You might as well live

[Published in the February 2008 issue of The Benildean]

My uncle—a young architect—after spending his remaining days wasting away in a wicker bed positioned in his father’s kitchen, succumbed to cancer of the colon one Sunday evening.

The evening he passed on, the family drove two hours to his rural town in the heart of nowhere, the elders interacting through hushed conversations.

The evening of his death was a perfect stereotype of a melancholy circumstance: the heavens were a massive blue-black backdrop of gloom, the stars buried beneath the heavy assembly of sinister clouds. The fields of rice in the dark displayed no emeralds or bottle greens—like colors in the absence of light, they are black in black. The air reeked of animal dirt—the cold cutting through skin in knife-like touches.

My uncle, in our arrival, was stretched out like a willowy doll on his wicker bed.

Realizing the oddity and rarity of the situation, I examined the silent body resting on a white bedspread with a needlework of pink carnations.

The oil of the skin had dried out, leaving a rubbery appearance of synthetic leather with maps of blue surfacing on the abdomen and temples. The eyes were shut tight, sunken and miserable. His hair—the only article of his being that gave the impression of life—waved and fluttered in the evening draft.

A solitary fly settled on his shrunken cheek and leapt its little leaps. However, his facial muscles remained still. Thereafter, a reality had sunk in the four walls of my head: He really is dead; and with that relaxed stillness of a dead tree, my uncle couldn’t possibly be faking it.

It is likely that a rural family invites the local mortician over to prepare their dead for a five day funeral to be housed in their living room.

My uncle’s wife had a neighborhood mortician come after she and the rest of the family had spent a proper amount of time mourning in privacy.

Mugs of coffee were handed out in the kitchen where the embalming took place, with the entire family in observation.

I examined the entire process of embalming: the mortician appeared detached and unaffected —his blotted teeth biting on a half-smoked Marlboro, the cigarette ash peppering the carnation-decorated bedspread.

Plastic pails were carted in and out of the kitchen, mugs of unfinished coffee crowded the sink and small children were escorted to a neighbor’s faucet for water.

The dead’s hair was washed, with a small basin held underneath the neck and the limbs, sponge-bathed. Afterwards, a thick cake of make-up was smeared on the face, covering as much exposed skin as possible, focusing on the shadowed depressions around both eyes. A tint of rose-pink was brushed on the sewn lips and the hair was untangled and combed with a hairdresser’s hairbrush and a blob of pomade.

Soon enough, a freshly pressed suit was handed to the attending mortician and after enfolding the body with strip after strip of packing tape, the dead was clothed and made to appear like a spruced groom in willing anticipation of his bride.

My uncle appeared like a three-dimensional portrait of a slumbering man behind the glassed window of his auburn coffin. He seemed all right laying there, his sunken cheeks blushed with an artificial glow of pink powder, masking any hint of the disease that took his life at a time when he had so much to live for.

I questioned the impassivity of the mortician at handling the body and my mother responded: That body is now but an empty, hollow case. He is no longer there.

I thought about what my mother had said and imagined my uncle seated unseen on a kitchen stool, in observation of his body’s two-hour embalming. Then, he probably drifted off to somewhere, taking pleasure in his new being in an existence far from a corporeal existence. Where ever he drifted off to, I can only imagine. All I know was, right there, the only thing I could acknowledge in my heart was the overwhelming feeling of consolation at being alive.