An innocent encounter with death.

When I was six or seven, my great aunt passed away after a long illness. On the day of the viewing, my parents dressed my brothers and me in our Sunday best, complete with clip-on ties and scuffed black shoes and pants that were 2 inches too short, and drove us the 20 miles or so to where the funeral parlor was. There were no major highways connecting the town where we lived to the town where the funeral parlor was, so the trip seemed to take forever.

When we got there, tall trees and somber black cars like the ones you see in an old 1950s TV show lined both sides of the street. The funeral parlor looked like a comfortable old house, with a large front porch and a driveway that ran around to the back where there was a little parking lot. As my father parked the car, my mother turned around and looked at us packed together with no room to spare in the back seat, eyeing us sternly through the veil that hung just below eye level from her little round hat, and warned us all to be on our very best behavior. We nodded nervously and clamored out of the car and followed them like polite little lambs unsure of what we were in for. We walked around the side of the house to the front door and entered.

Inside it was hot and crowded and smelled like a combination of flowers, cheap aftershave, cheap perfume, burning church candles, old people smell and sweat. The open casket with my aunt inside was in a room immediately to the left when we walked in. There was a black sign with white lettering on a metal stand placed near the room's entryway with my aunt's name on it. Other black signs were down the hall in the entryways of other rooms. A man in a nice suit and slicked back hair smiled at us as we entered and asked if we were here for the deceased.

We were the only children there. The room was filled with old wrinkled men in their best wrinkled suits and old powdered women in their finest flowery Sunday dresses. There was an incessant murmuring, as people spoke to each other in hushed little groups as the women sat together on long couches and ornate wooden chairs, and the men stood around nodding and smiling nervously at each other and wishing they were anywhere else but here. People glanced every now and then at my aunt in her casket, and then quickly averted their eyes.

I couldn't avert my eyes. I stared at her and walked up close. I was fascinated. She looked like she had just gotten back from the beauty parlor and decided to take a nap in her best Sunday clothes. Her face had a waxy appearance, and a vague, pained smile that I never saw on her face in real life.

It seemed so silly, I started to sing.

"The worms crawl in! The worms crawl out! In your body and out your snout!"

I vaguely remember dancing around.

And then I was picked up and my father rushed me out the back door.