The room is bright and sterile, like a doctor’s office, except more barren. There are none of the posters on the walls here, cheerfully telling you to check your moles or the benefits of HPV vaccinations.
There is table in the middle of the room, but it’s not for examinations. It’s for preparations.
A body lies on it, an elderly woman. She has already been embalmed, but she is awaiting some final touches. Some tissue filler, to smooth out her face, perhaps. I watch as the funeral director massages her extremities, easing the tissue, and at his nod, I step forward and together we dress her. He is business-like but gentle, impersonal but tender. He speaks softly while he’s doing it, talking me through the process, what he does and why. He’s done this job for a long time.
Afterwards, I watch as the family comes to see her. There are tears, there usually are. “She looks so good,” they say. “Not sick at all.”
That night I sit with my host, and ask questions. In the old days, it was family that washed the body, that dressed what remained, sat with him or her through the last steps of the journey. These days, we stay as far away as we can from our dead. A choice, conscious or otherwise.
I fly home a couple of days later, sit on a couch tucked in with my son, my mother in a chair across from me. She’s always said she doesn’t want a fuss. I roll my eyes and tell her it’s not about her, when she’s gone, but about what remains. That I will wake her good and proper, when the time comes, and if she doesn’t like it she can come back and haunt me.
She smiles, and watches the baby wriggle in my arms.
“I will take care of you,” I say. “I will wash you, one last time, my hands, not a stranger’s. I will dry your hair and dress you. I promise. If I can do nothing else for you then, I can do that.”
She tilts her head and studies me for a minute before she sighs, smiles and wanders off. The baby is asleep in my arms. “This is what we do,” I whisper, “for our own.”
1/22/13
1/2/13
the music as remembered.
The 400 Bar closed.
I feel like I must have been living under a rock or something, because when they started talking about it on The Current this morning on the drive in I almost went off the road. It’s not old news, I guess, having done a little Internet searching when I should actually be working, happened in the last week or so as I’ve been off in family-induced oblivion. And I’m kind of at a loss for why I’m so bummed out about it, honestly, but I’ve spent the morning in an emo funk over a shitty little bar that’s tied up in so many of my memories of college and after.
I mean, that’s why, obviously. Seventeen years isn’t an epic stretch of time, but it opened about the time I came to the Cities for school, and I saw so many shows there, the Jayhawks, an epic set by Elliott Smith, Jimmy Eat World and the Promise Ring, Semisonic and the Supersuckers, Whiskeytown and Dr. Dog. So. Many. Shows.
The drinks weren’t great and the acoustics were mediocre but it was a great place to see a show all the same.
It’s Chris Whitley I remember most, though. He played there more than once, but this is what I remember. October, 2004. The last show he would play in Minnesota. I was helping out with merch for that show, got there early and he was running late. His mom had died, that morning, the day before, I can’t remember but I do remember how much sadder he looked, how soft his words were. I remember sitting in the basement of the 400 Bar, signatures lining the walls, sharing cigarettes and drinking coffee out of paper cups. He played this gorgeous, gut-wrenching set that night to a crowd that was nowhere as big as it should have been.
We packed up the van afterward and he told me a few stories that made me cry. I gave him a hug and he was gone, one moment to the next. He was staying at the Holiday Inn up the hill from the bar, and I remember standing at the street corner watching him, his shoulders hunched as he walked, braced against the wind and he was probably sick even then, certainly heartbroken and it physically hurt to watch him move. It was the last time I would ever see him.
It was the last time I was in the 400 Bar.
I moved away and then moved back, but with kids in tow and too old for unannounced 11 pm shows anyway, not on school nights and maybe it’s as well that I haven’t been back since. Nothing is ever like you remember it. Except the music, in my head, in my heart, just a click away.
There was a kid there that night taking pictures, scrabbled down his name and a website that I’m not sure exists anymore but I found a picture he’d taken the next day that was everything about Whitley I remembered and everything about the 400 that I loved. I saved it, and it’s traveled with me ever since. The photographer’s name was Joe Cunningham, and this picture is his.
Hope you’re resting easy, Chris. Thanks for this memory and so many more, 400.
I feel like I must have been living under a rock or something, because when they started talking about it on The Current this morning on the drive in I almost went off the road. It’s not old news, I guess, having done a little Internet searching when I should actually be working, happened in the last week or so as I’ve been off in family-induced oblivion. And I’m kind of at a loss for why I’m so bummed out about it, honestly, but I’ve spent the morning in an emo funk over a shitty little bar that’s tied up in so many of my memories of college and after.
I mean, that’s why, obviously. Seventeen years isn’t an epic stretch of time, but it opened about the time I came to the Cities for school, and I saw so many shows there, the Jayhawks, an epic set by Elliott Smith, Jimmy Eat World and the Promise Ring, Semisonic and the Supersuckers, Whiskeytown and Dr. Dog. So. Many. Shows.
The drinks weren’t great and the acoustics were mediocre but it was a great place to see a show all the same.
It’s Chris Whitley I remember most, though. He played there more than once, but this is what I remember. October, 2004. The last show he would play in Minnesota. I was helping out with merch for that show, got there early and he was running late. His mom had died, that morning, the day before, I can’t remember but I do remember how much sadder he looked, how soft his words were. I remember sitting in the basement of the 400 Bar, signatures lining the walls, sharing cigarettes and drinking coffee out of paper cups. He played this gorgeous, gut-wrenching set that night to a crowd that was nowhere as big as it should have been.
We packed up the van afterward and he told me a few stories that made me cry. I gave him a hug and he was gone, one moment to the next. He was staying at the Holiday Inn up the hill from the bar, and I remember standing at the street corner watching him, his shoulders hunched as he walked, braced against the wind and he was probably sick even then, certainly heartbroken and it physically hurt to watch him move. It was the last time I would ever see him.
It was the last time I was in the 400 Bar.
I moved away and then moved back, but with kids in tow and too old for unannounced 11 pm shows anyway, not on school nights and maybe it’s as well that I haven’t been back since. Nothing is ever like you remember it. Except the music, in my head, in my heart, just a click away.
There was a kid there that night taking pictures, scrabbled down his name and a website that I’m not sure exists anymore but I found a picture he’d taken the next day that was everything about Whitley I remembered and everything about the 400 that I loved. I saved it, and it’s traveled with me ever since. The photographer’s name was Joe Cunningham, and this picture is his.
Hope you’re resting easy, Chris. Thanks for this memory and so many more, 400.
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