The Sun

I enter the room alone. The assistant warns me in a quiet sympathetic tone, she's just on the other side of these doors here, so you can take a minute if you like, before you go in. I want to see you, so I go straight in.

This is when I realise, seeing your form ahead, that it is really that simple. A small everyday action - walking into a room - is enough to change my life, change me, for as long as I live. This is the first time I have ever seen a dead body.

And yet I have always had what you might call an interest. Yes, I rubbernecked with the best of them from bus windows every time I saw an accident, but it was to try and spot my first corpse, not to be nosy, or to work out what had happened, who hit who. My mother made disparaging comments in my teens when I bought books like 'The World's Greatest Murderers' and 'The World's Worst Killing Sprees'. I think she was genuinely worried at one stage, or else just didn't understand how a child from her own womb could want to confront death, to read and talk about it, when all she ever did was run. We weren't to talk about it in the house. She practically screamed if I brought up the subject of my own funeral arrangements. My mother could not abide the words 'anything is possible'.

So, yes, death has always fascinated me. I have been called ghoulish, macabre, weird, unnatural, and most of these by my own mother.

What I'm trying to say is, despite all that background, the innate interest that was there since I was a tiny child, it is the hardest thing I ever do, not running out of that room, not bolting from a dead body, not trying to escape the fact that you are dead.

The assistant opens the frosted double doors and I move in slowly towards the dim light, immediately aware of you on the table before me, your head at my end, your feet splayed out by gravity at the other. What strikes me before anything else, as the doors are quietly pulled in behind me, is how much stuff there is in the room. Stuff is the only word for it - cards, presents, stuffed toys. As I move close to your head I see that you, too, are covered in stuff - flowers and jewellery, tokens of love. It is just past Christmas by several days, and the tree in the corner is decorated with little silver cardboard stars. From here I can just make out the handwriting on them. A song plays on the stereo in the far corner of the room, something soppy, a pop ballad, and although I know that the assistant must have switched it on before I arrived, the empty room makes me want to think it was you, that you put on your favourite song to welcome me, made things just so before you lay back down and closed your eyes once more.

To my right, level with your right manicured hand, is a floral armchair, and I move slowly towards it to sit down. Every careful movement I make feels like a ritual, heavy with importance, as if I were in a church ceremony. The armchair is comfortable, soft with a give to it, and I sink back into it, imagining all the people who must have sat there this past week, all the weight it must have supported, and how many tears have been cried into its solid arms. Now sitting, with time completely unimportant, vanished, left outside this strange room, I can look at you more closely.

People have said to me that you look just like you're sleeping. You do not. Your face is slightly discoloured, greying perhaps, a colour that no amount of foundation or blusher could cover. Your skin is bagging slightly, sinking a little, too heavy now. Gravity is teasing you, my love. Your face does not look like a face.

I have to admit, they've done a marvellous job on the make-up, apart from the dead colour of your skin of course. Otherwise, your eyelids sparkle with dusted green, and your eyelashes curl out so long. I want to open your eyes, to see them close to mine, staring without seeing, but I daren't ask the assistant, for fear that she wouldn't understand, would look at me in absolute shock at my disrespect, when it isn't that at all. It is a natural curiosity, and although I wish for many reasons that the empty vessel in front of me were that of a stranger, it is not, it is you, and so we must both accept our lot. You are my first dead body. I am the visitor who both mourns you and carefully observes my first dead body.

Your mouth hangs open slightly, reveals your two very white front teeth. The angle of your lower jaw makes them appear as an overhang: I know this not to be the case. I imagine the assistant before I arrived, pouching your refrigerated skin together, biting her lip as yours didn't stay together and those stubborn teeth peeped out like chalk from the earth. The discolouration is stronger here, runs almost in thick lines around your jaw line. I want to see your tongue, too, to check the colour of that. Would it be covered in bacteria, visible to the eye as a new colour? Would it look stricken and stretched out as a cow tongue? There is so much I want to know from you.

I think about you for a few minutes, ensconced in the heavy chair, my head bowed. You as I knew you, a child full of energy, skinny with such pointed features and such a bright cockney squall for a voice. Remember a song you always used to sing that puts me in mind of a playground. You look so different now, your features less pronounced, right at the start of womanhood. I think how unfair it is that no-one will get to know you when you're all, what an attractive wrinkled face you would have had as your features lost their fat once more, returned to the sharpness of your childhood. How you will be forever frozen as this picture in my mind, either this prone dead girl dressed for the prom, or a jumping jostling bird-like child, and how there should, by the normal rules of things, be so many more pictures of you available, so many more ways to imagine you.

I start to look more closely at your body, at the way you lay and have been arranged. One arm, the closer to me, by your side and the other over your chest. Family members and friends have poked things into your hands, a rose, an angel figurine, a beautiful little card, moved your fingers about until you grip these important objects of love, these offerings. You wear rings and bracelets, and what you do not wear is draped over your hands and arms, sparkling jewelled chains that glint in the soft light of this room. Your nails have been done, acrylics applied and French-manicured, and because I haven't seen you in so long I don't know if this is normal for you, to have your nails so long and polished. Is this the sort of thing you spent money on regularly? Is this one of things I never got to learn about you, or have they done this because something happens to the nails in death that they want to hide? Maybe the cuticles start to recede, or the nails turn black. Either way, the nails do not suit you, look too uncomfortable, make the position of your fingers look even more fake.

You wear a ball gown, I suspect the dress that you had worn to celebrate the end of college, a stunning dark purple dress in a gauzy, shiny material that contrasts perfectly with your golden hair, which lies in ringlet curls on your chest and the pillow. I wonder if your hair was easier to curl, more compliant in death. It looks synthetic, plasticky, but only if you are looking too closely, as I am, and even then, it looks pretty.

Although you look beautiful, and I know this must be a comfort to the people who are closest to you, who come and visit you here every single day, there are several things wrong with the picture. Little things that are incongruous, or displeasing to the eye.

You wear a blanket that your left hand rests on, pulled up to your stomach, as though you were tucked up in bed. But although the blanket is clean, and certainly not ragged, it is not luxurious enough to match your special dress, so the effect is similar to that of a diamond ring presented in, say, an empty matchbox. This detail annoys me, gnaws at me for several moments. How, with all the effort they have put into to your hair, make-up, nails, could they fail to notice something as important as this? Why are you not lying under a piece of rose silk?

Further to this is the way your feet look. Splayed out under the thin cover, they are obviously bare, perhaps in socks, but certainly shoeless. The toes stick up in peaks, and it is this that seems undignified to me. It is your feet that are the most obviously dead thing about you. Added to this the fact that you are barefoot in your lovely dress. I think if they have dressed you as if for a special occasion, then that ought to stretch to including the shoes you would have wore, even if they weren't to be seen, were under the cover. It is this that finally upsets me, because these inconsistencies are the signals that you are really dead. This is my moment of acceptation. It does not actually matter if you have bare feet or socks on, because you will not dance in your ball gown. It occurs to me that the cover is perhaps to hide injuries, wounding or bruising, mangled limbs. I concede that there must be a reason for everything, that an assistant in a funeral parlour would not pass over a single detail, that matters of life and death are far too important to leave anything out.