When did the smell of formaldehyde stop making him sick? In the beginning its brisk, alien nature soured his stomach, put his brain on high alert, and made him dread the first few hours of work each day. Far from being distracting, its chemical presence made him too awake, wore him out, made lunch look like the end of the day. But over the years the daily assaults faded as his defenses naturally built up. It lurked in the background now, an easily ignored bystander.
Every body is different, he thought. You can see this every day of your life and never get to the bottom of it.
Skin tones were as distinctive as fingerprints. A section of skin built up and soft on someone’s uncle can be little more than a crease on a wife. And wounds were even more varied. A knife slice, by the time he saw it, was simply a discolored mark, but gunshot blasts caused tearing, as if, a long time ago, something angry had escaped.
There were two living bodies he could use for comparison - his, of course, and his wife’s, but not hers anymore.
“How’re you going to make that look decent?”
The mortuary’s accountant, Efram, had stumbled into the prep room and was asking questions that didn’t need answers.
"It’ll be safe. You won’t see it under the suit.”
“But everyone will know it’s down there somewhere, won’t they?”
Kurt remained silent for a moment, glanced down at the pads of his right hand. They were thoroughly clean, the cleanest living surface on the face of the earth. Making sure of that was part of the daily routine.
He exhaled, not quite a sigh. “People forget. Most don’t even realize what they put out of their head.”
“No kidding. The only reason I come here is to duck what my kids are up to! No, really, they’re great. I mean, they’ll trip themselves up once in a while, but they come to their senses quick. Like yo-yos, up, down, up, down. Good thing you and I are solid citizens, huh?”
“That’s a good thing. A really good thing...”
The dead man’s face lay in front of him, surprisingly inert, existing, but somewhere off the radar. He scrubbed it with the unscented, light-grit soap he used for the first pass, carefully working through the creases and folds of deceased’s face, making sure all the grime was removed without disturbing the skin (abrasions can’t grow back, a surprisingly obvious point Professor Jackson had buried in his head, like a fleck of grime that could never be scrubbed off).
The funeral was a 2 o’clock and he was pretty much on schedule. The face is the last thing - the crowning touch - and then just putting on the suit. However not a suit this time, but, per the family’s request, a jogging outfit and a dirty pair of Nikes (Kurt could picture the eulogy. “He is being buried the way he lived - running!” The line would get a laugh, and begin the process of healing, give people the OK to start forgetting death and turn back to their lives.)
“Great. Fine. Almost done. Don’t rush me.”
-----------
It turned out to be a fine day to have a funeral. Kurt had learned that clean weather was just as important as clean bodies. Rain can make grief go sour. Too much wind just confuses things. Cold forces the attendees to choose between loyalty and guilt - “I need to stay” constantly fights with “I want to go”. The struggle ends up being distracting, and takes attention away from the ability to make peace.
But with blue skies and a slight chill in the air, everything will go just like it should, he thought, just like its gone time and again.
Kurt approached the graveside, slowing as he came near the back of the crowd. A dandelion sprouted just in front of his feet, a full, bursting bloom, its feathery seeds deployed like an array of missiles, waiting for the next gust of wind to fire them off.
A mild breeze swept across petals of silk flowers, first a bouquet of reds and oranges, then a similar arrangement further away. Kurt gazed into the topmost branches of the trees that spread across the cemetery and fell into imagining what it would be like to be up there, watching the world from such a great height. He would see the bald spots of the older men. Flowers would be pixels, car paths would be ribbons, and the highway would be loud. Nothing would block his view to the sky, to the God who lived above it all. Nothing could get in the way of his questions being heard, his only real effort trying to discover where the answers were.
From up there he could also see directly into the graves, a view no one else was privileged to have, the textures and colors of the caskets clearly visible, the brilliance of the cadavers just as clear.
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But it was a bad evening to be alone, to be left behind by a wife who had finally given in to a cancer that had nibbled away at daily routines until there was nothing left, leaving Kurt to pick his way through an emptied world, specks of air-borne dust spinning in his wake.
Dust levitated before him now, hanging unnoticed in the thin shafts of light allowed by the trees. His light sweat, dried by the breezes, had become a crust on his skin, stiffening patches of his short sleeved white shirt. His arms, set either side of his hips, supported his back. His bottom, he assumed, had gone numb.
He couldn’t help but remember all the other times his job had brought him here, walking down this narrow ribbon of concrete to one grave or another. Over to his left, just nearby, he recalled a small group of just three. The two men were tall, with worn tans and angry faces - farmers, maybe? - that were used to cursing nature for what it could or couldn’t do. A second group, just behind him, was a knot of folks jockeying for position, something up front they needed to see.
But he could see another group, maybe larger, near the highway, just past the edge of the neatly arranged trees. There was drizzling rain that day, and mostly black umbrellas, but one blue. Strong emotion radiated through the congregation like steam, eyes both tearful and laughing, broken, joyful hearts. He could still hear the sounds of the men slapping each other’s backs, the women producing light giggles in spite of tear stained makeup, the hands of the speaker gesturing gently toward the ground, then finding glory in the huge, gray sky.
His wife was buried somewhere else, in soggy ground in the nearby state of Louisiana, a little too far away to remember from here, the sounds of her funeral more than he could bear to think about, just now.
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