The Smell of Death

I was going to post a comment responding to the comments that I received on the last post.

So please don't think that I'm ignoring anything that was said.

When I replied "WOW" to the comments left it was because I didn't know what else to say and because I did not have the strength nor the desire to wage Holy High Verbal Combat.

But then I got some more sleep and I suddenly found that I did have the strength.

But that was then, and the worm has turned yet again, and that conversation seems too irrelevant in light of yesterdays events.

My Grandad died yesterday. And though he was eighty-seven years of awesome Jamaicaness, and I am decidedly white, he really was my Granddad. While I have fond "playtime" memories of my father's father, Cecil duCille impacted my life more profoundly than any natural Grandparent ever has.

I hope and pray that his fingerprints will ever be visible upon me.

He was the one person in whom I had total and absolute confidence. I have told people that if he told me to jump off of a cliff, I would, (I like to think without hesitation) because I always knew that he actually did have my best interest in mind.

Now please believe me when I say that I was not a blind acolyte, that I was not a Cool-Aid drinking disciple. And do not think for one moment that I was compelled by his will to follow. He always said, like a good General, "This is where I have come from. This is where I am. This is where I am going. This is what we may, will, and probably shall encounter. Follow me as I follow Christ."

When I got the call yesterday morning that he had passed away, I was surprised, but not shocked. It was unanticipated, definitely unexpected. I thought that he would live forever.

And I was a little surprised at my lack of devastation. I remembered when three of my natural Grandparents died and how little it affected me. No crying, just a stranger's dissociated calm. It wasn't callousness, but for two it was a lack of relationship, and for the third it was relief, because of the Hellish ride he had taken and because I knew that he was in a better place and for the first time in his life he was truly happy, and that his tenuous relationship with Christ had finally been sealed, locked into an everlasting bond.

As I was listening to the man on the other end of the phone, and the apparent devastation that Granddad's passing had created in him, I was a little dismayed at my own inner calm. And filled with selfish regret that I hadn't spent more time with him.

I got off the phone and told Belle that I wanted to go to where his body was.

I haven't looked at a corpse in fifteen years. I want to remember people for who they are. They aren't that person in the box. And as a Christian, I know that they have put off mortality for immortality, and that they have left behind the trivial trials of this world.

But for some reason I had to see Grandad.

And I'm glad that I went. As hard as it has turned out.

When I arrived the paramedics where leaving, the new deputy coroner was doing an inordinately thorough job, and the sheriff's deputy was, initially, keeping any and all comers from going down into the plush finished basement where Grandad lived.

After the deputy coroner was finished satisfying her reservations and her check lists, the Sheriff's Deputy came up stairs and with him came a very peculiar odor.

I have always thought that the "smell of death" talked about in books and movies was some spiritual experience, something metaphysical created by the human mind in response to the knowledge that something human is dead nearby.

I am here to attest that it is not. It is real. And though not pleasant, it's not repulsing. Though perhaps the circumstances may affect this perception.

We were granted permission to go down then, and we did.

And I saw him lying on the floor where the paramedics had left him.

He looked small. He looked oddly like a wax statue. And like he was preaching a sermon. His hands were raised slightly and held in a timeless duCille gesture. He had such expressive hands.

And for the first time since I had gotten the call something stirred in my chest.

My mother-in-law, whose house Grandad had been staying in, was crying and all I could think was, "He's not here anymore. And yet he's still here."

I touched his leg: cool, soft, and pliable, and said "God speed Grandad" and sat down on the end of the bed. And I heard him shout, in my head or the Spirit or whatever, like I had heard him shout so many times in so many meetings.

The Klingons have it right: we sit with our dead.

After a short while the coroner was ready to leave, and take Grandad with her. Only one small problem, for her: no one to help carry him out. The sheriff's deputy ushered us all out of basement when it came time to enclose Grandad in the nondescript blue plastic bag. It was like a heavy duty tarp with black nylon straps and a zipper.

Then they asked me and another, with much apologizing, to help.

It was absolutely no problem for me. "Terms of the service" I told them. And it was a great honor for me, if only in some small insignificantly belated way, to take care of the man who had so often taken care of me.

We carried him up the switch back stairs and around the switch back corner out into the garage and onto the waiting gurney. I held Granddad's head, through the impersonal plastic body bag, so that it wouldn't knock on the gurney rail as the deputy coroner pulled him farther down. He really wasn't as small as he had looked lying on that cold basement floor.

"I have it from here" the woman said, and I think that she was ordering me back inside. I didn't go inside, I followed her out onto the driveway, keeping my distance, watching her load Grandad into the back of the one-ton ford van.

It was very nice. Completely unmarked except for the government plates. The back interior was neat, carpeted, and clean. And they had maroon velvet covers to draw, with elastic ends, over the utilitarian body bags. It was nice to see our tax dollars actually doing something decent for a change.

She closed the doors and I gave a two finger salute from my eyebrow to the man who was no longer there.

I went back inside and down to Granddad's room and started to pick up. Shoes where left all over, like a teenagers. So I pulled the stuffed in socks out of them and took them to the closet to put them away.

In the back of the closet a walking stick had fallen down and I picked it up, and began to laugh, because it wasn't just a cane but what can best be described as a "pimp stick." (I would later learn that the "gentleman's walking stick" had been a gift and it was something that "he would never us."

It was a total Lifetime Movie moment. I started out laughing and ended up crying, bitterly, if only briefly, as the words of a song came flooding through my mind: ". . . I guess you got what you wanted, but what about me 'cause Without you I'm not okay And without you I've lost my way . . ."

I found my composure, and some consolation from the Director, and finished the task that I had set for myself and then I left and went heavily through a regular day.

On my way home the melody of a song kept coming to me but I chose rather to just go to bed as soon as I had eaten and showered, and try and forget about the day by burying myself in a good book. It worked until chapter 34, when the hero's father figure contracts a vicious viral bug and withers away and dies. But then later I found some more consolation in the same book, something that I had actually been thinking about earlier in the day:

"If you weren't going to ask me to have my troops break some heads, then why did you ask me here?"

"Not to ask anything of you, my friend. To ask how you're managing. Ord was more to you than an exceptional noncommissioned officer."

I stared out across the city, at the slow-flowing River Marin. "I don't know. How did you manage when your mother died?"

"Badly at first. But they say a son isn't fully realized until his last parent is gone. I suppose that's literally true for an heir to a throne. You lost your parents long ago, but the sergeant major, I think, stepped into that role for you since. Now, Jason, we're both orphans. There's no one to point the way for us. Now it's our job to point the way for others, and the only compass we have is within us." - Robert Buettner, Orphan's Triumph

I no longer have a completely objective compass to turn to when I am completely lost in the fog of this life. It's time to grow beyond that dependency I guess. Dig deeper into Jesus. Find that relationship with Christ that Grandad had. That true friendship that he walked in with the Lord.

There are only two ways that I want to go from this life into the next (if at all):

The first and currently preferred is with my arms full of explosives, hurling myself into the enemy bunker so that my comrads can live. (Of course I am speaking metaphorically.) No greater love, you know?

The second is exactly like Granddad: on my knees praying, in a blaze of spiritual glory. (I'm sure that one day this will become my first choice.)

Today was strange. It was a full, normal, work day and in the late afternoon I had to struggle with the thought that yesterday was all a bad dream.

But I know it wasn't. It was real. Painfully real.

So I'll close now, and leave you with the song that has been keeping me company all day.

So say goodbye 'cause you'll be leaving soon. I know it's hard and I'll be missing you. I know it's time to say goodbye. I know the road has worn you down. You never broke, you always held your ground, but now it's time to say goodbye. And I know we'll meet again. But I wish it'd never end. You don't mean to make me cry but it's so hard to say goodbye. And though you're gone I remember now the time we shared, your words still ring out. You're never far, you're in my heart. Some day we'll meet again, cause that's how the story ends. It's so hard to say goodbye. - Sanctus Real