Coffin Lid Closing on a Clown

Desi Mulcahy

At age 13, I saw that my uncle’s eyelids were sewn shut as he lay in his coffin. The little threads were visible, perhaps the undertaker had been in a hurry, or perhaps it was because AIDS makes you so thin. The last time I saw my uncle alive, he was gasping to say something but couldn’t. That was perhaps a worse thing to see than the eyelid threads, but I don’t think about it as much. 

Once, by accident, I showed genuine emotion around a straight man. I told him about the eyelids and how the horror never left me. Then he performed what I call “the move,” a quick forearm-application dick swipe. Guys think we can’t notice them touching their penises if they don’t use the hand explicitly to touch the dick. Next to me on the couch, he did the move while I told him about how the sewn eyelids haunted me. He wasn’t good at faking listening; he was only fair at pretending to do so. I won’t call him a predator, because I didn’t feel like I was being hunted. I felt more like I was being tricked by a magician to be his cut-up-table lady. It felt like a coffin lid closing on a clown.

An open casket is a thing to behold. The person is in there but not really. Why a box? Why not seat them in a chair until it’s time to set them on fire or cover them with dirt?

You can provide all the photos you want; the funeral directors always get the bodies wrong. They stuff your grandma’s bra a little too conically, as if she was Madonna circa 1990, instead of Diana from Waycross, Georgia. Or they put salmon-colored lipstick and blush on your grandpa, Frank, and you laugh because Frank had to change his name from the fruity “Allesio Bruno” to the much tougher and straighter “Frank Bruno” when he came to the U.S. In the 30s, to be Italian was gay. What would the fellas from WW2 say if they saw him now, in death drag? 

Did you know that even if you are being cremated, funeral homes strictly enforce that the deceased be fully dressed for the services? Socks, underwear, and shoes must go on before all that make-up.

I do not like the emotion I feel at wakes and funerals. I saw a receptionist cry so hard at a wake that she had to throw up. I found that excessive, and I am Italian. A helpful person grabbed one of the trash cans reserved for Kleenex and mint wrappers, and the receptionist hurled her sorrow and lunch right into it. The corpse was a psychiatric doctor I worked for, one of several that was secreted behind the receptionist’s front desk. He had died unexpectedly in his sleep, after going on a nice date with his husband. Dying unexpectedly is probably great for the deceased, but a big pain in the ass for everyone else. Disappearing like that? Without your affairs in order, without your shoes, socks, underwear, and make-up ready?

I have a question—why get so dressed up? Does anything happen when you die?