Let me help you

My sister-in-law and I drove together to the mortuary. I talked nervously most of the way there, trying to keep my mind busy with trivia so I wouldn't think about what was coming. I'd been successfully dodging that mental boulder for several days, ever since Tuesday evening when my brother called to tell me Mom didn't make it. Even staying at my mom's house, looking through her photos and papers, sleeping in her bed, I could defer the dread by pretending she was just in the hospital again. She'd been so close to death on so many other occasions, and she'd pulled through each time. It was easier to imagine this was just another one of those times. Even standing in the mortuary foyer, talking to the mortician, walking down the hall, I was fine.

But then we turned left and went into the room, and there was her body.

If you've never seen a dead person, let me destroy a common trope for you. A dead person does not look asleep. A dead person looks dead. There's no gentle rise and fall of breathing, no soft muscular movement in the arms or legs, no subtle changes of expression in the face. Everything is completely, impossibly still. The shock of it is realizing that this person who once moved and thought and talked and laughed and loved is now a still, cold object, like a figure made of wax, and she will never move again.

I didn't want to touch her at first. But that was why we were there: to dress her body and prepare her for burial.

It was easier to touch the top of her head, her hair, first. That felt pretty much the same as it always did. Someone had parted her short, straight hair on one side and brushed it back, the way she might have done it herself, and there was something calming about that detail.

Her feet were the kind of cold you don't usually experience with living people, unless they have hypothermia. We started there, working carefully -- "Her skin is very fragile," warned the mortician -- to clothe her. It was oddly like trying to dress a very large doll; we needed help moving her to one side or the other, carefully raising limbs that would not yield, pulling articles of clothing up and around and otherwise into place.

And then I was pulling up the long sleeve of her dress. There was nothing special about that sleeve; it had a simple, straight cuff on the end. I just had to pull it up around her fingers to her wrist. But as I got it into place and smoothed it down, I could hear my own four-year-old voice saying,

"Tighter, Mama! Make them really tight!"

My mama was bent over one of my shoes, trying to tie the shoelaces as tightly as she could. I was already in kindergarten, already reading, already able to do a lot of things on my own, but I couldn't tie my own shoes. And I lived in dread of them coming loose on the playground because I wouldn't be able to tie them again, and I didn't want my classmates to know.

"If I tie these any tighter," Mama said, "I'm going to cut off your circulation." But she pulled them a little tighter, made the knot a little firmer. She was 30 years old, after all, and had boundless energy. "There you go," she said. "I need to teach you how to do this yourself--"

--and then I was suddenly back in the room with the body, with those hands that had tied my shoes, lying so still. And the grief hit me full force, with no way to hold it back -- and I sobbed so hysterically that it must have sounded like laughter.

Those hands that willingly tied my shoelaces so tightly, that changed my diapers, that fed me and washed me and cared for me when I was a tiny infant incapable of doing anything for myself, that did countless loads of laundry and sinks of dishes, that made thousands of meals, cleaned scraped knees and dried tears and patted cheeks, dialed my phone number and wrote loving letters and did a myriad other clever and wonderful things -- couldn't move.

She could do nothing for herself. She couldn't sit up. She couldn't ask for help. She couldn't even make sure her body would be treated with care or dressed with dignity for her own burial.

But she had taught me through years of example how to care for other people, and now I could do this one final thing for her.

It's all right, Mama. I'm here. Let me help you.