Camille Woods - The Softest Touch

 

So, I never realized that the most important promise ever kept to me would be from a stranger that I had met and spoken to for about 20 minutes. It was the day after I’d driven back from Alabama, when I had found out that I lost my son. We went to the funeral home to start all the proceedings, which is really an interesting and morbid, clearly, process. 

 

Her name was Judy, and she was about yay big. She had blond hair and I think she was maybe 35. She had blue eyes and she was the sweetest thing. She handed me this book with all these caskets in it and a book with urns and all this shit that I had no idea about, except that I was supposed to choose something and create something out of the loss of the best thing that had ever happened in my life. 

 

So, we sat speaking. It had been about less than 24 hours since the loss. I had to drive back, my brother had to fly and pick me up and drive me back from Alabama to Michigan. I hadn't seen him and I wanted to know where he was. I just wanted to be with my son. I remember in my head thinking, I don't give a crap about any of these books, I don't give a crap about the funeral, I don't give a crap about this place. It was this very quiet and pristine and almost sterile kind of building. It was just a building I knew existed next to Red Lobster on Carpenter Road. It happened to be a funeral home, and that's where we ended up. 

 

I couldn’t stop crying and I kept saying, "When can I see him? When can I see him? When will he be here?" We had seen him on a video screen earlier that day, because I live in Wayne County. And in Wayne County, you're not allowed to see a body up close. So, they sit you in a room with Kleenex and a TV screen, and then your son comes up on the screen swaddled. He looked like he was sleeping. It wasn't nearly as traumatic. Fuck it, yes, it was very traumatic. It was very traumatic. So, I just wanted to be with him. 

 

So, Judy, I looked at her and she looked at me and she said, "Well, let me talk to somebody." She left the room and came back a moment later and I was saying the same thing, "When can I see him? I want to see him." And she said, "Well, they're going to bring him here tomorrow." And I said, "So, when can I see him?" "Well, I'm not sure." I said, "When can I see him?" She said, "Give me another second," and she walked out of the room. I'm sitting there with my brother and I'm sitting there with my ex-husband, and she comes back and I said again, "When can I see my son? I don't want to see him in the casket. I don't want to see him when you've done things to him. I want to see him now."

 

And she looks at me and she says, "Tomorrow around 2 o'clock, I promise. He will be brought here and I will find a way for you to see him, I promise." And so, I heard her. I'm a pretty easygoing person. And even in that moment, I agreed to believe her. I went home. My house is full of people, because it's going to be, right, somebody died. So, we're going through photos. It's the next day, we're going through photos, we're trying to figure out, “Oh, what's the funeral going to look like.” I didn't give a crap, there's people all over the place, floating around. And my phone rang, and it was 02:05, actually. 02:05. And it was Judy.

 

And she said, "He's here. You have to come now, because we have to get him ready," which I didn't know what the hell that meant. And I said, "Okay, I will be right there." Well, we gathered up, my sister was there, my brother had gone, my stepson, my stepfather, everybody got in the car. I called the ex-husband who said, "I can't go," because he wasn't strong enough. So, we went. We went and we walked down the stairs with Judy leading the way. She held my hand. She held my hand, I won't forget that. She held my hand. We came down the stairs, and across the room was this big bag, because my son was 6’5” and he weighed about four hundred pounds.

 

And my knees buckled. My sister kind of held me up. We walked across the room, and I realized that the only thing out that I could see was my son's left arm. And I said, "Where is the rest of him?" And she said, and this is something you don't learn until you lose someone, "I'm sorry, I can't show you the rest of him." I said, "Why not?" She said, "Well, they do an autopsy and we put him back together, I can't show him to you." But as awful as it sounds, the 20 minutes that I got to hold the chubbiest hand that I'd ever held in my life [sobs] and got to rub the most beautiful arm that I had ever had on the earth, meant everything to me, even though I couldn't see the rest of him. It was the only time that I was able to see the real him and hold who he really was. And so, God bless Judy for making the most awful, beautiful, tragic promise kept in my life.