quietly to him in Italian.
Simon and Elizabeth stayed in Rome to wait for Hildi’s ashes. They went to San Luigi to see The Calling of Saint Matthew . Simon fed the light meter till he ran out of coins, and then they walked back to the hotel over the Isola Tiberina, past San Bartolomeo, where Simon and Guido had watched the funerale finta.
They spent time with Checco and his family; they ate at Carlo Menta; they went to hear Checco’s sister sing at Club Dante. She and Bruno came to their table and sat with them during her breaks, and Elizabeth rested her hand on Bruno’s head. They went to the mask store and saw Hildi’s face in the window in different guises—masks made from the originalmold—and Simon bought a lot of masks: a clown, a plague doctor, the Caravaggio Medusa for Louisa, suns and moons and elves and Renaissance ladies, a Bacchus and a satyr, two long-beaked birds. Maddelena tried to restrain him, but he knew what he wanted, and she gave him a substantial discount.
The consulate said it would take seven or eight weeks to get the ashes, but Guido had them in three days, another professional courtesy. Checco wanted some of the ashes, and Simon asked Guido to open the urn. Still another professional courtesy.
Checco was almost apologetic for “stealing” their daughter, for living together without her parents’ permission (or even their knowledge). Checco had been worried about this. He didn’t know how Americans would react. He’d worried about preventing her from going into business with her father. She had assured him that her parents wouldn’t mind their living together, but she hadn’t wanted to disappoint her father. They both had worried about it. They had been planning to get married. They had considered various scenarios: spending half the year in Rome and half in Galesburg. Maybe Checco could practice medicine in the United States. Maybe Hildi could become an impresario funebre in Rome. Checco spoke about these ideas seriously, as if they were problems that still needed to be resolved.
CHAPTER V: THE TRUTH ABOUT DEATH
Hello, everybody. I’m Elizabeth. Simon’s wife. I want to tell you about the last years of Simon’s life. He was a good man, and I loved him with all my heart (at least most of the time). And I want to tell you about Olive (our black lab) anda little bit about myself too. And I want to tell you the truth about death.
PART I: SIMON
After Hildi’s death a chilly wind blew through our lives, blew right through the double-glazed windows and the storm doors, whistled through the fireplace chimneys, hummed under the wide eaves. You don’t get used to something like that, but you learn to work around it. And work was what we did.
I taught my classes and resumed work on a long-term project about the puzzling figures that decorate the margins of medieval books of hours and books of prayers—ass-kissing priests, sciapods, grylli, drunken apes, potbellied heads, putrifying corpses—which I planned to call Marginalia . (Sciapods, in case you’re wondering, are humanlike creatures with one gigantic foot, big enough so that they can lie on their back and hold their foot up as an umbrella to shade them from the sun. Grylli usually have two legs, a head, and a tail, but no body or arms. They’re often wimpled like nuns or have manes like lions.)
Simon instituted most of the changes Hildi had wanted. He encouraged people to have funerals at home. And he encouraged the bereaved to help him wash the body—or at least hold the dead person’s hand, as he had held Hildi’s hand in the obitorio in Rome—while he did the prep. Not during embalming, of course, but he made it clear that embalming was not necessary, that you could keep the body in relatively good shape for quite a while in the refrigrator or for several days at home by placing chunks of dry ice under it at strategicpoints. He encouraged cremation as an inexpensive alternative to a traditional burial. He hung
Simon and Elizabeth stayed in Rome to wait for Hildi’s ashes. They went to San Luigi to see The Calling of Saint Matthew . Simon fed the light meter till he ran out of coins, and then they walked back to the hotel over the Isola Tiberina, past San Bartolomeo, where Simon and Guido had watched the funerale finta.
They spent time with Checco and his family; they ate at Carlo Menta; they went to hear Checco’s sister sing at Club Dante. She and Bruno came to their table and sat with them during her breaks, and Elizabeth rested her hand on Bruno’s head. They went to the mask store and saw Hildi’s face in the window in different guises—masks made from the originalmold—and Simon bought a lot of masks: a clown, a plague doctor, the Caravaggio Medusa for Louisa, suns and moons and elves and Renaissance ladies, a Bacchus and a satyr, two long-beaked birds. Maddelena tried to restrain him, but he knew what he wanted, and she gave him a substantial discount.
The consulate said it would take seven or eight weeks to get the ashes, but Guido had them in three days, another professional courtesy. Checco wanted some of the ashes, and Simon asked Guido to open the urn. Still another professional courtesy.
Checco was almost apologetic for “stealing” their daughter, for living together without her parents’ permission (or even their knowledge). Checco had been worried about this. He didn’t know how Americans would react. He’d worried about preventing her from going into business with her father. She had assured him that her parents wouldn’t mind their living together, but she hadn’t wanted to disappoint her father. They both had worried about it. They had been planning to get married. They had considered various scenarios: spending half the year in Rome and half in Galesburg. Maybe Checco could practice medicine in the United States. Maybe Hildi could become an impresario funebre in Rome. Checco spoke about these ideas seriously, as if they were problems that still needed to be resolved.
CHAPTER V: THE TRUTH ABOUT DEATH
Hello, everybody. I’m Elizabeth. Simon’s wife. I want to tell you about the last years of Simon’s life. He was a good man, and I loved him with all my heart (at least most of the time). And I want to tell you about Olive (our black lab) anda little bit about myself too. And I want to tell you the truth about death.
PART I: SIMON
After Hildi’s death a chilly wind blew through our lives, blew right through the double-glazed windows and the storm doors, whistled through the fireplace chimneys, hummed under the wide eaves. You don’t get used to something like that, but you learn to work around it. And work was what we did.
I taught my classes and resumed work on a long-term project about the puzzling figures that decorate the margins of medieval books of hours and books of prayers—ass-kissing priests, sciapods, grylli, drunken apes, potbellied heads, putrifying corpses—which I planned to call Marginalia . (Sciapods, in case you’re wondering, are humanlike creatures with one gigantic foot, big enough so that they can lie on their back and hold their foot up as an umbrella to shade them from the sun. Grylli usually have two legs, a head, and a tail, but no body or arms. They’re often wimpled like nuns or have manes like lions.)
Simon instituted most of the changes Hildi had wanted. He encouraged people to have funerals at home. And he encouraged the bereaved to help him wash the body—or at least hold the dead person’s hand, as he had held Hildi’s hand in the obitorio in Rome—while he did the prep. Not during embalming, of course, but he made it clear that embalming was not necessary, that you could keep the body in relatively good shape for quite a while in the refrigrator or for several days at home by placing chunks of dry ice under it at strategicpoints. He encouraged cremation as an inexpensive alternative to a traditional burial. He hung
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