When I was a little boy, I loved the westerns on tv, especially the shootouts where stuntmen fell on airbags, and no real blood and guts were left to clean up afterwards. I also enjoyed war movies where the explosions and battles produced the same aftereffects. Back then, I thought it would be cool to see a real dead person instead of just live ones lying there in the dirt on a television screen looking like they were napping instead of being blown to bits.
My wish came true at nine when the church minister, a scary-looking fellow with a skeleton face in real life, died of a heart attack. My little bowed legs couldn’t carry me fast enough from the Oldmobile’s passenger seat to the entrance of Howe’s Funeral Home and my first real meeting with the deceased.
I remembered opening the double doors to a wide lobby, then two-timing it to the next single doorway ahead, then being stopped frigid because that room was just large enough to hold a casket, and my pre-adolescent self was suddenly thrust face-to-waxy-skeleton-face with the preacher man's corpse. All I remembered of the visitation after that was the smell of embalming fluid and flowers.
A year later our neighbor died of old age; this time, I was pried, traumatized, from the Oldsmobile’s backseat armrest by my sadistic mother who insisted I pay my last respects and not be a bawlcalf…as she ironically bawlcalfed herself while hovered over good old dead Fred’s casket.
My young nerves were plugged back into the electrical outlet; I tried to block the smells, but failed; I didn’t mind seeing the corpse this time, because my eyes were pried wide shut. That night, I had my first dream of a casual walk through a cemetery, like it was a public park. After being jarred awake by the alarm clock doing its annoying job. I remembered a tombstone with the name Gunderson on it. The sex, birth, and death dates were obscured.
Three years later, my father died of lung cancer. My third nightmarish visitation at Howe’s was personal. I dared look at dear old dad for just a mini-blink, photo-flashing only on the light blue suit and his legionnaires cap he held in his waxy hands, proud to have served his country. That, and mom up there hovering over the bronze box, rearranging the toupee he was branded to wear forever.
Growing into manhood, I began dreading going to bed at night because my once benign recurring dreams of death and casual walks through cemeteries had become scary nightmares: dead bodies on fire just standing there, zombielike, blazing like candles on a birthday cake; my guts leaking out at parties held at Howe’s after chugging shots of embalming fluid while the other kids were chugging Boone’s Farm; the skeleton minister on a bloody Sunday morning rampage through Zion Lutheran Church tearing the perpetual sinful from limb to limb.
Then came the horrific night terrors: shadow people lurking about the room; sweatfests of me strolling through cemeteries of open graves, the dead’s guts oozing to the dirt from formaldehyde overdoses. Yet, always around three AM, came a calming influence of a kindly-looking older woman with a strikingly beautiful face hovering at the foot of my bed, always with a loving smile, lulling me back to sleep.
Around my junior year, I began dreaming that I was attending this old hovering woman’s funeral—in every one of them, the church was packed with mourners, her elderly husband and three adult children in the front pew bawlcalfing their eyeballs out. She must have been deeply loved, I remembered after being jarred awake the first time by the alarm clock doing its annoying job. These nocturnal funerary reoccurrences continued through college, until my senior year and my final semester.
I was at a party when she thunderstruck me from across the room. It wasn’t her dimples and big brown eyes or her beauty or her body that slam-dunked me, although they contributed. It was her strikingly beautiful young face that for a few flash-seconds, aged drastically several decades, yet retained its vibrancy. She was the woman of my dreams! When she introduced herself as Jenna Gunderson, I knew instantly that her and I and our future kids were destined a long and happy life together because we were the ones sitting in the front pew of her sad goodbye.
That night after the party broke up, my future wife (and former angel of the night) bestowed me with her first sweet kiss. I’ve have had pleasant dreams and long nights of undisturbed sleep since.
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