Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(103)

Why not? It wasn’t prohibited. It wasn’t disrespectful. It wasn’t, or shouldn’t be, disgusting.

“I took a philosophy class in college. I can’t remember what it was called, and can’t even remember the professor, but I do remember learning that some prohibitions aren’t ethically grounded, but rather because certain things are not to be done. One could reach for all sorts of reasons that it isn’t right to eat the bodies of humans who died of natural causes, but at the end of the day, it’s just not something we do.”

“I didn’t say eat him.”

“No, I know. I’m just making a point.”

“Who would want to eat a human?”

“It would almost certainly smell and taste good. But we don’t do it, because it’s not to be done.”

“Who decides?”

“Excellent question. Sometimes the not to be done is universal, sometimes it’s particular to a culture, or even to a family.”

“Like how we eat shrimp, but don’t eat pork.”

“We don’t eat shrimp as a practice. We on occasion eat some shrimp. But yes, like that.”

“Except this isn’t like that.”

“What isn’t?”

“Looking at Great-Grandpa.”

He was right; it wasn’t.

Max went on: “We’re here to be with him, right? So why wouldn’t we be with him? What’s the point of coming all the way here, and spending all this time, just to be in a different room? We might as well have sat at home with popcorn and a streaming video of his body.”

Jacob was afraid. It was a very simple explanation, even if the explanation for that explanation was harder to come by. What was there to be afraid of? The proximity to death? Not exactly. The proximity to imperfection? The embodied proof of reality, in its grotesque honesty? The proximity to life.

Max said, “See you on the other side,” and entered the room.

Jacob remembered the night, decades before, when he and Tamir had snuck into the National Zoo.

“You OK?” he called to Max.

“Freaky,” Max said.

“I told you.”

“That’s not what you told me.”

“How does he look?”

“Come see for yourself.”

“I’m comfortable where I am.”

“He looks like he does on Skype, but farther away.”

“He looks OK?”

“I probably wouldn’t put it like that.”

How did he look? Would the body have looked different if he’d died differently?

Isaac had been the embodiment of Jacob’s history; his people’s psychological pantry, the shelves collapsed; his heritage of incomprehensible strength and incomprehensible weakness. But now he was only a body. The embodiment of Jacob’s history was only a body.

They used to take baths together when Jacob slept over as a child, and the long hairs of Isaac’s arms, chest, and legs would float on the surface like pond vegetation.

Jacob remembered watching his grandfather fall asleep under the barber’s cape, how his head slumped forward, how the straight razor mowed a path from the back of his hairline to the limits of the barber’s reach.

Jacob remembered being invited to pull at the loose skin of his grandfather’s elbow until it stretched to a web large enough to hold a baseball.

He remembered the smell after his grandfather used the bathroom: it didn’t disgust him, it terrified him. He was mortally afraid of it.

He remembered how his grandfather wore his belt just below the nipples, and his socks just above the knees; and how his fingernails were as thick as quarters, and his eyelids as thin as tinfoil; and how between claps he turned his palms skyward, as if repeatedly opening and shutting an invisible book, as if unable not to give the book a chance, and unable not to reject it, and unable not to give it another chance.

Once, he fell asleep in the middle of a game of Uno, his mouth half full of black bread. Jacob might have been Benjy’s age. He carefully replaced his grandfather’s mediocre hand with all Wild Draw Fours, but when he shook his grandfather awake and they resumed the game, Isaac showed no wonder at his cards, and on his next turn drew from the stack.

“You don’t have anything?” Jacob asked.

Isaac shook his head and said, “Nothing.”

He remembered watching his grandfather change into a bathing suit wherever happened to be convenient, with no regard for his own privacy or Jacob’s mortification: beside the parked car, in the middle of a men’s room, even on the beach. Did he not know? Did he not care? Once, at the public pool they sometimes went to on Sunday mornings, his grandfather undressed poolside. Jacob could feel the glances of strangers rubbing together inside him, building and tending to a fire of rage: at the strangers for their judgment, at his grandfather for his lack of dignity, at himself for his humiliation.

The lifeguard came over and said, “There’s a changing room behind the vending machines.”

“OK,” his grandfather said, as if he’d been told there was a Home Depot just off the Beltway.

“You can’t change here.”

“Why not?”

Jacob spent decades thinking about that Why not? Why not, because the changing room was over there, and here was right here? Why not, because why are we even talking about this? Why not, because if you’d seen the things I’ve seen, you would also lose your ability to comprehend embarrassment? Why not, because a body is only a body?