My Grandmother Oliver died
before my Grandfather Oliver did. She died at home,
at night, in that time just before the morning comes
up, just before she was supposed to wake up.
My grandfather stayed with
her for a few hours before he called the doctor and
the funeral home. My grandfather knew that that was
going to be the last time that he was going to be
alone with her. But he was also waiting until she
had been dead long enough so that she couldn't be
revived by anybody. My grandmother didn't want to
be only that much alive, even though my grandfather
wanted her to be alive for as long as she could be.
There were three days of
viewing at the funeral home before her funeral and
her burial. My grandfather and the rest of our family
that was still alive stayed in the viewing room of
the funeral home for all of the viewing hours on all
of those viewing days. My grandfather sat up near
the casket on a chair with a long back and one of
the rest of us - my mother, my brother, my sister,
his sister, or me - always sat with him.
The people who my grandmother
and my grandfather had known, all of them who weren't
already dead, they would walk into the viewing room,
walk up to my grandmother's casket, and look at her
face and her hair and her hands. They would maybe
touch the side of her casket, maybe say a prayer,
and then turn away from her casket to walk over to
my grandfather to say something to him.
They would usually say something
about what a wonderful or a generous or a kind and
loving woman that my grandmother was and how lucky
we all were to have known her for the time that we
did. Any of this was true. She was. We were. But they
would also usually say something about need, how if
my grandfather needed anything, if there were anything
that they could do for him, that he should let them
know. But there wasn't anything that he needed then
except for his wife to be alive and back at home with
him.
I keep thinking about each
of us sitting in the viewing room with my grandfather
and how that must have been our family's attempt to
approximate my grandmother and how she sat with my
grandfather for all of the years that they were married
- how they sat together at the kitchen table, the
dining room table, and on the couch in front of the
television in their living room.
I keep thinking about how I watched
all of those people go up to my grandmother inside
her casket to give her their last respects. I had
given mine, but I couldn't look at her inside that
casket for very long. There wasn't anything there
that reminded me of my grandmother and how she was
when she was alive, except for the dress with the
flower print on it that she had made for herself and
that they had dressed her body up with.
Everything else seemed wrong -
the unnatural color that her hair had become after
she died, how her face and her neck and her hands
were thick with that funeral make-up, the strange
way that they had made her hair up so much curlier
than it had ever been when she was alive, and even
that she was even dead and laid out inside that casket
inside a viewing room with all of those other people
looking at her. I didn't want to remember any of it.
This is why I am still surprised
when I think about my grandfather taking pictures
of my grandmother inside her casket inside that viewing
room. My grandfather had gotten up out of his chair
with the long back, walked up to the casket that held
his wife inside it, and held his instant camera up
to his face. He looked through the viewfinder of his
instant camera for a long time before he took any
pictures of her and I keep thinking about how the
camera lens was turning her upside down and then right
side up again and that that might have somehow made
her look and seem alive again through some trick of
mirrors or perspective or light.
Or maybe it was the way a picture
of her brightened in his hands after it came out of
his instant camera, the way she turned from some kind
of filmy gray back into all of the colors that she
had been. My grandfather held her in his hands. He
blew on each fresh picture of her and waved it back
and forth and waited for her to materialize before
him.
