I walked into the funeral home--a thing I knew nothing about because at age nine, I had never been to one before. No none had died before. I don't remember any other room in the building, or the building from the outside, or even the drive to get there, or the flight from Denver to Detroit, or the drive to Stapleton, or packing for the trip--only the morning my brother had woken me up a few days before to tell me that our grandfather had passed in his sleep.
From the door to the room where the casket was, I remember looking tentatively toward the big box surrounded by flowers and, in my memory, illuminated by light. I could see his profile. His chest--not moving up and down as it would if he were sleeping. His skin looked pink, not cold and dead. His eyes resting closed. I had never seen a casket before or a dead person, and this dead person was my grandfather.
I can't remember when I had seen him before that--I think it may have been a while, but the vision I had of him at that moment did not align with the memories I held of him. Galloping down the sidewalk to the park with him walking behind me, pretending my pony tails were reins. How when he visited Denver, he retrieved donuts for us every morning from the donut shop a few blocks away--a shop we rarely went to when he wasn't in town. Silver dollars from him pockets. The two-step shuffling dance he did in our foyer, humming and smiling. The joyful glint in his eyes. How he said he was only resting his eyes when we caught him asleep in his chair.
At this moment in that coffin, he was not only resting his eyes. And that was a very difficult thing for me to understand.
That morning I had woken up on a scratchy green sofa in the living room of my grandparents' apartment. My grandmother no longer stayed there; both she and my grandfather had been moved to the nursing home where he died. But that is where my brother and my parents and I stayed while we were in Dearborn for the funeral.
My brother and I camped out in the living room on the olive green sofa, much too narrow to really sleep comfortably on. My parents slept in the two twin beds in my grandparents' room, separated by a nightstand. I had only ever seen that on "I love Lucy." Lucy and Ricky's bedroom kept their beds at a safe distance from one another, something I thought was only about television land rules of marriages or something, since a queen-sized bed dominated my parents' bedroom and I thought that was how it was everywhere except for on TV.
All of it was weird, the narrow sofa, the twin beds, the kitchen without Grandma standing in it putting cookies back in the oven for just five more minutes, the table without Grandpa sitting at it reading the paper. Even the shower in their bathroom--the shower curtain leaned in toward me as I washed, a phenomenon I had never witnessed before. The shower curtain at home had magnets in it to attach to the side of the tub to keep the curtain from attacking a person while showering. But here the steam billowed freely behind the curtain making it reach out toward me, sucking all the space out of the shower. Grandpa was dead, and my nine year old mind imagined he had something to do with the shower curtain encroaching on my shower.
My mom led me slowly to the casket. She told me I could walk right up, touch him even. I kept a safe distance of at least six feet. From there I could crane my neck to see him, to see the suit and tie he wore, to see his motionless hands folded one over the other on his belly. His hair was combed, his skin I could see from here was kind of powdery, his chest did not rise and fall slowly, though I watched and waited for it to. My vantage point from the doorway of the room made it seem he was peacefully sleeping. From the vantage point of six feet away, I could see that was not the case.
My grandmother suffered a brain aneurysm in her forties that left her paralyzed on her left side. Her left hand always sat still in her lap, but she still played pinochle using a special half-moon contraption that sat on a table and held her hand of cards for her. She wore a brace on her lower leg to keep the ankle straight, and that along with a four-legged cane allowed her to walk. Her gait required her to step with her right foot, then use her entire body to propel the left foot forward, leaning on the cane for support.
By the time my grandfather passed, Grandma got around in a wheel chair mostly, but that day she insisted on walking to the coffin to say goodbye. We all watched as she slowly approached, supported by my dad. She held a handkerchief in her right hand to catch the tears she could not hold back. When she got to him, she touched his chest, grasped his hands, kissed his forehead. She sobbed loudly, repeated his name over and over, bent her head over the casket. I watched but didn't, feeling as if I was intruding on one of the most sacred moments of a human life.
Our vigil at the funeral home took hours that day. The family--my parents, brother, and I, my dad's two sisters and their husbands and my ten cousins (I the youngest of my grandfather's twelve grandchildren)--we stayed there as people came by to see us, to see him, to say how sorry they were, to sign the visitors' book. My young adult cousins seemed to get it all a bit more than I; they escaped to the basement of the funeral home to smoke cigarettes and would come back upstairs to murmur quietly with the visitors, whom they knew and I did not since they all lived there in Dearborn and I was only visiting.
At one point. I found myself sitting next to my aunt Barbara, my dad's older sister. She would pass away herself only a few months later; I know now looking back that she was already that day ravaged by lung cancer. And again a similar scene played out in that same funeral home, even the young adults escaping to the basement to smoke cigarettes while their mother reclined silently in a coffin upstairs due to her own years of smoking. I wasn't at that funeral, but my dad told me about it. So the day I sat next to her was the last time I saw her, and we both had our shoes and socks off, looking at our toes.
Look at that, she said.
Our second and third toes, both of us on both feet, are almost webbed together, connected by flesh at a spot much farther up on the toes than where the flesh connects between the other toes on our feet.
Until that moment, I had always thought my toes were kind of weird and they even embarrassed me.
But my toes, like my memories, they connect me to these moments and these people. I, the youngest of my grandfather's grandchildren, am married and have a kid and a 17-year career and a few college degrees. I'm turning 40 this year. The oldest of us, my cousin John, is now in his 60s and his four children are all married. When I see my cousins now we are all adults together. I'm no longer the nine-year-old child, confused by death, terrified by a shower curtain, looking to them to see something about how I was supposed to act with a dead grandfather in the room.
We share these memories. We are family.
