THE LIBRARY · THE VALE

The Closing

aka The Order of Acts at a Death, What the House Does

A plain household instruction, copied from grandmother to grandchild across every people of the Vale, for what to do when someone dies — a rite of closing, not of words, so that the Last Guest takes only what it came for and leaves the door shut.

When the breath goes out, do these things and do not speak the name of the one who came for it. Shut the eyes. A dead man left looking is a dead man still in the room. Snuff the lamp that burned beside the bed. A light left burning is a place kept ready; keep no place ready now. Stop the clock or the wheel or whatever in the house still turns, and let it be still until the burying. Latch the door. Count slow — a hundred, the old folk say, but count honest, not fast — and in that counting the Guest goes out the way it came. Then unlatch it, and open it wide, and the house is a house again and not a threshold. Do this and the ending is finished. Leave any of it undone — an eye half open, a lamp guttering, a door on the latch too long — and you have left the door ajar, and what does not rest on the far side of a shut door is the Unclosed, and it is your own fault, and it will be your grief to mend. There is no prayer for it. There is only the doing, done right.

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