Imagine a typical West Texas day - the perfect day for a funeral.
Aunt Seal, or as the program reads, "Lucille Vancil," lies perfectly embalmed. She's cooly open to the airconditioner in Starbuck funeral home, Merkel, Texas. Her 80-year old sisters and baby brother, Howard, look on as she lies still. They visit.
The air is much cooler inside. The chapel is about the size of two living rooms. Funerals are such a strange tradition aren't they? To preserve a temporal thing such as the body, and to display it as an honor seems sad. Seal (which seems more correct of a spellings of her nickname other than "Cille," because of her legendary laugh which sounded like an old woman seal) does not look peaceful, but rather just stationery - just there. And everyone in the audience looks a bit like her: the family in their cheekbones, the visitors in their wrinkes and spots.
Surely Seal would rather her corpse be baking in the scorch of this Texas sun than be bathed in the cool air of a funeral home. In fact, that's exactly what she's thinking about: the sudden gust of cool air that would come in the heat of the cotton field that would cause her to look up to the house where she would see -
But the funeral director closed the casket for the serive. The family and friends look stoic on the box-topped with a huge red rose casket corsage.
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1 comment:
I liked that, not in like a "Hey that made me happy" way, but it made an interesting point. I like how it told the story from the perspective of the deceased instead of the family. And I liked the discussion about the plastic and uncomfortable feel of funeral homes. It shows the irony of calling a funeral parlor a home, as there is no comfort there. I hope you are having a good time in South America. Peace.
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