“POW!” I hear the noise, smiling at the thought that it’s a fire cracker, maybe even a car back-firing... ”POW-POW-POW!” Three more shots are fired as I put the key in my front door, but then, it’s too late, the door opens and I fall into a pool of my own blood!

Shocking? Maybe, but there wasn’t much pain as I lay there, half in and half out of my apartment, my hands instinctively reaching for the wounds. I feel the warmth of my blood gushing out, washing over my hands, and staining my carpet.

Then? Calm, serene calmness. I know, I should be confused, afraid, at least surprised. Yet all there is, all that exists is a calmness that I can’t explain. Strange men in police uniforms stand over my lifeless form, talking about a drive-by shooting. They shake their heads and call it: “Senseless.” It takes me a minute to realize that they’re talking about me and what just happened.

I’m loaded into a van, it’s not even an ambulance. Someone in the crowd of neighbors and gawkers whispers something painful that stabs me in the heart, something about a ‘meat wagon.’ The doors are slammed shut and my embarrassment ends. I want to make sure someone locks my apartment door, and then I realize it doesn’t matter any more. It’s funny what you think about when you’re dead!

The wheels turn and the van takes me away. I wonder about the tunnels of light, about angels and deceased relatives...I’m not even floating like they say people do. Yet somehow, I ‘know’ things, like what people look like, who’s around, what I look like...but it’s more mental than visual, more conscious than physical. I mean, I ‘know’ so well, I see without looking. Do you understand?

Then, I ‘see’ it, a bright, blinding light! I hear a whirling noise. But it’s only the Coroner turning his light on to examine my corpse. Only his assistant turning-on the saw that will rip open my flesh. The Medical Examiner takes measurements, cuts into my skin, he pokes and prods and probes...he makes some notes. The whole thing is cold and clinical and most of all, very messy, what with blood and tissue and bullet and ashes. “Ashes?” The Coroner can’t even read the sign on the wall, the one that clearly says: ‘No Smoking’ and yet he’s cutting me open? Ha! It still irritates me, well, the idea does. Like I said before, it’s funny what you think about when you’re dead.

The cutting, and smoking are over now. Some greasy looking assistants lift my remains, they put me in a bag, someone pulls the zipper shut. Finally, the goons throw me in a freezer-like box. The latch clicks as the door shuts and I’m left alone in the cold and the dark. I don’t really ‘feel’ it, or fear it though. There is an after-life, and now I ‘know’ it!

I start to wonder if I can communicate with any of the other ‘stiffs’ in this place. They must be ‘conscious’ and ‘waiting’ too, I think. The latch clicks open. Strangers sign and exchange papers, other strangers take my body out of the dark, cold place, out of the Coroner’s building and into the back of a car, a hearse, a Cadillac. At least I’m going out with a little respect, a little style...as if it matters.

We approach the mortuary, a pleasant, home-like, brick building. Indeed, the undertaker and his family live upstairs, the actual funeral parlor being downstairs on the first floor. The driver turns the two-toned, gray and black hearse off the busy street and up the driveway.

A young girl pauses on the sidewalk, in a moment, less than that, in a flash...I know her whole life, I know her every thought. Sadness, I feel it as she looks at the car, the funeral home, and as she remembers...her Aunt Rosie, her favorite relative. The aunt who took her everywhere and who did everything. The aunt so full of life and love. One couldn’t help but love the young, vivacious commercial artist.

There was an accident. Rosie drove off a freeway overpass and crashed in her beautiful Chevy. I feel so much of what this girl feels, it’s almost too much to bear, I want to cry.

By now, the girl is gone and the hearse is parked in the rear of the mortuary. The back door of the car is open, I feel the air, fresh air! Yet the thoughts, the girl’s memories linger and I wonder if I’ll ever meet this Aunt Rosie. She seems, in a word, wonderful!

The driver, whose whole life also flows through my thoughts, walks into the building. He returns shortly with two other men. One of the men, sporting a white lab-coat and a magnificent mane of white/silver hair is obviously in-charge. I know about him too, and how he started this place about twenty-two years ago with his wife. Now, he’s doing quite well though. Almost to punctuate the point, he checks the time on an impressive Rolex watch. His son and the driver share a laugh over a joke as they pull the bag containing my naked remains out onto a collapsible gurney.

In a well-lit, stainless steel furnished room with a concrete floor, the boy and the driver unzip the bag from the morgue and toss me onto yet another table. The mortician in his lab-coat slips into a huge apron, then, he rolls a small tray of tools near my corpse. His ‘helpers’ leave the room and the man turns on a stereo receiver, filling the room with classical music.

He cuts an incision to drain whatever blood is still in my cold, lifeless, slightly blue body. He rolls a machine, a kind-of pump next to me to fill my veins with formaldehyde. While the pump ejaculates its thick, cold fluid deep inside me, the man meticulously sews my lips shut. I think about this, I reflect on how I’ll never kiss, or taste, or talk. For the first time since this happened, I feel just a little lonely, just a little less than human.

The man rinses me off with cold water from a short garden hose. He scrubs my body with a sponge and some disinfectant and rinses and scrubs some more. He’s rough, just washing a dead carcass, an inanimate object. His handsome wife comes in, she’s helped her husband since the beginning. Her job is to fix my hair and shave me. After this basic grooming, she smiles, and even calls me: ‘Handsome.’ “I told you before”; her husband counters with a grin: “No flirting with the customers.” I can feel the love these two people share.

The mortician brings out my blue suit, the one I always liked best. Double-breasted, pin-striped, very stylish. Together, they dress me, put me in my coffin, and then she fixes my tie. The wrong tie! My mother picked it, and she picked the wrong tie! Wait a minute, my mother? She flew all the way in from New York? How sweet!

The woman rolls another table next to me. It’s cosmetics, make-up. Her touch is gentle and caring, but it’s still make-up! I feel the indignity, I feel self conscious. It’s strange, but she only makes me look natural, life-like, okay...’handsome.’ She’s done a good job, I ‘know’ it.

They roll my lifeless body from room to room, the man puts a rosary in my hands folded and resting on my belly. He smiles at this ‘final’ touch. They roll me down the hall and into a room with folding chairs set in silent rows and flowers leaning along the walls. Wreaths of flowers.

My casket is perched on a small, matching pedestal. Briefly, I worry about keeping my balance. I want to help, I don’t want to fall! Then, I forget my fear, and I’m struck by the sense of that blue-ish look, the hue that surrounds me, I know that the undertaker’s wife put that make-up on me, but I sense it, I feel it...all around me...like a glow or something. And it clashes with that tie! Just like my suit. "Why did she pick that tie?"; I ask myself again.

The room is full of emptiness, crowded with empty seats and the sad, sweet smell of flowers...roses, their pungent perfume permeating everything, even the cold air whispering out of the vents near the ceiling.

Unexpectedly, voices, hushed voices, sad voices gather in the hall outside. I know the voices, I know the people, and just as unexpectedly, I’m flooded by their emotions.

Someone opens a book and people scribble some words, then they sign their names. A kneeler is hurriedly brought before my coffin. A priest says some prayers, he anoints me with sacred oils, he gives me what are known as the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. This priest is devout, but he’s also angry about something. He’s very angry about my family’s insistence that my funeral Mass be in Latin according to the Tridentine tradition of the Latin Rite. He doesn’t want to do it, he’s afraid of his bishop. He’s worried about the concept. But it’s my last wish.

My father holds my mother up, she squeezes his arm. As they near, I feel their emotion, their sadness, their pain. I feel all the intensity - I never knew how much, I never realized how much they loved me. My heart, if I still had one, would burst! I want to tell them that I’m okay I want to yell, I want to scream. I want to hold them one last time.

They kneel and pray, my mother repeats my name over and over and over again. My father puts up a strong front, but inside, in his soul, he cries. Silently they mourn and weep, yet I hear and feel it louder than I’ve ever heard or felt anything.

My children are next, my son and my daughter. Oh God! This is unbearable. My son, like my father, tries to be strong, he tries to hold it in. This is terrible, and yet I know how much they love me. It’s horrible and yet it’s fulfilling. Still, I envy the living, if only for the ability to communicate, to hug, to touch. I am with my children, but they don’t know it. I feel their pain, but I can’t comfort them.

A chill seems to pass through me as my ex-wife approaches. It’s the coldness in her dark, shriveled, unimaginative, desperately greedy heart. She makes a show of fake tears, she sobs and cries, she says she’s "sorry." She turns briefly, to make sure the others are looking, after all, what’s a good performance without an audience. She proclaims her ‘love’ for me. Yet I know her only love is avarice. I know her only real tears when she learns that there’s no money for her.

The chill deepens...another empty heart approaches. Rodney, my dearest friend (or so I thought). He smiles a fiendish grin that no-one else can see. His thoughts are on how he can bed my ex-wife and my girlfriend Grace. We helped each-other, we took trips together...once, when I was really broke, he even bought me a pair of shoes. I thought of him as a brother.

Grace brings me warmth again. Her thoughts and heart are pure and good. Her pain is my pain, her sorrow is true. I share her deepest thoughts and memories of our first meeting all those years ago. The dress she had specially made for our first date. Things she never told me, things I never knew. She remembers how impressed I was by her intelligence, her degree, her scholarship - and how she stroked my fragile male ego with her romantic submission.

Salty tears leak from her eyes, her reddened eyes, and I feel guilty, knowing that I should have married her. She never complained, I never understood, I just assumed she was happy.

The seats are full now, and over the next two days people come and unknowingly share themselves with me. My incredibly dedicated boss, Elizabeth, who at one time was a history professor at Yale. My friend Don, who went through basic training with me in the Army. Then there is Tom, a childhood friend, and Jim from Minnesota.

I’m almost irritated by that tiny hole in the ceiling, and then the priest is back...he says some more prayers. He sprinkles some holy-water on me, on my coffin. They close the lid, but it changes nothing, I still see without looking, I still know and feel.

Casket and all, I’m loaded into the hearse. It’s the same car that brought me here. Now, freshly cleaned and waxed, it carries my corpse to church. We drive past this building and that, places people think were important to me. And now I wonder why there’s a hole in the ceiling of the hearse, a little bigger than the one in the funeral parlor, and the sun is shining through it.

My friends carry me into the church, they’re called pall bearers. They put my casket on another stand in the center aisle, near the altar. The Jesuit priest, once again blesses the bronze box with holy-water. Then there’s incense...it smells good. The priest begins his Gregorian chants in ancient Latin. He makes a sign-of-the-cross with his right hand, and the Mass, my last Mass, begins.

I’ve been blessed to live my life again through my friends and family. I’ve been blessed to know their hearts. And now, it all becomes so clear. The large hole in the ceiling of the church, it’s not a hole! The light, the bright, brilliant, warm light isn’t from the sun! I rise, I float, I linger for a moment until the priest sings out: ‘Dominus Vobiscum (the Lord be with you),’ and the tunnel grows, the light shines...I silently say goodbye, and then, I’m gone...

Created: October 29, 1999r.
Last Updated: May 23, 2005r.