"with the grace of a corpse"
2006-01-11 9:47 p.m.

I had a dream last week that I saw your face decaying rapidly. A week's worth of decay every minute. That was the extent of the dream - your physical decomposition. The colors were gruesome as you would expect colors of the dead to be. Or maybe not the dead, but the embalmed. When your death was still somewhat recent, your face was red. They said that the blood ran to it and pooled overnight, but you looked fine to me. A bit dirty, leaves and soil in your hair. Otherwise, you looked like you. Your hand felt like your hand, only colder. I wish I had taken the opportunity to kiss your forehead.

Three weeks later, you wouldn't have recognized yourself. The ground wanted to take you in, and even though you'd been embalmed, everything was diving hard downward. Your muscles were slack and drooping, as was the flesh on your fingers. Your neck was a flat sack, almost a pillow for you. I think your chest may have protruded some as the skin that otherwise would insulate it fell soft and low. As your cheeks sank, your lips stretched longer, five plus inches. The saddest part was your poor masculine nose - the tip pulling down made the bone more prominent and gave you a grand Roman nose. It was distinguished, and you might have thought it suited you. All the same, it was not how I remembered you.

And so I tried not to focus on your nose or mouth (the mouth frightened me most). I pulled out the characteristics which remained closest to your image: your eyelids and fingernails. Your nails still had dirt in them and were bruised underneath. A rotting hole grew in the top of your hand, but I tried to ignore that. Along with the small black holes and crevices that appeared in your face. It looked almost like a dusting of soot had settled into your pores and wrinkles. Kari, the mortician, said she veiled you because "some things you just can't control." Megan said Barbara had touched you. I did not touch you.

I did bump your casket three distinct times. It frightened me to do so, but I was determined to be intentionally loud about it. I really expected you to jump up and scare the crap out of me, to be honest. It seems like something you would get a kick out of. But you laid still.

I lifted your veil and put my letter in beside you. I looked at your pictures, and the disparity between a live body and a dead one was unavoidably clear. I tried to wait for a song to come on that sounded familiar, one I could hold in my memory forever as the last song, but I think it was all obscure Bach, and I didn't know any of it.

I pulled a chair up from the arranged rows and sat by you, trying to memorize your features despite their foreign appearance. It didn't help. I looked again at your fingernails, and held my hand up to yours, trying to see yours in mine. The knobby joints, maybe, were alike. I spent a long time again examining your eyelids, and wondering at the eyes underneath them. I whispered to you, and I turned around and walked away. I took at least 15 prayer cards on my way out. It was dark now, and the cold sky was overcast. But I still saw stars and saw my own breath leaving me.

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