UNWRAPPING THE BODY by Natasha Singh
1.
You have already seen the pictures on her website: class participants rolled up in white sheets like mummies, lying next to one another on a carpeted floor. Having taken a course on becoming a death doula with this instructor, you know she also teaches about attending the dead.
Whenever she’s called, she shows up in her station wagon with sheets of dry ice. After ritually bathing the dead body, she lays a sheet behind each shoulder blade like frozen wings, beneath the sacrum and hips, and, for the first few hours, below the neck and across the lower abdomen. When turning the body, she is careful to place towels nearby to absorb any fluid expelled from the lungs or stomach through the nose or mouth. Then she commences the ritual wrapping, swaddling the body in fabrics and shawls like she’s delivering a baby back to the womb.
“Three days is the optimal time,” she has told you repeatedly. “Spend at least three days with the dead body.”
When you first heard this, your heart sank, for you did not spend even three hours with your father’s body before it was carried out, flushed pink, and emptied of his spirit. Like a seashell being tossed back to shore, you’d thought. You’d spent less than an hour washing and cleaning the skin that was visible, finding it increasingly difficult to move his limbs because rigor mortis had set in and you were too afraid of bending, pushing, or forcing more compliance from a body that had, in its final year, already complied so much. Using oatmeal soap and a warm washcloth, you’d moved your hands on autopilot, not because you felt numb but because you weren’t quite sure what to do, how to do it, or whether this ritual held any meaning for you at all. You had taken it upon yourself to do it only because your mother used to talk about the ritual bathing of bodies after relatives in India died at home. You’d imagined she would know what to do when this time came – that she would take the lead, as she did with all the other family rituals – but she just sat on the bed across from where your father’s body lay, eyes glassy, chin in her hands.
2.
You recently saw a video of your instructor alongside the family and friends of a deceased person. The video begins not with the death, but with the life of the deceased person before she experiences a fall that becomes her doorway to death. Before her fall, she is lively with sparkling blue eyes and short silvery hair. Statuesque and elegant, she wears a blue silk scarf and bears a countenance that borders on regal. Laughing heartily, she shows off colorful caftans in her closet just above rows of pretty – if not unnecessary – high heels. The camera lens zooms in on grainy pictures of her younger self when she was a dancer, still in her prime.
Though she has cancer now, she shows no visible signs of weakness or distress. In fact, she appears joyous and determined when talking about how she would like to die at home surrounded by loved ones, as if planning not her death but her final dance recital. Though she seems at ease about the inevitable, surely she never imagined what followed. The next frame shows her after her fall. Astonishingly thin, she lies on her side in a hospital bed, tubes going into her, trachea down her throat. She appears to have aged another eighty years.
After your father fell and suffered a hip fracture, he, too, seemed to age another eighty years. Before undergoing a surgery he never wanted, he’d smiled nonetheless – joking with you over FaceTime and raising his hands into a trembling namaste – as if surrendering to the medical machinery that quickly assumed control like a despotic god. Not one of his doctors informed your family about what anesthesia can do to a ninety-five-year-old man already suffering from dementia, so the father who emerged from that surgery was shockingly different from the father who went in.
3.
He lived for another year after that, his survival a bittersweet miracle, for he lost his ability to walk, feed himself, and tend to his garden. Sometimes, when you looked in on him through the app your brother installed on your phone, you saw him sitting alone in his wheelchair, watching the clock while thin rays of light streamed in through partially closed blinds, bathing his body in dim light. You could have spoken to him if you’d wanted, kept him company with your voice. Instead, you’d watched over him with an exquisitely pained yet protective air while your family rallied, convinced he would live at least another ten years.
In the video, your instructor expresses deep regret at this turn of events, at not being able to finish making plans with the now deceased woman who died alone in the hospital, a shell of what she’d been. Since your instructor owns a funeral home, she is permitted to cart the body away in her station wagon, bring it back to the deceased woman’s apartment. After placing it on dry ice on the kitchen table, she invites the women’s family and friends to bathe the body and dress it.
4.
Not long after you finished bathing your father’s body, two people in dark suits entered his room. You had no idea who called them or why they were there. Only later would you curse yourself for being so death illiterate, for not knowing what happens after someone dies. You were so focused on tending to your father while he was alive – keeping vigil during his final days – that it never occurred to you to consider the minutes and days that would follow.
The men in suits asked only your brother to stay with the body. Bewildered, you’d looked to your brother who raised his eyebrows, as if they were shrugging for him. You wondered if the men had come to note the time of death, dress your father in different clothes, or if they were medical examiners sent by the hospice nurses. “Most people don’t want to see this part,” was the only explanation they offered.
You sat in silence next to your mother in the living room, rising only when the men re-emerged, carrying your father past you in a zipped-up blue body bag. As your mother’s protests filled the house, neighborhood, and then the skies, your fingers gripped the sofa’s arm rest like claws. You released a sound so guttural, you became animal. Filled with wild grief and even wilder fury, you watched the men carry your father out of his home, then past his rose garden. “Come back,” your mother kept wailing. Come back. You still don’t know what those words meant. Had she wanted your father to return to his body? Had she wanted the men to bring his body back?
All you know is that something was taken from you that day, not just your father’s body but your ability to determine for yourself what was needed. Maybe you would have felt nothing sitting at his bedside for three days. Maybe you would have kept vigil over the spirit the holy books say is there – hovering above the body, the family, the room – after the body dies. Maybe you would have been able to see for yourself the slow ebbing away of this spirit, for even as you’d bathed your father’s body, he’d worn the most beautiful glow, as if that particular light – and not his white pajamas – were his true and only garments. Or maybe you would have carried his skeletal body onto the lawn in your arms and laid it before the bowed heads of his beloved roses, so that they, too, could express gratitude for his careful tending over the years and offer their blessings for wherever he was going.
5.
After your instructor and the deceased woman’s family and friends attend the dead body, you see it lying in a cheap cardboard box that has been painted in vivid colors. The body is wrapped in silk caftans and scarves from her closet. In theory – and before seeing this part of the video – this ritual had sounded beautiful to you, like something you should have done for your father. But after seeing it, you can’t help but think the body resembles a shriveled apple doll, the kind you used to make in art class as a child. You feel even more disturbed when people begin dancing around it, stopping on occasion to kiss a hollowed-out cheek, or run their hands across wrinkly skin. You shudder as if in the presence of something sacrilege, but the guests seem oblivious to this possible affront, for they flail their arms and sway as if dancing to a song only they can hear.
6.
You suppose the rituals following your father’s death were supposed to be your own grieving song, but they demanded too much, too soon. The funeral director asked for eulogies and a slide show, which plunged you into a prolonged state of doing. Then there were all the visitors who needed constant attention. When your family finally found a Hindu pundit, his prayers held no meaning for you, not only because you don’t understand Sanskrit, but also because your father’s prayers had always been made in silence behind his closed door. While your siblings appeared to have no problem following the pundit’s rapid-fire instructions, you’d bumbled practically everything, as if trying, even then, to rebel against centuries-old dictates.
All these rituals and rites, in the end, had seemed no different to you than the conveyer belt your father’s body was placed on just before it was cremated. While watching the brown box being carried forward, moving closer to the flames – as if keeping time with a drumbeat of meaningless repetition – you did not cry out as your siblings did when the body began to burn. Instead, you’d thought, It looks like a piece of borrowed luggage.
7.
Before your father’s death, you did not know what you truly believed about death and dying. But when you got the news that he had only days to live, a hidden cosmology began to reveal itself like a thing emerging from the depths of the sea. When he spoke to dead relatives in his final days, you saw that you believed in the visitations of your ancestors. When he tossed and turned, picking at his sheets, his clothes, and then his skin, as if trying to remove an unnecessary layer, you saw that you believed in the restlessness of the spirit – its longing to return home. When his agitation began to ease, you saw that you believed in the power of mantras and in the sacred syllable of Om.
Just before the men took his body away, you saw something else that would stay with you: the permanently creased wrinkle of your father’s brow had become astonishingly smooth, an empty page. You’d released a small gasp, as if realizing two things simultaneously: the soul has a doorway through which it leaves and enters the body, and your father’s brow – the space between it – had been that doorway. As you leaned over him, circling that place with your index finger, never had you been so certain that the body is just a shell.
When your eyes wandered across his full frame for a final time, trying to memorize the shape of his absence, you noted his tan blanket lying crumpled by his feet. For a moment, you thought of gently covering him with it, but then you let your hands drop to your sides. Perhaps you knew even then that there would be no way to wrap your father, no way to make a dead body more beautiful than when the spirit still resided within it.
Natasha Singh’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Brevity, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, and South Asian Review.