Touch

I come from a line of people
intimate with the dead, my mother
taking my hand when I was a boy
and placing it on the face
of my dead great-grandmother,
first her forehead, then her cheeks.
My mother said my body
would keep the touch of her body.
I repeated what she had taught me
with my two grandfathers, two
grandmothers, my father, and then
my mother. When my son died,
I brought his two brothers to the basement
of the funeral home before the undertakers
worked on him, and had them touch
his face, hold the thick fingers of his cold hands.
I stroked my dead son’s hair,
as if doing so were some last essential act.
I could not take my hand away,
nor imagine myself doing so.
I could feel his thick hair, more wiry
in death, and how the top of his head
imprinted my fingers, and steadied me.
I wonder if my two sons can still feel
their brother’s skin beneath their hands,
because we stayed a long time
to become comfortable
with what we were doing,
each of us completely alone with him,
though we were all together. We knew
without speaking when it was time
to climb back up the stairs.

Read more from Issue 22.1.