Anna in the Afterlife Read Free Page B

home. A few things had been done to them—she didn’t pay much attention at the time; she had been listening to a great flock of wild parrots screaming in the trees outside her window, an impressive farewell recitative that she appreciated.
    The van had been summoned and should be there shortly to pick her up. Years before, she had given her daughter Janet a long list of absolute instructions about her funeral. No transients should be there, no flowery baloney in the newspaper, no treacly “adored wife, beloved mother, devoted daughter, cherished sister.” She wanted no strangers gawking at her, crying crocodile tears and then going back to Janet’s house to stuff themselves with food that cost a fortune, pretending they were heartbroken that Anna was dead. She most definitely did not want a rabbi who had never laid eyes on her and would make a big speech about how good and charitable she was, like the baby-faced rabbi who had done so for her husband Abram, so long ago it was in another lifetime. At the funeral, this boy who had barely grown a beard, this know-nothing about life, had called Abram “a boat whose journey is now over and is about to dock in the next world.” “ Daddy is not a boat!” she had whispered to her daughters. They had warned her with dirty looks. “Shh!”
    So could she trust them now to do the right things for her funeral? To refuse the services of a desairologist? To allow no makeup to be applied to her sunken, sallow cheeks? To refuse to have her ravaged flesh dressed in fancy clothes—especially those with a high neck or a tight waistline? To insist that they lay not one finger on her? She understood that she’d have to be deposited in some refrigerated morgue, but no cosmetologists! No embalmers! No doveners!
    Her daughter Carol’s mad husband, Bard, after he had killed himself, had been cremated. His ashes were supposed to have been scattered from a small sailing yacht near Santa Barbara, floating off into the wind while a canon by Pachelbel was played over the loudspeaker. This image had so entranced Bard’s mother that she had flown down to LA to bring her dead husband’s ashes (saved all these many years) to be mixed with her son’s. As it turned out, the mortuary, named after a sea god, got rid of all their clients’’ ashes in a big garbage dumpster. No Pachelbel’s Canon, no sea breeze, no rose petals tossed upon the waves by sobbing widows, just a dumpster with some rotten hamburger meat in it, dirty baby diapers, and empty milk cartons. The police got tipped off by a garbage collector, then the lawyers jumped in, then even Carol and her sons became part of a class-action wrongful death suit. One of these days they would each collect $500 for pain and suffering and for eternally knowing that the ashes of their beloved husband and father were not being strained through the baleen bristles of a great white whale or dusting the wings of a seagull, but instead were in a landfill combined with coffee grounds and discarded tampons.
    For all these reasons Anna had rejected the idea of cremation. Furthermore, Abram was already buried and she had every intention of inhabiting the plot next to his. In any case, ever since World War II, cremation wasn’t a good idea for Jews, not just because they didn’t believe in it but because enough Jews had been cremated by Hitler. Anna wasn’t going to sign up for entering the ovens as her last personal choice.
    Because the night that Anna died was New Year’s Eve, and because Janet and Danny had to eat somewhere after leaving Anna’s deathbed, and because Janet didn’t have the strength to cook, and didn’t want to go to a restaurant, she went to her New Year’s Eve party. Though Anna could see her daughter was torn by the very notion of going to a party while her mother’s agonal breathing was still in progress, it was clearly a practical