They asked us at the funeral home and we said yes—
we thought it better, thought the last memory we had
of him alive was cleaner than the press
of seeing what the final weeks had made of Dad.
The closed lid held the possibility
of him as he was at his best, not at his end,
and the visiting line moved with the dignity
of grief that didn’t have to comprehend
the visual final punctuation of what illness does.
The casket was closed and the room was kind,
the flowers and the photo left behind
a picture of him that the sickness hadn’t touched,
and the mourners in the room hadn’t clutched
at the actual absence.
But my brother said the open casket helped him
when our mother went, that seeing her at rest
made the abstract fact of death less overwhelming,
confirmed the thing he’d barely understood.
He said her face in its repose was different—
something he’d needed to believe,
that peaceful was the word for how vacant
the dead look to the things that make us grieve.
Both approaches serve the ones who make the choice,
the open and the closed both hold their truth:
one gives you back the man, the living voice
of his best years; the other, the stark uncouth
and honest fact of what happens at the terminus,
how the face releases from its final effort.
I’ve stood at both and both modes of farewell blend
grief with something that the living infer—
soft or hard, the casket holds what we can bear.