Death Preparations

by Kate Farrell

When she was first diagnosed, I stood on Lynn’s countertops cleaning decades of grease from her kitchen cabinets. I crushed almonds in a blender then squeezed the nut chunks through a cheesecloth to make milk for her tea. Lynn had survived protesting alongside the Black Panthers in the sixties. She raised a daughter with cerebral palsy. Her husband died on top of her, of a heart attack, during sex, on his birthday. Lynn was ten years older than me and the strongest woman I had ever known. She had no patience for complaints and taught me to take my own sorrow to the garden, to the kitchen, to stomp on it while hiking. No one, especially Lynn, believed she would die. 

I joined her at Romemu, her weekly religious gathering, where Lynn was invited to attend a healing ceremony for another dying friend with a Native American elder. After that session, Lynn hired him too because she was desperate. She had exhausted her medical options. Chemo could not save her and radiation promised to weaken her. The doctors listened to Lynn’s stubborn questions about experimental remedies, then patiently reminded her that stage IV lung cancer could not be cured. But Lynn was not done fighting. 

In the lushness of July, in a friend’s backyard, Lynn and thirty of her friends and family assembled inside a tent at sunset on a Friday night, and we did not come out until sunrise on Saturday morning. I entered because Lynn had guided me through two painful endings—a seven year relationship’s demise and my brother’s death—and we were bonded like sisters. I was part of her front line, committing my strength to help push death away. 

Before we entered the tent, Lynn’s family and friends were playful with anticipation, but when we crossed the threshold and observed the elders sitting in silence, it was clear we had entered a church. We found places to sit on the ground, now covered with blankets. The peak of the tent spiraled upward, a small opening at the apex exposing the final blue of twilight. I closed my eyes and prayed until the woman beside me tapped my arm and passed me the peyote. I took a small button. Two more rounds followed: we drank liquid peyote from a communal cup and then a bowl filled with crumbs arrived. I gathered pieces with my fingers and placed them into my mouth like communion. I didn’t know why there were so many options, but I was here to save Lynn, so I did all of them, every time they were passed. I wanted to meld with the drug so I could be part of Lynn’s healing, and I assumed the greater the portions, the greater the healing. We were told to focus all of our energy, all of our prayers, each vibration on one thing: the vision of Lynn’s healing. I held the image of a radiance passing through her body, clearing cancer with a wake of thunderous light, her hair glowing like sunbeams, the yearning and fear washed from her eyes and replaced with miraculous joy. Her nephew threw up after three rounds of peyote. The elder announced, He’s getting well, as the firekeeper cleaned up the vomit.  

Eventually, Lynn was instructed to stand so she could tell Spirit why she should live. “Well, welcome to my death,” Lynn started, joking. No one laughed. She looked small in front of the fire, even with her crown of long grey hair. She smiled at first, showing a snaggletooth on the right side that caused her to turn her face the other way when photographed. But then she became tearful, pleading, “I have a kid. I have to take care of her!” Next came anger, the muscles in her face tightening. “Fuck cancer!” she screamed. “I’m healthy, I’m good, I’m worth saving!” Finally, on her knees, exhausted and raw, she just said, “Please.” 

The elders prayed. The firekeeper turned the logs. I watched the flames. I felt the serenity of my uncluttered mind, an open space for a sacred power that I could connect with to save Lynn. 

The next morning, I crawled out of the tent, smoky and certain that something important had occurred. I squeezed into an Adirondack chair with Lynn and we giggled like teenagers, the weight of death lifted. 

The ceremony had lifted our hearts but Lynn’s eyes had grown larger as cancer continued to chisel the fleshy parts from her face. She had always been tiny but now she had become doll-like, her limbs as fragile as porcelain. Lynn no longer fetched her own tea but let me serve her, her eyes closed, giving me a smile but not wasting energy to utter thank you. She sat regally on her red velvet couch, wrapped in cotton blankets, her wild mane tied high on her head. 

It was midwinter, the season of surrender, when Lynn called seven friends to her home. Lynn thanked all of us for coming and officially named us her “death squad.” She had made three decisions: no chemo, no more radiation, and no funeral home. Lynn wanted her death squad to care for her once she died. 

“Is that even legal?” 

“We’ll need gloves.” 

“Will the funeral home allow it?” 

Lynn assured us. “I’ve done the research and called the funeral home. There are rules for taking care of a dead body, but you can do it. I don’t want strangers touching me.” 

Lynn explained that the funeral home would deliver and monitor dry ice that would sit under her coffin. Lynn did not want to be embalmed. Once we had cleaned and wrapped her body, which we could do here, in this room where she would spend her last hours, the funeral home would transport her body into her loft office in the barn.

Everyone talked at once, but Lynn called for order, reminding us to use the talking stick, decorated with feathers and tiny bells, which always seemed to be in her hand. 

Lynn asked, “Who’s brave enough to spend that first night with me, when I’m a corpse?” 

I raised my hand. No one spoke, not even Lynn, and their silence emboldened my decision. 

Less than a year before Lynn’s diagnosis, my brother died. I saw him on holidays and vacations, growing increasingly skeletal and grey from years of drinking whiskey, smoking pot daily, and snorting cocaine when available. He finally went to AA but only after his kids wrote desperate letters, begging him to get sober. I begged him too—when we were kids and again when we were adults. Typically he laughed and asked, Why are you so worried? 

That Easter, my mother warned me not to go to the hospital to see my brother. “You don’t want to remember Billy that way.” Her advice sounded absurd. I could hold his hand, at least. But when I walked into the ICU, I understood. I could not get beyond the ventilator, the room full of his artificial breath. I could not kiss his forehead. Billy was now a small pile of bones and wild hair. I was too late. 

 I recited from memory: “Joseph of Arimathea wrapped Jesus’ body in cloth after he was taken from the cross. His Mom and Mary Magdalene anointed him with oils and perfume. When the two Marys went back to the tomb two days later, they said, ‘He’s not here’ because he’d risen from the dead.”

“Shit.” Lynn smiled. “That’s what I want!”

One month later, Lynn was silent in her pine box.  

That night I was in Manhattan sleeping off beers and fried food after a fruitless Tinder date, oblivious to a string of texts calling me upstate to assist with the preparation of Lynn’s body. I had missed my chance to care for her in her final hours, to be part of the sacred act of dying. 

The next morning, her sister rushed forward when my taxi pulled into Lynn’s driveway, hugging me the way we do when we lose a sibling. She held me hard and I matched the ferocity of her touch. I could see Lynn’s frozen garden, littered with bee balm and echinacea flowers. They had once been lovely but now the petals were stiff remains, a winter nightmare of summer.   

Upstairs, in her barn loft turned office, the early light was just coming in. Lavender oil hung like a whisper in the air. Lynn’s hands were crossed at her chest. She was swaddled, according to her wishes, in a soft blue cotton sheet that matched her eyes tucked beneath her permanently closed lids.  

Lynn’s hair spilled over the pillow and onto her shoulders. She never wanted to lose that mane. Her shocking white hair roared into the room before she did, announcing her strength. Without it, she was just a petite, funny lady; with it, she was a force. A few months earlier, after a round of radiation, I met Lynn to escort her home and feed her. We sat on the bench of the hospital locker room and chatted while she changed from her gown into her jeans. She sat back down and sighed, “I’m not coming back here,” she said. “I’m not dying without my hair,” she said.    

“Can you make her face pretty?” Lynn’s sister handed me a makeup bag. 

I wanted to squeeze into the coffin and lie beside Lynn like we did on her bad days, close enough to whisper, to hold hands. Throughout her illness, her body went from wiry and fit to emaciated and, now, unmoving. Her face was all that was left to care for. I gingerly brushed powder on her cheeks. Her skin, no longer supple, absorbed color easily; I feared I was applying too much. I painted mascara on her closed lashes and left inky spots under her eyes. The flesh of her lips didn’t give at all, not like in life when she smiled, or laughed and said things to me like, “You Irish girls are drunks.” 

Her sister reached for Lynn’s hand and instead adjusted the blanket that surrounded her. I wrestled with the promise I had made to stay with Lynn’s body alone. 

In the evening, friends came to pay their respects. The “death squad” had set up photos in the foyer, away from the coffin, and her friends and family spent time there laughing and remembering Lynn alive. I sat in the front row to show that it was okay to get close, but few people joined me. Neighbors and acquaintances who didn’t know Lynn well were uncomfortable with the hominess of the arrangement and spent more time in Lynn’s kitchen guzzling wine, beer, shots, seeking to delay facing the corpse. I stood at the window near the coffin and watched them say goodbye to the death squad. Then the death squad departed too, leaving me alone with Lynn. 

My bravado, volunteering to sleep with her corpse, seemed stupid now. The door didn’t lock. The room was cold. Her coffin was not shut. What remains alongside a dead body? I didn’t want to find out. I searched for distraction on the shelves. Jung’s Red Book gave death authority and stood alongside the coffin, testing me. I wanted to confess, I’m scared. I wanted to sleep inside the house like Lynn’s sister, not in here. I had made a promise but would Lynn know if I didn’t keep my word? 

She was so tiny in her coffin. I couldn’t leave. I was her guardian. 

I lay on the couch, six feet from her. Our heads faced the same direction. We were both still. Her face was stiff, her body cold. Nothing real remained of my friend. I worried that Lynn’s dead body had a power that I couldn’t understand. I felt defenseless against whatever lurked while I slept. While my frightened thoughts fought themselves, I prayed the rosary without the beads, counting ten Hail Marys then one Our Father with my fingers. I called on my brother to be with me. I offered my body but the night required my soul.

When I was a child, I was certain God was calling me. When I confessed to my favorite nun that God wanted me to commit my life to him, I asked if I could have sex first, just to be sure. The nun promised me that God wasn’t calling me. I knew that my favorite nun just didn’t understand. Her rejection stayed with me, but it hadn’t stopped my devotion, my desire for a spiritual connection. I lived through Jesus’ death and resurrection every spring for the twelve years of my Catholic school education. We were ordered to fast and sit quietly from one to three in the afternoon on Good Friday, the hours when Jesus was dying on the cross. We gave up our favorite things during the forty days of Lent. By the time Easter arrived, we were allowed to resurrect from our suffering.

When I woke, the room felt cozier. Lynn and I had knitted ourselves together with my breath and her stillness. This new togetherness between us was different than when she was alive. We had kindled a new intimacy during the night while I breathed and she lay lifeless. I stood by her coffin, no longer afraid. The makeup had settled nicely. I kissed her forehead.

The barn door was boulder heavy, and I had to push with all my might to exit Lynn’s tomb. Outside the air was cold and my breath floated like a pillow in front of me. The mature trees laced in silhouette, knitted against the sky. The barn’s interior light pierced the dawn as the sleeping neighborhood’s silence filled my ears. The words of Lynn’s rabbi echoed in my head: “The desire for faith, is faith.” 

Published October 11th, 2020