1985

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It was upon me to keep my promise to Mother that I would be her morgue coiffeur. Mother's body was familiar to me: her hands, her toes, the scent of her skin, the feel of her silky hair, her breath, the set of her teeth in her mouth, the arch of her lips.  I was familiar with her body in animation - with her inside of it.  Imagining her body now void of its spirit, without thought, movement and emotion, was confounding.  It was, however, the realization that she had departed that allowed me to keep my promise to Mother to make her as lovely to behold in death as she had been in life.

For me, looking at my father was still beyond difficult.  My grief was most assuredly of a different ilk from his; so, there was not that deep resonating oneness customarily found in a family coming together as a tight unit to mourn the precious matriarch of its clan.  The emotional separation from Daddy caused me to feel physically alone, too.  We sisters abandoned our father to himself and he stayed his distance from us.  His woman lay dead on a cold morgue table, her physical death preceded by the heart-stabbing, soul-robbing truth that she had not been his heart's desire.  He was in love with a thirteen-year-old boy-- had sobbed more from that loss than this one.  I did not see him cry at all for Mother.

Quite honestly, I did not cry, either.  Ineffability can preclude tears. My grief encompassed so many sorrows that it went deeper than the fountain where tears originate.  Maybe Daddy was feeling that, also. I will never know.  I lost Mother and Daddy in 1985 - an emotional orphan at thirty-seven, and it just did not seem that tears adequately expressed the vacuum deeply enough.  I would be sorry later that I shut off the flow; that stream can be healing.  I also could not justify weeping for Mother because she had escaped finally into paradise, golden streets, the presence of God, and everlasting love.  I was jealous, maybe, but not sad for her.

When I told my sisters Mother had requested my expertise with her hair, my "master's touch" is what she called it,  they were quite reticent to join me in turning the morgue into a beauty salon.  This was, of course, understandable and I was absolutely, stoically, willing to go by myself.  My younger sister, however, changed her mind and came with me, much to my relief and delight.  Emotionally, we did not know what to expect of ourselves.

The funeral director led us back to the holding area where the corpses are kept after they have been embalmed.  Here the bodies are  prepped for their caskets - clothed, groomed and beautified.  Instinctively, my sister and I stopped in the doorway before entering the sterile space where Mother's body lay.  She was naked and covered to her shoulders with a sheet.  The obvious absence of living and breathing in the room actually calmed me.  I heard a voice in my heart say: "She is not here. She is risen."  We sisters looked at each other, inhaled deeply, and tenuously walked over to the slightly elevated slab on which our mother's body had been deposited.  All trepidation vanished almost immediately when we saw Mother up close.  Our response was almost comical because our first collective thought was: "Oh, my God, what have they done to Mother's face?"  We just wanted to take a hot soapy rag and wash all the hideously applied make-up off her lovely skin!

"She would hate this!" my sister said, touching the too-red blush layered in large round circles on Mother's cheeks.  It made her look like an aging cupie doll.

"Why don't you work on getting that crap off her face, and I'll fix her hair!"  My sister had already begun the facial - did not need my direction as she began removing the blood-red rouge, the overly blue eyeshadow and the jet black eyebrows painted, clown-like, on the canvas of Mother's face. She had radiant skin and never wore much more than a dab of lipstick rubbed lightly into her cheeks and dark pink - red was for "hussies" - on her lips. We felt our mission from God that afternoon was to "un-hussy" Mother before her friends and family saw this funeral face.  Mother must look like Mother again before we left her alone. The curling iron was a little too hot and dead hair actually reacts differently than living follicles; so, I singed it a little in the back and left a very tiny burn on Mother's forehead which I covered with her bangs.  But, all in all, we were proud of our efforts and knew Mother would have been pleased that we rescued her visage for eternity.

One thing we noticed before we bade her body a last farewell was that all the wiping, cleaning and redoing of her make-up had opened her eyes up just enough to suggest that she was "playing  possum"- pretending to be asleep, but peeking.  Our best efforts at reclosing her eyes failed; they would not stay shut.  The next day during her viewing at the mortuary, it looked as if she were watching the proceedings, clandestinely observing the mourners.  In some esoteric way it made me feel like she was enjoying the funeral, spying to see who really gave a darn and who did not.