What is Sittin' With the Dead You Ask???

1981

I will never forget her face, how her eyes would widen and her voice would lower to a whisper when she would tell me those stories of the dead.

"They always put them in the parlor. And they always let them lay there for days. You know why?" She clicked her false teeth.

I shook my head no, me, a girl of ten, could not possibly know of such things. Things of why anyone would leave a dead person laying in the parlor for days.

"It's because they would sit straight up." And her brown eyes would meet mine in a haunting yet fascinating manner. "Sit up right there in that coffin and their arms would go straight out and some of them would even let out a big moan. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh-ooooooooooooooooo-uhhhhhhhhh!"

I shuddered. Pulling my legs underneath me. Barely breathing.

"We'd have to sit with the dead, make sure they were really dead and to make sure they didn't get up and run around the room like an old chicken with his head cut off. You ever see an old chicken with his head cut off?"

I nodded. In fact, I had seen her in the backyard just the day before chop the head clean off an old rooster and his body ran all over the yard while his head lay at her feet. She had plunged the ax back into the stump and waited for him to stop running before she went over and picked him up by the feet and swaggered over to a table by the back door blood slinging in every direction and put him in a bucket of water. She then plucked all the feathers off and I swear I saw him twitch now and again. Then she put his pink carcass into a boiling pot and within hours it smelled like scrumptious chicken soup. And when she made the dumplings I had all but forgotten about the chicken body running around the yard.

"Well, that's what we had to do. Sit with the dead, until they were cold and stiff and then not stiff anymore. Then we'd bury them usually on the third or fourth day."

"I will never sit with a dead person, Grandma. I swear it. I'm scared. I don't like dead people or dead chickens."

She laughed. "Oh, child, now they won't hurt you. If they sit up, you just put your hand on their chest and gently lay them back down. They'll go, you just gotta be gentle. But, sometimes when you lay them back down they will open their eyes and if that happens you put your hand over their eyes and close them. They won't bite."

"No, Grandma, I ain't sittin' with the dead. Ever. No way, no how, and nobody can make me."

"You ought not be afraid of the dead, they won't hurt you. It's the living you gotta worry about. It's the living..."

It's something how you remember words from your childhood, it's something how prophetic they can be. I have learned that it truly is the living you gotta worry about. For the dead are dead...and they ain't coming back.