The Thawing of Mrs Bishop Was No Easy Matter

The thing is, people expect a corpse to look natural. Natural indeed! In this neck of the woods if you die on the first day of winter it could be five months or more before the ground’s soft enough to bury you. Nobody looks like themself after five months in the deep freeze. Best case scenario; you’re a little on the pale side. Worst case; you look like a chicken fillet defrosted in the microwave. Still, we’re expected to present a nice natural looking corpse, all ready for folks to file past and have a good old gawp. If it were up to us there’d be no such thing as an open casket. But nobody ever asks us what we think.

“Can you make my daddy look like he’s sleeping?” they ask. “Can you put a wee bit of colour in my wife’s cheeks, so there’s a bit of life about her?” “Could you fix his nose?” They stop just short of requesting a resurrection. Clearly, they think we’re capable of working miracles. They’re not prepared to pay for a miracle of course. They wouldn’t spend Christmas round here.

Mr. Bishop was typical of our clientele. His wife passed away on the second week of November, just as the first snowstorms started moving in. We kept her in the walk-in freezer all the way through Christmas and into the New Year. Cremation was out of the question. When we tentatively suggested it might be the most workable solution, Mr. Bishop went scarlet and said, “what do you think I am? Some kind of Roman Catholic?” And that was the end of the discussion. Mrs. Bishop would be kept on ice until the ground thawed out and she could be buried in the family plot next to Mr. Bishop’s parents and his late, unmarried brother. Mr. Bishop asked if it might be possible to keep a nightlight running in the freezer, all winter long. He did not like to think of his wife alone, in the dark. “Of course,” we said and did not tell him when the cold caused the lamp’s bulb to blow and we could not be arsed with sourcing a replacement.

On the first of April we brought Mrs. Bishop upstairs to defrost. The funeral had been booked for the following morning and -horror of horrors- Mr. Bishop had asked for an open casket. Mrs. Bishop had not wintered well. The dry ice had done a number on her hair and it came away in clumps when we tried to style it according to the rather out of date photo her husband had provided. Her skin was pale blue and speckled with tiny ice crystals like so many white heads clustered across her cheeks and chin. Most worryingly however, Mrs. Bishop refused to thaw at the usual rate. Even after several hours above ground, she was still smoking cold. She was a big lady, but not grotesquely so and we did not understand why she would not defrost.

We went over her with hairdryers. We wrapped an electric blanket round her and turned it on at the highest setting. We went down to the chemist and bought them out of deep heat cream and rubbed it all over her body so the whole room stunk of it and our eyes were streaming and yet Mrs. Bishop remained frozen solid. We could have stood her up in the corner and hung coats on her, she was that stiff. In the end, we gave up. The funeral was mere hours away. We had to level with Mr. Bishop. His wife would not thaw. There was nothing more we could do.

Mr. Bishop was calmer than we’d expected. He wanted to see the body and there was no reason to stop him. He walked slowly round the table, scrutinising her from every angle. Then, he bent over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. There was a kind of dry papery noise as his lips froze to her skin and then peeled away gradually. “See,” we said, “perhaps a closed casket might be best.” Mr. Bishop wasn’t even listening. He was looking at his wife in that strangely intoxicated way people will sometimes look at old paintings in galleries. “You’ve done a marvellous job,” he said at last. “My wife looks exactly like herself. People always said she was the coldest woman who ever set foot in this town.”

Inspired by a line from Agatha Christie’s 1940 novel Sad Cypress