Mortuary Confidential

silent as the previous one. When we got home, Anthony went right to the funeral home to perform his work and I crashed in bed. I woke hours later, still tired, and made my way down to the kitchen, where I found Anthony.

“Ant?”

He gave me a look of pure exhaustion. Anthony was used to late nights, but I had never seen him this tired before.

I massaged his shoulders. “How was it?” I asked.

“Tough.”

“Want to talk about it?” I wrapped my arms around him. The sweet smell of formaldehyde lingered on his shirt.

“No.”

He was silent. I knew it had been hard on him. His employee, Violet, had called to say she had found him crying in the garage in his embalming suit. I knew Anthony was too tough to ever admit it to me. I’d press the issue at a later time; give him a little space for now.

“Ant,” I said tentatively.

“Yeah?”

“I think I need to go back—to the hospital.”

“Really? Don’t you think Jim’s parents will drive down? And obviously Grace’s will fly out to be with them.”

“I’m sure they will.” I paused. “I just need to go be with her.”

“How long are you going to go?” he asked.

“However long it takes.”

“And the kids?”

“We’ll tell them before I go. Then you can get some sleep. I’ll ask your mom and dad to come over and sit this evening.”

“Okay,” he said. I could tell he was too tired to even function.

“Kids—” I called.

I sat next to Grace’s bed. She wore a number of casts, and the bandage on her head was fresh. The head nurse assured me the surgeries had been as successful as one could hope, and they were guardedly optimistic about her recovery.

The tube had been removed from Grace’s throat, and when she woke she tried talking. Some of the swelling on her face had subsided, but she would definitely need an oral surgeon sometime in the very near future. Her voice came out in raspy whispers. “Did Ant take care of Jim and little Jimmy?” she asked, tears rolling down her face.

I nodded, tears running down my face, too. I couldn’t speak.

Grace tried speaking again, but I interrupted her, “Grace, don’t talk. Please. Just rest.” I squeezed her hand.

“You know, Marie,” she said, ignoring my protest. I had to strain to make out the words. “I sometimes think life is like a tapestry. And—” She stopped and winced as her tongue traced over broken teeth. “And… we’re looking at the back. We’re looking at the mess of tangled threads—knots and threads going every which way. It’s seemingly meaningless.”

Tears flowed freely down my cheeks, and I held my friend’s hand tightly as she continued, “Walk around that same tangled mess and on the other side is a breathtaking piece of art. I think—I think we only get to look at the back of the tapestry most of the time. Right now, I’m only seeing chaos and knots and loose threads. I know though, I know, that one day I’ll get to look at the front and it’ll all make sense. It’ll all make so much sense… I’ll get to see the beauty of God’s work.

“Thank Ant for me. He bore his cross.”

CHAPTER 46 The Gay Man in the Wine Bottle Contributed by a vintner

My partner and I met Charles and Jacques when we were touring the Bordeaux wine region for the first time. We ran into these Americans at an outdoor cafe, started talking, and found out that not only were they from the same state, but they lived about ten minutes from Wes’s and my house. They live in Concord and we live just north of Manchester. We exchanged numbers and have since become good friends and travel buddies.

I am a funeral director and Wes is a general surgeon at one of the local hospitals. In between our hectic schedules we don’t have as much time together as we’d like, but we make time for our shared hobby, making wine. We’ve been making wines for over twenty years now and have gotten to a point where we can turn out a pretty good bottle of vin. We make all sorts of whites and reds, depending on what’s in season when we’re making a batch. Our friends rave that our wines are better than store-bought, but mostly I think they’re blowing smoke.

Since Wes and I are wine freaks, we naturally like to tour wine regions when we go on vacation. After we became friends with Charles and Jacques, they started tagging along on our wine touring extravaganzas, not necessarily for the winery tours, but for the destinations. Wes and I would go and do our wine thing and they’d go off on their own sightseeing thing. We’d been traveling together for fifteen years with destinations including Melbourne, Napa, Sonoma, Bilbaon Rioja, and Mendoza, to name a few.

Charles came to me one day and asked me to handle his funeral arrangements. He had HIV. This was before the antiretroviral drug cocktails; the disease had progressed to such a point that the available drugs could only prolong his life. He lasted four years, six months, and nine days.

Charles had moved from his home state of Louisiana the day he turned eighteen. He needed to be somewhere a little more liberal than the Deep South, and he ended up in Massachusetts. As soon as Charles’s family found out about his “affliction,” they disowned him. Charles hadn’t spoken to his family since. When his father died in the mid ’80s, Charles received a letter in the mail, months after the fact, from an aunt telling him what had happened. She told him not to send his sympathies to his mother.

The day Charles came into the funeral home to make arrangements for himself, he told me, “I want to be cremated and my ashes to go to Jacques,” who, at the time, had been his companion for seventeen years. “I am going to extend the same courtesy to my family that they extended to me when daddy died.”

He handed me a sealed envelope addressed to his aunt.

“Promise me you’ll mail it after—” He choked off the rest of the sentence.

I nodded and patted him on the back.

“She’ll tell my mother and even though I haven’t spoken to that woman in twenty-nine years, I know she is going to come north, playing the mother card, and demand my ashes,” he cautioned me. “Curt, under no circumstances are you to give them to her. I have made Jacques the executor of my estate; the beneficiary of every earthly possession I have, and have had my lawyer draw up an affidavit that says Jacques gets my remains. Promise me you’ll give them to him.”

I promised him.

With a twinkle in his eye, he added, “I’ve also done a lot of thinking—this disease makes you do that—about my urn. Will you bottle me?”

“Huh?” I replied, shocked.

“You know, put me in one of your wine bottles and cork me. I figured since I like to drink wine, and I like to drink your wine, it’ll be perfect. Besides, it looks less threatening than,” he did air quotes with his fingers, “an urn.” He rolled his eyes in the fashion that only women and gays can.

I laughed, but Charles assured me he was serious.

“All right,” I acquiesced. “I’ll bottle you. You want a label?”

“Nah, just cork me.”

That conversation was the beginning of the end.