Part 9: It Is Raining (Sunday)

It is raining and my father’s body is somewhere else.

For days, my mother and I didn’t know where he was. Men in suits wheeled him out on a stretcher in the middle of the night after he died. As we were waiting for them, I sat in the kitchen with Nina as she destroyed his cache of morphine by dumping it into a little plastic bag filled with cat litter and bleach.

“People are trashy.” She told me. “They steal their people’s morphine and sell it instead of letting them have it. Sometimes we have to lock it up so addict family members don’t steal it.”

I had a little whiskey and gave her a hard apple cider from the fridge.

“That’s insane,” I commiserated.

“Some of these people are crazy people.”

“That’s so mean.”

Nina agreed with me.

It was 2 am, I think, by the time the mortuary men got to our house. They were dressed in suits just to wheel him down the stairs and put him in a van. Jim and the Mormons had dressed daddy in his priesthood robes. Mike took. daddy’s picture one last time.

Daddy suddenly looked so small in the guest room bed.

“He looks like he’s wearing a Chef Boyardee hat…” I whispered to my mom. She gave me an amused-but-disapproving face, her eyes light up for a second and then her face said “be good. Now is not the time for giggling hysterics.”

“Wow. This is so beautiful,” Nina said. I wondered if she secretly thought his priesthood robes looked silly, but I looked at her face and she looked powerfully moved and as earnest as I’ve seen a face ever look.

I looked again and thought that yes, it is so beautiful. This is just what he wanted. This is sacred and I shouldn’t be so nervous to let things feel sacred. The problem is, the funniest thing always pops into my mind, like there are muppets in my head forever preventing me from being somber. The muppets, I suppose, are a coping mechanism that keep me from sobbing wildly as my heart is breaking, or sinking into the dark nihilistic abyss as I face the fact that we’re all going to be dead in 100 years.

In 1,000 years, no one will remember the differences between 1918 and 2018 outside of the inventions of the printing press and the internet and our proclivity for suddenly launching monkeys, dogs, and pale human males into space. In another hundred million years, our entire civilization will be flattened into a layer of sediment the width of a piece of cigarette paper. Everything we ever were will be gone. My father and I will have died at the same time.

The muppets keep me distracted.

I helped carry daddy’s stretcher down the stairs. The men doing it were in suits and I felt guilty that they dressed all the way up at 2 am to help us. It looks simple to remove a body from a house on the news, but the reality is, many people die on the second floor. If you have a landing, the whole affair is like moving a twin sized bed with a person sleeping on it. I don’t think he was covered up like it was a murder, but I don’t remember him being tied down to anything either.

“You could have come in pajamas,” I told the mortuary men. “We wouldn’t care!” They were sweating in their suits and trying to pivot the stretcher around the banisters.

“We want to show our respect,” they told us.

When he was in the car, Mike and mom and I thanked them over and over. Jim and the Mormons were milling around helping and Nina was doing paperwork.

They took my father somewhere In a van, and for days, my mom and I forgot the name of the company or who those mortuary men were who helped us.

“I have it written down on an index card that Nina gave me,” she would say a few days later and we would think “Hmmm…”

“Welp. That is something we’re going to need to locate once we find our minds.”