I did want to give him a loving preparation, so on the day of his burial I went to the funeral home carrying the clothes and cloth and the soap and towels I would need to send him out clean and dressed for his last time above ground and the time after that below it.
My Husband lay on a table in a room. He lay next to the coffin I had bought from the coffin maker and taken up to my home town. I had painted the coffin with a nine pointed star on the lid. It had taken three days to finish and now the lid was set aside and the box waited like an empty hole for its contents.
He was so still. He lay with his eyes half open, in the semi curl that his tightened muscles would never relax. His legs were drawn up and the stumps where his feet would have been sat in the air. Who was that, and what did you do with the man that I loved and lived with? Without life he was almost not recognizable, was that really him?
He suffered deeply from the cold, always, so I had chosen and washed his favorite warm clothes. I brought his lined jeans, the long underwear, the favorite shirt, woolly stump covers and one of his ubiquitous hats. I brought the knitted vest he chose the yarn for, that I had knitted and he had worn into a felted mess that he would not take off, except twice a year, for washing. I laid aside the clothes and pulled out a pan and soap.
I looked him over as I washed his legs and belly, trying to memorize what would be gone soon, trying to gather a sense that this was the same person I knew so well. Even washing his face and combing and parting his hair feeling the whiskers under my fingers and his mustache, I still couldn't have a sense that this still dead form was anything but a seashell.
I changed the water three times washing the last remaining bits of his final days off him. they hadn't been nice days and he smelled. I left his hands for last.
The tendons in his hands had tightened over time closing his hands into half curls that he could open only partly. He had worked with them all his life. Even old and shrunken his fingers were callused and hard palmed, with ingrained dirt and short nails. Now they were curled tight against the palms like withered leaves. I took a while to soak out some of the dirt and to loosen the fingers enough to place the burial ring on one of them. They loosened a bit with the warm water, not much, just a bit.
I uncurled the one hand and set the ring in place. His hand curled around mine and cradled it in a movement that was so natural and so habitual, It was the movement that over all the years had held my hand and let me feel his love. When we were driving at night, sitting together watching TV, curled together in bed spooned behind me his hand held mine like that.
This was the last time he would ever hold my hand. It was the time I cried the most and longest, for all the times he would never be there to hold my hand again.
I dried my eyes and wiped and blew my nose on the cloth I brought to wrap him in. The rules said silk, Somehow silk would not have fit him at all. I had looked through the fabrics that were on offer at the store and finally chosen a woven cotton flannel plaid in green and brown. He would have liked it. I wrapped the fabric around him carefully and asked one of the assistants if he could help me with the last bits.
Two men came in and very gently and respectfully lifted him into the open hole in the box. I patted him one last time, and the lid slid home. He would have been happy to hear the battery powered drill that fastened the lid down seating the screws neatly into place, he liked a job done right.
He was made ready as well as I could, I was entirely wrung out and done for the day, and ahead for me was the burial and the funeral dinner. I patted his lid and said goodbye.
He rolled off to ride out to his last place, I folded my towels and picked up my things and walked home to get ready to meet him there.
