Todd Harra - Mortuary Confidential

So engrossed was I in my thoughts that when Anthony swung the hearse door open, I jumped.

“Marie, everything all right?” he asked.

He had a concerned look on his face, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere.

“Sure. Fine,” I said quickly.

“Okay. Why don’t you go on in.” It was a command not a question. “The lady at the reception desk will tell you where to go. I’ve already told her our situation. It’s not normal visiting hours, but she’ll let you go up. I have to take the hearse around back and park it. This will save you from having to trudge through the basement.”

I nodded and got out of the hearse. Anthony dropped it in gear and roared away. I put my arms around myself and walked through the front door of the hospital.

It was worse than I thought it would be. Grace lay propped up in bed with tubes and wires covering every inch of her body. I couldn’t imagine a human was under all the bandages and dressings. Her head was half covered by a giant bandage. The gauze had a giant brown spot of dried blood on it.

The room held the pungent smell of hospitals: powerful disinfectants and fear. Grace’s room was dark save the glow of the monitors. One of the machines gave off a constant beep beep sound. The sound, marking the passing time, was maddening.

To my relief, Grace was asleep. I dragged a chair next to her bed and laid my hand upon her tube-covered hand. She stirred. I’m not sure if she could see me as her face was so swollen, but she could certainly sense me. She tried forming words around the tube going down her throat.

I swallowed and tried to speak, offer my sympathies, something, but my words sounded clumsy so I just finished with, “Anthony and I are here for you and Phoebe. Just rest. We’re here for you.” I made quiet shushing sounds and just stroked her hand until she seemed to drift off again.

After a bit, Anthony strolled into the room. “How is she?”

“She knows we’re here.” I looked at him. “That’s all that matters.”

“I stopped and checked on Phoebe. The nurse told me her prognosis is much better than her mother’s.”

“That’s good,” I replied. It didn’t feel like it was me speaking the words. I felt so disconnected.

We stayed for a couple more hours until it was time for Grace’s first scheduled surgery of the day. Anthony loaded Jim and Jim, Jr., into the hearse and we began the long trek back to Tennessee. The return ride was just as silent as the previous one. When we got home, Anthony went right to the funeral home to perform his work and I crashed in bed. I woke hours later, still tired, and made my way down to the kitchen, where I found Anthony.

“Ant?”

He gave me a look of pure exhaustion. Anthony was used to late nights, but I had never seen him this tired before.

I massaged his shoulders. “How was it?” I asked.

“Tough.”

“Want to talk about it?” I wrapped my arms around him. The sweet smell of formaldehyde lingered on his shirt.

“No.”

He was silent. I knew it had been hard on him. His employee, Violet, had called to say she had found him crying in the garage in his embalming suit. I knew Anthony was too tough to ever admit it to me. I’d press the issue at a later time; give him a little space for now.

“Ant,” I said tentatively.

“Yeah?”

“I think I need to go back—to the hospital.”

“Really? Don’t you think Jim’s parents will drive down? And obviously Grace’s will fly out to be with them.”

“I’m sure they will.” I paused. “I just need to go be with her.”

“How long are you going to go?” he asked.

“However long it takes.”

“And the kids?”

“We’ll tell them before I go. Then you can get some sleep. I’ll ask your mom and dad to come over and sit this evening.”

“Okay,” he said. I could tell he was too tired to even function.

“Kids—” I called.

I sat next to Grace’s bed. She wore a number of casts, and the bandage on her head was fresh. The head nurse assured me the surgeries had been as successful as one could hope, and they were guardedly optimistic about her recovery.

The tube had been removed from Grace’s throat, and when she woke she tried talking. Some of the swelling on her face had subsided, but she would definitely need an oral surgeon sometime in the very near future. Her voice came out in raspy whispers. “Did Ant take care of Jim and little Jimmy?” she asked, tears rolling down her face.

I nodded, tears running down my face, too. I couldn’t speak.

Grace tried speaking again, but I interrupted her, “Grace, don’t talk. Please. Just rest.” I squeezed her hand.

“You know, Marie,” she said, ignoring my protest. I had to strain to make out the words. “I sometimes think life is like a tapestry. And—” She stopped and winced as her tongue traced over broken teeth. “And… we’re looking at the back. We’re looking at the mess of tangled threads—knots and threads going every which way. It’s seemingly meaningless.”

Tears flowed freely down my cheeks, and I held my friend’s hand tightly as she continued, “Walk around that same tangled mess and on the other side is a breathtaking piece of art. I think—I think we only get to look at the back of the tapestry most of the time. Right now, I’m only seeing chaos and knots and loose threads. I know though, I know, that one day I’ll get to look at the front and it’ll all make sense. It’ll all make so much sense… I’ll get to see the beauty of God’s work.

“Thank Ant for me. He bore his cross.”

My partner and I met Charles and Jacques when we were touring the Bordeaux wine region for the first time. We ran into these Americans at an outdoor café, started talking, and found out that not only were they from the same state, but they lived about ten minutes from Wes’s and my house. They live in Concord and we live just north of Manchester. We exchanged numbers and have since become good friends and travel buddies.

I am a funeral director and Wes is a general surgeon at one of the local hospitals. In between our hectic schedules we don’t have as much time together as we’d like, but we make time for our shared hobby, making wine. We’ve been making wines for over twenty years now and have gotten to a point where we can turn out a pretty good bottle of vin . We make all sorts of whites and reds, depending on what’s in season when we’re making a batch. Our friends rave that our wines are better than store-bought, but mostly I think they’re blowing smoke.

Since Wes and I are wine freaks, we naturally like to tour wine regions when we go on vacation. After we became friends with Charles and Jacques, they started tagging along on our wine touring extravaganzas, not necessarily for the winery tours, but for the destinations. Wes and I would go and do our wine thing and they’d go off on their own sightseeing thing. We’d been traveling together for fifteen years with destinations including Melbourne, Napa, Sonoma, Bilbaon Rioja, and Mendoza, to name a few.

Charles came to me one day and asked me to handle his funeral arrangements. He had HIV. This was before the antiretroviral drug cocktails; the disease had progressed to such a point that the available drugs could only prolong his life. He lasted four years, six months, and nine days.

Charles had moved from his home state of Louisiana the day he turned eighteen. He needed to be somewhere a little more liberal than the Deep South, and he ended up in Massachusetts. As soon as Charles’s family found out about his “affliction,” they disowned him. Charles hadn’t spoken to his family since. When his father died in the mid ’80s, Charles received a letter in the mail, months after the fact, from an aunt telling him what had happened. She told him not to send his sympathies to his mother.