Arlo #2
He was a good man, still young, but he was by no means a bad person, and not even an unthinking one.
In many ways, he was the opposite of Elaine.
He was a bright spot for the funeral home, charismatic and excellent with people.
I had witnessed him pulling a laugh out of those who were, by all accounts, lost to their grief.
Not that he was all jokes and sunshine, he could take his usually upbeat personality and slide it behind a mask of somberness and respect.
Still, he had a natural gift for knowing what to say with most people he interacted with.
It made him a perfect fit during services.
It was even more obvious when you considered that his attention to detail was…
lacking. However, his shortcomings were easy to manage, and it was worth a little extra effort to make sure he was the face people saw when they were here to pay homage to the departed.
“I’m always careful around people when they’re here,” he said thoughtfully. “People don’t need to hear me being a jackass.”
“Your self-awareness doesn’t do you a whole lot of credit,” Elaine piped up as she passed, checking the alignment of the chairs, which was unnecessary. It struck me as odd that she was in the business in the first place.
I knew why Mitchell was here; he had been drifting aimlessly through life until shortly before he began working here, including getting into trouble involving drugs and a car accident.
His grandfather had served with Mr. Dalton decades ago and had apparently made a call, hoping to find work for his grandson, who, while good-hearted, got into trouble if he didn’t have something to focus on.
Mr. Dalton had given me the details when he’d decided to bring Mitchell on, and while I thought it a strange choice at the time, as a funeral home wasn’t exactly a usual place to ‘straighten’ someone up, I hadn’t questioned it.
Which turned out to be a good choice on my part, as Mitchell had clearly proven he could do the work.
Despite his age and immaturity, he had adapted to the work with surprising grace and speed, and none of the discomfort surrounding death and grieving I sensed from Elaine.
Any business that dealt directly with death and dying tended to repel most people, but it also attracted some of the strangest groups of people.
Some people looked at me and saw a quiet, stoic figure and wondered how I ended up working at a funeral home.
I glanced over my shoulder to see Elaine adjusting the large picture of the deceased in happier times. “Elaine, there’s no point messing with it. People will end up bumping into it and moving it. We’ll be lucky if someone doesn’t accidentally knock it down.”
She gave a little huff that I took as acknowledgement and annoyance. “I know. I can’t help myself. Mitchell, let’s go.”
“I know she’s in charge of stuff, but I didn’t know that stuff included me,” Mitchell grumbled.
“We need your smug face out front in case there are early arrivals,” she said, her shoes digging into the carpet as she strode past us. “Arlo is still preparing; he doesn’t need us underfoot.”
Mitchell glanced at me and blinked. “Oh…right. You’ve got your meditation or whatever to do. Sorry about that.”
“It’s not…” I began, then stopped. “Well, I suppose there are worse things to call it. I’ll join you up front shortly.”
“Sure, yeah, whatever, no rush. I can handle things now if I need to,” he said with a shrug.
Huh. That little blip reminded me that although summarizing people in a few neat sentences was normal and sometimes helpful, it was a good idea not to engrave a summary in stone.
For all Elaine’s coldness and lack of empathy and care, she had recognized that my little ritual every time there was a service was one I needed to do.
And Mitchell’s empathy and abundance of social awareness had missed the fact that they had intruded on a private, needed moment.
People, like life, were complex, messy, and had more layers than given credit for.
I waited until I heard the sound of their distant voices before looking around the room again.
Elaine’s fussing, a product of her meticulous nature, but born of her anxiety around death and grieving, had done little to change anything.
The room also began to lose the warmth and light Mitchell carried with him, leaving the soft peace that wouldn’t intrude upon those who came to show their respects.
I turned to the open casket, rolling my shoulders and taking a breath. Once I was ready, I walked up to it and stared into the deceased’s face thoughtfully. I already knew what he looked like, having helped to set up the service and the subsequent burial, but death changed things.
Looking to my right, I took in the large picture on the stand and the collage of images beside it.
He had been a towhead as a child, but his hair had darkened to nearly black as he aged.
He had grown a beard in what I guessed was his twenties, but his hair had remained the same close-cropped style he’d had until his death.
He was a smiler. Even in the pictures where someone caught him in a candid moment, he was smiling as the camera caught him.
Snippets in time caught by a lens. Little moments displayed for others to enjoy, to look back and feel the wash of nostalgia and happiness.
All of which were pinned to a board, a summary of his life.
Twenty-two pictures. Forty-nine years.
There would never be enough pictures to sum up a life.
There were things in every life that could never be put up on a board to mark their importance to the person and the world around them.
There were secrets they kept, some bad, some good, mostly everyday secrets we all kept because they were our secrets and no one else’s.
I let that wash over me as I stared at the pictures, then turned my attention back to the casket.
As always, the cosmetic work had been meticulous and graceful.
I never believed that the deceased, even touched up expertly, could be mistaken for sleeping.
All the memories and secrets had gone with him when his life ended.
His past was memory for the living, his present was a corpse, and his future was forever gone.
I didn’t know if there was an existence after death, though in this business, I heard plenty of beliefs from both sides.
I didn’t think it mattered if there was an afterlife, or what shape that afterlife took.
Whether gone forever or gone for now, he was no longer here, with those who begged, pleaded, and bargained to have another few hours with him.
Mom, my younger voice echoed in my mind as I stared at his still body. Mom, please, mom! Please get up, please, Mom, please! Wake up, wake up! Mommy!
There was no waking up, though, not for my poor mother who had never hurt a soul in her life, or for this man whose life had been summarized in a couple of dozen pictures.
All that was left was a body for people to weep or rage over, memories of his life and death that would sit with the grieving for years to come.
Some would move on, some would even forget him, save for a moment here and there when they looked up from their fixation on their lives and remembered him.
Some might hurt for the remainder of their lives, aching at his absence, but most would learn to live with that hurt and perhaps make a friend of it, and others would never escape it, never make peace with it, never move on.
But there would be no waking up.
No, he did not look asleep, but there was no more pain or suffering, just as there was no hope or joy. The dead did not know happiness, but they did not know sorrow either. They were done with life, entering a void or perhaps something more. No one knew because the dead did not speak.
I bent over, laying my hand over his heart, and murmured the only prayer I had ever spoken in the presence of a body. “May you know the peace in death you were never allowed in life.”
Because no matter how bright and wonderful life was, there was no life without suffering.
The two went hand in hand. Even if his life had been a joy unlike so many people’s, there were still things he had suffered, wounds that never healed, and worries he had been unable to avoid.
Now those things, along with the memories, were gone.
With that done, I stepped back from the casket and made my way to the double doors.
The bathroom down the hallway was empty, and I stepped up to one of the sinks.
Like our latest ‘guest,’ I was a former towhead turned dark, though unlike him, my hair was jet black.
I kept it neat, nearly shorn on the sides and a little longer on the top.
Green eyes were framed by a thin face and a clean-shaven jaw.
On the job, I used a thin layer of makeup to cover the dark circles that hung under my eyes, which were deep-set enough to give the appearance of sleeplessness.
I took a moment to check my phone and saw a couple of texts, one from one of my brothers and another from my adopted mom.
I scanned them to make sure there was no emergency before tucking my phone away.
I’d deal with them later and perhaps drop by the hotel where I’d been raised from the age of ten, owned by my adopted parents.
It had been a few days, which was long enough as far as I was concerned, and if I didn’t show up, they would eventually start worrying.