Death comes in threes they say and that is how it has seemed to me 

First his mother.

They wouldn’t help her die.

So when called by the police to come, the family was advised not to look

And they didn’t. 

“My mother has died”

she told me from her cell phone

“And sadness has blackened my heart

I shall not be comforted again.”

And in a substantial polished wooden casket with the lid opened she was set out wearing a red suit and a jaunty striped floppy bowed business blouse and silver rimmed glasses and her dentures and her eyes closed and her children, all four of them, and her grandchildren, babies, touched and kissed and said goodbye a million times in front of all those mourners at the Weinstein Chapel.

I did not look closely. 

Then my father.

“He died peacefully,” my sister said

And I thought that was a nice thing to say.

When she told me I could go and look if I wanted to

It took me the rest of the morning and half the afternoon to make up my mind.

“Ask mother if she wants to go again,” my sister ordered.

I did not want to take my mother but in the end three generations of his women

Looked 

The naked old man on the slab partly covered by a sheet.

Hawk nosed, white haired, hanging skin.

Cold, cold, cold

Seated in the empty funeral parlor

Demented wife, daughter, granddaughter.

Mother said “get up Matis, time to wake up.”

I know he was cold because I touched him once.