He Looks So Good Lying There
Always makes me want to laugh, but I’m in a funeral parlor and The Guest Of Honor is up front with mourners to the left, right and in the chairs.
Someone comes along; someone always comes along and says, “Oh, he looks so life-like,” or, “He looks so good.” The fact that he has been carried by the angels to everlasting life in heaven seems to have been lost for the moment. No matter how good he looks, he’s still deceased.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t do an awful lot to bring him back. The best we can do is admire the mortician’s craft in suspending our disbelief that The Guest Of Honor isn’t going to get up after the place closes and go out for a quick beer.
I sometimes wonder if that’s their real job: Not the comfort of the people, not the closure of a life lived among us, but the somehow denial of lasting death. The hairdresser comes in, someone colors up any skin that will show, loads of cotton fill out the face if necessary. They aren’t dead; they are just sleeping.
It doesn’t have to be gruesome; there are nice ways to send someone off to their reward. I don’t go for the crucifixes, but would prefer a sketch of a laughing Christ welcoming a person into heaven.
Then an after-funeral meal where we tell the best stories.
Someone comes along; someone always comes along and says, “Oh, he looks so life-like,” or, “He looks so good.” The fact that he has been carried by the angels to everlasting life in heaven seems to have been lost for the moment. No matter how good he looks, he’s still deceased.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t do an awful lot to bring him back. The best we can do is admire the mortician’s craft in suspending our disbelief that The Guest Of Honor isn’t going to get up after the place closes and go out for a quick beer.
I sometimes wonder if that’s their real job: Not the comfort of the people, not the closure of a life lived among us, but the somehow denial of lasting death. The hairdresser comes in, someone colors up any skin that will show, loads of cotton fill out the face if necessary. They aren’t dead; they are just sleeping.
It doesn’t have to be gruesome; there are nice ways to send someone off to their reward. I don’t go for the crucifixes, but would prefer a sketch of a laughing Christ welcoming a person into heaven.
Then an after-funeral meal where we tell the best stories.
posted by Tom Carten at 2:12 AM
3 Comments:
I remember the nuns (those wretched spoilers of childhood) telling us that we should be happy when loved ones die because now they are with God. Be that as it may - or may not - they are no longer with US. Some people truly make the world a better place when they depart from it. Others, and I'd say most, are so much a part of our world that our grieving lasts as long as it takes to mentally create a new reality, one without them. All that we love deeply, becomes a part of us. Your friend will live on through your memories and stories.
I've often been glad that we don't have open-casket funerals in Judaism.
So God sez,
''Hey man, you're lookin' good, mebbe I shoulda waited awhile''
CJV
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