Fart Smeller

I have always employed immensely dark humour as a coping strategy. It is more or less the only one I have.

I am wholly irreverent about death.

Fuck it.

Who said death was a serious business?

When my father died, my mother announced that she wanted to go and see him in the chapel of rest. This was not something I had been expecting, but I'd already seen him dead, and so I made the fairly significant error of thinking:

How bad can this be?

I agreed to take her.

Reuben came with us, though he wanted no part of viewing a body and meant to wait it out in the reception room. With hindsight, this was a jolly good thing.

There was the requisite amount of rudeness and drama while we waited. My mother had apparently assumed each corpse came with its own private room, and was not at all impressed to learn that someone else was, at that very moment, visiting their own dead husband.

Eventually, we were shown through.

The chapel was dimly lit, the kind of gloom rooms like that seem to specialise in.

My mother peered into it.

"It's dark. I can't see."

I looked at my father.

Thank fuck for that, and her cataracts.

There was a problem.

He had stopped wearing his false teeth some time before he died. A couple of days after, my hand had found them by accident. It was not an experience I wish to repeat.

My mother was quite firm about what should become of them.

"He can wear those when we bury him. I don't want them in the house."

So the teeth went into a carrier bag along with his monkey suit, his green shirt, and his green tie, and were driven off to the funeral home. I suspected, looking at that bag, that it consisted entirely of things my mother didn't want in the house.

Unfortunately, by the time somebody at the funeral home came to fit the teeth back where nature had originally intended them to sit, my father's mouth no longer obliged. In forcing the matter, they had arranged his face into a very particular expression.

I knew that expression.

My children knew it too.

It was the face my father made whenever somebody farted.

He looked, lying there in his good suit, exactly as though the man in the coffin beside him had just let one rip.

I felt a giggle arriving, uninvited, from somewhere low in my chest.

My mother stood beside me, looking at her dead husband, beginning to wail. I stood beside her, looking at my dead father wearing his who the fuck has farted? face, and trying, with everything I had, not to laugh.

I failed.

My shoulders shook with the effort of keeping it silent. Tears ran down my face. My mother, mistaking one thing entirely for another, thought I was crying.

We didn't stay long.

Reuben took one look at me when we emerged, and knew they were not tears of bereavement. I was hysterical. He had no idea why.

Unfortunately, I still had to drive us home.

It was only five minutes. It felt considerably longer. I laugh-cried the entire way, my mother patting my knee comfortingly at intervals, Reuben sitting behind us fully aware that something appalling had happened in that room and that, whatever it was, I found it extremely funny.

I could see him in the rear-view mirror.

That was the thing that finished me.

Every time our eyes met, I went again. Driving, my mother patting, Reuben trying valiantly not to set me off, and me in actual physical pain from the effort of holding it together.

It was a very long five minutes.

Once we were safely back at the house, I finally got the story out.

Reuben was delighted.

He wanted it disseminated among his siblings immediately, though he sensibly assigned me the official account.

"Mum tells it better."

Mostly because I couldn't tell it at all without dissolving.

Mairead arrived from Dubai the next day. I collected her from the airport and drove her straight to my mother's, filling her in along the way. There had been a death in the family. Her grandfather had died. There were things she needed to know.

Top of the list, naturally, was that Grandad had apparently died smelling a fart.

Mairead understood the gravity of the situation. 

Sometime after we arrived, my mother started telling her how glad she was that she'd gone to see him. How peaceful he'd looked.

And, she said, looking directly at me for confirmation, didn't he look smart in that suit?

Oh dear.

Without missing a beat, I said:

"Oh yes. He looked like a real smart fella."

Dr. Spooner would have been proud.

Mairead remained expressionless.

I could only admire a degree of self-control that had so comprehensively eluded me the day before. 

My mother carried serenely on, blissfully unaware that a second conversation had even taken place.