The Open Casket

January 15^th

Morning

I have never been a fan of the open casket. When I have been to funerals at which the deceased are available for viewing before the service, I have found it startling; the bodies have often looked like wax mannequins to me. I know that when I was 5 I was allowed to be with my mother during the visitation for my aunt, since I didn’t like the woman who was supposed to baby-sit me and I demanded to go with my mother. I remember seeing my aunt in the coffin but I have no clear memories of my impressions of that experience. I do not remember being traumatized.

When my beloved grandmother passed away, I travelled with my parents and sister to her home community for the funeral. We stopped by the funeral home as soon as we arrived; I declined to see her in her casket and stayed in the car. I just didn’t think that what I would see would be “her.” I remember my sister coming back to the car distraught and my mother commenting that the funeral home had styled her hair all wrong.

And yet, when I heard that there would be a viewing of K.B., I embraced the idea. Partly I think that I will simply not believe that she is dead until I do see her. But another strange thought has been in my head the last couple of days, a sort of counting down until I get to see her. Waking up this morning, I thought, “At least I get to see K.B. today!” That I will be seeing a lifeless K.B hardly makes an impression on my thinking. It is almost as if I am confident that once I see her, all this will turn out to have been a mistake and that she will be ready to get in her little red car with the vanity plate “TIJEAN,” open its door to me, and whisk me off on some delightful outing. This demented sense of excitement cannot be entirely suppressed.

But there is still some rational capability in my brain, some level of awareness that this won’t be easy. I am packing a huge wad of tissues. I am taking out my contact lens and putting on glasses because I am guessing there will be tears. And when B. casually made reference to going to Scottish country dancing afterward, I felt like yelling, “I am going to see my DEAD FRIEND. I doubt I’ll be feeling like dancing!”

[To be fair to him, the dance practice occurs virtually across the street from the funeral home, and he was mainly focused on meeting with some of the participants, those who will be taking part in a musical performance at the funeral, after the practice.]

Later, evening:

She was and she wasn’t there. I saw and talked to her sister before going to look in the coffin.  Her sister said that it did not look like her, and that made it easier; she was not smiling, and when was she ever either not talking or not smiling? I went over. Her sister was right. It was not K.B. It was a pale waxen imitation of K.B. The skin of her hands had smoothed out; there were no veins, no contours. Her hair was pulled back in a way I had never seen her have it in life. Her mouth was utterly expressionless; there was not a hint that here had been a smile that had been so big on her wedding day that it looked like her face would break. They had put on her lips a glossy lipstick. Given that she usually did not wear any make-up, it only helped heighten the impact: this was not her. She was not there. The sense of delirious expectation that I would be seeing my friend this evening fell flat. This was not my friend.

As I was standing there MayB came up and embraced me. I sobbed in her arms. She spoke of how she was determined that K.B.’s legacy was that her friends would preserve their connections to one another and that she would maintain close ties with myself and Wynn Anne. This helped in a way that nothing else yet has. As I went around the room and spoke with her family and close friends, I thought, yes, this must endure, this sense of us all caring for one another. That is where K.B. is, in the love that she had for us all which now binds us together.