My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  “What if we just cut the clothes down the back and tuck them in around her?” Sean suggested.

  “You can do that?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’s a classic,” Sean said. “Funeral directors do it all the time.”

  “Well, we can’t dress her or put her in the casket now,” Antonio pointed out. “We’re going to have to wait until right before the funeral. Otherwise she’ll just leak all over everything.”

  He pawed through his supplies bag and emerged with something clear and plastic that looked like a cross between a jumpsuit and a body bag. “Between now and the funeral, let’s try to dry her out as much as possible.”

  A few minutes later the three of them had her legs hoisted up in the air toward the ceiling. I stared wide-eyed as they attempted stuffing her into the suit, which was too small for her.

  “Terry knows I charge by the pound, right?” Antonio grumbled.

  “He’s only joking,” Sean assured me. “If we did that, someone Lucas’s height would be, like, one-fourth the normal cost.”

  Antonio hooted, his good mood restored.

  A dull click emanated from somewhere in her body. “Uh-oh,” Lucas squeaked. “I think I just broke her kneecap.”

  Yep, definitely cremation for me, I thought.

  Once she was inside the bag, Antonio sprinkled her body with a special blue powder designed to soak up liquids, then turned to load Abe Lincoln onto a gurney. “Noelle, can you help me get him into his casket?”

  “Why am I doing all the cleanup?” Lucas whined. “I got the short end of the stick today.”

  “You got the short end of the stick in life, too!” Sean cracked.

  Antonio cackled and added, “Listen, Lucas, it’s like I tell my wife—shut your hole and know your role!” He casts a sideways glance at me. “Are you married?”

  “No, I’m not,” I said, caught off-guard.

  “Good! Don’t get married. Trust the undertaker—life’s too short.”

  Next to the preparation room there was a smaller garage full of caskets. This was the holding area. Like the green room where dead people could hang out after they’d been through hair, makeup, and wardrobe, but before it was time for their show.

  As we wheeled Abe into the garage, Lucas called after us, “Remember, it’s only a temporary coffin. After the service tomorrow, he’s going to be cremated.”

  “You can rent coffins?” I asked in disbelief.

  “Oh yeah. Though, really, it’s more of a sublet.”

  I was nervous to pick up the body and afraid that I’d drop him. I braced myself, expecting to feel the heaviness of a man, but Abe was surprisingly easy to lift. There seemed to be almost no mass. It was as if most of the weight was contained in the soul. I felt a sudden rush of pride as I helped maneuver him, honored to be a part of such an intimate ritual.

  We placed Abe carefully into a casket, which was, appropriately, the color of a shiny new penny. Antonio arranged the man’s hands on his abdomen, left hand clasped over right.

  “You forgot this!” Lucas ran in and placed a plushy orange Cleveland Browns football in the crook of his arm. The three of us stared into the casket for a few moments. There was something very dear about this display.

  “Well,” I said, “now I know what Abe Lincoln would look like reimagined as a Browns fan.”

  Lucas shook his head in amazement. “It’s not what I’d wear to the hereafter.”

  “Me neither,” Antonio said. “What if God is a Steelers fan?”

  For her journey into the afterlife, the African American woman had pre-selected an extra large white casket with copper piping. The Cadillac of caskets, really. When I arrived for her funeral the following day, I was speechless. She looked fabulous. Antonio had worked his magic. You’d never know her clothes were cut up the back. He’d even put a veil over the casket to keep people from touching her. Genius. Terry and another funeral attendant stood on either side of the casket as sobbing, moaning family members came up to pay their last respects.

  “We’ve had people flinging themselves into the coffin before,” Lucas whispered as we stood in the back, handing out programs to latecomers. “Now we have people there to hold it to make sure it don’t get knocked over and spill the body onto the floor.”

  A half hour later we said good-bye to Abe Lincoln in all his football jerseyed glory. I thought he’d be the most casually dressed person at his funeral, but I was mistaken. Outfits seemed to have been selected with no other criteria in mind besides what best showcased their tattoos. One of Abe’s daughters arrived in a halter top and black denim hot pants just long enough to cover her butt. Her brother, to his credit, had worn his best Nike swoosh pants. The eulogy was delivered by a chaplain named Biff. Just as I was admiring his button-down shirt, he turned around to reveal a massive dragon embroidered on the back.

  After the service, Lucas took Abe Lincoln to the crematorium, and I headed home for the day. On the way I passed by a horse farm with rolling hills. As I watched the horses flicking their tails delightfully while they grazed, I felt strangely content. If I’d had my own tail, I’d have been flicking it. I was almost too ashamed to admit it, but I’d actually been enjoying myself. It struck me how much I’d miss the place and the people I’d met here. But underneath all this was an urgency. Tomorrow was my last day and I had no more insight into my fear of death than when I’d arrived.

  When I got back to my hotel room, I shut the blackout curtains so no one walking by could see in. Then I took the pillows off my bed and settled down on the greasy bedspread, my back straight against the headboard. Dr. Bob told me that meditating didn’t just have to be about observing your breath and detaching from your thoughts. You could also meditate to receive insights on things you don’t understand. I began by stating my intention: “I want to better understand my fear of death.”

  Then I closed my eyes and let everything that came to my mind rise up, without trying to block any thoughts. Surprisingly, what came up wasn’t a thought, but a story from a book I’d bought at the beginning of the project called Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously. I’d almost forgotten about that book. It contained an Indian fable about a powerful emperor who died and went to heaven. According to the legend, every thousand years when a very important emperor died, he was given the honor of engraving his name on the highest mountain in heaven, which was made of solid gold. So the emperor hiked all the way to the top but was baffled to find there was no space for his signature. The whole mountain was engraved with names of past emperors! The emperor was crushed, having finally understood his insignificant place in eternity. Heaven’s gatekeeper, who was watching with great amusement, suggested the emperor erase one of the other names to make room for his own.

  “What is the point?” the emperor replied bitterly. “Someday somebody will come and erase it.”

  That was what it meant to face death, I thought. Having to face your own impermanence. Fear of death was the fear of being nothing. The fear of being so easily erased, your presence on earth replaced by someone else. Eventually, everyone who remembered you would die and you would be forgotten. It would be as if you were never there at all. It was a terrifying thought. I felt the clouds part in my mind slightly, some larger understanding beginning to shine through. It wasn’t dead bodies or the physicality of death that I was afraid of, not really.

  “Accept uncertainty,” Dr. Bob was always telling me. Death was the biggest uncertainty in life. You couldn’t prepare for it. You never knew when it would come for you. When it did, you were stripped of everything familiar. You couldn’t take anything with you. You had to go alone. All fears were a process of letting go, I realized, and death was the ultimate release. You accepted that the world would go on without you.

  The next day I rode with Terry in the hearse to deliver Abe Lincoln’s ashes to his family and the Mennonite woman’s body to her funeral
service at the cemetery, my last jobs before heading home. At stoplights the cars next to us hung back, curious drivers angling for a glimpse of the coffin through our curtained windows in the backseat. I tried to imagine what Franklin’s cross-country funeral procession must’ve been like for Eleanor, having to grapple with so much at once—her husband’s death and infidelity, her daughter’s betrayal, staying strong for the public. She’d stayed the night in Warm Springs and the next morning boarded a train that carried Franklin’s body back to Washington, D.C. She kept the window shade up the whole way and looked out at the thousands of weeping Americans who gathered along the route in tribute. She wore one piece of jewelry at the White House funeral service, a gold fleur-de-lis pin that had been a wedding present from Franklin. When she returned to her apartment in New York, a clump of reporters was stationed on her doorstep. “The story is over,” she told them.

  We pulled into the Mennonite cemetery and drove the hearse toward a group of men in straw hats and women in bonnets and navy prairie dresses. Like the Amish, they wanted to run the funeral themselves, so Terry and I stayed back at the hearse while they performed the service. When the service was over, they headed to the woman’s house, where the entire community would gather for lunch.

  Next we delivered Abe Lincoln’s ashes to his family. When I handed the urn off to Abe’s son, he revealed that after yesterday’s service, they celebrated by playing the video game Rock Band for six hours with each family member playing a different musical instrument. Now they were strategizing about how to carry out Abe’s final wish to have his ashes buried in Cleveland Browns stadium, which was illegal. So far the plan was to walk to the front row during a game with the ashes disguised in a coffee cup, pour the cremains over the side, and hope they were faster than the security guards.

  That night, as the train pulled me back to New York, I stared out at the trees flashing by. When I thought about the people I’d seen crying at the funerals that day, I knew Sean was right—this was a fear you couldn’t practice for. No matter how many loved ones you’d already lost, it would always be devastating. We’re human beings. Even more powerful than our instinct to stay alive is our instinct to love. It’s why people run back into a burning house to rescue their family members. It’s why mothers throw themselves in front of their children in the face of danger.

  I wouldn’t say I no longer had a fear of death, but I’d made peace with it. Death had been demystified for me. I wasn’t sure I’d want to be completely rid of that fear. Fear of death could go one of two ways: it could force you to live in the present, where you had a greater appreciation for the people and things around you, aware of the fragility of life; or it could force you to live in the future, always worrying about when death was coming, but then you weren’t really living.

  In the last week I’d met the most interesting people of my life, not all of them alive. Some of us spent our lives working in the fields and had quiet deaths. Others went out with style, wearing our favorite outfit even when it was too small for us. We were all so different. Death was the one thing we had in common. There was something incredibly lovely about that.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We are constantly advancing, like explorers, into the unknown, which makes life an adventure all the way. How interminable and dull that journey would be if it were on a straight road over a flat plain, if we could see ahead the whole distance, without surprises, without the salt of the unexpected, without challenge.

  —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  The truth was that I wasn’t ready to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I knew Dr. Bob would say, “You can’t wait until you feel ‘ready’ to take a risk. You’ll never feel truly prepared,” but I truly was not prepared. As in, I didn’t have any clothing or gear yet. Mentally and emotionally, I didn’t know what to expect. I was physically ready, at least. For the last two months I’d hit the gym three days a week, climbing the Stairmaster and squatting into unbecoming positions with a weighted barbell balanced on my shoulders. But that was about all I had going for me.

  In my defense, Kilimanjaro was a hard mountain to prepare for. It was a mountain of extremes comprising five distinct climate zones: rain forest, heather, moorlands, alpine desert, and ice cap. Temperatures ranged from the eighties in the rain forest to negative fifteen degrees at the summit. A typical hike took four and a half days to reach the summit, and only a day and a half to descend. Kilimanjaro inspired extreme behavior in others. In 2001, an Italian man named Bruno Brunod (seriously) ran to the top in a record five hours and thirty-eight minutes. Wim “Iceman” Hof did it in two days, bare chested, wearing only shorts. Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, climbed to the summit wearing an eight-foot rubber rhinoceros costume. I’d stick to hiking gear, thanks. Though, frankly, you’d have had a better chance of finding a rhinoceros costume in my closet.

  Thank God for Becca, who came to my rescue on the clothing front. While mixing milkshakes one day, I told her I wouldn’t be able to volunteer at the hospital for the next two weeks because I was climbing Kilimanjaro. “No way!” she squealed over the blender. “I climbed Kilimanjaro three years ago!”

  “Really?” Becca was so girlish that I would have never thought to ask if she was a mountain climber.

  She stopped the blender and poured the milkshake into a cup. “Yes, I wanted to see the glaciers before they disappear.”

  As we rolled our cart of milkshakes down the hall for delivery, she said quietly but firmly, “You will get diarrhea, by the way. It’s just a question of when.”

  Most of her hiking stuff was at her parents’ house in Maryland, she said, “but I can bring what I have to your apartment a few days before you leave. And if you want, I can look over your clothes and equipment to see if there’s anything else I think you might need.”

  “Like someone to carry me up the mountain?”

  “Oh please, you’ll be fine!” she said cheerfully.

  The tour company I’d signed up with had a checklist on its website detailing what I’d need for the hike. I printed it out and crossed off the items I’d be borrowing from Becca. The rest I’d have to buy. I took my list to REI sporting and camping goods store, where there was nothing sporting or good about the merchandise total. It had to be split up on four different credit cards. The hiking boots alone were the ugliest $200 I’d ever spent. Standing there in front of the cash register, it hit home that I’d officially bankrupted myself with this project. I had a moment of reckoning with my bank account. (“Oh my God, you’re EMPTY? HOW COULD YOU?”)

  A few days before I left, Becca brought over her gear. It was a thirty-minute subway ride and ten-minute walk to my apartment from hers, but when I’d offered to pick it up she’d waved me off, saying, “I need to check out what you’ve bought and make sure you haven’t forgotten anything.” Looking at the heap of stuff she’d toted, my heart swelled a bit, the way it does when someone you don’t know very well makes a gesture of generosity that exceeds the nature of your relationship. In that instant I felt us shift from acquaintances to friends.

  “Thank you so much for doing this,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

  She examined the clothing and hiking equipment laid out on my bed. “The only time it’ll be warm enough to wear shorts is at the very beginning and end of the hike,” she said, tossing all but one pair into the Don’t Need pile. She suggested bringing extra batteries. Cold weather drained them quickly, which could result in a particularly disappointing moment at the summit when one realized his or her camera was dead and the nearest convenience store was twenty thousand feet down.

  “When you get to the colder temperatures, keep
the batteries as close to your body as you can, even when you’re asleep. Your electronics, too. Before going to sleep, stuff them in the bottom of your sleeping bag where it’s warmest.”

  A half hour later I walked her to my door where we hugged good-bye. “Remember,” she said, “the only thing that gets you up that mountain is sheer iron will. On the last part of the summit climb you’re actually on all fours crawling to the top—partially because of the steep angle but also because you’re so exhausted.”

  Noting my worried expression, she added: “Just remember, you can always take another step.”

  The night before I left, I stopped by Jessica’s apartment to drop off my keys so she could feed my parakeets while I was away.

  “So how are you feeling about it?” she asked.

  “I’ve never traveled so far from home before,” I said nervously. “Especially not alone and to a third world country.”

  She pulled me into a hug. “Listen, I love you. You’re about to go on an incredible journey. You’ll learn something on this trip that you can only learn by confronting this mountain and what it represents.” Jessica had become gentler in the past few months. Surprising us all, she’d gotten heavily into yoga and was even considering signing up for a spiritual retreat in the Berkshire Mountains. She pulled back and held me at arm’s length. “Namaste, bitch,” she said. “Oh, and bring me back an orphan baby. Obviously.”

  The first day we’d hike through rain forest to 9,000 feet, where we’d spend the night in the Mandara Huts. The second day we’d cross the heather and open moorlands to the Horombo Huts at 12,000 feet. The third day, our acclimation day, we’d be hanging out at 12,000 feet, giving our bodies time to adjust to the thinning oxygen. The fourth day we’d climb over alpine desert to Kibo Hut, which, at 15,000 feet, was the last campground before the summit. That night we’d go to bed early, awaken at midnight, and hike six hours to the ice cap summit at 19,340 feet. Then we would turn around and hike back down to the Horombo Huts, spend the night at 12,000 feet, and hike the rest of the way down the next day. Altogether we’d walk over fifty miles.