Numbed to Death

M.R. Lehman Wiens

The parking lot was empty. Angie took in one breath of fresh, spring air before locking the front doors. The metal bolt clicked softly inside the heavy oak. In the silence of the Owen Family Funeral Home, she felt all the tension release from her lower back, her jaw, her temples. It had taken hours, but she’d finally shooed away the last of the mourners, sending them out with the firm, compassionate tone that was a tool of her trade. At last, she was alone.

Or, almost alone. One person waited for her, one more task before the burial tomorrow. The coffin in the chapel needed to be closed, and then the body would have to be moved from its place on the bier to the refrigerated chamber in the embalming room.

It had been a successful service, she thought, one her father would have been proud of. Her mentor, her boss, her colleague, the man that had caught her opening the casket of a burn victim when she was eight. He’d been angry, but his anger had always been soft. A week later, he called her down to the preparation room. Together, they’d excised her love of horses and Barbie and karaoke and stuffed the resulting cavity with the cold smell of embalming. She learned how to dress a dead body, and how to tie a man’s tie—a skill her father somehow lacked. They applied makeup to the still faces of neighbors, friends, and strangers.

Her brother had never been interested in the family business; his time with Dad was all chess and baseball and model ship building. Sometimes, Angie thought that she and Robert each carried half of their father with them; she took his career, and her brother took everything else.

“Why do you have to be such an unfeeling piece of shit?”

Robert’s words echoed in her head as she straightened the chapel’s chairs. Words he’d spat at her three days ago, words that still groaned beneath the floorboards. She knew he was right; knew that working with death all day numbs you to it, changes it from emotion into science and fact. But letting real emotions in, even for a minute, was dangerous.

“You have to shut it off, Angelica. If you let yourself feel it, you’ll never stop.” Her father’s voice replaced Robert’s, speaking words her brother never heard. And their father was right; you let yourself feel a little sad as you prepare your fifth-grade teacher’s body, and then the dam breaks, and you’re crying for the old widower last spring, the orphaned college student last week, the mourners, the mourned, and the ones that no one weeps for.

“I’m not unfeeling. I feel plenty. But it’s too much,” she’d spat back at Robert.

“And I resent the emotional imposition of people that expect me to comfort them or be sad because I’m being paid!” She said this last part out loud to the empty chapel, her words deadened by the soft panels and heavy carpets. It was her job to prepare the body of a loved one, to breathe life back into their cheeks with a makeup brush, not to dry the tears of those left behind.

“I know how it sounds, but I can really only afford to care about preparing the dead.”

The sound of someone knocking came from the lobby, and she jumped.

“We’re closed—”

 Something pounded against the heavy oak, the doors shaking in their frames.

“Hey!” she shouted. Running from the chapel to the lobby, she unlocked the double doors and threw them open. They rebounded against the walls, swinging back into her shoulders as she stepped forward onto the portico.

The parking lot was still empty. The setting sun glazed the pillars of the funeral home’s facade, turning them a dull orange. The wind was picking up, rushing and filled with the cool scent of rain.

She waited, listening.

Ding-dong ditchers. Fairly harmless, if annoying. She was sure if she walked around the outside of the building, she’d find a group of teenagers hidden in a bush, barely containing their laughter. They were children, dealing with their fear of death in the only way they knew how. She went back inside, but did not lock the doors. Next time, she’d catch them.

A voice whispered that she was avoiding the body in the chapel, and she ignored it. She brewed herself a cup of tea in the small kitchen off Visitation Room 1, and took it with her back to the lobby. The couch there was rarely used, more a picture of welcome than an actual invitation. It gasped out a small cloud of dust when she sat.

She’d never thought of the funeral business as weird; it was just what Dad did. Then, hidden in a dark part of the middle school auditorium, her first kiss told her that her hair smelled like formaldehyde. She almost told him that his breath smelled like dogshit, and that it hadn’t been her idea to try making out between the stage curtains. But even as she stared at his mouth and the blonde wisps on his upper lip, a slide show of her peers began to run through her mind. Strange looks from across the cafeteria, children stepping to the other side of the hall as she passed.

A horrible stream of ice filled her veins, pulling her down through the stage and into a cold oblivion. She found Jessica Hunt’s grandfather’s funeral, buried and forgotten in that darkness. Jessica sobbed into her shoulder as the pallbearers carried her Pop-pop away, and then refused to speak to Angie the next day at recess. Jokes about how life-like her makeup looked echoed in her ears, vibrating into hard iron bars, all of it framing a solid cage of othering.

That was years ago, though. Death was closer to them all, and the few classmates that stayed in town now eyed her with a wary respect. Death was waiting, a reality that could not be denied. She became their shepherd, the town’s Charon, and as long as she was alive, she would meet them all. If the young were struggling to deal with that concept, she would be more than happy to instruct them.

There was another knock at the door, sharp and insistent, matching her heels as she stood and strode across the wood floors.

Stepping onto the portico, she caught a glimpse of a sneaker disappearing around the corner. Without thinking, she kicked off her heels and sprinted after it barefoot. She trampled the marigolds, shoved past a white spruce, and flung herself around the corner of the building. The three teenagers let out a yelp as she appeared, and then she was screaming too, the back of her throat burning, pressure building behind her eyes and ears, and even as the three boys were sprinting away across the parking lot she was chasing them and still screaming, tears streaking across her face and back into her hair.

And then the boys kept running, crossing the street to a driveway and a waiting car. They honked and jeered at her as they drove away.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, and black clouds threatened to steamroll the sunset. She wanted to sob, to destroy something, but it was as if she’d been hollowed out, drained and frozen like one of her clients. Her feet were bleeding, she could tell by the warm, sticky feeling between her toes. Still, she felt no desire to bandage her feet, or to go inside. Lightning crackled and spit across the sky. Her mind moved back into the chapel, and she watched herself closing the casket one last time. The face, drained of blood by her own hand. Formalin was settling into the spaces the blood left behind, the paleness hidden behind a light coat of rouge. The hands clasped over the chest, hands she had washed, nails trimmed and neatly polished. The body’s suit, pulled from Dad’s closet, the one he wore for every funeral. A red silk tie, still knotted, that she had slid over his head.

Rain began to fall, and she wished she could cry. The parking lot was empty, but for the first time in her life, she wished it wasn’t. She wanted the mourners to return, wanted their hands to softly pat her shoulder one more time. She wanted to wait for the door knockers to come back so she could invite them in, give them tea and cookies, and let them soften the hardness of her soul. Her suit was getting wet, but she couldn’t move, could barely breathe, and Angie prayed that a flash of lightning and thunder would crack her open and leave her bare.

Her phone rang, vibrating inside the pocket of her slacks. She silenced it automatically, pushing the buttons through the cloth. Angie turned back toward the chapel, and then stopped. The phone was ringing again. Pulling the phone from her pocket, she glanced at the screen.

Robert was calling.

With one shaking thumb, she answered the phone.

On the other side of the call, Robert Owen was surprised she picked up.

“Hey,” he said, his voice soft.

The line was silent.

“Angie, I wanted to talk about earlier.”

He waited, listening. There was a flash of lightning across his car’s windshield, and then he heard her take a short, ragged breath. Angie Owen began to sob. In the background of the call, thunder rumbled, and then was echoed outside his own window, the sound racing itself through time and space. He said the only thing that felt right.

“I’ll be right there.”

Top Ten

10 things to do with my body once I’m dead, ranked from most preferred to least:

1. Compost me, and give bags of the soil to my friends
2. Natural burial beneath a black walnut tree
3. Cadaver lab
4. Forensic Body Farm
5. Cast me as Yorick in a production of Hamlet
6. Burial at sea
7. Funeral pyre on a Viking longship
8. Cremation, and then shoot my ashes into the atmosphere on homemade model rockets
9. Mummification, as long as I’m wheeled out for family reunions
10. Traditional embalming and burial