You can go a lifetime without touching a dead body, until yours is the body that’s dead. It’s not an essential experience for a fulfilled life; and definitely not an experience you anticipate, unless you’re a true crime junkie with serial killer tendencies. I can tell you with certainty that I wasn’t expecting it as a 10 year old.
It was the late 90’s, and we had recently moved from upstate New York to Southern California, where my dad was making the transition from being a Baptist East Coast reverend to a Nondenominational West Coast pastor. Vestiges of formality lingered. Dad was still wearing suits in the pulpit, while it wasn’t uncommon that one church member in particular showed up in sweat pants with snaps down the side. I’m sure there are certain parts of Southern California where people get dressed up for church, but the High Desert isn’t one of them. That guy would later serve on the elder board and pass out communion wafers in his track suit.
My dad had brought me and my younger sister early to the chapel where he would be performing the funeral ceremony. The room was eerily quiet, pews empty, bereft of any weeping family members or parishioners in black. The top portion of the casket was open in front of the powder blue curtains that lined the stage. There he lay, the dead man. His thinning gray hair was coiffed to one side, matching gray suit, his hands flat against his sides. No one holds their hands like that in real life, unless you’re in the military, so we were certain he was truly dead.
His name I’ve forgotten now. But I vaguely remember that he had been on the search committee that brought my dad and us by extension across the continental U.S. His was the first welcoming presence to a family going through a major life transition. I didn’t know him well, but Dad seemed saddened by his passing. He said that this man had been kind to him.
My sister and I walked tentatively to the casket and gazed in at his face, which was at eye level. There was a tightness to his skin, starched and pale as his crisp white shirt. He looked as if he was on loan from a wax museum.
A large floral arrangement was to one side. It’s always been odd to me that flowers are present at funerals. Perhaps their presence is to brighten the mood, their perfume to disguise the fragrance of formaldehyde. Or maybe they’re a simple reminder that once cut from the root, it’s nothing but a brief bright bloom before the inevitable end.
“Do you want to touch his hand? It feels like a hot dog.” Dad said this matter of factly, as if handling dead bodies was just a part of a day’s work for a pastor. I hesitated. I was afraid to touch this man; this body that had once breathed, now reduced to a stiff suit and hot dog fingers. It’s a cliché to fear death, but how was I supposed to feel about the dead?
I looked over my shoulder at the empty chapel to make sure no one was watching, quickly shot out my hand, squeezed his right pointer finger, and withdrew my hand quickly, half expecting him to flinch. It turns out that his hand did indeed feel like a hot dog. I looked conspiratorially at my younger sister who wasn’t about to touch his hand if I didn’t go first. How daring we were!
I’m sure I fidgeted through the whole service, ate oversized helpings of potluck casseroles at the reception, and went home to peel the itchy dress off my body before bed. Those memories are lost to me now, but are scenes entirely familiar to many a church event from my past. But the hot dog fingers of the dead? That has stuck with me. The man who had laid before me was not the man who was. He was probably the kind of man who, in life, would have offered his hand to me. But in a moment of morbid fascination, without his consent, I had gripped his cold dead finger, and this act felt audacious.
As a ten year old, I couldn’t fully explain my dad’s nonchalance about this man’s body. He wasn’t afraid of it or concerned we were committing sacrilege by touching it. I think my dad understood that while the human form was there, his humanity was gone the moment breath left his body. And even that body would soon return to dust. Death is a final dehumanization. And yet, it is also, beautifully, for those of faith, the means by which we become fully human as we were designed to be. How many times had my dad told us over the years that to be absent from the body was to be present with the Lord? Too many times to count. When we have faith in Someone who conquered death, we don’t have to fear death anymore. Or the dead, either. Or life for that matter. We’re all just dust & hot dog fingers on our way to something eternally better.
A Good Crisis 