The Next Few Days

There are things about the next few days that I remember vividly and some things are just a blur.

If you are from the south you know that once someone dies the community immediately begins to fill the house with food. Well meaning folks would come in with their casseroles and chicken and say things that made no sense. I remember one woman that Mama worked with told her that she was young and could marry again. Yes, Mama was only 37, but who in the world tells someone something like that? Besides if your husband’s lover’s husband had just killed your husband, would you even want to think about another man? Other folks would just look at us, some would just sit, and some would go in and out of the house and smoke. It was all a lot to take in.

The day of the viewing or wake at the funeral home was awful. Back then they put the dead folks in the very back room for viewing. It is a tiny little room and really not a good place for the flow of folks to come and go while paying their respects. The new owners of the funeral home, Jack and Joy, put the corpse right out in the big room where everybody can visit and swap old stories comfortably.

(I’ve told Jack and Joy that they had better put my make-up on and have Ricky fix my hair if something should happen to me. I sure don’t want folks looking at me and saying that I look like I’m sleeping! I’m not real sure what exactly is on the other side, but I want it to be a party every day and I want to look my best when I show up!)

Back to the story…Daddy was in the small backroom of the funeral home. When we went in I freaked. Embalming fluid was draining out of the bullet holes in his neck and onto his shirt. Looked like pink blood to me. The funeral director did some high stepping to get it corrected. I had seen dead people before, but I had never touched one before, but I had to touch him. I still remember the feel…stiff…cold…hard. Well, flowers were everywhere. I occupied some of my time there by looking at the cards on the flowers and remember being surprised by some of the people who had sent them. Grief is a strange thing. Everybody deals with it in a different way. I thought thoughts that normally I wouldn’t. I began to grieve for all the things that my Daddy would miss…my graduation, wedding, children, etc. I remember thinking that soon all this would be history and I would be 20 (five years down the road). My heart wouldn’t hurt anymore.