Bodies at Rest

After 18 Years Working in Death and Dying, Some Observations of Bodies and Remembrance

“The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor.”
― Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

The first dead body I ever saw was my grandfather’s. At four years old, my father held me, legs wrapped around his waist, as we proceeded passed the casket where his father lay. We walked deliberately in a line of family and close friends, starting at my grandfathers feet. We paused at his head, looking down at him.

Closed eyes, blushed cheeks. He looked peaceful, but I knew he was dead. I knew what dead meant. Next to us, I watched one of the figures of my young childhood, my grandparent’s housekeeper, Willy Lee, bending to kiss my grandfather on the forehead.

I admired Willy Lee and I was surprised that she kissed my grandfather’s dead body. “Why did she do that?” I asked my dad later. “He’s dead.”

My mom and dad probably didn’t think about it at all — my dad was just 29 when his father died — but this was the beginning of something that has turned out to be my life’s work. Not understanding death, but trying to understand how we human beings live with the dead.

We start with the body.

******

One of my favorite hospice patients was a man who died of colon cancer when he was about the age I am now. He’d been an electrician and worked hard to make a better than middle class living for his family after having grown up with an alcoholic, abusive, and underemployed dad.

My patient, I’ll call him Joe, had an enjoyably (at least to me) cantankerous side. The day I met him, I let myself in his house after being greeted by his huge mastiff-like dog. I sat on the well-worn couch beside his recliner, introduced myself to him, and I let the dog lick my face. “He licks his balls, too,” Joe noted.

On my next visit, he told me about his hospice nurse, who he said he didn’t like. “She told me I’m skinny. She said, ‘your arms are so skinny.’ It’s insulting.” It was a lesson for me about the pride we might have in our bodies. What the deterioration of our strength signifies and the insensitivity of someone commenting on it in an offhand way.

“Do you want to talk with her about it?” I asked.

“I’m dying,” he said. “I don’t want to work on my relationship with my nurse.” He rolled his eyes. “I want a new nurse.”

“You got it.” I replied. I took him seriously.

We got to know one another over time and he fell into the mental category I hold for certain clients and patients, which I call: If we met in ‘real life’, we would have been great friends.

Before he died, he and his wife talked about his cremation and what he wanted done with his ashes. It was strange to be part of this intimate and practical conversation, but as an observer. So strange to know that this man in front of me with opinions and loves and pain would be ashes before long. “Bury my ashes in the flower garden,” he instructed his wife.

“But what if we move one day?”

“Dig them up and take them with you to the next place.”

I felt at home in the juxtaposition of the surreal and the practical. How this discussion put non-existence or whatever happens after we die into the mundane. And underlying the mundane, lay the deeper thing: it is important to stay together. It is important to remember. His wishes are important. He will always matter.

After he died, I attended the family’s visitation for Joe. The display poster boards and framed pictures in the funeral home of him and his family (on vacation, in posed church portraits, goofing at the kids’ ballgames) revealed a different version of Joe to me — one I’d never seen. Here was the hefty, muscular electrician. Here was the man with the strong arms. I found myself surprised. That man was different than the one I’d known. I could understand more fully who he had missed — himself as he’d known himself to be.

*****

When my maternal grandfather died, I was 22 years old — nine years before I began my work in hospice, grief, and death. I had a different perspective then.

My grandmother, the family matriarch, gathered us at the funeral home prior to the visitation. She circled us around his body and indicated that we should hold hands. She led a short prayer as my mom, sister, dad, aunt, uncle and cousins either closed our eyes or averted our eyes from his open casket. I felt resentful of this ritual in the moment. I didn’t want to, “remember Pop like that.”

Yet, after almost 20 years in a vocation immersed in all our experience of death and dead bodies, I can tell you that an open casket can sometimes truly help us in grief. I have never seen an embalmed and casketed body look like the person did in life. But, I also understand that the facsimile is a way for the living to comprehend the reality of their loved one’s death.

Death is unreal. Especially if the person who died is young or died tragically. This is the “shock and denial” part of grief described in Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s Five Stages of Grief. It’s not that we don’t logically know the fact that our loved one is dead, it’s that saying the fact is only a performance.

Seeing that a body is dead can be terrible; but holding the hand of a dead loved one, seeing the fingers, the shape of the nail beds, and the lifelessness in them, can be a grievous punctuation that our human brains need to understand words like “gone” and “loss.”

*****

In 2015, for the first time in the United States, cremation was the preferred choice for families over traditional burial. In the 1960s only 3.6% of people chose cremation, in 1980, it was about 10% and now, about 60% of us choose cremation.

Yet burial is a deep and abiding tradition and hearing stories for many years now about how my clients relate to the experience of visiting gravesites continues to open my understanding of not only grief, but love.

A number of years ago, one of my client’s son died by suicide. A young man, in his early 20s, he’d enlisted and served in the Army in the Middle East. He’d been in an IED explosion, he came back to the U.S. and battled drug addiction here. He was handsome, beloved, and a kindness ran through his heart deeper than the ravages of addiction. When he died, he was buried at our immense veterans’ cemetery outside my city.

One cloudy morning in the months after he died, I visited his gravesite with his mother. The grave had been decorated by friends, family, and of course his mother. A bottle of whiskey, a Christmas wreath, toys, notes, candy. His mom said that she planned to put lights up for the holidays too.

His was not the only gravesite decorated like this. Earlier in my life, I’d mostly seen flowers on Memorial Day. My own mom went to her parents’ graves every year in May and placed geraniums or impatiens there — sometimes I’d even filled in for her if she was out of town. This tradition was important to my grandmother, and my mom honored it.

But seeing the gravesite of this young man stirred in me a different sort of feeling. I saw that this utter care of the place where his body lay was a sort of caring for him and nurturing him. It was a way to channel the energy of love and tenderness. We love you so much, these trinkets said, we want the world, the clouds, the stars, the deer who munch on the grass, any passing friend or stranger — and YOU to see how beloved you are. You are not forgotten. The love we have for you is still alive.

Some people I have worked with tend to gravesites with the muscle of a groundskeeper and creativity of a botanist. They lie down on top of the gravesite when no one is looking — just to feel as if they are with the body of the one they love. They sit for hours as the day changes to evening and cry on nearby benches.

Other people don’t care for the cemetery at all. It’s not important to me, they say. I don’t feel connected there. I feel connected at the ocean.

Or, I feel connected when I hear Bob Seger.

Or, I never feel connected. I wish I did.

*****

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest

By now, I have been with many people’s bodies in various stages of dying. I’ve been with hospice patients days and hours before their death, minutes after their death — and with just a few people — at the moment they take their last breath. Our bodies and whatever the spirit is that enlivens them are bafflingly intertwined. They are not the exact same, but the relationship between them fills me with wonder.

Memory, love, and an essential spirit of our collective humanity is conveyed in the care of a dead body. While the pragmatic four year-old at her grandfather’s casket still makes herself known in my interior landscape, today I understand why a person might kiss a dead man on the forehead.

I often think of a story I read in the New York Times in 2012, a year after Japan was devastated by a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami. Hiroko Tabuchi wrote about an undertaker who cleaned and cared for almost 1000 bodies piled in a morgue who had not yet been identified. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/world/asia/a-year-later-undertakers-story-offers-japan-hope.html

The undertaker, Atsushi Chiba, “became a fixture at the morgue, speaking to the bodies as he prepared them for viewing and then cremation. “You must be so cold and lonely, but your family is going to come for you soon so you’d better think of what you’re going to say to them when they arrive,” he recalled saying.”

It is this sensibility that possesses me now, after working for 18 years amongst the bodies of the dying and the dead, the memories of people loved and lost, and the loved ones who live on, remembering and remembering.

The everyday world I live in is populated by the living… and the dead.

My grandmother walked outside with me on this snowy morning. I breathed in the cold air as deeply as I could, for a dear client — a triathlete — who died from colon cancer two weeks ago. I imagine she can feel the air in my lungs, because I know she loved that feeling. I even think of the earth under the pavement my feet tread today — the bones of long dead deer or foxes or far more ancient things mixed in the layers beneath me.

My bones will be there, too, one day.

There is not one right way to honor or remember bodies or the love we have for the souls who inhabit them. But, as long as we are human, we will find a way.