The Blue-Grey Dress
My name is Jingshu Yu. I am forty-nine, and I host farewell ceremonies at a funeral home in Pasadena. Seventeen years, over a thousand of them. My voice sits half a tone lower than everyone else's, my steps make no sound, and when I walk into a room I check three things first: which row the family is sitting in, whether the flowers are placed right, and whose shoulders are shaking. Open my wardrobe and there are eleven black suits in a row, the darker and lighter ones for different seasons, every collar pressed flat. In my line of work, nothing on you is allowed to catch the eye — even my earrings are one plain silver pair.
The first Saturday of every month is a date I booked three months ahead, and it does not move. That morning at seven I opened the wardrobe, let my hand rest a moment among all that black, and took down the dress at the very end: blue-grey, bought two years ago, the tag cut off only last month. Before leaving I switched off my work phone and put it in the drawer by the door, on top of next week's ceremony sheets, and watered the gardenia on the balcony on my way out. My husband was frying eggs in the kitchen. He asked where I was going; I said, for a treatment. He did not look up. Oh — come back for lunch, then. I love that ordinary sentence. This did not need anyone to make a ceremony of it. It was supposed to be an ordinary thing.
Only the afternoon before, I had seen off a ceremony: a gentleman of eighty-six, his daughter flown in from out of state, who halfway through could no longer stand for crying. I held her arm and eased the rest of the service forward, line by line. Driving home I passed the flower market and, on an impulse I could not explain, bought a bunch of white lilies and put them on my own table. People in my work mostly keep no flowers at home — we see too many. I keep them. Flowers are for the living, I tell the families. I tell myself the same.
Open my phone calendar and it is dense with other people's dates: whose funeral, whose ashes are laid to rest, whose birthday brings the family back with flowers. My own birthday last year I remembered three days late, and only because the bank texted me. I do not feel wronged by it. This work is like that: everyone else comes first. But that morning, changing into the dress, I thought — seventeen years of first. This one Saturday, I come first.
I Will Tell You Every Step First
The person who received me did not hand me a list of services. She poured a cup of warm water and asked how I would like the morning to go — slowly was fine. I stood there a second. At my ceremonies it is I who talks the family through what comes next: now we will present the flowers, now a moment of silence, now a few words from your representative. When people reach that hour, the grief itself has a shape; what has no shape is the next step. This time it was my turn to be told in advance: we would begin with my legs, every step would be explained before it happened, and if anything was not right I could speak — or not speak, and just lift a hand.
She asked where I was most tired lately. I said my knees. I stand through a ceremony for forty minutes without moving; I come home, take off my shoes, and my knees are swollen, and a night's sleep does not fix them. And my right shoulder — holding car doors, taking elderly arms, always the right. She nodded and said the right side would get more time today, and the left only a light pass. There was no extra comforting, and nobody told me to just relax. I say those words to families hundreds of times a year, I mean them every time, and I have never once managed them myself. Nobody said them to me that morning, and I breathed out anyway.
Holding the warm cup, I noticed the small scab on my fingertip where a pin had caught me days earlier, pinning a corsage for someone. In my first year, my mentor taught me one sentence before anything else: keep the family one step ahead of what is happening, and they will not panic. It has been my rule for seventeen years. That morning someone used my own rule on me — told me the water temperature first, told me where we would begin, told me a lifted hand was enough. Something in me that stays braced all year loosened by half an inch, before anything had even started.
One more thing took getting used to: the quiet. In my work, silence belongs to the one who has gone; on the living side there is always muffled crying, tissues being pulled, a chair shifting. The quiet in that room was full — full enough that I could hear my own breathing, one breath, then another. She asked if the water temperature and the light were right as they were. I said: the water a little hotter, the light a little lower. Saying it, I paused myself. So this is what asking is like. No softening it first, no apology. The words land, and someone simply goes and does it.
Next Time
The room had no clock — I only realised that afterwards. When the hot towel went over my knees, the ache pushed back first, and then it began to melt, the way water starts moving under ice. Warm oil moved down my calves, and through the window came the sounds of a morning: a sprinkler, birds somewhere far off, a neighbour's shutter going up and coming down again — all of it the noise of living people getting on with a day. Lying there, I thought of a ceremony the week before. Afterwards, a woman in her seventies held my hand and asked: dear, people in your work — when your time comes, who sends you off? I had smiled and changed the subject; we are all very healthy, I said. Remembering it, my eyes went hot. Nothing fell. It just went hot.
Later the warm towels moved to my calves and wrapped them layer over layer, until I went properly lazy. Seventeen years of standing have left a faint blue vein across one calf. At a ceremony my legs may not shake; my voice may not shake; my hands may not shake. However hard the family cries, I am the still point they hold on to. Nobody was watching me in that room. I curled my legs a little inside the towels, into a posture that was for no one, and lay there like that a while.
When it ended, the sun was properly up. I changed back into the blue-grey dress and, standing by the door, swapped my earrings back to the plain silver pair, like changing shifts. Driving home, all I thought about was next time. The first Saturday of next month, I am coming back; the month after that, too. I have kept the dignity of a last time for so many people. From today, I am keeping a little next time for myself. When I got home my husband had reheated the eggs a second time. He asked how it was. I said, good. He said: keep it booked, then. I nodded. On the calendar, in the square for the first Saturday of every month, is my own name.
His eggs were a little overdone at lunch, and I ate a whole one anyway. In the afternoon I took a nap — a real one — and woke to the smell of the gardenia coming in from the balcony. That evening I took out the calendar and circled the first Saturday of next month in red pen. In my work calendar, red is only ever for other people's dates: whose farewell, whose seventh day, whose anniversary. This time it circled me. I looked at it a while, closed the calendar, and went to put the kettle on for the morning.