It was at my aunt’s funeral that I pulled aside the funeral director. “Alex, can I ask you something?”
Old schoolmates, we whisper conspiratorially in the hallway away from the long line of prying ears.
I had recently stumbled across a mortician on Tiktok. She illuminated all the answers to all the questions we ever were to afraid to ask. Although there was that time in a bar that I struck up a conversation with the brother of a friend who worked at the local funeral home and he confided in me all the ghastly details of his work. Of bodies that die in chairs. Or worse. The necessary work to straighten limbs and bring the body under its final submission. These things haunted me recently.
My brain regularly coasts down dark winding roads that run through the black forests of imagination. The headlights create warped shadows in the night. It is always night. “Alex, what is the family allowed to do to a body? Say, like, style hair? Cover scars? Dye hair? Apply fake nails?”
I spilled out a torrent of words that try to say what I mean without saying what I mean. Alex laughs. “Anything you need to. As long as it’s legal.”
“My daughter lives in the street. She’s an addict. You saw her at my mom’s funeral. I don’t want to be morbid. I just need to be…prepared.”
“I’ll call you, Rosemary. We’ll talk,” he reassured me.
Alex has been faithfully burying our dead for decades.
My daughter is deeply scarred by drug use. Psychosis, life on the street and abysmal personal care habits have wreaked havoc on her body. Her hands have suffered the most. Beautiful long slender fingers that once created music over piano keys or held a pencil to sketch lovely likenesses are marked with the scars of abscesses, scabs-red and raw from the disease of psychosis, and nails that have recently grown back after months of cold and fungus pulled them away from their beds. Drug use is an ugly master. It may soothe the soul of the user but it pits the brain against the body in a never-ending battle of abuse.
In late November we brought warm food and supplies to their campsite in a forest of tall sentinel trees. She had gone to a nearby café to charge her phone, her boyfriend told us. We searched in vain until a call came. Those were the days when they could keep a phone. She was in a bathroom stall at a local coffee shop sobbing into the phone. “Mom, my hand! It hurts so much! Can you come and get me?”
Her finger had an abscess the size of a loony and was red and swollen up into her hand. I touched it and she screamed. My brain was frantic for what to do. It was late and our home was an hour away. We decided to drop her off at emerge after she stopped at her tent to grab some things. At the hospital, outside the car, we group hugged as she held a liter of chocolate milk I had brought her. She leaned into my husband and me and stayed there. “It feels good to be loved,” she said quietly before she stepped back.
My heart lurched. Her relationship with her dad was strained at best.
I woke several times that night wondering if she had been seen. Finally, at 7 am I received a call. She was in the cafeteria crying. Twice they had called her name and she had been asleep. They didn’t bother waking her.. She was dope sick and didn’t want to wait longer. I called the hospital and lit into the triage nurse. They saw her within 30 minutes. She had a staph infection in her hand and was prescribed antibiotics. I breathed a sigh of relief.
On one of my regular Tuesday visits, I got her into the bathroom at the Ark, a local mission. I had brought an arsenal with me. Hot water, a bowl, sea salt, hand towels and coconut oil infused with tea tree oil. The volunteer workers hovered over us and brought hotter water as I soaked first one hand then the other in hot salty water, then dried her hands with soft towels before applying the coconut oil carefully to her mangled hands. A worker we nicknamed Kim Horton because she runs the take-out window where dinners are handed out to the community when the dining room is full, swooped in and produced a bottle of lavender oil from a leather purse strapped around her hips. “Here, add some lavender to that coconut oil! It’s very healing.”
We carefully brush her long blonde hair, working through the tangles at the bottom first. One of the ladies produces a toothbrush and toothpaste from their stash of toiletries. It’s a covey of mothers, fluttering around her, helping, healing; a ritualistic laying on of hands in a sacred ceremony of hope. The mirror reflects a young mom, brushing her hair, and washing her face while she chats away at the other end of the counter. She shares the names of her 5 children she isn’t allowed to see. Addiction exacts a toll that is too costly to count.
I pray the words of Joel often at my crying place. The tears can fall into a sink full of sudsy water and dishes and no one sees but Him.
I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you.
Joel 2:25
The destroyer in our time is fentanyl.
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