I dreamt my aunt was still alive

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)