CHAPTER 12
•May 1918•
Pauline
Did you know people have been caring for their dead since the most ancient of times? I read this in one of Uncle Fred’s books. He’s letting Evelyn read anything in his library that she wants to, and she left a book about ancient history open on the sofa table in the sitting room a few mornings ago when the school day beckoned. Fred has an interesting array of books in his office and in the sitting room—only one shelf in the office is dedicated to publications about his trade. The rest are about nature and history and science—all the things Evie loves to study. I picked up the book to see what Evie had been reading about and saw that she’d stopped on the chapter about ancient rituals for the dead. My interest piqued, I read the chapter in its entirety.
I learned that in every culture in human history, the living have treated their dead with honor and respect, some even with adoration. There is something sacred about the body when the soul has left it, no matter which corner of the globe or how far back you look.
You’d think the opposite would be true, that this tent of flesh, which starts to decompose within hours of the soul leaving it, wouldimmediately be cast aside as worthless. Instead, our mortal remains are given more reverence after Death’s visit than even before it.
It’s as if the body is a candle and the soul is its flame. When the flame is snuffed out, all that is left to prove that there had been a flame is the candle, and even that we only have for a little while. Even the candle is not ours to keep.
And yet how we care for that candle for that stretch of time that it is still ours! How we want to remember the shape and fragrance of the little flame it held.
This fascinating thought keeps me company now when I go into the embalming room with Mrs. Brewster’s basket of combs, scissors, and curling rods: this idea that what we do here is holy more than it is needful. Perhaps I see it that way so strongly because Fred and Thomas ask that I stay away until the chemical process they undertake is complete. When I am called in, the deceased are washed and waxed and dressed in their finest. All that is left to do is primp and prepare their faces and hair for their laying out.
Fred nearly always leaves the viscera intact. Some embalmers thrust a device called a trocar up the navel and tease out the insides in a terrible maneuver Fred says I would find appalling. And he says it’s unnecessary. Unless the cadaver must travel a long distance, or be laid out for many days, there is no need to suck out the innards. Emptying the body of its insides is no new thing, however. I read in Fred’s book that the ancient Egyptians used to remove the brain with a sharpened metal rod shoved up the nostrils. Can you imagine? The organs were also removed and then immersed in salt harvested from the dry lakes of the desert. After the organs were washed and laid to dry in the sun, they were placed in elaborate jars made of alabaster and limestone. The body cavity was then filled with a mix of resin, sand, and sawdust. Linen bandages, often made from cloth saved throughout a person’s lifetime, would be used to wrap the body from head to toe. Lotus blossoms were pressed between the layers of strips.
Then the body would be laid in its beautiful coffin all wrapped upin spices like myrrh and cinnamon, and the jars would be tucked right alongside it. The body would last a long time. A very long time. But the book said that mummies that have been opened and unwrapped look very little like the people they had been several millennia before. Eventually, the candle disappears, too. It just does.
•••
“But children do not belong in the embalming room,” Fred is saying. He and Thomas are getting the funeral parlor ready for a viewing, and the girls are at school. Maggie wants to help me with the hair and cosmetics, and I’ve come to Fred and Thomas with her request. She’d apparently asked Thomas before if she could do this, weeks ago, when he was still learning his way around the embalming room. He’d said then that he’d have to mull it over, thinking perhaps Maggie would lose interest. But she had complained to me last night at bedtime that her papa was taking too long to decide.
“She’s nearly thirteen, Fred,” I reply. “Not so much a child anymore. She just wants to help.”
Maggie’s birthday is indeed fast approaching, and she has said nothing about it. As I made her toast this morning, I asked her what kind of cake she’d like, and she merely shrugged and said any kind would be fine.
This answer and her desire to be with me in the embalming room had me wondering if my companion has been trailing her, too, like it’s been trailing me, and filling her dreams like it’s been filling mine, and if this is the reason why she wants to help me. My heart had begun to somersault inside me because I do not yet trust my companion even though I sense nothing but benevolence from it. How can Death be trusted? It can’t. So I changed the subject and told her as I handed her a plate of toast that I’d ask about her request to help me in the embalming room. I also said that I might need to tell Fred and her papa why she wanted to, though it was I who needed to know, and she’d answered, “I just want to help fix something that will stay fixed.”
“If she wants to help, why can’t she just take on more chores in thekitchen?” Fred says as he sets a wooden folding chair into a row of other chairs.
“Because she wants to dothis.”
Thomas, straightening a chair in another row, looks up at me. “She really still wants to?”
I nod and Thomas furrows his brow. “Is this about Henry? Is it because she’s not done grieving for him?”
This question needles me a bit, though I know Thomas doesn’t intend it to. “Aren’t we all still grieving for Henry?” I reply.
“I didn’t mean she shouldn’t be or that you and I are not still grieving. I just think being inthatroom might make it worse,” Thomas says gently. “It’s a room of dead people.”
When he says this it’s not the first time I think that grief is such a strange guest, making its home in a person like it’s a new thing that no one has ever experienced before. It is different for every person. “Maybe for her it’s the one way to make it better. Not worse.”
Fred is looking at Thomas, seemingly waiting for him to rule on this. Thomas is thinking.
“She hasn’t made new friends here, except for Charlie and Jamie,” I continue. “And Jamie’s leaving has made her so very sad.”
“Jamie is a grown man,” Thomas interjects softly, as if just to me. I can see that he’s picked up on Maggie’s schoolgirl infatuation just like I have, though we have not talked about it. I didn’t think he had noticed, he’s been so busy, and men typically don’t notice those types of things.
“But that doesn’t mean her feelings aren’t real. Helping me might distract her from her troubles.”
“Or intensify them.”
“She just wants to fix something that will stay fixed, Tom. She told me this.”
He ponders my words for a moment. “All right,” he finally says. “We can give it a try. She can assist you from time to time if her other chores are done and she has no schoolwork.”
As I leave the room, Fred reminds me in his most parental tone yet that the embalming fluid is dangerous and that Maggie must be careful around it.
With all that has recently complicated her young life—losing Henry, moving from Quakertown, having to say good-bye to one of only two friends she’s made here in Philadelphia—I understand her desire to repair something that will stay repaired.
She doesn’t yet realize what eventually happens to the candle. She surely will come to understand when she is older, as we all do. Sooner or later she will learn time changes everything, takes everything: sometimes in a blink, and sometimes so slowly you can’t even see it happening.
