know that makes 'em harder to drain.”

“That's no excuse,” Antonio tut-tutted.

“I even used Purple Jesus on her!”

“What's that?” I murmured to Sean.

“You use different embalming fluids based on the condition of the body. Purple Jesus is one of the strongest. It's used on the most difficult cases, like to flush out the jaundiced tissue of an alcoholic, for instance.”

“Why do they call it Purple Jesus?”

“Because if Purple Jesus doesn't work, nothing will save you.”

I was wondering who was going to save Lucas from Antonio, who was still lecturing. “Next time just call me when you get a tough case like this. Because I don't like having to come down and clean up other people's mistakes.” He furrowed his brow and leaned in closer to the body. “Her tongue is coming out, for chrissakes! Did you even bother sewing the mandibles shut?”

Lucas stammered, “Uh, well, I—”

“Never mind,” Antonio cut him off. “We'll just superglue the mouth closed and be done with it.”

Sean tried to change the subject. “Lucas, how about you show us her burial clothes?”

Lucas returned with a mustard yellow dress on a hanger. “Her family says it was her favorite outfit.”

Antonio stared at the outfit incredulously. “When? In 1965? There's no way she'll fit into that. It's half her size!”

“What if we just cut the clothes down the back and tuck them in around her?” Sean suggested.

“You can do that?” I asked.

“Oh, that's a classic,” Sean said. “Funeral directors do it all the time.”

“Well, we can't dress her or put her in the casket now,” Antonio pointed out. “We're going to have to wait until right before the funeral. Otherwise she'll just leak all over everything.”

He pawed through his supplies bag and emerged with something clear and plastic that looked like a cross between a jumpsuit and a body bag. “Between now and the funeral, let's try to dry her out as much as possible.”

A few minutes later the three of them had her legs hoisted up in the air toward the ceiling. I stared wide-eyed as they attempted stuffing her into the suit, which was too small for her.

“Terry knows I charge by the pound, right?” Antonio grumbled.

“He's only joking,” Sean assured me. “If we did that, someone Lucas's height would be, like, one-fourth the normal cost.”

Antonio hooted, his good mood restored.

A dull click emanated from somewhere in her body. “Uh-oh,” Lucas squeaked. “I think I just broke her kneecap.”

Yep, definitely cremation for me,
I thought.

Once she was inside the bag, Antonio sprinkled her body with a special blue powder designed to soak up liquids, then turned to load Abe Lincoln onto a gurney. “Noelle, can you help me get him into his casket?”

“Why am I doing all the cleanup?” Lucas whined. “I got the short end of the stick today.”

“You got the short end of the stick in life, too!” Sean cracked.

Antonio cackled and added, “Listen, Lucas, it's like I tell my wife—shut your hole and know your role!” He casts a sideways glance at me. “Are you married?”

“No, I'm not,” I said, caught off-guard.

“Good! Don't get married. Trust the undertaker—life's too short.”

Next to the preparation room there was a smaller garage full of caskets. This was the holding area. Like the green room where dead people could hang out after they'd been through hair, makeup, and wardrobe, but before it was time for their show.

As we wheeled Abe into the garage, Lucas called after us, “Remember, it's only a temporary coffin. After the service tomorrow, he's going to be cremated.”

“You can
rent
coffins?” I asked in disbelief.

“Oh yeah. Though, really, it's more of a sublet.”

I was nervous to pick up the body and afraid that I'd drop him. I braced myself, expecting to feel the heaviness of a man, but Abe was surprisingly easy to lift. There seemed to be almost no mass. It was as if most of the weight was contained in the soul. I felt a sudden rush of pride as I helped maneuver him, honored to be a part of such an intimate ritual.

We placed Abe carefully into a casket, which was, appropriately, the color of a shiny new penny. Antonio arranged the man's hands on his abdomen, left hand clasped over right.

“You forgot this!” Lucas ran in and placed a plushy orange Cleveland Browns football in the crook of his arm. The three of us stared into the casket for a few moments. There was something very dear about this display.

“Well,” I said, “now I know what Abe Lincoln would look like reimagined as a Browns fan.”

Lucas shook his head in amazement. “It's not what I'd wear to the hereafter.”

“Me neither,” Antonio said. “What if God is a Steelers fan?”

For her journey into the afterlife, the African American woman had pre-selected an extra large white casket with copper piping. The Cadillac of caskets, really. When I arrived for her funeral the following day, I was speechless. She looked fabulous. Antonio had worked his magic. You'd never know her clothes were cut up the back. He'd even put a veil over the casket to keep people from touching her. Genius. Terry and another funeral attendant stood on either side of the casket as sobbing, moaning family members came up to pay their last respects.

“We've had people flinging themselves into the coffin before,” Lucas whispered as we stood in the back, handing out programs to latecomers. “Now we have people there to hold it to make sure it don't get knocked over and spill the body onto the floor.”

A
half hour later we said good-bye to Abe Lincoln in all his football jerseyed glory. I thought he'd be the most casually dressed person at his funeral, but I was mistaken. Outfits seemed to have been selected with no other criteria in mind besides what best showcased their tattoos. One of Abe's daughters arrived in a halter top and black denim hot pants just long enough to cover her butt. Her brother, to his credit, had worn his best Nike swoosh pants. The eulogy was delivered by a chaplain named Biff. Just as I was admiring his button-down shirt, he turned around to reveal a massive dragon embroidered on the back.

After the service, Lucas took Abe Lincoln to the crematorium, and I headed home for the day. On the way I passed by a horse farm with rolling hills. As I watched the horses flicking their tails delightfully while they grazed, I felt strangely content. If I'd had my own tail, I'd have been flicking it. I was almost too ashamed to admit it, but I'd actually been enjoying myself. It struck me how much I'd miss the place and the people I'd met here. But underneath all this was an urgency. Tomorrow was my last day and I had no more insight into my fear of death than when I'd arrived.