Free Us by Michael Kimball

nice, and that looking nice meant that I had to comb my hair, wear a belt, and tuck my shirt in.
    I got dressed up in my best clothes and the rest of my family did too. We all got into the family car and drove to a little town out in the country where my grandfather had lived. Nobody said anything on the drive out there, but the car windows were open and the driving wind was messing everybody’s hair up and making our good clothes seem worn out.
    My father parked the family car in a gravel parking lot behind what I thought was somebody’s house. I realized later that it had been somebody’s house, but that it had become a funeral home. We got out of the family car, walked around to the front of the funeral home, walked up the front steps, opened a screen door, and walked into what must have been somebody’s living room and had become the front room of the funeral home.
    The screen door closed behind us with a slap against the wood doorframe. The windows in that front room of the funeral home were all open and the wind was blowing through it, but it was still hot and smelled musty inside there.
    My mother and my father stopped inside the screen door and my sister and I stopped behind them. My mother and my father were talking to somebody or somebody was talking to them. I don’t remember what they said, but I remember that I wasn’t included in the conversation and that I started looking around that front room.
    I know now that it was the viewing room that we had walked into when we walked into the funeral home, but I didn’t know what it was then or why I could see my Grandfather Kimball at the other end of the viewing room all laid out inside his casket.
    I knew that he was dead, that his body was going to be inside a casket, that people were going to say nice things about him, and that they were going to bury him in a grave. But I didn’t expect it to be so casual—for the funeral home to be somebody’s house, for the viewing room to be somebody’s living room, and for there to be people standing around talking in somebody’s living room while there was a casket with my dead grandfather inside it in the living room too. I thought that I was going to be able to approach my grandfather’s casket, and that somehow in that approach that I was going to be able to prepare myself for his death, for him being dead, and for how that was going to feel.
    But I wasn’t prepared for it. It felt as if I had been punched in the stomach by somebody that I couldn’t see when I saw my grandfather’s dead body inside a casket and on top of a table in that living room. I didn’t know that the casket was going to be open. I didn’t know that we were going to have to look at him or that the skin on his face would be so limp that it wouldn’t look like his face anymore.
    Nobody told me that grief feels like fear. I kept trying to swallow, but my mouth had dried up. My tongue got thick and stuck to the roof of my mouth. My jaw started trembling up and down. I tried to hold my mouth closed with my hand. My eyes started opening and closing too. I tried to keep myself from crying.
    I pinched the bridge of my nose. I closed my eyes tight and wiped them dry. I took deep breaths. I don’t think that anybody else noticed any of this. My mother and my father stopped talking with those other people. We all walked up to my grandfather’s casket.
    I remember that my father made me look at his father. I remember thinking that must have been what we were there for. I think that my father thought that was what we were supposed to do too—that we were supposed to look nice, look at the dead body, and then sit down to listen to the nice things that were going to be said about the dead person.
    I looked, but then looked away. We all turned away from the casket. We all walked back up to a row of chairs in the front of the viewing room and my father told us to sit down there. They