Stories
Mr Glad
It is a joy to behold. The eyes light up. We get comments like you’ve made her look twenty years younger or that they are as radiant as the gates through which they have just passed. When you arrive at a client’s you never know what to expect. Death is so varied whether it be a bee sting or a pulmonary blast each passing has its own personality, as individual as a newly born.
One chap had such a strained face. I thought it was because it had been a difficult passing. But no. He had just been an extremely stern fellow through out his life. He had that puritan pout, you know?
I wonder why some of them bother to live. He was strained in the forehead and his mouth had such a grimace that his teeth, what were left of them, were far too exaggerated. He had that look that makes children cry. Normally they just throw their corpses into the ground. The don’t approve of the ritual, unlike the Catholics. I suppose they consider it flattery of a corpse, which in death is like a discarded toenail. Spit and prayer that’s their sort of thing, spit a prayer and hang up the hat of their memory. But this chap was something a bit more special, which is why I was called.
I took one look one look at this fellow and I thought my heart would burst. He looked terrible. The pallor of death on some is a woe to behold. Some of our dears look quite serene, some ecstatic, but I think this fellow had been writhing for quite a period. His wife said he had been fighting to the last, though what he was fighting I didn’t dare asked.
Tenderness is what a corpse needs, and a soul requires. But there was nothing that could be done about that face. It was a horror.
Now, of course, by the time I was called to administer he was already in the throes of rigor mortis, which is a blessing because the actual process of decay is halted. You have a working window of about thirty-six hours, after which they really need to be in the ground or the final service is mucky like the Thames.
I used my time well, I coaxed out the frowns on the forehead by gently releasing the tension around the temples. I applied a little tenderness to the jaw, loosened the muscles behind the ears, all those facial grotesques that strain as the wind changes direction relaxed and vanished. Not a year of age was lost. You cannot un-weather the skin, cosmetics are false even in the living. Besides I don’t consider it my craft to make of someone a waxwork. I find what is there, what life has painted over or perhaps poor judgement has buried. You might consider me a therapist for the dead, I bring out the best in them, make what is cold warm. I cannot bring a body back to life but I can re-kindle what has been lost to the living, uncover a memory, a lost moment, you know the sort of thing and in this man it was a wonder to behold.
And when his wife saw him she fell upon him. Not tragically - lovingly. For someone so old you could say that she reclaimed a gracefulness that age had long since absconded with.
Afterwards she took me aside, quietly, and told me that she could not be more grateful because I had brought to the surface an aspect of her husband that had been so long lost that she had forgotten that it had ever existed at all. I had reminded her of why she had married him in the first place. I had given it all back to her. Not her youth, you understand, her love. Her love.
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