Washing the Dead

Working at the funeral home had changed me. Elena and I had prepared hundreds of bodies together over the years. We'd been friends since nursing school, thirty years of friendship scarred by divorces and dead parents and the slow erosion of hope.

"They sent the wrong photo," Elena said, holding up the picture frame. "She wants her hair curled."

I looked at the woman on the steel table. Her hair lay limp and gray, straggly in death.

"Her sister is paying double," Elena said, turning on the water. It splashed into the metal basin. "Make it look right. That's the job."

I thought about my own hair, thinning with age, about the appointments I kept canceling. About how Elena and I used to talk about futures we'd stopped living years ago.

"You remember Sarah?" Elena asked suddenly. "My college roommate? She died last month. Cancer."

"I didn't know."

"You didn't ask." Elena adjusted the water temperature. "We don't ask anymore, do we? We just work and go home and wait."

The water splashed against the metal sides of the basin. It sounded like rain, something natural and cleansing instead of this ritual of lies.

"I could have visited her," Elena said. "I was preparing bodies for strangers instead."

"So what are you saying?"

"I'm saying that someday someone will be washing our hair." Elena turned off the water. "And we should have lived first."

She picked up the curling iron. "Help me curl it. Make it beautiful."

We worked in silence. Something in me had begun to flow again, something dammed up for years.

"What are you doing tomorrow?" I asked.

Elena smiled, the first real smile I'd seen in months. "I don't know. What are we doing?"

"We're going to visit Sarah's grave. And then we're getting tea."

The water had stopped. But we hadn't. Not yet.