what remains

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.”