[12]

In the Vincent Price Room, Journey’s End

“Undertakers to Meet” —The Guardian [Charlottetown, PEI] July 19, 2001

What do undertakers talk about

when they meet? Do they share the black humour of anaesthetists, that exacting

routine punctuated by moments of sheer terror when false teeth are lost or a spouse

glows with white-hot anger at a death-grimace no art could remove or, at least, lacquer?

Do they practice those fastidious

make-overs on each other?

Rehearse those hushed voices, gently touching their colleagues’ elbows?

Or gather in sound-proofed convention rooms and strike Chinese gongs, drink Tequila sunrises and play

giddy rounds of paper, scissors, rock? Perhaps they massage each other’s delicate hands, those manicured fingers blessed

by the angel of death, with the tact

and sure precision of surgeon and beautician.

I have come to believe they flirt and pair

off in their rooms and undress, a slow seductive shedding of charcoal suits

and skirts, stiff white blouses and shirts, underwear flimsy, sheer, vermillion,

never taking le petit morte lying down

but upright, defying gravity.

Though some never touch, only their eyes ferrying back and forth across the river.

Walking past them down the hotel corridor

I hear one mention ashes on the Ganges. -

Or is it managing their assets?

If I crashed their workshops, would I discover them practising those soft, deep, compassionate sounds, or training to suppress laughter?

In the session on “Understanding Grief”

do they meditate on photos of their late

fathers, ailing mothers, or tirelessly enact

the Monty Python dead parrot skit?

They must shop-talk about us,

the mourners. Rate our bereavement, _ swap designations: weepers and wailers, eye-dabbers, cinder-block-faced, zipper-lipped, will hunters, morbid. And surely they must complain

about music, how they hate

hearing “Nearer My God to Thee.” How they long to crank up “Sympathy for the Devil” or “You ain’t ; nothing but a hound dog,” or instruct the organist to play “Stairway to Heaven’ backwards. Late in the evening,

>

in the hospitality suite, they drink shooters they call embalmers,

and with a flushed, self-conscious thrill play “Name the Immortals.”

Then push each other over the brink

of remembrance: the devastated,

the forlorn they could not console. That done, they make lists.

Hymns that permeate even the brass and varnished wood of their hearts. Handshakes that made them tremble. Moments alone with the dead

when the room’s air thins and parts, the mind wavers, light-headed,

as if someone has drawn a boost

from the brain’s electricity, recharged and sped off, the lights briefly dimmed, air quivering, then still.

—Richard Lemm