Honoring the body

The older I get, more I appreciate Hemingway’s description of how to go bankrupt: “Two ways: gradually, then all at once.” It applies to other life situations, including life’s end. My husband’s decline had been gradual from the time of his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s, with one big step down in January 2024 when a UTI led to sepsis. From that point he followed a gradually descending path until last August. At the beginning of the month, he could stand up and walk with no help. At the end he could do neither, ushering in the shower chair, wheelchair, and Hoyer lift.

I thought he might hang on until his December birthday, but he ate his last meal on Nov. 8, and nothing after that. Not even a sip of water. He passed away peacefully the following Friday, with me and our son beside him. Three staggered breaths, and he was gone.

After a moment of stillness, the all-at-once: the hospice nurse, the bath aide, washing and dressing the body, maneuvering the cot from the funeral home around tight corners. Two things struck me. One, how flaccid a body goes once the brain has surrendered control. It makes sense, of course, but I wasn’t prepared for arms as limp as a marionette’s and a head lolling back on a fragile neck.

Two, once he was loaded on the cot, covered, and wheeled out to the funeral van, I realized I would never see him again. Not in this life.

Doug was a contrarian: He liked to do things differently. This is often a good trait, sometimes not. Though affable and kind, he tended toward suspicion and distrust. Years ago, he read The American Way of Death, a harsh indictment of the funeral business, and decided he wanted none of it. “Just put me in a pine box,” he said. No frills, as little expense as possible. Don’t venerate the body; what is it after the soul has fled but an empty husk?

Victor Sweeney would disagree. His memoir, Now Departing: A Small-Town Mortician on Death, Life, and the Moments in Between, describes his vocation as one of love and service to the body and to the small community of family and friends surrounding it. A funeral director’s life is long and irregular hours, difficult and often tragic circumstances, painstaking sessions restoring a sallow, shrunken face to something like it appeared in life. Though respecting anyone’s desire to be cremated, Sweeney is uncomfortable with the reduction. A human being takes up space in life and perhaps shouldn’t pass into nothing so quickly. “As someone who moves dead bodies on a regular basis,” he writes, “I can tell you that humans are altogether too long, too heavy, and too floppy to move around with ease.” Yet, “there’s something to the sheer clumsiness of being human that is both familiar and wholesome.” And endearing, I thought, while cradling my husband’s floppy head.

We buried him in a pine box built by our hospice chaplain. The rules of direct burial (no embalming and as soon as possible) meant that only the family could be present. But I got my wish to see him into the grave.

The vault company truck had already arrived and the concrete grave liner positioned when we got there. We watched as the coffin lowered into a hole shallower than I expected, then each family member tossed in a handful of dirt. The youngest grandchild and I scattered yellow rose petals (like the yellow roses in my wedding bouquet), and we all stepped aside while the vault lid clanged shut and the backhoe driver did his work.

Once the professionals left, we circled the mound and sang “Abide With Me” (which I had sung to Doug sometimes when he was restless). Everyone shared a memory or two—the good ones. My son-in-law said a prayer, and then we all went home to dinner, leaving the remains under the soil of a windy hillside. Doug would have approved. Maybe his spirit is smiling.

When I think of his poor emaciated body at this moment, the flesh shrinking against bones once knit together in his mother’s womb, I know it’s only a matter of swiftly passing years before I join him there. Together we will await the ­resurrection, for our bones to be clothed again in gloried flesh, wherein we will see God.