Everyone should see a dead body. Not the kind of dead body you see in news footage or in films, but a Real Live Dead Body.
The first dead body I saw was dad’s. I’d taken mum to see him in a chapel of rest on the other side of town, near to where he grew up. I didn’t know what to expect. One of my colleagues told me that they’d draped her mother in a weird nylon thing provided by the funeral home, which they pinned in place around her neck.
‘She should have been wearing the pink trouser suit I bought her from Marksies,’ she said. ‘She looked like the Pope.’
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said, because what else was there to say.
The undertaker, who had inherited the business from his father-in-law, arranged to meet us in the car park outside the chapel of rest.
‘Bonnie’s Merc has one of
