Good Mourning by Elizabeth Meyer

Author:Elizabeth Meyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

“THE PRIEST is here,” said one of the guys who did removals for Crawford. He was walking to the back, where the smell of garlic was already wafting through the air.

“A priest?” I asked, chasing him down the hallway. “I thought this was a Muslim funeral.” I looked down at the folder in my hand—yup, definitely Muslim. Why would a priest be here?

“Yeah, whoever, he’s here,” said the staffer. He had only been at Crawford for a few months, and we’d barely interacted.

I looked down the hall and saw the imam, patiently waiting by the reception desk while Monica avoided eye contact. She avoided dealing with visitors as much as she could and mostly got away with it. The union rules were locked pretty tight—it would have been hard to fire her, and weirdly, nobody seemed too concerned that she spent some afternoons napping on one of the couches in the chapel.

“That’s not a priest, he’s an imam,” I told him. Maybe it was all my studies, but it bugged me when people refused to use terms from a religion or culture different from their own.

The staffer turned to me, annoyed at my correction. “Yeah, well, this is fucking America,” he said. “Here, he’s a priest.”

Before I could correct the narrow-minded twerp on the fact that nationality had nothing to do with it, he had already disappeared into the back room. I turned my attention to the imam. Typically, Muslim funerals were very simple and to the point. They also did a ritual washing and wrapping of the body in a white cloth that looked like a sheet, à la the Hare Krishnas, but they were super efficient at it, à la the Jews. Muslims were almost never cremated; the most religious families, had they not lived in the US, where it’s illegal, would have buried their loved ones without a casket even, laying them in the ground in just the sheet, with the head facing Mecca.

“It’s a pleasure to see you again,” I said to the imam. I recognized him from another service I had planned for a fabulous Muslim family whose daughter I had gone to private school with. Even though the $40,000-a-year school was historically Christian (the name was Trinity), about half of the students were Jewish, and a few were Muslim. We used to joke that the big cross hanging in the chapel was really just a “T” for Trinity.

“Same to you,” he said with a smile.

I wondered if he had heard any of the comments from the staffer, who was probably now gorging himself with ­rigatoni.

“Should I take you to the viewing room?” I asked. Sometimes, priests, rabbis, or imams would say a few prayers before visitors arrived for a service.

“This priest would like that very much,” he said, still smiling.

I felt myself blush. In 2004, when my father was sick and I was taking the subway between the NYU campus and the hospital every day, I used to read the Quran for class during each ride.

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