And now for something completely different...

Four reasons why I'm not afraid of death (which is not to say that I'm not afraid of dying):

1.  "I see dead people."  Story City, Iowa, where I grew up, was a town of about 1600 inhabitants, most of them Norwegian and Lutheran.  (Unfortunately, I can still recall of the odor of lutefisk from the semi-annual lutefisk and lefse dinners.)  In my class which roughly held steady at 33, there was an Anderson, Carlson, Johnson, Knutson, Larson, Matson, Nelson, Olson, Paulson, Peterson, Samson, and Thompson. My best friends were Bobby Knutson and Kathy Johnson.  Kathy's cousin, Liz Larson, was the daughter of the owner of the local funeral home.  The key word was "home," since the Larsons lived there.  It was one of the biggest houses in town, and Kathy and I spent many happy afternoons there.

I still remember the layout of the house.  When you entered, there was a formal staircase on the right that led to the second floor.  To the left there was a large room, sparsely furnished because when there were funerals in the house, it would be filled with folding chairs for the service.  Beyond that to the left was what we'd now call the family room, a smaller room with the TV.  Behind the largest room was the dining room, and to the left of that was the kitchen with a second set of stairs leading to the second floor.

There were two rules for us kids: one was that when a funeral was taking place, we had to stay outside.  Since most Story Citians had their funeals in one of the three Lutheran churches or the one Methodist church, this proscription wasn't very difficult.  The other rule was that the room on the second floor where Liz's father did the actual embalming and other preparations was off limits.  I'm sure we must have been tempted to sneak a peek or test whether the door was unlocked, though I don't remember that we ever did so.

But I've omitted one room.  If, when you entered, you turned neither to the left nor right, there was in front of you the viewing room.  That was where the dead lay so that others could view the body.  During all the years that we played in that house, there were often bodies nicely laid out in this room.  And as kids we thought nothing of it.  It seemed perfectly natural--not an object of fear or even curiosity, except when we might know the person who was lying there.  That people died seemed just a part of the way things are.

Nearly thirty years later, I met Kathy again.  She was returning to nursing and wanted to work with AIDS patients, this at a time when a diagnosis of AIDS meant almost certain death.  Both of us agreed that our experience in the funeral home gave us a healthy perspective on death and its familiarity.

When I told this story to a good friend, she said that it would make a great short story. But my point was the opposite: there was no story there--no tension, no arc, no epiphany, just life in all its fullness and completeness.

Obiter scripta:  In thinking about the room upstairs, I think too of Van Wyck Brooks's The Ordeal of Mark Twain, published over 90 years ago.  Brooks argues that the endings of Twain's books are almost all flawed and offers a Freudian explanation: they fail because Twain had never successfully resolved his Oedipal complex (hardly a surprising conclusion given the Freudian premise).  Brooks sketches the predictable family pattern, and supplies one significant detail: the "datemark" for the Oedipal trauma occurred when Twain was 11 (a perfect age for an Oedipal moment), and his father died.  The autopsy was performed on the family's dining room table, and Twain peeked in and got a glimpse of the gruesome procedure.  For years, the veracity of Brooks's recounting of that moment seemed to me dubious--just too convenient.  But later, when I was editing Dr. Karl Menninger's letters, I came across one in which he's offering advice to a young physician.  Menninger tells him that he'll do autopsies in the home and that he should always hang his jacket on the doorknob because family members won't be able to resist the temptation to look through the keyhole.  I should have trusted Brooks more--at least for the facts.