Michael Kimball - Us

The funeral director called me at home and asked me to bring a picture of my wife to the funeral home. He wanted the picture of her to be from when she was still alive and before she got sick. He wanted to see what the color in her skin was and the way her face looked when she smiled.

He asked me to bring some of the clothes that she liked to wear with me too. He said that they could be clothes that she would wear anywhere and every day, but that they were going to have to cut her clothes open in the back so that they could dress her up and lay her out in them.

I picked out a picture of her from when we were on vacation one time. We were next to a lake and the wind was blowing her hair back away from her face so that it showed the way she smiled and her whole face. There was all that water and so much sky behind her that it seemed as if we would always be alive and be together.

I found the red dress that she was wearing in that picture in some boxes of summer clothes that she had put away years ago and never worn again. It hadn’t been summer for us for years. I picked out a set of her underwear that matched, a pair of sandals that matched the dress, and a sweater that she could wear over the dress.

I drove the picture of her and her clothes to the funeral home to give them to the funeral director. He thanked me for her things and said that there were some other last things that we needed to talk about. He said that my wife could have a wooden casket or a steel one. He said that the casket could be made out of bronze or copper or stainless steel or a regular steel that came in different kinds of thickness. He said that the casket could be made out of poplar or oak, out of cherry or maple or pine. He said that the casket could be made out of particle board or cardboard. He said that the casket could be made out of ash.

He said that they could cremate her and put her ashes inside an urn or that they could put her body inside a casket and bury her in the ground. He said that they could embalm her so that there could be a viewing of her. He said that they could bury her ashes too or that I could take them home or take them somewhere else and spread them out somewhere she liked, like the lake in the picture of her.

I didn’t know how to decide. She had always liked to put her feet in the dirt, but I didn’t want her to be buried in the ground so far down away from me. I wouldn’t be able to take her home with me. But the weight of the dirt pushing down on her casket didn’t seem as bad as her being burned up into little pieces of ash and bone and poured into an urn.

The wood casket sounded more comfortable than the steel one or a ceramic urn, but I picked the steel casket out for her to keep the dirt and the rocks up off her for a longer time. I didn’t want all that weight pushing the top or the sides of the casket down or in on her.

I picked out the padding for the casket that was thick and firm but soft. I decided on a lining for the casket that contrasted with the color of her dress, but that was going to match the color of her skin after they put the funeral make-up on her. I picked a pillow out that went with the color of her hair and that was also going to keep her neck from getting stiff.

We had practiced for all this in those last days too. We had used the couch for how she wanted to be laid out inside her casket. She had wanted to get her body position right. She had wanted her hands at her sides and her right side showing out. We had propped her head up on the armrest of the couch so that we could smooth the wrinkles in her neck and her face out for her. She had picked out that red dress that she had wanted to wear from memory and I thought of the sweater that she had always liked to wear at home and that she could wear over the dress and that might help to keep her warm.

I had not seen her since she had died and they had carried her out of our house and driven her away from me. But they let me see her again before they showed her to anybody else. They tried to make her look like she had looked. They put make-up on her face and her ears and her neck to replace the skin color that she used to have in those places. They wanted the color of her face inside the casket to match the color of her face in the picture by the lake.

They asked me if they had the color and the style of her hair right. They had fixed her hair up and pulled it back away from her face, but it wasn’t the wind or anything natural that made her hair look that way this time. I told them that her hair wasn’t the right color anymore, so they colored more of her hair color back on for me with a hair crayon and sprayed more color on it with colored hair spray.

The color of the skin on her neck was already coming off on the collar of her red dress and the sleeves of it cut into the make-up that they had put on her hands up to her wrists. They had drawn more eyebrows above her closed eyes with an eyebrow pencil and thickened her eyelashes up with some kind of mascara that made her look as if she weren’t going to open her eyes up again.

They wanted to make a last picture of her for me so that I could think of her when she wasn’t sick or dying or dead. But her mouth looked wrong and they couldn’t really make her face look like her face looked. Her body wasn’t the right body shape anymore either. All of that made her look so different from herself and made her seem so far away from me.

They laid her out inside the casket on a slant. They angled her front shoulder lower than her back shoulder so that she didn’t look so flat on her back inside the casket. It made it look as if her body were being lifted up. But they also had her laid down low enough so that the lid of the casket would still close over her without hitting her nose.

They asked me if there were anything that I wanted to put inside the casket with her, but I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted her to take with her but me. A picture of me would not have been enough of me and the casket wasn’t big enough for both of us to get inside it.

They put her casket and her on top of a table and rolled her out into the viewing room of the funeral home. They said that viewing the person dead was supposed to make it feel as if the person really were dead, but I don’t think that it could have felt any more real than it already did. That was my wife inside that casket who was all filled up with embalming fluid and covered up with funeral make-up and dressed up in clothes that didn’t look right without her standing up in them.

The make-up and the hair color didn’t help. The red dress didn’t help and neither did the matching sandals or the sweater that she had liked to wear at home. There were sounds coming out of my mouth and I started to cry even though I didn’t think that there was anything else that could have come out of me.

Everything inside the viewing room seemed or felt or looked or was dead. The shag carpet smelled musty and damp. The air smelled as if it were filled with exhaled breath. The frame of the chair that I was supposed to sit down on felt as if it were made out of soft and rotting wood.

I got up out of that chair, walked up to her casket, and leaned in over her. I blew a little breath across her made-up and waxy face. Her slack cheek moved in against the wind and then back out. Her lips trembled a little bit and it made my lower lip tremble a little bit too. I held onto my chin to stop my mouth from moving up and down. I breathed deep breaths in until my chest went out and my shoulders went back and I didn’t feel as if I were trembling anymore.