Saying my prayers fifteen years ago in Jerusalem I stuck a note in the wall of the Second Temple built by Herod the Great and completed in the late first-century BC. The famous Western Wall that I stuck the note into is actually the top layer of retaining wall below Mount Moriah. The actual bottom of the Temple’s wall is at bedrock sixty feet below. What’s going on here is a complex of little things, the biggest of them all being this. Micrometeorite dust falls on the earth at the rate of a ton every hour.

We knew what to do. My brother and I had done the drill in our heads before. We had a travelling kit of embalming supplies: gloves, fluids, needles, odds and ends. We had to explain to the security people at the airlines who scrutinized the contents of the bag, wondering how we might make a bomb out of Dodge Permaglo or overtake the cabin crew with a box marked “Slaughter Surgical Supplies” full of stainless steel oddities they’d never seen before. When we got to the funeral home they had taken him to, taken his body to, the undertaker there asked if we were sure we wanted to do this—our own father, after all?—he’d be happy to call in one of his own embalmers. We assured him it would be OK. He showed us into the prep room, that familiar decor of porcelain and tile and florescent light—a tidy scientific venue for the witless horror of mortality, for how we slip from is to isn’t.

It was something we had always promised him, though I can’t now, for the life of me, remember the context in which it was made—the promise that when he died his sons would embalm him, dress him, pick out a casket, lay him out, prepare the obits, contact the priests, manage the flowers, the casseroles, the wake and procession, the Mass and burial. Maybe it was just understood. His was a funeral he would not have to direct. It was ours to do; and though he’d directed thousands of them, he had never made mention of his own preferences. Whenever he was pressed on that matter he would only say, “You’ll know what to do.” We did.

There’s this “just a shell” theory of how we ought to relate to dead bodies. You hear a lot of it from young clergy, old family friends, well-intentioned in-laws—folks who are unsettled by the fresh grief of others…. It is proffered as comfort in the teeth of what is a comfortless situation, consolation to the inconsolable. Right between the inhale and exhale of the bonewracking sob such hurts produce, some frightened and well-meaning ignoramus is bound to give out with “It’s OK, that’s not her, it’s just a shell.” I once saw an Episcopalian deacon nearly decked by the swift slap of the mother of a teenager, dead of leukemia, to whom he’d tendered this counsel. “I’ll tell you when it’s ‘just a shell,’” the woman said. “For now and until I tell you otherwise, she’s my daughter.” She was asserting the longstanding right of the living to declare the dead dead….

So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is “just” anything rings as tinny in its attempt to minimalize as it would if we were to say it was “just” a bad hair day when the girl went bald from her chemotherapy. Or that our hope for heaven on her behalf was based on the belief that Christ raised “just” a body from death. What if, rather than crucifixion, he’d opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than “just a shell” he’d raised his personality, say, or The Idea of Himself? Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that? Done the Crusades? Burned witches? Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures. If he’d raised anything less, of course, as Paul points out, the deacon and several others of us would be out of business or back to Saturday sabbaths, a sensible diet, and no more Christmases.

_______________________________________________________

Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade