I went with Mom to the funeral home today to pick out a coffin for Grandma, who died of pneumonia last week even though she’d had colon cancer for two years. While Mom looked a second time at the Southwest Sunset with the real Navajo blanket sewn in, I wandered into the viewing room of someone else’s funeral.
There were maybe fifteen people milling about and chatting in small groups. A few others were sitting in simple pews. One person looked at me with a blank expression and then looked away after a second.
The coffin was at the far end of the room, gleaming white and expensive looking. I walked up to it slowly and looked down on the first dead person I’d ever seen. He was maybe sixty, tall. His face was waxy and bronze in color, and he was wearing a brown suit. It was hot in the room. Too hot to be wearing such a suit, and seeing him in it made me suddenly uncomfortable. I glanced at his face again, half-expecting to see beads of sweat forming.
My gaze wandered down his sleeve and stopped at the watch on his right wrist. A modest Seiko model with a dark lizard-skin strap. It was ticking, and when I compared it to my own watch I saw that it showed the correct time.
On the way home, Mom drove faster than she usually does and at one point, as she was accellerating after stopping at a stop sign, I looked out my window and saw a small boy racing us on foot along the sidewalk. He’d sprinted far ahead of his mother, or babysitter. His head was down as he barrelled ahead, and when he finally looked up to see us, we were way down the street, almost out of sight.