crème de la crème , you look up to see a little picture of Jesus, the crucial accoutrement to the designation of chapel of rest. What else?
Anything else?
Yes, of course, no twitching at the curtain of the interior window needed to catch that. It is the labyrinth at the centre, the bier or bed or bearing point of life. The day before the funeral and this is the one and only opportunity to see his father reposing, almost prostrate, laid almost horizontally but with a slight propping up of the upper body, the shoulders and head just as he had been last time ‘in life’. All our yesterdays a fortnight of solemnity. Day fought to death, seems only yesterday, but then propped up perhaps a shade more, and smiling that faintly Mona Lisa cryptic valediction about which he will never tell anyone unless in a touch, a certain squeeze of the hand, and now so strangeways, all awry, all away,utterly not. As she said when he invited her to come in and stand a moment with him:
– That is not your father.
You expect to see the one who has died, instead this bier, this base, this resting-place empty but for this untenable tenant, intolerable not least because all the time you are acutely aware that the laying out and propping up is but the exhibition of a moment and no sooner will you have vacated the office at the front of the funeral parlour than your lumbering undertaker with the help of his brother-in-law will be carting that one out and bringing in the next for some other’s viewing an hour hereafter, and the body not the body but gone away, imprisoned without weight, the air heavy with lilies, the strange starched white shirt sported by the corpse not his father, his face drawn, yes, hollowed away and weirder than waxwork, with eyelids sealed and stitching too on the forehead, a word he always hears in his father’s voice, the suppressed aitch introducing a sort of naval charm, familiar as a fo’c’sle, for’ead with the proper dropping of the aitch pronounced deep in a forest of id, not head, stitching not only of the surrounding of the face but for the gash, the foregashed forehead a couple of centimetres long, the trace of the wound sustained when he fell from the hospital bed, unattended and unnoticed for who knows how long, onto something he imagines sharp as gravel.
So digging into that steak and potatoes his wife cooks that night the undertaker will remark on the son as isbereaved and the slip of a girl with him both wearing spring-green shoes and what is the meaning, in a lifetime of working on the sward, turfing up and turfing back down, he never asked himself about green as such and now with this strange couple it is written all over the churchyard. The vicar arrives and they exchange a few practical and time-of-day remarks, suitably subdued. Neither says anything about being ill-at-ease with the manner of the man and the woman in green shoes, but both are troubled, the undertaker now in particular, by suspicions of superstition, a supernaturalistic greenery jarring with the homely Christian calling that goes with the territory, as of grace omitted before the steak. There’s a lifetime’s mistaking brought up in a moment like this, spotting the green shoes and wondering quite out of church bounds, and it’s a blessed relief he considers, as the pallbearers maintain their shuffles of conversation looking at the ground, that he can keep his thoughts to himself and imagine the place where it’s already not possible, what with all the newfangled technology, a man’s privacy approaching the verge of extinction.
The church, once they’re all ensconced (besides a cousin who is stuck in traffic and only makes it to the reception shortly before everyone leaves), is cool and surprisingly calm out of the August mid-afternoon heat. There are more people than the son had suspected or could even recognise. Presiding over the proceedings, the vicar has comfortably internalised a modus vivendi for dealing with this
Anything else?
Yes, of course, no twitching at the curtain of the interior window needed to catch that. It is the labyrinth at the centre, the bier or bed or bearing point of life. The day before the funeral and this is the one and only opportunity to see his father reposing, almost prostrate, laid almost horizontally but with a slight propping up of the upper body, the shoulders and head just as he had been last time ‘in life’. All our yesterdays a fortnight of solemnity. Day fought to death, seems only yesterday, but then propped up perhaps a shade more, and smiling that faintly Mona Lisa cryptic valediction about which he will never tell anyone unless in a touch, a certain squeeze of the hand, and now so strangeways, all awry, all away,utterly not. As she said when he invited her to come in and stand a moment with him:
– That is not your father.
You expect to see the one who has died, instead this bier, this base, this resting-place empty but for this untenable tenant, intolerable not least because all the time you are acutely aware that the laying out and propping up is but the exhibition of a moment and no sooner will you have vacated the office at the front of the funeral parlour than your lumbering undertaker with the help of his brother-in-law will be carting that one out and bringing in the next for some other’s viewing an hour hereafter, and the body not the body but gone away, imprisoned without weight, the air heavy with lilies, the strange starched white shirt sported by the corpse not his father, his face drawn, yes, hollowed away and weirder than waxwork, with eyelids sealed and stitching too on the forehead, a word he always hears in his father’s voice, the suppressed aitch introducing a sort of naval charm, familiar as a fo’c’sle, for’ead with the proper dropping of the aitch pronounced deep in a forest of id, not head, stitching not only of the surrounding of the face but for the gash, the foregashed forehead a couple of centimetres long, the trace of the wound sustained when he fell from the hospital bed, unattended and unnoticed for who knows how long, onto something he imagines sharp as gravel.
So digging into that steak and potatoes his wife cooks that night the undertaker will remark on the son as isbereaved and the slip of a girl with him both wearing spring-green shoes and what is the meaning, in a lifetime of working on the sward, turfing up and turfing back down, he never asked himself about green as such and now with this strange couple it is written all over the churchyard. The vicar arrives and they exchange a few practical and time-of-day remarks, suitably subdued. Neither says anything about being ill-at-ease with the manner of the man and the woman in green shoes, but both are troubled, the undertaker now in particular, by suspicions of superstition, a supernaturalistic greenery jarring with the homely Christian calling that goes with the territory, as of grace omitted before the steak. There’s a lifetime’s mistaking brought up in a moment like this, spotting the green shoes and wondering quite out of church bounds, and it’s a blessed relief he considers, as the pallbearers maintain their shuffles of conversation looking at the ground, that he can keep his thoughts to himself and imagine the place where it’s already not possible, what with all the newfangled technology, a man’s privacy approaching the verge of extinction.
The church, once they’re all ensconced (besides a cousin who is stuck in traffic and only makes it to the reception shortly before everyone leaves), is cool and surprisingly calm out of the August mid-afternoon heat. There are more people than the son had suspected or could even recognise. Presiding over the proceedings, the vicar has comfortably internalised a modus vivendi for dealing with this
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