Connie Willis - Passage

“Well, I’m not,” Eileen said and slid into a pew. The other two nurses sat down next to her. Richard stood a moment looking at the casket, his fists clenched, and then walked up the aisle. When he got to the casket, he stood there a long moment, afraid to look down, afraid Joanna’s terror and her panic might be reflected in her face, but there was no sign of it.

She lay with her head on an ivory satin pillow, her hair arranged around her head in unfamiliar curls. The dress she was wearing was unfamiliar, too, high-necked, with lace ruffles, and around her neck was a silver cross. Her white hands lay folded across her chest, hiding the slashed aorta, the Y incision.

A gray-haired woman had come up beside him. “Doesn’t she look natural?” she said. Natural. The mortician had set her glasses high on the bridge of her nose, and put rouge on her white cheeks, dark red lipstick on her bloodless lips. Joanna had never worn lipstick that color in her life. In her life.

“She looks so peaceful,” the gray-haired woman said, and he looked earnestly into Joanna’s face, hoping it was true, but it wasn’t. Her ashen, made-up face held no expression at all.

He continued to stand there, looking blindly down at her, and after a minute Eileen came up and led him back to the pew. He sat down. The nurse who had recommended Ten Steps reached across Eileen and handed him a pamphlet. It was titled “Four Tips for Getting Through the Funeral.” The organist began playing.

Kit came in, leading a tall, graying man. Vielle was with them. They sat down several rows ahead. “Who’s getting married?” the man said, and Kit bent toward him, whispering, and no wonder she hadn’t been shocked by what he’d told her. She witnessed horrors every day.

And the funeral was one of them. A soloist sang, “On Jordan’s Banks I Stand,” and then the minister preached a sermon on the necessity of being saved “while there is yet time, for none knows the day or the hour when we will suddenly come face to face with God’s judgment.

“As it says in the Holy Scriptures,” he intoned, “when that judgment comes, those who have confessed their sins and taken Jesus Christ as their personal savior shall enter life eternal, but those who have not accepted Him shall go away into everlasting punishment. Now, will you please turn to Hymn 458 in your hymnals?”

Hymn 458 was “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” I can’t stand this, Richard thought, looking wildly around for a way out, but there was a whole row of people on either side.

The minister brought down his hands in a broad gesture. “You may be seated. And now, Joanna’s colleague and dear friend would like to say a few words about her life,” he said and nodded at Mandrake. Mandrake stood up, holding a sheaf of papers, and started for the front. As he came near the casket, he turned to smile comfortingly at Joanna’s sister.

And if Richard had needed any proof that Joanna wasn’t there, that she was oceans, years away, trapped on the Titanic, this was it.

Because if she’d been there, even though she was dead, she would never have lain there passively on the shirred satin, eyes closed, hands composed, with Mandrake coming. She would have been out of the casket and sprinting for the choir loft, making a dash for the side door, saying the way she had that first day, “If I talk to him I’m liable to kill him.”

She didn’t move. Mandrake went up to the casket, looked down at her, still with that disgusting smile, and bent to kiss her forehead. Richard must have made a sound, must have made a move to stand up, because Eileen reached over and put a hand on his arm, grasping it firmly, holding him down.

Mandrake walked to the pulpit and then stood there, his hands on the sides of the pulpit, smiling oilily at the congregation. “I was Joanna Lander’s friend,” he said, “perhaps her best friend.”

Richard looked ahead at Vielle. Kit had her hand clasped firmly in Vielle’s.

“I say that,” Mandrake said, “because I not only worked with her, as many of you did, but because I shared a common goal with her, a common passion. Both of us had devoted our lives to discovering the mystery of Death, a mystery that is a mystery to her no longer.” He smiled gently in the direction of the casket. “Of course we all have our faults. Joanna was always in a hurry.”

Yeah, trying to get away from you.

“She was also sometimes too skeptical,” he said, and chuckled as if it were an amusing shortcoming. “Skepticism is an excellent quality…”

How would you know?

“But Joanna often carried it to extremes and refused to believe the evidence that was so plainly before her, evidence that Death was not the end.” He smiled at the congregation. “You may have read my book, The Light at the End of the Tunnel.”

“I don’t believe it,” Eileen muttered next to him. “He’s plugging his book at a funeral.”

“If you’ve read it, you know that Death need hold no fears, that even though dying may seem painful, terrifying, to those of us left behind, it is not. For our loved ones await us, and an Angel of Light. We know that from the mouths of those who have seen that light, seen those loved ones, from the message they have brought back from the Other Side.”

He cast a sickly smile in the direction of the casket. “Joanna didn’t believe that. She was a skeptic—she believed near-death experiences were hallucinations, caused by endorphins or lack of oxygen,” he waved them away with his hand. “Which is why her testimony, the testimony of a skeptic, is so compelling.”

He paused dramatically. “I heard Joanna’s last words. She spoke them to me only moments before her death, as she was on her way down to that fateful encounter. Joanna was heading down a hallway to the elevator that would take her down to the emergency room. And do you know what she did?” He paused expectantly.

She looked frantically around for a stairway, Richard thought, for a way out.

“I’ll tell you what she did,” Mandrake said. “She stopped me and said, ‘Mr. Mandrake, I wanted to tell you, you were right about the near-death experience. It was a message from the Other Side.’ ”

“ ‘You have seen what lies on the Other Side then?’ I asked her, and I could see the answer in her face, radiant with joy. She was a skeptic no longer. ‘You were right, Mr. Mandrake,’ she said. ‘It was a message from the Other Side.’ What more proof do we need of the afterlife that awaits us? Joanna herself has told us, with her last breath, her last words.”

Her last words, Richard thought. “Why do people in movies always say things like ‘The murderer is… Bang!’ ” Joanna had said at Dish Night. “You’d think, if they had something that important to communicate, they’d say it first.”

“Joanna used her last words to send a message from the Other Side,” Mr. Mandrake said. “How can we fail to heed that message? I for one intend to as I complete my new book, Messages from the Other Side.”

“ ‘You’re doing it wrong,’ ” she had said. “ ‘Important words first.’ ” “ ‘Tell Richard… SOS.’ ”

“Joanna had only a few minutes to live,” Mandrake said, “and how did she choose to spend it?

By sharing her vision of the afterlife with us.”

“She didn’t think it was the Titanic,” Kit had said. “She said she wished she could die saving somebody’s life.”

Mandrake must have finished. The organ was playing “Shall We Gather at the River?” and people were starting to file out. Richard followed them into the aisle, and then stood there, staring at Joanna’s casket.

“I don’t think that was what she was trying to tell you,” Vielle had said. “I think she was trying to tell you something good.”