5. SHOPPING AROUND

At  two o’clock in the afternoon, approximately twelve hours after Em’s death, Solitaire and her stepson Zach drive to the Heavenly Heights Mortuary and Old Pueblo Crematorium.  It is in the center of town, a modest, Spanish-style building set back from the street with a bit of grass and geraniums and three sago palms guarding the entry.

“I think we should shop around a bit,” Zach says as they pull up in front.  “I know a guy who says he can do it for half-price.”

 Zach always knows “a guy”—usually it’s a chap named Lester --  who knows another guy who’ll do it for half price.   “It,” which Solitaire had formerly regarded as an inherently innocuous two-letter objective pronoun, has evolved into a kind of “Lester’s List” of cosmic proportions that encompasses anything life can conceivably throw your way:  cut-rate circumcisions, bank heists, church socials, Mexican dentures, bar-mitzvahs, refrigerator repairs, revolutions, firing squads, tuxedo rentals,

gun-running, body-part implants and/or reductions, fake passports  

(ditto visas and green cards), prom parties, quinceañeras (with or without mariachis), prayer retreats (with or without fasting),  matricides,  hot watches, nose jobs, Jimmy Choo knock-offs and – it should go without saying – burials and cremations.

"Did Lester pick up a cheap crematorium at a yard sale," Solitaire asks, "or did it fall off the back of a truck?'

“He knows a guy who’s a major share-holder in an international chain of funeral homes.  They deal in quantity so they can afford –“

                                                                                                            
“International?  You mean like…  across the line?”

“Well, yeah… I guess so.  They’ve also got a fleet of hearses, so transport’s not a problem.”

“I don’t think your Dad wants to be cremated in Ciudad Juarez.  The Department of State has it on their no-go list.  Besides, we don’t even know what the price is yet.”

“Lester says he can beat any price.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” says Solitaire.

“I just don’t want to see you get manipulated or pushed around by one of these slick Six-Feet-Under types.  Obviously they’ve got some kind of deal going with that hospice outfit.”  

“That’s possible,” Solitaire concedes.  “On the other hand, they’re providing a service that’s a convenience to all parties.  I mean, where would we stow your Dad while we’re – quote -- shopping around? “

“Don’t you have an extra fridge in the store room?”

“It’s a side-by-side.”

“We can stand him up.  It’s only for a day or so.”

Solitaire rests her head against the seat-back.  Somehow, she’s wound up in a David Lynch movie and she’s wondering when it will end.

“Kidding,” Zach grins.  He pats her on the shoulder, “Just trying to make you laugh.”

“I know,” she sighs.  “It’s okay.”

“Remember,” Zach says as they walk from the car, “these guys are piranhas -- they’ll nibble you to death – five hundred here, five thousand there -- before you know it you’ve bought Dad a marble mausoleum for a hundred thou.  So my advice is –- keep your business wits about you.”

“My what?”  Solitaire, who on her best day has less business sense than her  Shih-Tzus, has been suffering severe sleep deprivation for weeks and now has a bad case of brain-fog.

“Maybe I could offer him a few poker lessons in exchange for –“

“Oh, please …”                                           

A professional poker player, Zach plays mainly online, but also teaches classes and gives private tutorials.  His nom de jeu is “Poker Moses.”  His business card, recently designed, shows a stone tablet with the Ten Commandments of Poker (each one bulleted) and a long, gnarled finger sternly pointing at one of the bullets. 

His brother Benjamin, who deals poker at a casino near Three Points, closely scrutinizes the card.  “Is that meant to be an index finger or a middle finger?”

“That’s the stupidest question I ever heard,” Zack replies.

“Not at all.  It’s basic Byzantine iconography – if it’s the index finger, Moses is pointing the way, saying ‘Thou shalt raise!’  If it’s the middle finger, he’s flipping the bird, ie, ‘Thou shalt not!’   A huge difference, injunction-wise.”

  Solitaire, herself, thinks it looks as though Moses is pressing an elevator button.

THE MOM-AND-POP MORTUARY

Entering the den of piranhas, Zach and Solitaire are immediately set upon by a cocker spaniel so brimming with the joy of puppyhood that he just can’t stop wriggling.

“Wriggles!”  From somewhere within, the voice of God (a female here) commands, “Sit!”  The dog tries desperately to obey but can’t quite manage it and his bottom goes on wagging in a kind of rear windshield-wiper action.

Mrs Wriggles, a handsome streaky-blonde woman in a tailored V-necked dress, proffers her condolences and informs them that her husband, Wally, will appear momentarily.  She then offers them a seat, a cup of coffee, and a spectacular glimpse of alpine cleavage as she scoops up the still-undulating “Wriggles,” tucks him under her arm, and disappears into an office.

“Well,” says Zach judiciously, his eyes tracking the disappearing backsides of Wriggles and his mistress, “this seems like an okay sort of place.”

“I thought you wanted to shop around,” Solitaire says.

“I’ve got a gut instinct for these things,” Zach says, his hands tracing mystical circles in the air, “and the fong shoo is right.  Besides,” he smiles,  “a good pair beats a couple of ducks almost any day.”

Solitaire, a pushover for dogs, agrees that the fung shwei feels right, and that so far she likes the Wriggles family.

And so this decision, like so many of life’s major decisions, is arrived at in the usual objectively analytical, rational and businesslike fashion. 

Waiting for Wally, Solitaire thinks back some twenty years, when she attended to the crematory arrangements of a much-loved great Aunt in Carmel-by-the-Sea.  The mortuary, in Monterey, was dark in décor, heavy on crucifixes, somber in tone, and Victorian in its implicit threat of a hideous Hereafter:  were you really going to Heaven, or might you be cast out --and down – into That Other Place?  Might you be impaled for Eternity on the devil’s toasting fork?  Might you, at the very least, find yourself lingering overlong in that dreary old holding pattern called Purgatory?  The undertaker himself, gloomy and cadaverous (what else) in a three-piece black suit, was straight out of Dickens.  Emerging shakily from the shadows into the sunlight, Solitaire shuddered, as, presumably, she was meant to do. 

Goodbye to all that!  

The Heavenly Heights Mortuary and Old Pueblo Crematorium is propelled by an entirely different philosophy, one that is essentially secular and christian with a small “c,” and anyone who books passage to the Next World through their good offices need have no fears about the fires of Hell, not if the Ullmers, which turns out to be their family name, have anything to say about it.

Their gentle, cheerful optimism about your Loved One’s long range future is clearly reflected in their pristine pastel decorating scheme:  the cherry-pink and Wedgewood blue paintings of sylvan landscapes, the baby blue brocade wing back chairs, the blue and white cabbage-rose slipcovered sofa, the vases of fabricated pink roses and blue hydrangeas, the little porcelaine dishes of cellophane-wrapped peppermint candies, the hint of rose-scented freshener in the air-conditioned room.  The sole concession made to an unpredictable and potentially uncontrollable grief is the bouquet of pastel boutique Kleenex boxes reassuringly placed on every shining, dust-free surface.

When Wally appears, Solitaire, who had paid scant attention to him earlier that morning, observes that he, like his establishment, is freshly-scented and dust-free.  Trim, fit and boyish in a light blue polo shirt and crisply pressed chinos, he leads them down the hall to the conference room.  Along the way, he tells them a bit about himself – that his family is from the Midwest, that they moved to Arizona to escape the harsh winters and to indulge their love of the outdoors … hiking, swimming, tennis … and that his two girls are heavily into gymnastics.     

“How did you get into the mortuary business?” Zach asks.

“Purely by accident.  When I was in college I took a summer job as an apprentice at a mortuary and I liked it.  I thought, ‘Hey, this is something I can really do!’  I’ve been doing it ever since and it’s given me a great sense of satisfaction to make a fair living and help people, too. "

“I guess the work’s steady,” Zach says.

Wally smiles. “Yeah … death and taxes."  He shrugs.  "Steady, not too stressful.  I like to hold cremations to about four a week.”  He turns quickly to Solitaire.  “Sorry, didn’t mean to be insensitive.”

“No problem.”  She smiles.  She’s back in that David Lynch movie, wondering how to get out.

The conference room is the business heart of the establishment.  The lighting is subdued and the items on display are spotlighted.  One wall is lined with casket samples, just the ends, which stick out of the wall like ornate, brass-handled filing cabinets. The samples are offered in a prism of muted colours from dove grey and azure to oxblood and malachite, and range in price from $385 to $13,000.  They look built-to last, able to withstand every underground assault from earthworms to earthquakes, and every test of time right up to, and possibly through, the Resurrection.  A claustrophobe’s ultimate nightmare. 

Two other walls are lined with urns of every shape, size and price ($40 to $3,000) for containing the ashes, or what are referred to in the trade as “cremains:” memorial boxes of carved wood or etched bronze, cloisonne and celadon ginger jars, brass bookends for couples.  On the bottom shelf, not illuminated, is a sturdy rectangular box in basic black plastic, standing upright; this is the box in which Em, unless Solitaire orders something different, will be returned to her.

They sit down at the conference table.  Wally hands them each a manila folder with price sheets and information about assorted funeral and cremation packages, as well as official state permits and death certificates.  He tells Solitaire that he can’t cremate her husband until he has an official permit, which he doesn’t expect to come through until Friday – this is now Monday – and therefore her husband will probably not be cremated until sometime over the weekend. 

“Where is he?” Solitaire asks.

“What?  Well, he’s here,” Wally says, “under refrigeration.”

“Is he in one of those pull-out steel drawers?”

“You mean like those morgue shots they show on TV?  No, we don’t use those anymore.  It’s more like a refrigerated …um…”

Solitaire glances at Zach; he looks stricken, as though his father’s death has only just hit home.  She realizes suddenly how selfish she has been, how her relentless need-to-know, her desire to immerse herself in Em’s body and soul before he goes up in smoke has desensitized her to the pain of his children, especially Zach who has tried so hard, in his quirky way, to help her.    

“Zach,” she says, and he starts, “perhaps you and Wally could discuss the various options.”

“The basic cremation package,” Wally says to Zach, “is $1495, which includes transport of the remains, refrigeration, obituary notices, guest registry, acknowledgment cards, services of the staff, cremation with a memorial service in our chapel, plus an optional $150 honorarium for clergy and $150 for a reception with cookies and –“

"Wally," Zach interrupts him, “we've pretty much decided to have our own memorial service and reception at home.”

In the end, they order the “Direct Cremation” package ($800), which includes transport, five days refrigeration, on-site cremation, basic particle-board container and plastic urn, plus $25 for the permit and ten copies of the death certificate at $15 per copy.  The total comes to $975 plus 8.1% state sales tax.  Solitaire hands over her American Express card and hopes it won’t be rejected.

“I think that’s a fair price,” Zach says when Wally leaves the room, “I doubt Lester could have done much better, frankly.”

"Probably not," Solitaire agrees.

She thinks of Em lying nearby in his sky-blue shirt, locked in a refrigerated unit, some sort of steel vault, and she wonders if Em is sharing it or if he is alone in the dark.  She stares at the painting on the wall; another of those pastel landscapes, this one of waterfalls and a meandering river, a flower-strewn path winding beneath a blossoming jacaranda, and the whole arched over by, yes, a rainbow.  And she wonders why this painting is here and what it has to do with Em lying in the dark in a refrigerated locker in nothing but his sky-blue shirt.

4. THE COUNSELOR OF GRIEF

Wrapped in an anoetic fog of mindless consciousness, Solitaire lay waiting beside her husband’s corpse.  Eyes shut, her right arm angled across his girth to clasp his hand, she pressed her face against the immobile bulwark of his chest.

Through the closed door,  she heard the nurses noisily chattering and clattering away, apparently setting out medications for morning dispensation.  What a racket they made -- enough to wake the dead.  But, in fact, it wasn’t.  She peered at Em in the gloom and saw him still lying stone cold beside her.  A pale haze of first light filtered through the scrim of white curtain, backlighting his form and giving the crowded cubicle an unlikely aura of religiosity.  Carefully disengaging her hand from his stiff fingers, she tentatively placed it on his unbeating heart and felt only the hard shell of his pacemaker.  Was it still working?  Does a pacemaker stop when the heart stops?   She guessed not.  Perhaps it did not even  know that its host had died and that it was a superfluous guest in an empty house.   It repelled her to think that though Em's heart had shut down, his pacer, the last straggler at the party, danced on without him.   

Solitaire wondered if Em’s soul had left his body.  She thought that it had, but who can say?  The ancient Greeks, who practiced precise burial rituals, believed that it was necessary to close the mouth and eyes of the deceased so that the psyche or soul would not escape and wander off in disconsolate confusion, but would stay home, as it were, remaining safely within the body during the two-day laying-out period prior to the funeral.  It was, in effect, a security device, in lieu, she thought, of a motion sensor.

In her minimal reading on the migration or transmigration of souls, Solitaire has noticed a curious gender discrepancy in the depictions of psychic travellers.  In the older paintings and drawings, the soul, whatever the sex of the deceased, is depicted as a female, whereas in the more modern imagery, the departing soul is a male -- often attired in a business suit and tie.

This slavishness to convention is in itself a bit odd.  Unless he is struck down in a board room while giving a power point presentation, a person on the point of death, or even in the throes of a near-death experience, is most likely to be situated in a hospital, hospice, home, automobile, battlefield, bottom of a lake, bath, etc, in which case he or she would be wearing a gown, robe, uniform, swimsuit or nothing at all -- in sum, almost anything but a business suit. Perhaps the Soul is dressing up for his job interview with God.  But God, if we can believe Michelangelo, is a sartorial slouch who, even in the Sistine Chapel, never wears anything but flowing robes and bare feet, and obviously wouldn't be caught dead in a business suit.  No slave to fashion He.

Solitaire's mind has by now begun to wander so far afield that she is beginning to fear for her sanity.   She thinks that if she lies here much longer she will most certainly go mad and is therefore relieved to hear an approaching hum of soothingly low masculine voices. The hum increases, the door opens, and in a moment she is being drawn to her feet and embraced by Em’s sons, Zach and Benjamin.

Zach, the elder of the two, is a single father of two small daughters.  Rising early to get them ready for school, he has picked up Solitaire's message, left the girls with a friend, and driven to his brother's, arriving at the hospice around six.

As they lead her from the room, Solitaire clutches Zach by the arm and whispers fiercely,  “They won’t let me change Em’s clothes.  You've got to do it.  Please.”

Zach nods.   Pausing at the nurse's station, he says to the tech, “Can we get some coffee?” 

Socorro looks at Kristee.

“Get them some coffee,” Kristee says to her subordinate. Her tone is crisp.

Zach takes Kristee aside while Benjamin and Solitaire follow Socorro to what is called the "Family dining room," where they sit down at a long table covered with a protective cloth. Through eyes dull with fatigue, Solitaire observes that although the intent has doubtless been to create an atmosphere of homey elegance, the mission has gone awry. Reminded of a Dylan Thomas story set in a warehouse piled ceiling-high with chairs, she feels suffocated by a depressing clutter of dark furniture --  consoles and desks, sideboards and coffee tables, love seats and, most especially, chairs, as though in expectation of burgeoning generations of extended families lounging around idly as they wait for their loved ones to make up their minds: stay or go, live or die, to be or not to be?  In her deranged state of mind,  these chairs seem to take on surreal characteristics.  Mutant Chippendales clad in fuzzy brown and maroon stripes, line up on either side of the table like importunate pensioners demanding to be fed; in the reception room, overstuffed arm chairs and sofas, similarly upholstered, jostle for space like dowagers at a dance; behind them sit desperate duos of dutiful wallflower chairs, whilst dusty dieffenbachias, false family retainers, stand sentinel in corners, guarding tabletop arrangements of plastic pears and pine cones that gleam like heirlooms with coatings of Lemon Pledge.

“It’s done,” Zach says, sliding onto a chair.  “But just the shirt -- too late for the trousers.”

“Well.. at least he won't have to wear that wretched hospital gown.”

It is close to seven o'clock when Paul Cantwell, the Grief Counselor, rides in like the cavalry from Benson and the relief on Nurse Kristee's face is visible as she briskly ushers Solitaire into the Bereavement Room.

Solitaire has barely entered when she finds herself enfolded in Cantwell's long spidery arms.  He is exceptionally tall -- six-four, or five -- and thin, youthfully good looking in that anodyne way that one often encounters in the west.  Like the Migrating Soul, he is dressed in a jacket and trousers (no tie).

"I'm so sorry for your loss," he murmurs, bending over nearly double to place his face close to her's.

Unaccountably and infuriatingly, Solitaire, who had thought the well-of-tears was temporarily dry, bursts into sobs.  But Cantwell, a certified bereavement practitioner, after all, is ready for her and with the speed of a prestidigitator simultaneously produces a box of Kleenex and sweeps her into a brown and maroon arm chair.

Solitaire hates this man on the spot.  She knows it's unreasonable; he's been kind and sensitive, the very embodiment of caring, waiting courteously while she mops her face, sniffles, gulps, hiccups, blows her nose.  But there it is:  she hates him.  It's visceral.  She can't help it.

"Try to take comfort in the knowledge that your husband has gone to a better place."  Cantwell's voice is almost unbearably gentle, as though he were smoothing baby oil onto her scorched psyche.

To Solitaire's basic hard-core hatred there is now annealed a top coat of inexpressible loathing, contempt and searing detestation for Cantwell.  Far from taking comfort, she wants to take a weapon and kill him  -- to split his skull with an ax down to the jawbone as the Vikings did to their enemies in battle.

"What place is that?" she asks.

He blinks with surprise.  "Why ... Heaven."

"But you can't possibly know that, can you?  No one knows."

"You're wrong there," he says, smiling with equable certainty.  "We have centuries of evidence, reports from the dying and the near-dead, those who've gone through NDE's (near-death experiences) -- highly descriptive visions of departing Souls ascending to Paradise...

... not to mention innumerable accounts of Souls rushing toward the light at the end of a long dark tunnel..."

"I thought that was Vietnam,"

"Excuse me?"

"The light at the end of the tunnel ..."

A tiny frown like a hairline fracture appears on Cantwell's implacable brow and Solitaire knows her flippancy was ill-considered.  She has gone too far.

"I think you might benefit from our bereavement support groups," he says flatly, but his meaning is clear. "And, of course, I'm available for personal grief counseling at any time."  He rises, his calling card in hand.

Nurse Kristee appears in the doorway.  "Excuse me, Walter is here."

Walter is the owner of The Heavenly Heights Mortuary,  "Wally's a great guy, very sympatico," Cantwell says.  "You'll like him."

"I'd like Wally to bring my husband's body to our house and then pick him up tomorrow.  Of course I'll pay any additional expense."

Cantwell's eyebrows raise just enough to make Solitaire feel ashamed, as though  he suspects that she intends to perform crazed sexual acts upon her husband's corpse. "I'm afraid that's not possible."

Now she is reduced to begging. "Just a few hours then -- a brief stop en route."

"Absolutely out of the question.  Sorry.  It's against the rules of the Health Department,  It would be breaking the law."

Solitaire is sure it isn't true, but she knows when she's been beaten.  Bowing in defeat, she takes his card.

"Let me give you another hug."  She submits stiffly to his embrace.  "Remember," he admonishes her, again ever so gently, "time heals all."

"So they say," she answers sourly.  But she doesn't believe it for a second.

Leaving the Bereavement Room, Solitaire finds Zach and Benjamin in conversation with Wally, the mortician.  One of them makes a comment about "Six Feet Under" and they laugh.  Wally is an irredeemably cheery young man. She makes one last try and asks him if he can bring Em's body to her house.  Wally shrugs regretfully -- "against the law" --  but suggests that she drop by the mortuary some time this afternoon so they can discuss arrangements.  Solitaire suddenly feels dizzy and light-headed, as though she's levitating, looking down on this scene.  She thinks she must be having an OBE, (an Out-of-Body Experience, as opposed to the Order of the British Empire.)

Benjamin suggests getting something to eat.  Her stomach growls receptively and she realizes that she's hungry.

And so they part, Solitaire and Em, she by the front door, he by the back, she to Starbuck's and he to The Heavenly Heights.

3. TO SPEND ONE NIGHT WITH YOU

Solitaire wants to bring Em home.   She isn’t asking for much -- a few hours, a night, at most.  The fact that he’s dead strikes her as irrelevant.

“You can’t take him home.”  The nurse’s tone is flat but emphatic, brooking no argument.

Em is lying on a narrow hospital bed in the corner of a curtained room.  Solitaire is sitting on the edge of his bed, hunched face down, somewhere between a defensive crouch and a possessive sprawl,  over his upper body, her arms spread out like wings across his chest.  She’s been in this position for roughly an hour and when she raises her head to the nurse, her cheeks are creased and streaked. 

“He’s mine.”

The night nurse, whose name is Kristee, looks down at her.  She sees trouble, maybe hysteria.  Her resolve hardens.

“It’s against the law.”

“What law?”

“A city ordinance states that the deceased must be removed from the premises in an hour.”  She speaks in the quaintly distanced argot of a police briefing.  “After that the body starts to putrefy.”  

Solitaire wants to tell Kristee that if she fills Em's nostrils with ambrosia and red nectar as the Greek Gods did for fallen heroes, his flesh will remain uncorrupted. But she doesn't.  

Kristee looks at her watch.  “It’s already past four.  I've left a message at the mortuary to come and get him as soon as possible.”

Em is at a hospice in the foothills.  He has been there since Friday night when he was dismissed from the hospital and sent home to die.  For reasons having mainly to do with transportation, he has been remanded to this hospice, but only on a temporary basis.  He is to come home in a medical transport van on Monday.

“This isn’t a dying facility, he can only stay the weekend,” an administrator admonishes her. 

This is news to Solitaire.  She was under the illusion that a hospice was precisely where people went to die.  So.  No dying allowed.  Well, no matter.  She didn’t want Em to die there, anyway.  But now, in what looks like bald-faced defiance of the house rules, he has died there.

The call comes at two-thirty Monday morning.  She rings Em’s sons, but their phones are off.  Picking up a bag already packed with his clothes -- socks, underwear, khakis, a royal blue shirt -- she leaves the house at three o'clock.  In the black, starlit silence of the desert night, with a chill wind blowing off the mountains and random traffic lights blinking robotically over the empty street crossings, she winds up bone-dry River Road into the cactus-strewn hills north of town.  

A few hours before his death, without her knowledge, Em had been moved from a private room to the cramped, curtained-off corner of a double room. Arriving at hospice on Sunday night, she had found him on his back beetle-like, legs splayed, naked, sheetless and shivering beneath a glaring ceiling light, a diaper around his ankles.  His hospital johnny coat, ripped off, lay on the floor.     

Now, in death, he lies obediently in the johnny coat.  The sheet is pulled up under his chin; his mouth and eyes are half open.  Slit-eyed and slack-jawed, he appears vaguely imbecilic.  She cradles his head in her arms and rocks; a groan of pain rises out of her gut and her tears spill onto his brow and into his eyes.  She wants to go home and howl at the heavens.  But she has duties to perform.  She presses her fingers gently but firmly down over his eyelids, closing them, kissing them shut.  The mouth is another matter.  Even in the dim light she can see that his lips are blue-ing up, and when her cheek brushes against his mouth it feels, not rigid, but rubbery. His jaw is beginning to set.  She must work quickly.

Solitaire has seen plenty of dead bodies, but has never been to a “viewing.” It has not occurred to her that mortuaries are probably equipped to handle any and all contingencies.  No doubt they have pulleys and tackles that can winch a man’s jaw or any other resistant body part into any conceivable position.  Still, she doesn’t trust them to do it right and she doesn’t want to send Em off to Eternity looking as though Death had found him carelessly snoozing at the opera, catching a few z’s halfway through the third act of “Siegfried.” 

She looks around warily -- she doesn’t want to be apprehended by Nurse Kristee, whom she now perceives as her adversary -- and hearing the nurse and the tech chattering volubly over the charts and seeing that the coast is clear, swings into action.  She puts the heel of her hand under Em’s chin, works her right leg up so that her knee is against her elbow and by exerting sufficient slow, steady upward pressure with her thigh, levers his jaw shut.  She waits, leaving her hand in position for a count of ten, then gently removes it.  The mouth holds for a second, then slips back open a fraction.  She repeats the process and this time it stays shut.

Round One to her.  As Theseus slew the Minotaur, as Heracles beheaded the Hydra at Lerna, so she, Solitaire, will triumph over Kristee at this hospice named, with exquisite, presumably unintended, irony … Odyssey.

Now for Round Two:  the change of clothes.  She raises the head of the bed, removes the hateful johnny coat, takes the long-sleeved blue shirt from the bag, unbuttons it, then pulling Em forward, puts his right arm into the sleeve.  It is when she tries to get the shirt around his back that she runs into trouble.  Em is a big man – six-two, 180 pounds – and she just isn’t strong enough to do this by herself. She is up on the bed wrestling with Em and the shirt when the tech, Socorro, wanders into the cubicle.  A look of alarm animates the tech's stolid expression and she bolts from the room, returning, predictably, with Kristee.

“You can’t put that shirt on him – "

"Yes, I can ... if you help me..."  She grunts with the effort of trying to hold Em up.  She's got her knee in the middle of his back and is trying to insert his left arm into the sleeve.

"It's too late -- he's got rigor mortis."

"He hasn't, damn it ... look!"  Solitaire takes Em's arm and gently shoves it as though it were a swing.  The movement is stiff, but undeniable.

Solitaire is triumphant.  "You see! ...  you see!" she cries.

“You can discuss this with Mr. Cantwell... the Grief Counselor,”  Kristee says.  “He's on his way, but it will take him an hour to get here.  He has to drive in from Benson.  I'm going to call him again.”  

Solitaire folds.  Conceding the round, she curls up beside Em, whose blue shirt is now half on and half off, while she awaits the arrival of the Grief Counselor.  In his absence, Solitaire muddles through on her own, grieving without counsel.

Her anguish advances in waves, surging like surf, crashing, crushing her, knocking her flat, then ebbing, subsiding, sluicing out, leaving a sloshing tidepool of tears, rank with pale anemones and sea grass, slack weeds of woe, tiny crustaceans of useless guilt, small hollow shells of remorse, worn shards of sadness, thoughts scuttling like sand crabs  … all the effluvia, the pitiful flotsam and jetsam  washed up and depleted in death’s wake.  She lies panting, exhausted, briefly numbed, waiting for the next wave, even now gathering momentum in the recesses of her heart.  Then, in the silence, she hears a sound, a faint stirring and rustling, and realizes with a stab of shame that the sound is The Other Patient … the other dying man behind the curtain….

What are the rules of correct behaviour here?  Is there a paradigm?  An existing etiquette for a double-occupancy chambre des morts?  Should she thoughtfully tamp down her tears, stifle her sobs? It seems inconsiderate, at the very least insensitive, to carry on like Hecuba while the poor man is – so she supposes – in extremis.   Or is he merely, in line with professed policy, weekending here?  Even so…

Solitaire wants to go home now.  But it seems she can't.  She must wait for the Grief Counsellor and the Mortician.  She doesn't want to wait.  What are they to her or she to them?  She longs to mourn her fallen husband as the ancient Greeks mourned their dead.  She wants to wash Em's poor tired body, anoint his wounds – his cracked skin and clotted sores and purple bruises -- with oils and sweet-scented lotions, cloak his body in fine muslin, wrap him in purple robes and lay him on a bier mantled in white. 

In the privacy of their home, in the presence of family and a few friends, Solitaire wants to rage like Achilles over Patroclus, shriek and tear her hair like Hecuba, claw the skin from her face, swoon like Andromache over Hector, groan, hurl imprecations at the Immortals, utter elegies and lamentations all night long.  It’s unlikely, of course, that she would do any of these things, it’s not her style.  But if she should … then, why not?  Why should she be denied this last rite? This last right?  This last night?

                                        

“For never sorrow half so deep
Shall pierce my heart again!”

            

           

A WHISPER FROM THE GRASS

On the night of her husband’s death, Solitaire sat on a Chinese bench beneath an orange tree in her garden.  It was the 6th of April 2009, nearing midnight.  She breathed in the dizzying fragrance of the blossoms on the boughs, the climbing roses and jasmine.  She heard the night music of the Sonoran desert:  the reedy hoot of the horned owl, the yip of coyotes hunting with their pups in the moonlight, the giddy aria of a nightingale.  The air was heavy and still.  The pale leaves of the honey mesquite trembled, but no breeze stirred.  She felt that she was suffocating, her breath shallow, panting, heart fluttering, face wet with tears.  Her husband, Em, had been dead since two o’clock that morning and she wept in the knowledge that they would never again, together, hear the nightingale sing.  Never would they lie on the grass and watch for shooting stars.  Never would they navigate the constellations, steering from Sagittarius to Cepheus and on to Cassiopeia.   

She looks overhead.  A quilted cloud layer is creeping up the sky;  the eerie, flaming pink and orange undersides smolder like a bed of burning coals.  Black plumes trail across the moon, reducing it to an anemic wax-white eye dimly peering through its tattered veil.  A ghoulish Gothic-novel sky.  




                                                                               
 Is it a sign from the dead?  The obverse of the Underworld?  Ridiculous!  On the other side of the garden wall is a narrow dirt path choked with weeds -- mallows and grasses and wild sumac.  She hears a sound beyond the wall – a footfall? a whisper? a sigh? -- and jumping to her feet, peers into the shadows, but sees nothing.  Her skin crawls, the hair rises on the back of her neck.  She calls her two small dogs and not daring to look back, hurries inside. 

Once in the house, she goes to her dressing room and with her hand on the door knob, freezes.  She has a sudden premonition that Em is on the other side of that closed door.  Why would he be in her dressing room?  He was never there when he was alive, why now?  And what if he should appear to her?  What then?  In what horrifying rebarbative guise would his shade present itself? 

What age would he be?  Would he look as he looked at the hour of his death?  Or at the hour of their wedding?  Would he be healed in death?  What would he be wearing?  A hospital gown with embedded chest catheter and trailing tubes?  A pin-striped suit?  The evolution of ghostly apparel is in itself an interesting study. In Elizabethan times, male ghosts like Hamlet's father trod the boards in clanking suits of armor.  In ancient Egypt,  dog-headed guides led kings in winding sheets down to the Underworld.  Biblical shades wore shrouds. Jesus, we are told, left his shroud behind when He went missing from the tomb.  Victorian vampires sported opera capes and female wraiths reverted to gauzy gowns floating in dusky groves of yew and myrtle.   Nowadays, ghosts wear chinos and polo shirts, slow-dance with their winsome widows, and give them tips on their stock portfolios.  Others flop about in bed sheets like Caspar-the-Friendly Ghost.  


What would Em say?  Would he exhort her in sepulchral tones to “Remember me ...”?  Would he lure her to her death like Peter Quint?  Claw like Catherine Earnshawe at her bedroom window?  Would he stare at her  accusingly like poor bloodied Banquo?  Or would he merely ask her to take his blood pressure… fetch him a popsicle… a pill … a bed pan?

Solitaire has read somewhere that 80% of Americans believe in paranormal phenomena.  Also, specifically, that some 50% of widows say they have seen, heard or felt the immediate presence of a recently deceased loved-one.  Solitaire, herself, does not really believe in ghosts; on the other hand, she doesn't not believe in them.  In some obscure, occultish cul-de-sac of her consciousness she rather hopes that Em is nearby and watching her, that he knows how much she misses him and how bereft her life has instantly become without him.  She is prepared to accept that the Dead, or Undead, may be all around her, but she does not believe they have been in contact with her --- with one possible, olfactory, exception.  

Some years ago, she and Em lived in a 17th century farmhouse in Rhode Island. Occasionally, during the summer months, Solitaire, a vegetarian, smelled the unmistakable odors of roast beef and frying bacon rising from her kitchen. Admittedly intrigued, she eventually concluded that as the sun warmed the house, the old pine boards and horsehair insulation expanded, releasing the vapors of ancient sides of beef, joints of mutton, slabs of bacon.   The scent of perfume, however, a musky fragrance that was not hers and that wafted on occasion round the guest bedroom when there were no guests was less easily explained away.  


Perhaps, she thinks, the dead inhabit a parallel universe.  Perhaps Dark Energy is composed of dead souls.  

Solitaire cannot sleep.  Em’s side of the bed is smooth, the pillows undented, as they have been ever since he entered the hospital nearly two months earlier.  She and the dogs huddle together on her side of the king-size bed.  They never cross that invisible fence; the dogs seem to understand this.

It is generally believed that cats and dogs can sense the presence of the dead.  She thinks there might be something in this, to the extent that if anyone can commune with the other world, it is more likely to be canines or felines than humans, whose noisy need to communicate has all but nullified their ability to commune.  She looks at her two shih-tzus for a sign:  are their ears pricked, their eyes dilated, their whiskers quivering, their hackles raised?   No.  They are splayed on the coverlet like carelessly dropped dust mops and one of them is actually on his back, legs in the air and snoring.  She turns on the white noise machine, and lies in the dark listening to a combination of Hawaiian Surf and Snoring Shih-tzu, then gives up the ghost, as it were, and decides to take an ambien, hoping she will not find herself an hour later devouring the contents of her fridge or cruising around the desert in her convertible.

She goes into Em’s bathroom for a glass of water and as she turns to leave, comes face to face with the his dressing gown hanging on the door.  It is a blue cotton dressing gown from the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok.  She recalls with heart-wrenching clarity the enchantment of their visits there.  Seized with a spasm of grief, she leans into the door, enfolds the robe in her embrace, and hugs it close. 

Barefoot, wrapped in Em's robe, she wanders out onto the terrace.  The sky has cleared, the full moon shines, the nightingale still sings..  She remembers other nights, other nightingales… a shabby hotel overlooking a garden in Paris…A pre-dawn walk in London, along the canal in Little Venice… Yet another night, another nightingale, beneath a flowering quince in Salamanca. 


 "... Not for the towering dead with their nightingales and psalms, but for the lovers..."

 These are the true ghosts, the ghosts of memory.  Ghosts of the past.  The ghosts within us. Ibsen  had it right.  We are the ghosts.

"I almost think we are all of us Ghosts…

There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea."

1. IS THIS THE WIDOW?

Imagine a woman – blonde, slender, not young -- sitting at a writing table in her bedroom.  It is five-thirty in the morning and she is in her dressing gown, straight-backed, head canted, looking down in a pool of lamp light at the telephone in her hand.  She eyes the phone warily.

She is waiting for something.  While she waits, she jots some notes on a pad of paper.  Then she raises her eyes and through the open shutters, sees in dawn's first light the familiar muted shapes of the trees in her garden:  the gnarled, supplicating limbs of an old mesquite, the skirted fronds of a pepper tree sweeping the grass, the quivering fans of Mexican palms.  An Inca dove sings her sad little two-note tune -- "no hope!  no hope!" -- as she picks her way through a bougainvillea vine along the top of a whitewashed wall.  Beyond the wall rears a ragged range of mountains, bisected in the foreground by a tall aleppo pine.  A piercing shriek shatters the silence, a shadow plunges; there's a clatter of palms, a blur of bougainvillea … and the dove is gone, borne to her death in the talons of a Harris hawk, whose chicks clamor from their nest in the pine.  Death by predator is hardly a novelty in this southwest desert town where gunslingers prevail, coyotes on two legs or four roam the roads, and rattlers coil at the front door.  Nevertheless, she freezes, shudders at the casual cruelty of nature or fate, the gods or God, call it what you will, shrugs a shawl more closely round her shoulders, and, crumpling, begins to cry.  She knows her tears are not simply for the little dove, but for herself.

On the stroke of six, she makes her call.  In Washington, DC, it is nine o’clock.  In the personnel office of the State Department, a man’s voice answers and she says in a whisper as if she were afraid of waking someone (but who is there to wake?), “ I want to report a death.”

The personnel officer takes the relevant information:  name; age; date of birth; Social Security number; cause of death.  There is a pause while he enters these statistics into his computer, then poses a question.

“Is this the widow?”

Widow?

Surprised, she finds herself unable to answer.

Is this the widow?  Is this the widow? It is not merely the word that startles her, but what she reads in his tone.  His voice is uninflected, dispassionate, yet the sibilants seem to her to hiss through the silence with insidious condescension.  Why should this be?  Should her unsought status not elicit compassion rather than contempt?

Several seconds elapse as she considers his question and in that lacuna passes a lifetime.

Her marital history, as it happens, falls quite neatly into two parts:  unwed/wed.  No serial marriages, no stormy separations, no children, no messy divorces.  For the last thirty-five years she has been married to one man – let us call him “Em” – her mate-for-life.  His life, as it turns out.  Now, at six o’clock on a spring morning in April 2009, the disembodied, seemingly bored, satellite-borne voice of the State Department has laconically articulated what is said to be the most harrowing passage of one’s life, short of death itself – the death of a spouse.  The Voice of the Department has redefined her role, changed her label.  Moreover, it has, without license or leave, performed grammatical surgery on her identity – excising the pronominal “you” and inserting the objective “this.”  Is this the widow?  She has become an object. The marriage that took 35 years to construct has been razed.  In the missed beat of a heart, Em's heart, she has morphed from “wife” to “widow," from “you” to “this”...  from relict to relic.

 “Widow.” She hates the very sound of it.  The roots are as hardy as the word is wooden, thrusting back through Old Frisian (widwe), Old Saxon (widowa), Old High German (wituwa), Gothic (widuwo), reaching further back and farther afield to Sanskrit (vidhava), to Latin (viduus)... meaning void.  The label is one of historic derogation, of literary belittlement, connoting dependency, meagerness, penury, parsimony, impecuniousness (“widow’s mite”).  Visually, it calls forth bleak or satirical images … “widow’s peak” … “widow’s weeds”… those bows and bonnets and bolts of black bombazine shrouding Queen Victoria ( "The Widow of Windsor"), who for forty years after Albert's untimely demise, sartorially enforced her hysterical mourning on two generations of female subjects.

The word summons up sad visions of banishment:   to towers , to harems, to nunneries, to the purdah of worlds without men. The stereotypes (fashioned, often, by men) are sufficiently well-known:  The Rapacious Widow (Gertrude lusting after Claudius); the Avaricious widow (even Jackie Kennedy, so movingly elegant in her grief, was castigated for overweening greed when she married Onassis); the Mad Widow (poor deranged Mrs. Lincoln, whose sin was to grieve too much).  Then there are the Meddlesome Widows, Lady Auld Reekie and all the other old busy-bodies who trip and troop through the pages of Trollope; the Wily Widow, the Worldly Widow, (Madame Max Goesler, who is a bit too ambitious until brought to heel), not to mention the toothless Dickensian grannies drooling by the fire, the Dotty Widows, the Comical Widows, the Wicked Widows scheming to defraud the virtuous (see Mrs. Clenham in Little Dorritt).   Lastly, let us not forget the Constant Widow devotedly keeping her late husband's flame alight, and the Declining Widow, who, though she no longer commits suttee, withdraws from life, figuratively flinging herself onto the funeral pyre of her husband.  All these images crowd the New Widow's mind … flashing upon that inward eye which is the hell of solitude

Is she merely projecting her own weaknesses and insecurities?  Perhaps.  And do these thoughts not sow the seeds of a poisonous self-pity?  Probably.  But how to stave off such thoughts?  These are among the many questions that cannot be answered today, or tomorrow, or next week.  For thirty-five years, her roles have been largely defined by Em,  by his career and by his disease.  Now she has been cut adrift by death.  So be it.  She will honor him, love him, mourn and miss him to the end of her days, but she can not be defined by her dead husband, no matter how beloved, nor can she live as half of a defunct couple.  She will not wear the Black "W."  She is nobody's dead dove, yet.

But she can hardly enter into a philosophical dialogue with the Department.  “Yes,” she says, “I am the widow.”

Now what?

It is twenty past six and the sun is rising over the desert.  She hears the call of a quail and smells the sharp-sweet scents of wild creosote and citrus blossoms.   She opens the door, whistles up the dogs and walks out into the morning.