Why my mother brought me to the morgue, I’ll now understand. Almost every Saturday morning, I woke up to see my mother watching me.
“Hi, mom,” I said.
“Get dressed, it’s Saturday,” she replied.
I always dressed in black. Mother said it showed that I cared about the death. I had no idea if I cared about them. I didn’t know who they were.
My mother didn’t work in the morgue and she didn’t know the people in there either, but she said it was good for me to go. To realize that life is short and the black infinity beyond death is endless.
The first time she took me I was five.
“Touch it,” she told me.
“What, Mommy?” I asked.
“Touch that man,” she said.
I didn’t even know what being dead meant then. I reached out, and gently poked the man’s arm.
“Ow, Mommy,” I said, “It’s hard.”
“That’s because he’s dead.”
“What’s ‘dead’?”
“It means he isn’t here anymore.”
“But he’s right here, Mommy.”
“But his mind isn’t here. He can’t think. He’s like a toy in a store.”
“Where is his mind, Mommy?”
“I don’t know,” said my mother, and her voice cracked a little, like it did sometimes when she talked about daddy leaving.
“But you know everything, Mommy.” I said, surprise and confusion filling my mind.
“Nobody knows what happens when someone dies. That’s why we’re all so scared of it.”
“I’m not scared of dying, Mommy.”
“That’s because you don’t know what it is,” said my mother, and she grabbed my hand very hard and pulled me up close to the corpse I had touched. She ripped the blanket off the body and pushed my face up to the corpse. I began to cry. That’s when I understood what death was.
