Among the Lilies

Jack’s life revolved around dead people. 

It wasn’t creepy. It wasn’t sad. It was just what he did. Some people fix cars, some people write tax codes. Jack worked funerals. Thirty-five years of arranging caskets, smoothing lapels, and listening to people pretend they hadn’t spent the last five years ignoring their mother’s phone calls.

He had seen every kind of grief. The weepers who threw themselves onto caskets like they were auditioning for a TV role. The stoics who nodded grimly and gripped each other’s shoulders like a general about to give a speech. And the distracted ones—the ones who spent the whole service whispering about whether Cousin Danny was drunk again.

But the dead? The dead were easy, didn’t make a fuss, and often were quiet. Except today.

Jack stood in the back of the viewing room as he always did, surrounded by ornate arrangements of flowers, hands in his pockets, listening.

Margaret Allen lay in her casket at the front, wrapped in periwinkle satin, looking both deeply asleep and deeply unimpressed. She had that air of a woman who had been interrupted in the middle of something important, but who was being polite about it.

People came and went, murmuring, crying softly, telling stories about how she used to bake the best blueberry crumble or how she had once chased a goose out of her garden with a broom. These were the things people remembered, in the end. Not the grand scenes of a person’s life, but the small details. The scent of lavender soap. The particular way she filled out her crossword puzzles. She had been someone who left an impression worth remembering.

“Oh, Aunt Margaret,” a niece sighed, pressing her hand lightly to the casket. “What will we do without you?”

Standing there among the lilies, Jack heard a quiet, familiar sound beside him. A short tsk of disapproval.

“Oh, for cryin’ out loud,” said a voice beside him. “She’ll be fine.”

He turned his head, expecting another mourner, but what he saw instead was Margaret Allen herself.

She stood next to him, arms folded, appraising the room like a woman assessing a dinner party she wasn’t sure she wanted to attend.

Jack didn’t startle. He should have. But he had spent too much time around the dead, been in this business long enough to know that sometimes the dead stuck around to see how things panned out.

“You don’t scare easy, do ya?” Margaret said, giving him a sidelong glance.

Jack shrugged. “Not really.”

Margaret hummed approvingly before turning her attention back to the room. “I wanted to see the turnout,” she said. “See who showed up, who didn’t.”

People thought ghosts stuck around for unfinished business, like they had some big mystery to solve, but it was usually stuff like “who got my jewelry?” or “is my idiot cousin gonna give a speech?”.

At the front of the room, a woman in navy blue dabbed at her eyes dramatically.

“Oh, my dear, sweet Margaret,” she spoke loud enough for others to hear. “You were like a sister to me.”

Margaret let out an unladylike snort. “Elaine, you two-faced cow. You tried to get me kicked out of the book club.”

Jack raised an eyebrow. “What for?”

Margaret waved a hand. “I called Eat, Pray, Love self-indulgent nonsense.”

Jack huffed a small, unexpected laugh. “Was it?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

Elaine kissed her fingertips and touched them reverently to Margaret’s folded hands before stepping back, making sure everyone had witnessed her grief.

Margaret rolled her eyes. “She loves a good tragedy, especially when she’s at the center of it. I swear, if ghosts could throw things…”

Jack chuckled. He liked Margaret. He thought if he had met her in life, they probably would’ve ended up drinking in some crappy bar, complaining about everybody else.

“You ever think about it?” she asked suddenly.

The question confused him. “Think about what?”

She gestured toward the casket. “Who’s gonna show up for you?”

Jack let out a short laugh. “Not really.”

Margaret turned to him, her expression flat. “Oh, come on. You’ve worked funerals your whole life, and you’re telling me you’ve never looked at one of these and thought, Huh. Wonder if anyone’s gonna bother showing up for me?”

Jack exhaled through his nose.

The truth was, he had thought about it.

He had spent decades watching people grieve, watching them clutch each other, watching them say all the things they should’ve said when the person was still breathing. He knew how people carried loss, how some people broke under it and some just nodded politely and moved on. 

He had never been married, had never been the type for grand commitments. His life had been measured in quiet departures—people slipping away, relationships fading like old photographs. Margaret had people who gathered, people who whispered goodbyes through tears. Some people barely had anyone show up at all.

He did not know which he would be.

Jack shifted slightly, eager to change the conversation. “Did you guess what they’d say about you?”

Margaret smiled slightly. “I imagined some would be honest, some would embellish, and Elaine would make it all about her.” She turned her gaze back to the casket. “But I actually didn’t hang around to hear the stories.

Jack glanced at her. “Then why?”

“I wanted to see who my last kiss would be.”

He frowned. “Your what?”

“What, never thought about that one either?” she smirked.

Jack shook his head. “Well…no. Not particularly.”

Margaret hummed, tapping her fingers against her arm. “It should’ve been Harold, of course. My husband. But he went first.” She exhaled, a deep, knowing kind of sigh. “And you never get to choose, do you?”

Jack’s stomach twisted, just a little.

Margaret continued, more thoughtful now. “People don’t think about it. The last kiss. But it happens to all of us. Someone always presses their lips to your skin one last time when you leave the world for good.”

Jack thought about how, years ago, it could have been Marianne. If he had stayed. If he had been braver, or kinder, or simply more. But that was long ago.

The room had emptied out now; most had made their way to their cars for the procession, select family members waited in the vestibule to close the lid. Only one person remained—a young woman, eyes red and shoulders trembling slightly. Margaret’s granddaughter, no doubt. Her breath hitched as she approached the casket, as if she were holding back a sob or summoning courage. She paused, fingers gripping the edge of the casket as she looked inside.

Finally, she leaned down, pressing a gentle kiss to Margaret’s forehead. A tear snuck quietly down her cheek.

Margaret let out a sigh, soft as settling dust. Her face softened into an expression of warmth and gratitude. "Oh," she whispered, 'that's perfect. I am so glad it’s her."

Jack felt the air shift, heavy with an overwhelming sense of finality. The room seemed charged with a feeling of love that stretched to all corners of the room, and in the center of it standing next to him was Margaret wrapped in quiet acceptance.

She turned to Jack, tilting her head slightly. “I wonder who yours will be.”

Jack looked at her.

She winked. “It makes you think, doesn’t it?”

Jack turned toward her, but she was already fading, her form gently dissolving. Her smile lingered even as she disappeared, and then, she was gone.

Jack stared at the reflection in the window—the ghostly outline of himself, alone, standing in the dim light of the room. The thought still lingered like the aftertaste. One day, someone would be the last person to kiss him goodbye. Everyone has someone that is the last - who would be there for him? Would it be a nurse, a caretaker, a stranger? Would it be a friend, an old lover, a face he had not yet met? Jack remained in the room alone for a moment longer, hands in his pockets, feeling the silence pressing in on him.  

He wondered if, in the end, he would be pleased.