By Chloe Riley
I dreamt my aunt was still alive. Her and my uncle had moved
into an apartment right next to my cousin. Only it was like a fun house
apartment with really steep slanted floors. My sisters and I were running
around the apartment and it was only when I ran back to my aunt and uncle to
tell them I liked the place that I remembered my aunt was dead. I said to her,
“Oh, I forgot, you’re dead.” And she looked at me and kind of shrugged.
In real life – not the dream anymore – I just interviewed an
undertaker who owns the oldest funeral home in the city. He lives above the
funeral home in the same apartment his grandfather lived in when he took care
of the dead. We were talking about the importance of wakes. Back before the
1950's, wakes used to go for three days. After the 50's, it went down to two days
and now of course it’s just the one. The undertaker told me the reason it used
to be three was to help the living mourn. And by mourn, he meant, help them
believe the person was really dead.
“If they didn’t believe grandpa was dead on Tuesday, they
sure believed it on Thursday,” he said.
Back in the day, when his dad was the undertaker, my
undertaker was just a kid wandering through someone’s wake during the summer,
watching the family mourn over a body that was basically melting while smelling
salts were passed around to dim the stench.
Later he said to his dad, “Dad, why do we do this to people?
Why do we put them through this?”
His dad said, “Because it’s a natural process and they need
to see it to move on with their lives.”
I never got to see my aunt’s body. She had cancer on and off
for six years, and by the end, her body had shrunken to a Gollum-like state. I
saw her like this before she died and while it was jarring, it was still her in
there. Still with her cute button nose and expressive eyes and always with her
humor.
Instead of a wake, we went to a “memorial” at my cousin’s
house and I remember thinking it felt weird and forced and that something was
missing. Or maybe it was that a couple of things were missing. The body, and
our chance to touch it and kiss it and send it off into the great beyond – and
the undertaker, that River Styx man who walks farther with the dead than most
of us ever will.
I asked the undertaker, “How do you deal with the dead?”
He said, “I don’t think I consciously deal with them. I go
back there and do what I have to do. You may go through a whole day not
thinking of your mortality. Well, I see my mortality everyday.”
I may go whole days without thinking of my mortality, but
it’s certainly hard to control that old subconscious at night.
(Pencil drawing inside the oldest funeral home in Chicago)
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