Cedar Valley Divide 2020

Inundation Madison Voss

During my childhood, I saw a reasonable amount of dead bodies. My parents didn’t have me until a little later in life, so by the time I graduated high school, a number of distant cousins had passed in addition to all of my grandparents.

Each funeral I attended included an un-ignorable fixture being prominently displayed, known as the “open casket.” It would always be at the far end of a window-less, colonial-styled room. The walls were always aggressively cream, outlined in deep oak, and accented with precisely placed paintings. The carpet was always crimson and ornately patterned with cream, black, and bits of green. The entire room seemed to be screaming. I spent most of my time in the back room, which was full of natural light and food for the grieving family. Each time I re-entered the service area, my eyes would be drawn uncontrollably to the body at the front of the room.

The one that stands strongest in my memory is my last grandparent who passed, Grandma Rose. Her casket was a slightly purple metal, picked out because it complimented her final outfit, which was a purple dress adorned with roses, her favorite crystal earrings, and a bright white Easter hat. Unlike the rest of them, she honestly almost looked the same as she did when she was alive. Her hair was still a reddish brown, cropped short like a pixie, and she still had the soft smile I was so used to seeing her wear. She looked exactly as she would have liked to look: a bright light contrasting the morbidity of death and the dark events that brought her to it.

You see, I was seventeen when I got a call from my dad on a thunder-storming November night. He had just gotten off the phone with his sister who had been watching the 9 o’clock news when a report was aired about my Grandma Rose’s car being stuck in a cornfield located forty-five minutes away from where she lived. She wasn’t in the car, and no foul play was suspected; two days later, her body was found in a nearby creek. Later, we’d find out about how she drowned, about how her own muddy footprints ended up in and around the car, and about how her purse was found by the back passenger side wheel with everything important still in it. A urinary tract infection. That’s what we think caused her the temporary bouts of dementia people had witnessed in the weeks leading up to her death. One instance was how she left a lunch with friends only to follow one of them to the gas station instead of parting ways and heading home or to whatever she had planned next. Another thing she started doing was calling me all the time. She would ramble on and on about needing to plant the roses outside, but then she’d also ramble about how her garden was blooming beautifully. Neither made sense; it was late fall, and the garden had already been sealed for the winter. Though I know there were more, the only other specific instance I remember hearing about was that during a bridge match she had expressed plans to go home after the game, but when she backed out of the driveway, she went right instead of left.

That was the last time she was seen alive. Grandma Rose didn’t know how to swim. She died cold, wet, and terrified.

After the wake for each one, I would make my way to view their body up close when the crowd started to disperse; the empty shell would come into focus, eyes closed and hands always folded neatly in front of them as if being forced into an eternity of prayer. I’d look at my loved one trying to connect the statue in unfamiliar makeup to the person I’d spent so much time with. After a moment, I’d kneel down and reach my hands into the casket, bowing my head to pray, though unsure of what I was supposed to be praying for. At first the marble hands just feel cold, but Cedar Valley Divide 65