My daughter Jess left home one evening to see friends. She never came back.
Her death was sudden. No warning. None of the slow time I had with my mother before she passed. One evening Jess was here, and then she was gone.
The coroner showed me a photograph so I could identify her. They would not let me see her body. I have always assumed they were simply overwhelmed that day and had no room for a grieving father. I do not hold it against them.
But the photograph did not settle anything. I looked at it and knew it was Jess. And still, some part of me would not accept that she was gone.
It took five days for her body to reach the funeral home. It took the funeral director another day to prepare her. When he called and said I could come, I raced there.
I needed to see her. Not a picture of her. Her.
And when I did, something happened that the photograph never could. It became real.
There is a need in us, older than any custom we have built around death, to see a thing for ourselves before we will believe it. We say it without thinking. I have to see it with my own eyes. We mean it literally. The mind will not fully accept what the eyes have not confirmed.
Seeing the body does two things at once.
It confirms that it is them. The face you have known your whole life, right there in front of you.
And it confirms that they are gone. The face is present. The person is not.
A photograph can do the first. It cannot do the second. Identity is not the same as reality. I knew the girl in that photo was my daughter. What I did not yet know, not in my body, was that she had died. Standing in that room is when it became real.
We have arranged death so that most people never get this moment. The body is moved quietly, behind doors, by professionals. Often it is never seen at all. We have come to treat the wish to see as something morbid, something a person should be talked out of. So families do not ask.
They go home carrying a loss they were never allowed to confirm. And they wonder, for months, why it still does not feel real.
It does not feel real because they never saw.
This is where you come in.
In my book, A Beautiful Farewell, a family sits in exactly this position. Two of the siblings were not with their mother when she died. Before they leave the funeral home, David, their director, asks a quiet question. Would you like to see her before you go?
They are frightened. They nearly say no. Then they go in.
The oldest daughter looks at her mother and thinks, it is her, and yet it is not. The features are exactly right. The life is gone. That is the whole thing in a single moment. The confirmation that it is her, and the confirmation that she has left.
They did not ask for that. David offered it. He understood they needed it, even though they were too afraid to want it.
The coroner could not give me that moment. The funeral director did. He got my daughter ready, and he called me, and he let me stand in the room and see for myself that the worst thing had happened. I hated the moment, yet I needed it. It is where my grief finally had somewhere to go.
The families who walk through your door will rarely ask to see. The culture taught them not to.
Offer it anyway.
Until next time,
John
John H. Callaghan Call (248) 987 8210 Email: John@JohnHCallaghan.com
P.S. My book, A Beautiful Farewell, is available on Amazon. It tells the story of a family navigating the loss of a parent, and the funeral professional who became their guide. The moment I described here, the private goodbye, is in there too.