under my nails

I’d never watched anyone die before.

Sure, I’d seen dead people in open caskets, always standing at a distance thinking that barbaric until realizing that it provided closure, and that our ancestors handled their dead themselves, laying them out in the living room, as natural a part of the life cycle as birthing in your own bed.

But never the dying. As one of the few non-medical-personnel in the family, I’d carefully avoided those icky parts of life, natural childbirth the exception.

We got the call and made the long drive south, listening to Coldplay’s “Fix You” and, tears rolling, thinking couldn’t he still be fixed?

Walked quickly down the hospital corridor and found the room, peeking gingerly in.  I, the squeamish one, gasping in shock at the yellow skin, the distended abdomen, eyes staring into space (heaven?), mouth open with occasional moan and trickle of blood. 

Summoned a nurse to do something about the blood, if not the pain.

And we sat, and sat, talking to the shell of this 6 foot 5 strongest man I ever knew, singing “Amazing Grace” and Zevon’s “Keep Me in Your Heart” (Warren having gone on shortly before) and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, well knowing his disdain for sappy music.

This confirmed agnostic, who had married a Southern wild woman-turned- fundamentalist-later-mellowed, she later said came to faith.

And family came, and came, and we all sat, and sat, talking quietly while the numbers dropped and the morphine dose rose and the pulses and breaths became more distant, until they were no more.

Someone said we should open a window to let his spirit out, but I’d always thought that spirits could travel through walls. Weren’t they in another dimension, unbound by physical barriers?

We took the box of ash to his mountain, faithful ones and searching ones.  We talked and cried and laughed and remembered. We dipped our hands into the ash and he became one with the sprouting spring flowers beside his treehouse. He flew into the wind and stuck to the bushes. We dipped again and he lodged under our nails. He brushed on our jeans and tracked in our sneakers. 

And a smaller box we took on our long drive north, to bury the next spring beside those of brother and father, amid snow flurries and Navy honor guard playing Taps.