Preparation

(Found here)

“An Irish nurse taught me how to wash and wrap a corpse. She shut the door of the room and spoke in a low voice as though the man on the bed was asleep. She spoke about ‘the dignity of the dead’. After months of charts and lectures on blood cells and free radicals, this sounded intangible and mysterious. As I stood, hushed, in the middle of the room she snapped, ‘Take off his Band-Aids.’ Then she rolled her eyes when I gasped at the black blood that leapt out from one I peeled back. She was infinitely gentle with the dead man, though. She called him by his first name, with all the naturalness and polite merriment she used with any living patient. A mermaid tattoo stretched from his elbow to his wrist. It sat there on the wrinkled skin, discolored and faded, like the very old and irrelevant thought that it was. ‘Sponge him,’ she told me, ‘get off all the blood stains, and dry him well. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean you leave him damp. Check his teeth are real; if they’re not, take them out. Take his watch off and bag it.’ I was frightened. This was my first dealing with death. I kept expecting him to grab me—so, really, it was life that made me jumpy. The Irish nurse taught me to wrap him in a sheet. We turned him heavily on his side, and as we did so he gave a heartfelt sigh, and I scuttled like an animal or a child. ‘Ah,’ she said, undisturbed, ‘yes; they fart too.’ When we got to wrapping his head I almost could not bear to cover his face, the mouth which had so recently been full of breath and words. He seemed still brimful of life—in the air he expelled, but also in the residue of character and thought that hung in the room. But I drew the sheet loosely over his stubbly face, and sealed it with Sellotape; his heavy head fell against my chest, where I had no option but to cradle it before setting it down, carefully. The Irish nurse tidied the room, and drew open the curtains onto cool and sane daylight. ‘Now we open the window to let his soul fly,’. . .”

 ~Sally Read