Why am I the one having to do this? I thought, as I gingerly approached the body. The room was cold and painfully clean as if someone believed bleach could scrub away the finality of death. In a way, I guess it could, couldn’t it? I’ve watched enough prime-time crime TV to know that if you planned to kill someone you better have a few jugs of Javex readily available for the cleanup. But this was different, there was no hiding the death that filled this room, no one was trying to get away with murder. The crooked sign on the metal door I’d just slipped through stated it loud and proud, “MORGUE”. A place where death inevitably congregated and medical careers went to die. A place where devastated family members went to confirm their worst nightmares and in my case, a place where those no longer related gingerly approached the body. The body. His body. Paul’s body. 

I could tell before the sheet was lifted. I was anything but cursory. I remembered his height, the depth of his feet when he lay on the ground, the tiny bumps and ridges that comprised the side-profile of his face. I remembered the width of his shoulders and the valley of his concave chest. I remembered the shell that made him Paul, even if everything within it had changed in the last year. Dissipated, fleeing from inside him as if even his former self no longer wanted to be associated with his likeness. And what was it all for? I wonder now, wherever he is, if he’s relishing in his decision, a triumph from the afterlife. Or, had his suicide been an accident, a failed attempt to garner more sympathy—a thought I wasn’t able to determine as more or less painful. 

“Stop, you don’t have to, I know it’s him,” I said as the diener reached up over Paul’s head searching for the corners of the thinly-veiled covering that kept us separated. It was as though what was under the sheet and what was over top were two different worlds. A dichotomy of reality in which the two futures presented were equally undesirable but in entirely different ways.