Two weeks before the Dordevic funeral, we get flies. There are flies in the foyer, in the Big Parlor and the Small Parlor, in the men’s restroom, and in the maintenance closet. There are flies in the prep room and in the casket showroom. There are not flies in the industrial fridge. Sometimes, when the fridge is not too crowded, I’ll stand in there for a moment to catch a break.
The flies do not appear all at once. Instead, they come slowly, like timid travelers at shoulder season. We first manage them with an electrified swatter. This method is time-consuming but entertaining. The cemetery manager and I compete to see who can kill the most flies. She has forty years on me and wins by a landslide.
Hana Dordevic died of drowning. This determination comes from the county coroner. She was face-up in the Bay for nearly a week. She followed the currents, adrift, until she was spotted in the marshes by the Dumbarton Bridge. I tell the coroner that the story from the family is much more complicated: that she left her native Serbia in the Eighties and came to Burlingame, where she worked long hours at a senior care home cleaning up drool and crusted mucus, serving potatoes and watching the soaps out of the corner of her eye, till she met some inpatient’s grandson or grand-nephew, Lawrence, and married him quick, and all was well, with three kids and the financial freedom to leave the job and learn to work with clay and make glazed planter pots, until the shape of the pots became clumsier and she went to the doctor and it was months of testing and prodding before they found the multiple sclerosis, and the medicine vacillated between depressing her and causing hallucinations, and the trajectory of the disease was despair and she was found in the Bay with no real sign of suicide, but no real suggestion of a struggle, and some moments in the dark are intangible, intractable, unimaginable but for the body who lives it and dies it. That all her being could be summed up in a word, or even domesticated into my retelling, that the cause of death is so divorced from the cause of life (a childhood, an immigration, a family, a passion, a secret, a breath), I tell the coroner, is criminal.
“Are you new?” the coroner asks, on the other end of the line.
The cemetery manager, the other funeral counselor, and I search for the source of the flies. We discover several gum wrappers in the dusty corners of the casket showroom. Otherwise, spic-and-span. The other counselor wipes down the interior of our microwave just in case. I take out the trash again. The cemetery manager swats three small and two large flies. A war in small battles, we call it.
The embalmer explains that the case is difficult, though not as difficult as he initially expected. She shows little decomposition of the body, despite the conditions of her death. Her legs are beginning to marble. Her fingers and nails purpled. The face, which had been exposed to the elements, is blackish and flaking. The skin is delicate, almost impossible to cosmetize. The embalmer will have to be creative. “But,” he cautions me, “it is essential the family views and buries as soon as possible. The skin may hold foundation now, but in five days? No chance.”
I sputter and bargain with him. What is the point of the preservative process if not to buy us time? Could someone else, a colleague of his, step in and give extra help? There has to—I’m the kind of person who believes—be something we can do in all scenarios. The embalmer is staunch and strange and a Witness. He beats the sidewalks in San Francisco on Saturdays, trying to bring people to God. Me, in my picayune negotiations against decomposition, he levels with: “You’ve ever stayed in the pool too long, gotten raisin fingers?”
Lawrence shakes my hand hard when he comes to drop off another pair of shoes and view the body. I wonder if he is trying to show how moored he is. He brings a silver necklace and a bracelet and a pair of slip-on Sketchers. The kitten heels were too small. Her feet were swollen from sickness or dying or being dead. He asks whether she ended up needing nylons, and I reply probably not, but I make a note to ask the embalmer.
I take him into the Small Parlor where Hana is laid out in her coffin. The husband grows pale then red, an archipelago of blush across his neck and face. He asks whether I can put on her shoes and jewelry. The shoes go on fine, and so does the bracelet. I am careful to do the necklace. I must lift her head to fasten the clasp. Her upper body is so heavy. I catch a whiff of her fetid hair as I draw her up and mask my reaction. My fingers are thick and clumsy, I fumble for a while. When it’s clasped, I adjust the pendant, a small stag.
He claps my shoulders, the universal gesture for: good boy.
I spend forty minutes in the two-story Home Depot in Daly City. I am looking for fly paper. Years ago, in an old apartment, I bought fly paper for the fruit I’d leave out to show my mother I could survive on my own. The coiling type of flypaper that must be hung with the provided pushpins, leaving little holes in the walls. I do not ask an employee for help, want to do it on my own. I grow more and more frustrated, rattling and furious, feeling neuropathy flies land on my face and neck. When I finally find the fly paper, it is near the entrance. I buy the sort that is clear and clings to the window. I spend $18.71 of my own cash and don’t plan to file for reimbursement. Once we apply the fly paper, I check it daily. There are fly graveyards in our funeral home! I do this joke over and over again, crest to laughter from my disgust.
The morning of the funeral, some days after the viewing, I open Hana’s casket. To find that her skin has sloughed off her face, unaligned with her orifices, sagging gaps in the skin a centimeter below her nostrils, exposed bottom gum and melting lipstick, and the eyes drifted open to leave the bottom of her orbital, just below the iris, exposed.
A maggot curls from her nostril openings, a small swarm of flies crowns her. I cry for the embalmer, who says there is nothing we can do but put her in the ground, where she belongs, and stop playing God for God’s sake.
I take a long walk through the cemetery to invent a palatable synonym for decompose. Intrinsically, there is nothing palatable about human decomposition. I ruminate on change or progress. The vernacular: things get a little weird. Once, some dozen cases ago, I used evolve, but it seemed especially malapropish. By the time I get back to my desk, I land on degrade, accurate and unmorbid. Which is what I tell Lawrence over the phone.
“Things have degraded, I’m sorry to say. I have concerns about continuing as planned. We should rethink the viewing format.” A fly lands on my dirty tea cup. The Dordevic family expects over a hundred people to be in attendance today. They’ve invited the priest and the motorcade.
“But there has to be something you can do,” Lawrence whimpers. His voice is broken, I remember his strong handshake.
“We can close the casket.”
He stays silent in a way that I know is a rejection.
As the guests line up to view the body, I wonder if I can whisper to all of them not to look too closely, not to squint through the sheer scarf covering her face and neck, in fact, just sit down and pray for the dirt. Her sons and daughter look too long, and I know what they’ve seen, their mother begging for rest. Lawrence kisses her body. We drive her past the Dordevic family house to pray for her, our newest saint. I drive the hearse, which I usually enjoy, my gas guzzler, slow turner, prestige floater. Now, every dispatch on the radio from the motorcade startles me. I cannot stop my chest thumping till the gravediggers lower her into the ground. We throw roses on Hana’s casket, and mine soars.
I clean up the Big Parlor after the service, sweep up flower petals and used tissues. I sanitize the surfaces, pour bad coffee down the drain. I return the bier to the garage. A fly lands on my neck. I let her infest.
Kate Busatto is a writer and hospice chaplain. She is working on her first novel.