The loneliest I ever felt was in the winter, early in the year, many years ago. I was in the basement of a funeral parlor in Japan, standing before a metal table on top of which was a metal tray. On the tray were scattered ashes and cindery bones, still warm from the cremation incinerator. The brownish-gray dust was all that remained of an elderly woman whom I had never met.
There were four of five of us in suits and dresses, standing there, staring directly down in front of us, trying not to look at the tray or at one another. After a few hard minutes a funeral parlor worker came into the room with a brush and a dustpan, a pair of tongs, and several pairs of outsized metal chopsticks. With efficient, practiced strokes, the worker brushed the ashes to one corner of the tray, checking for any melted fillings, jewelry, artificial knees or hips, or other material besides the dust and partial skeleton that we, and he, would soon start putting into a pewter urn.
With pursed lips, he handed each of us a set of chopsticks. I should have prayed for the departed woman’s soul, but I prayed, at that moment, only that I would not drop the woman’s thigh bone, I think it was, as I picked it up from the tray with the big metal chopsticks and passed it to the woman standing to my left. She took the bone in her pair of chopsticks, handed it on in turn to the next person, and then that person handed it to the next, who put the bone into the urn. That was it. The worker then told us that he would attend to the rest. We put our chopsticks down and moved to the door. As we left the basement room, I turned to see him crisply sweeping the remains into a neat pile, which he transferred to the dustpan and thence to the urn before securing the lid and then moving to the next metal table, where another tray of still-warm ashes and bones had been laid.
The confrontation that day with the innermost parts of our bodily existence, the frame of our humanity, was the most inhuman moment I have ever passed. Those who think death is a part of life ought to try listening to the clinking of charred femurs and stainless steel, take into the nostrils the sharp odor of smoldering ash, reduced flesh and hair and sinew desiccated down to a powder the color of the inside of the foldable boxes that one’s shirts come in at Christmastime. Death is no part of life. Death is a disaster, no matter how many rituals we wrap it in.
My meeting in that funeral parlor with death, the workmanlike destroyer, was effected by a similar scene not one year before on the other side of the world. I came to be passing an unknown woman’s bones around a table in Japan because of something that happened in the place where I was born.
In southern Louisiana, in the full swarm of spring, I stood in the shade of a marble and granite mausoleum. My appointment at the Japanese funeral parlor was still ten months or so in the future. Through the arched opening to the outside of the mausoleum I could see the blue and zinc oxide of the sky and the green grass the color of crab innards, and the booming sunlight glinting off the corners of car windshields, and the young black man in the Navy uniform squinting and folding a flag after the white woman with the bugle had finished playing Taps. I looked up at the top row of the columbarium and saw the green flap of felt covering the square hole flutter a little in the breeze, revealing a breathing black emptiness. The square hole in the columbarium wafted down on me an odor like the gray mud we used to dive down to bring up to the surface from the bed of Lake Pontchartrain when we were kids. There was something about that mud, something about the odor of the columbarium hole, that was not supposed to be. On the ground in front of the columbarium there was the square cover to the hole with the temporary felt covering. The cover was a piece of marble with my last name written on it in several places. In whitest letters, just carved, was written the name of my grandfather, whose remains were about to be put into the blackness.
It had been many years since I had been home. I had gone overseas to study and stayed to work. I had changed the sky over my head but had only compounded the reticulation in my heart. In loneliness the mind begins to cannibalize itself. Perhaps there really is no meaning to any of this, one’s thoughts begin to whisper. A headlong tumult through a doomed encounter with a similarly lost woman was the beginning of my end. The fallout from that hellish affair was like the stropping of a scythe that mowed down the rows of my friendlier feelings. All was lost, all empty. I holed up in a tiny apartment in the countryside. I went out once a day, maybe, for groceries or lunch, and then for an evening stroll around the neighborhood, always hoping that I would meet no one. In my bed, before I went to sleep, I designed in my half-dreams gigantic spacecraft with impregnable hatches, panels of buttons and switches that I could operate, and a smooth porcelain cavernousness in which there was nobody, nobody, nobody, for all the miles in the universe and all the days of my life. We make our own niche in the columbarium before death meets us halfway with a real hole to call home.
Then one day I got an e-mail. It was from my father. My grandfather was ill and had been taken to the hospital. The doctors were working on him but who knew how much time was left. I called the hospital and was able to speak to my grandfather for less than a minute. He was slurring his sentences. His voice was like a terrified child riding a wildly galloping stallion. He started to cry. My father was in the room with him. He took the phone back and said they would have to call later, the doctors were taking him back into the operating room. By the next morning, it was all over. I never spoke to my grandfather again.
I booked a flight to New Orleans. All sadness begins and ends with a flight over the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. I called a taxi and went to the train station in my foreign country, and from there I went to the bus stop. I stood in the still-chilled spring of rural Japan and felt the sunlight on my face before boarding the bus to the airport. At Moisant I met my father. The truth of my grandfather’s passing became real when I saw my father’s face. We went to dinner in the French Quarter and then went to the hotel. There is something very comforting about the emptiness of the French Quarter, the spiritual vacuum there. Twenty-four hours later, the funeral was over, my grandfather was in the crypt, and I was already mentally back in Japan, running from terror, planning to make up for lost time by living as though I was swimming against the event horizon of a black hole, swimming out of the grave with my name on it, into the sunlight beyond the portico columns, back through my own life and the blank days that fell through my memory like quarters dropped into a well.
It is a great irony that lonely people so easily find one another. There was a woman of destitute loneliness with whom I came to be acquainted, and in no time at all we had signed our names on a form at the city hall and were, by some definition, married. Her loneliness proved to be far beyond her control. What I ran from by running she ran from by fighting. With raging fists she would lash out, striking anyone in her way. I was shocked when this first happened, and then terrifyingly sad. I resigned myself to this fate almost immediately. One is wrecked on one shoal or another, I thought. The beatings continued, her to me, until the police came one day and lifted me out of the rented prison of our matrimonial apartment.
Some months before that, though, the woman’s grandmother died. I never knew her. She lived in another town far away. She died of old age in a hospital somewhere, I forget exactly which one. There was a photograph on a cell phone someone showed me of an intubated woman with papery skin and a few silver strands of hair tucked behind her ears, her reddened watery eyes looking on the world as Tennyson’s Ulysses might have looked out on the sea. And then the eyes were closed one day, like nothing, like when you know there is a bird on a limb and then you glance again and it is gone. And then everyone was standing around a metal table in a funeral home, furiously trying to look at anything other than what was left of her.
It was that woman’s bones that I handled, the ashes of that skin and that hair that I breathed. Before the tragicomic archaeology in the funeral home basement there had been a grand feast for the dead woman’s relatives, which, by law, also included me. There was beer and rice wine, and delicacies and sweetmeats. There was even dessert. And then came the waitress to announce that it was time for some of us to move to the basement.
Death will have its feast, too.
And we will have ours. At the old woman’s wake a couple of days before, the body had been laid out in a coffin and surrounded with potted flowers. There had been drinks—toasts, even—and dainty dishes. Everyone ate heartily. We gorged ourselves in the presence of someone no longer able to eat.
Then came the reading of the sutras. We stuffed our bellies and then listened to words about the cessation of delusional desire. The mourners sat in metal folding chairs in a long, low-ceilinged hall, a soulless chamber that was linoleum on the bottom, painted concrete block on the sides, and drywall at the top. The coffin and the flowers and a big black-and-white photograph, draped with black bunting, of the deceased in a happier time were in the front. And then in walked a bonze in mahogany-colored robes and white split-toe socks and dark sandals, swishing majestically as he moved with great purpose to the front of the room, his aluminum wristwatch peeking out from the cuff of his starched undersleeve. With no ado whatsoever, the monk assumed his place at a low altar in front of the coffin and began chanting the sutras in a rich booming baritone. He was teaching the dead to read. He was teaching death to read. He was imposing order on chaos, giving anarchy a good talking-to, letting the destroyer know that we were on to him and were having none of it. It felt good to see death getting a tongue-lashing. Enough is enough, I thought.
In my heart, somewhere, some small starling darted off and I was left with the quietest despair. I had not been to Mass in years. I cherished loneliness more than communion. My insides pruned with pity for the world. Poor monk, I thought. Poor lady. Poor all of us, mourning after nothing, telling the prayers of annihilation to the annihilator, waiting for the chanting to stop so we could tuck into our suppers again and wash down our meat with beer.
Death is not a part of life. Anyone who says we should accept death tells a lie. There is either the Resurrection or there is nothing, Nothing, la misma nada in this or that key, Diamondcutter or Shiva or Mictlāntēcutli or Guru Nanak. The world is full of graves, from Metairie to Machida, the serried dead all doing nothing but mouldering, sinking down. And loneliness calls out to loneliness, death to death, and draws us all down, as surely as the golden draft goes down the gullet and irrigates the flesh like grass.
Featured: The Requital by the White Heron, Setsuko Mitsuhashi (1973).
