It's a familiar sight. The door bell rings. You open it to a kindly person carrying a container, basket or box of homemade goodies, greens, sweet potato pies, cornbread, and indeed without fail fried chicken and potato salad. They carry the hot food, steam and smells permeating the air as they find their way into the dining room or kitchen where they join the rest of the food family, already there, on the dining room table or the kitchen counter; more sweet potato pies, freshly made butter pound cakes, ham, more fried chicken, mac and cheese, and greens and cornbread. Recently, my brother-in-law passed and we were in Arkansas attending his funeral and I again observed the food, funeral, and family ritual. Northerners might think it’s a family gathering or dinner party in reality - it is both, because it’s a funeral. There has been a death in the family and everyone in the community is bringing food for the family, while honoring the dead. Southern culture dictates that death, though sad, and depending on the age and/or the seriously of the illness, or the shock of an accident that claims a young life too soon, people still find the time to celebrate and show their love with food, lots of food! When my grandmother died when I was six, the thing that stands out most in my mind was the wake, which back in that time was held in the home. That’s right, not a funeral home, but inside the family’s home. In our case, it was in my grandmother’s house right next door to ours. It was a large clapboard house in need of a paint job with peeling white paint exposing the weathered boards underneath. It had two doors, one to the right leading into the parlor, and one in the middle of the L shaped porch leading into the living room where there was a wood burning fireplace. The house sat next to the main highway and the dirt road next to the paved highway was filled with cars, parked on the grass, some barely off the highway. There was a steady stream of people dressed in their Sunday best carrying food and pots filled with goodies into grandma’s house in celebration of her death - in honor of her life. The dining room table was filled with food and the older people where celebrating with a sip of wine or spirits of some kind. Now I loved food and always have, but the thing that I remember the most, that still stands out in my mind, is seeing the white coffin sitting in the middle of the parlor and my grandmother’s body lying there, embalmed, in Sunday best. I remember her lifeless face skin tight with a grayish color, with her gray hair curled tightly and combed out. She was my grandmother but that was the first time I had ever seen a dead body and one in a coffin. The people walked by her and said their goodbyes, and then the most horrid thing that could happen to a six year old girl happened to me. One of my grandmother's friends grabbed me and pulled me toward my grandmother’s coffin and told me to “Kiss your grandmother goodbye”. I hesitated and shook my head but that would not suffice with my grandmother’s friend because she pulled me closer to the coffin and gently pushed my face toward my grandmother’s and before I could object my face was so close to grandmother’s and the voice kept insisting “go ahead baby and kiss your grandma goodbye”. Unable to respectfully loosen myself from her grip, I quickly leaned the inch or so closer and gave a brief and quick kiss to the cold rubbery cheek of my grandmother and ran out of the parlor, Petrified and Horrified. Scared that I had kissed a “dead person”; the year was 1963. When my mother died, her daughter, 35 years later in 1998, there was no wake. People still brought food by the house and visited with us, but there was no coffin or dead body in the living room but there was a scheduled time for the family to visit momma at the funeral home. I had not seen my mother for almost two years as I had moved to Maine from Lawrence, Kansas in 1996, and had not been able to get back to Mississippi at that time. I talked with momma weekly, sometimes daily but I had not seen her physically in two years. When I walked into the cold room at the funeral parlor where her body lay on the slab, just as it had when she died. She still had her long gray braids, her face withdrawn and thin, the most noticeable thing was her extended abdomen. It was swollen to three times its normal size. Her skin too had that greyish hue, cold and dampness of flesh without it's life blood. I stared at mom, walked over to her lifeless body, still resembling my mother, leaned over and kissed that cold grey face, and said "goodbye mom, I love you, and I'll see you in heaven." This time no one had to pulled me to her body, no one had to tell me to kiss my momma goodbye - this time it came naturally, of necessity, I needed to tell my mom "goodbye".
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Janice Swinton
A radical Christian and follower of Jesus Christ, trying to walk and live out a life uncompromised in this world; being informed and conformed to His Image. Author, writer, independent scholar and wife to James for over 35 years. Archives
September 2013
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