I crossed quickly and slipped into the prep room, cringing. You never knew what you’d find there. It’s where all the gruesome work was done, and bodies stayed on the steel table for at least a day after embalming to be sure everything went right. Wouldn’t want to dress them and then find out something leaked. Thankfully, there was no one—dead or alive—in the prep room now and any bodies picked up today wouldn’t be brought in until we were ready to embalm. There was a refrigerated area downstairs where they could chill out. Mr. Ludwig’s joke, not mine.
My sneakers squee-squeed across the waxed linoleum to the hallway that connected the prep room and chapel, the path bodies took for their final farewell. I walked it quickly, stopping by the door, which was propped slightly open by a clip at the top. Another of Mr. Ludwig’s illusions, preventing it from “clicking” closed if he needed to come in or out.
I leaned in close, hoping he was nowhere around. He’d freak if he found me eavesdropping like this.
“… right in the middle of a luncheon. They called an ambulance, but I guess it was too late.”
“How awful,” a woman murmured.
Not family members. They don’t discuss details at the wake. I stifled a sigh, knowing “he’s in a better place now” or “at least he didn’t suffer” would come next. I kept hoping for something meaningful, but had started to wonder if wake talk ever progressed beyond platitudes. They were part of the ritual, I supposed, like washing the body or saying prayers or old ladies wearing veils, things that happened at just about every viewing we’d done at Ludwig & Wilton, all of them so similar.
I’d thought working here could help me piece together some cohesive understanding of what people believe about death, but it turned out almost all our clients were Catholic and Christian. Hindus cremate, Jews bury the body first, visit afterward, and so on. Those who don’t embalm rarely come to places like Ludwig & Wilton, so I only saw one small slice of belief and practice.
Thankfully, Mr. Ludwig knew a ton about religion and mortuary history and liked to talk while he worked. Over body Number Two, he told me that families used to prep the deceased and hold the wake at home. They’d open a window so the soul could leave the room, then close it after two hours in case the soul changed its mind. Clocks would be stopped, mirrors covered, but the rituals of washing and dressing the body done today aren’t much different than a century ago. Except instead of laying out your dead grandma on the dining room table, it’s done here, at the mortuary.
Religion came up first over Number Three, Mary Margaret Hanley, Catholic, a rosary wrapped around her folded hands. Mr. Ludwig was wrestling with her dress collar and the two-sided tape, but my eyes kept wandering back to those beads wound through her stiff fingers.
“How bad do you have to be to go to hell?” I’d asked him.
“You have to commit a mortal sin,” he said.
“Like …?”
Mr. Ludwig waved blindly for the scissors, answering as I handed them over. “Killing someone. Or stealing. Or committing adultery.”
I frowned. “Stealing and murder are hardly the same. You really go to hell for stealing? Forever?”
“Well.” Mr. Ludwig glanced up at me. “The outcome may be different, but not necessarily the intent. Catholics believe a sin is something done deliberately and with full understanding that it’s wrong. That could apply equally to each crime.”
“But everyone’s stolen something,” I said. “Snuck into a movie, done dine-and-dash, taken candy on a dare. The Catholics can’t really believe all those people are going to hell. Who would ever get to heaven?”
“Everyone who goes to confession,” he said. “That absolves them of sin.”
“Even the really bad ones? Like killing someone?”
He smiled at my disbelief. “As long as they are sincere in their repentance, yes.”
“That’s like the mother of all Get Out of Jail Free cards!” I was amazed. “Why would anyone not sin?”
Mr. Ludwig stopped working, resting his hands just short of Mary Margaret on the table, and looked at me. “Would you kill someone if you could get away with it?”
“No.”
“Steal?”
“I don’t know. Maybe?” I thought about the time Tasha and I were in eighth grade and each stole a pair of socks from the mall. Mine were argyle—black, green, and white. Really cute. I’d never worn them. I don’t think Tasha had either. “No,” I said. “I don’t think I would, actually. I’d feel too guilty.”
“Exactly. If you had ever stolen”—he raised an eyebrow like he knew what I’d been thinking—“you’d probably still feel bad about it. That’s repentance. You can’t fake it. You actually have to feel it in your heart, and Catholics believe God knows the difference.”
That conversation rolled around in my head the rest of the day, collecting mass like a downhill snowball. People who died with an unconfessed mortal sin were damned to hell, Mr. Ludwig said. If that were true, and I knew they were going to die, I had to tell them, regardless of whether they ended up living or not. I couldn’t let them burn for eternity just because they hadn’t gotten to say they were sorry. I rushed home, madly searching online, elated that the answer was so simple all this time.
It wasn’t.
Of course.
Confession and mortal sins and hell were what the Catholics believed. The Muslims, on the other hand, thought the Catholics were going to hell because they weren’t Muslim. And the Buddhists didn’t believe in hell at all.
Back to square one.
But it was the start of our own ritual—Mr. Ludwig’s and mine—discussions about religious beliefs interspersed with draining fluids or wiring a jaw so it wouldn’t hang open like a broken mailbox.
“Carmen, Betty, thank you so much for coming,” I heard from the other side of the chapel door. A family member. I perked up, leaning closer, my hand against the wall for balance.
“Oh, Joshua, I’m so sorry about your father. We’d just seen him at the symposium. He looked so healthy … happy …”
“I know,” Joshua answered. I could picture him, dark and stocky like his father had been, nodding sadly. “It was very sudden.”
“How’s your mom?”
“A little better. Managing.”
I heard a sympathetic sigh, the cluck of a tongue. “He’d told me about the project he’d just started. His research sounded so promising …”