My father asked if I wanted to see my grandmother's body, and I refused.
Both parents went to see her, adorned with purple flowers, and the head which age had caused to slump to one side now straightened at last.
I was assured she is at peace, and it has even been said that she now exudes a permanent look of happiness. Nevertheless, it was more than I could do to look for myself.
In previous posts, I remember mentioning some of the television images which terrified me as a child: Kennedy's brain being scrambled by an assassin's bullet; the Turin Shroud; the mask of Tutankhamun; an anti-smoking advertisement showing a diseased lung with a doctor pointing at the most damaged parts with a stick or wand of some description.
I keep myself far from death, even as it is theoretically around the next corner. I am scared to acknowledge it lest a vague acquaintance turns stalker, misting up the windows of my flat with its kisses; sending its blankets through the mail; wrapping me around its finger as I sleep; composing threatening missives from NatWest that call in the debt.
Yet tomorrow, I have to look death in the eye, and he'll no doubt make a note of my name. This is what I did to your grandmother, progressively cutting away at her earthly ties, severing them one by one until she found rest.
If only the western mind could shed itself of the image of the grim reaper, the dark giant with a scythe on an insane, endless rampage. If only this western mind could!
If only the bleak synopsis could be dissolved, that of the infinite gathering its harvest. No-one, least of all your author, sees death as the gift which comes when all our work is done and all our lessons learned.
No, it takes an Elisabeth Kübler-Ross to do that, to free us from frightening images, to cease the lips which utter bitter comparisons between death and taxes. Kübler-Ross would have it that the untethered soul of my grandmother is now floating brightly like a gaudy shirt on a line or a butterfly, adjacent to that of the husband she lost too quickly.
On the eve of the funeral - it starts in ten hours - I thus know that the body which is left behind and which I cannot let my eyes turn towards, is nothing more than a vessel which carried my grandmother's energy, and that energy returned to the cosmos last week.
It is long gone, the arrears settled with nature, and becoming the soil, the breeze, the trees, a cycle to which we attribute petrifying mental pictures and fearsome titles.
The pictures, the soubriquets, do nobody any good. It is natural, nothing more, and the inevitability of death should not cause one to freeze. Perhaps in future I might convince myself that I said no to the visit because the husk I would see is no more my grandmother than the photograph of her that I have, but between the reader and I, there is still some way to go until I reach that exalted state of mind.
