The thing that surprises me most about my father’s corpse is how much it looks like him. The coloring is a little off—waxy and yellowish, like the fat cap on a well-aged brisket— but otherwise, it’s a stunning likeness, right down to the tiny bristles sprouting from the bridge of his nose. Remarkable.
The second thing that surprises me is my surprise itself. Of course it looks like him; it is him. I feel silly for expecting—what? A gaping-mouthed gargoyle? A half-rotted horror? There is none of that. He just looks like he is sleeping. Very deeply.
The third surprise is my intimate familiarity with each and every one of his features. My face close enough to his that he would have been able to feel the warmth of my breath, I survey the landscape of his cheeks and brows, his eyelids, lips, and nostrils. I haven’t spent a lot of time with my dad in recent years, but somewhere in the deep recesses of my memory, I seem to have a full inventory of every part of his face, down to the most minute blemish and whisker. The dimensions of the small bump on his cheek are exactly right. The big, soft earlobes are creased just where they should be. I exhale and drop my shoulders.
The nurse on the palliative care ward where my father has been dying for more than six months was initially resistant to showing me his body, but I pleaded a passionate case, explaining that I’d flown all the way from England, that I hadn’t seen him in months. That I was definitely not afraid to see the body, in fact, I needed to see it for my peace of mind. That my sister had died unexpectedly in childhood, and that when they put her in the ground without first allowing me to attend the viewing of her open casket, a hollow stone was planted in my chest whose weight I still carry.
The nurse was sympathetic but still hesitant. His eyes darted left and right searching for a tactful explanation. “He’s… not in a very nice room,” he finally says, pressing his lips together.
Oh. Yeah. I guess this little rural hospital probably isn’t set up for that kind of thing. I had imagined myself being ushered into a spacious, dimly lit morgue, walls lined with drawers full of cadavers. Maybe a bright steel table in the center where I could examine my father’s body from all angles, like a homicide detective.
Instead, the nurse wheels my father’s corpse out from an unmarked door (a walk-in fridge, maybe?) and parks him against the wall at the quiet end of a long hallway. I take a seat by his side on a folding chair, the kind you find in a break room, gazing solemnly at the figure on the gurney. My father is dead and this is his body. I feel dreamlike and removed, as though I am already looking back on a distant memory.
I try to soak up this moment, ingest it, make it click, but I can’t seem to pin myself to it. The walls are cream-colored. The linoleum floor is clean and worn. My chair is made of brown plastic. At the end of this hallway is a pair of frosted-glass doors. Beyond them is the rose garden where my father napped beside me in a wheelchair the last time I saw him alive.
I note each of these details but I can’t make them add up to a complete picture, so I gather them up like a shuffled deck of cards to be sorted into order another time.
My father was a flawed man. In his time, he did some things that make it hard to hold his memory in a purely clean container. But I loved the hell out of him as a child. I admired—and, I think, inherited—his garrulousness, his lust for life, his unsinkable optimism. I also shared his deep interest in all things metaphysical, and his eagerness to join me in long philosophical discussions about the meaning of life was a grounding comfort to me after my sister’s death.
Once we knew that his cancer would soon kill him we talked frankly about his impending death, too. Alongside my sorrow, I felt intense curiosity. In fact, I was kind of excited for him. He was about to cross over into the spirit realm, where (hopefully!) he would learn all the great mysteries of the cosmos. Where will he be? What will it be like? Will my sister be there? And can he please, please, try to report back, send me some kind of message?
He laughed. “I’ll do my best, Mags. But I have a feeling that if it was that easy, it’d happen a lot more often.”
I wonder if he is watching me watch him now. I close my eyes and try to sense his presence.
Nothing.
I am suddenly self-conscious, aware of the nurse shifting on his feet at the far end of the hallway. Is he getting impatient? What is a normal amount of time to spend viewing a parent’s corpse? How do you know when you are done?
And just then, I knew it.
I was done.
“I feel dreamlike and removed, as though I am already looking back on a distant memory.
I try to soak up this moment, ingest it, make it click, but I can’t seem to pin myself to it.” What a profound, yet paradoxically simple, reckoning. I know that distance well, and you did such a beautiful job carrying me across that distance, the surprises, the inquiry, the moments both matter-of-fact and existential. 🙏