DEAD

DEAD

I ran my finger across her lips, so cold now.  I was glad they left the lipstick off like I had asked, like she had asked me.  “No make-up, please, I am dead.  I am not going to a party.  This life is all there is and I don’t want people saying I look good dead.”

She had all these ideas about how to tone it down, the way people celebrate when someone is dead.  She also used to always tell me, “You don’t have to do what I ask.  I won’t be around to see.  I cannot come back to haunt you.  Do whatever.  I will never know.”  But she left me the guidelines and I wanted to do what she asked. I did mostly what she asked.

“I want a red headed wig”, she would say. “I could never wear my hair long.  It is too thick.  I want a green and gold evening gown.  I hope I die slim.”  “Are you crazy”, I would say? “Nope, “she replied,” just indulging a fantasy about looking good dead.”   Paradoxically.

I did not go with the wig.  It wouldn’t be her.  It matters that I am seeing her, to make this moment real.  She had short cropped hair for all the years I knew her.  She tried to keep it brown but the silver hair at her temples would not hold the color.

I did dress her in green.  She really liked that color.  But it was no evening gown.  She’s not going to a party.

They left her nails unpainted.  I would never kiss a corpse but I took up her cold dead hand and held it. I remembered when we had only been married a year.   It was the only time I was with her when she was getting a manicure.  When the nail tech said, “you bite your nails,” my head came up from the magazine I wasn’t reading and I looked at her.  She shrugged and grinned sheepishly.   What could she say?  I never knew she chewed her nails.  

I couldn’t stop holding her hand.  I wanted to bring some warmth back to it.  We were together twenty eight years before I told her, “I noticed the way you touch me.”  Maybe I should have told her that I liked it?

She used to stroke me everywhere, on my body and in every place.  If we were in bed, she wrapped herself around me.   She would curl her leg over my hip.  As she lay there, she would rub the side of her foot against my calf, foot, ankle, as if memorizing the curves and angles.

In public, she held my hand, or wrapped an arm around my waist.  She would reach way up (5’3” to my 5’ 11”) to cup my face and pull me down for a kiss.   Both hands would slide up to caress my neck.

In restaurants, she often sat beside me and played with my leg, running a flat palm over the trousers, squeezing my thigh or my knee.  It annoyed the hell of out of me.  Sometimes I made her sit across from me.  Then she would reach across the table to stroke the back of my hand.

She was so damn animated.  Her face had a thousand expressions that I never bothered to read. She was like silly putty, always morphing from a smile to a frown to a wink or a mock glare.  She wasn’t photogenic as a whole because the camera would catch her between expressions- when she looked her worst. At rest, her face held nothing at all, not love, or laughter or tears. She just lay there.  I did tell her she was beautiful in motion, when she was alive, at least I did tell her that.

She was older than me and I guess that rubbery face showed it but you could not tell by her actions.  She walked twice as fast as me on those stumpy legs.  If she danced (badly) or sang (even worse), she was never out of breath.  She rarely admitted to being tired, except for that last night.  

The funeral director walked up behind me.  Are you ready now?  “Yes, close it now.”

She’s really gone and I’ll move on.