Corpses

For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened— not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. 2 Corinthians 5:1

When I think about dead bodies I think about the rising sun. Saints, including my father, want to be buried with their feet facing the east in preparation for their Savior, Jesus, to return. When he does, they will rise, and see him face to face.

II.

In 19th century Victorian England body snatchers lurked around graveyards waiting for fresh bodies to be buried. Once the bodies were buried, they would dig them up and deliver them to doctors interested in dissecting the human body. In fear of grave robbers and the potential desecration of their loved ones, some families banded together to form “Grave Clubs” made up of protectors who would stand watch over new graves for five weeks, the amount of time it took for a body to become useless to anatomists. Other measures against body snatchers were also taken. Sometimes corpses were buried at twice the normal depth in the earth. Sometimes iron bars were laid in the ground to make it more difficult for the thieves to spirit away the corpses.

III.

During the Spanish Civil War revolutionaries were enraged with the Catholic Church because of the violence of the Spanish Inquisition and the institutional power and corruption with which the church was poisoned. The destruction of the sacred was unrestrained. Churches were set on fire, shrines were razed, statues tumbled over, treasures stolen, religious art and artifacts burned to ash. In one instance in Barcelona, the bodies of nineteen Silesian nuns were exhumed from their graves. Their coffins were pried open and set against the doors of the church, naked skeletons propped up to be exposed and jeered at in a statement that declared even the saints were only flesh and bones, bodies decayed, eaten by dirt and worms. Human, not holy.

IV.

Saint Emerentiana was a Roman martyr who lived in the third century. I learned about her in Rome, at an altarpiece dedicated to her in the Basilica of Saint Agnes, where her Emerentiana’s remains lie. Saint Emerentiana was the foster-sister of Saint Agnes of Rome. Agnes was martyred for professing her belief as a Christian. A few days after her murder Emerentiana went to Agnes’s grave. She was confronted there by an angry mob which stoned her to death, even as she defended her sister’s grave. In paintings Emerentiana is depicted as a young girl with stones in her lap and lilies in her hand. She is commemorated on January 23, the day after my birthday.

There is a Reformation story about Catherine Vermigli, the wife of the reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli. Vermigli’s religious enemies tried to humiliate, degrade, and torment him by disinterring his wife’s bones and throwing them on to the city dung heap. Her friends retrieved her bones and mixed them with the bones of the revered Catholic nun, Saint Frideswide. Vermigli’s persecutors were foiled. The bones of Catherine and Frideswide were so intermingled they could not remove one without fear of tampering with the remains of a saint.

VI.

In the Old Testament of the Bible, in the book of Exodus, God dwelled in a tent. His spirit was said to inhabit the Ark of the Covenant, which the Israelites, wanderers at the time, carried with them. When they stopped to make camp the Ark was placed in the Holy of Holies, a tent inside a tent. His spirit rested there, encased in woven threads.

VII.

My dad requested that he did not want to be cremated. My sister Lindsay said she would like to be cremated, but still have a tombstone. She just doesn’t want to sit on a shelf.

VIII.

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they replied. Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?” Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance.

“Take away the stone,” he said. “But, Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.” Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”

The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face. Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.” John 11: 22-24

IV.

In the book of Ezekiel, the prophet Ezekiel describes a vision. In the vision he was led to a valley full of bones. Dry bones coated the valley, piling up in heaps. God turned to Ezekiel and asked him if the bones could live. God alone knows, Ezekiel replied. The Lord directed him to tell them that the Lord says, “I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am Lord”. When Ezekiel spoke the words the bones rattled and rose. Flesh and tendons appeared on them. Breath entered them and they came to life.

It is said that the tradition of the wake dates back to the ancient Jewish tradition of leaving the sepulcher, or holding tomb, of the body open for three days in hope of seeing signs of a return to life.

XI.

My mother said that we will say goodbye to my dad when the coroner takes his body from our house. It will be a closed casket visitation. Partly because his body doesn’t look the way that we knew him. His body is swollen and chubby with little hair. He was always trim and clean cut. His skin was dark and swarthy. He sported the same haircut my entire life. Hair swept to the side, thick and black. Mom says the body isn’t really him, just his tent.

We are going to bury him in Earl Park, where he was born, next to his parents and older brother Dick in a small graveyard in the middle of cornfields.

We plan to have a wake, funeral, and then travel with his body to Indiana to be buried. Three days to say our goodbyes.

Excerpt from “Love Hours”, 2018