Michael Kimball: Us

I lifted the back collar of her sweater up and tucked the care label in behind her neck. I reached inside her casket and held onto the hand that was closer to me. I held onto her hand with both of my hands. I leaned in to whisper into her ear. I told her that she was still my wife and her earlobe moved a little bit when I said it so that I knew that she could hear me. I placed her hand back inside the casket and at her side and let go of it. I turned away from her casket and moved away from her.

The funeral director came forward and closed the lid of the casket and turned the screws for the lid down. He got a few other funeral workers to help him carry her out of the viewing room and the funeral home and out to the hearse in the parking lot. They slid her casket over those rollers and into the back of the hearse. I wanted to get inside a casket and have them carry me too. I wanted them to slide me into the back of the hearse with her too.

They closed those two back doors to the hearse and we all got into the hearse. They all sat down in the front seat and in the first backseat of the hearse and I sat down in the last backseat that was closest to her. We drove out of the funeral home parking lot and onto the street. The hearse had those two flags at the front of the hood that made all the other cars out there pull over to the curb so that we could drive past them without slowing down.

We drove through the cemetery gate and into the cemetery along those thin streets that only went one way. We drove out into the back of the cemetery where the new cemetery plots were. The funeral director parked next to a little hill and we all got out of the hearse.

Two of the funeral workers opened the two back doors up sideways so that they could slide my wife and her casket back out of the hearse. They held onto the handles at the foot of her casket and two more of them held onto the handles at the head of her casket as they rolled it out of the hearse.

They all lifted her up onto their shoulders and carried her up the little hill to her grave. They set her casket down on some wide straps that were up over her grave and set her down when they did that. I sat down along one of the long sides of her grave on a graveside chair. The funeral director sat down beside me and the other funeral workers stood behind us. There was a pile of dirt there beside us. They were going to fill my wife’s grave in with it after we left.

The funeral director stood back up in front of my wife’s casket. He looked up over all of us and up into the sky. He said a few words that I couldn’t really hear or couldn’t understand. There was some kind of roaring sound inside my ears that kept me from hearing anything outside of me. The funeral director looked at me and then looked away and down. I looked down and away from them too. I kept looking at the empty chair sitting next to me and kept thinking about my wife sitting down on it.

I think that the funeral director said something to me and that I was supposed to say something or do something. I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t get any words to come out of it or move my hands to say anything either.

The funeral director looked back up at me and I think that I nodded at him and that he motioned two of the other funeral workers over to her grave where there were these two cranks. They each released a crank to lower my wife and her casket down into her grave. They stopped when her casket hit the bottom of the grave and made a noise and then they let the cranks go down a little bit more.

I think that the funeral director asked me if I wanted to throw the first handful of dirt into her grave, but I couldn’t get myself to bend down or pick up any dirt to throw it on her casket. I couldn’t help to cover her up unless it was with a blanket and only if her face were still showing. So one of the other men threw the first handful of dirt into her grave and it made a dusty, splattering noise on top of her casket.

They all waited for me to stand up and walk away from her grave and then they followed me back to the hearse. I could see a little ways off that there were two other men standing there with shovels. They were waiting for us to leave so that they could fill her grave in with that pile of dirt.

We all got back into the hearse and drove out of and away from the cemetery. It was the first time that I was going to be away from my wife for such a long time.

Thank you for giving them the sweater for me to wear and for tucking the care label in for me. I didn’t want you to stop looking at me or holding onto my hand. I didn’t want them to close the casket.

They were so gentle with me when they carried me and lowered me down into the grave. The dirt and the rocks sounded like a heavy rain falling down on top of the casket that would not let up. Then it sounded muffled and then hush and then it got quiet. But I could hear you driving away and I could hear you thinking about me. I wanted you to hear me back so that you didn’t miss me so much or for so long.

There were three days of viewing at the funeral home before my Grandmother Oliver’s funeral and her burial. My Grandfather Oliver and the rest of the people in our family who were still alive stayed in the viewing room of the funeral home for all the viewing hours on all 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 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 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 those other people looking at her. I didn’t want to remember any of it.