I wonder how many people actually remember seeing a corpse in a coffin for the first time. I certainly remember the first time I saw one. I was five then. My father brought me and my youngest sister, Sylvia, to visit the wake of his friend. Our nursemaid, Rebecca, lifted me to view the dignified old man inside the coffin. I distinctly remember his gray pallor showing through rosy cosmetics. Whenever I think of that while painting, I also think of the necessity of mixing terre verte to flesh tones to achieve the right shade of gray appropriate to shading skin. I also remember the man's eyelashes One of them was completely white. I asked Rebecca why that was so. She simply replied that he was an elderly man. I am an old man now, but none of my eyelashes are white. My reading of the man's body, in retrospect, was that there were many things in his life he resented witnessing. Rebecca also told me that cadavers urinate and defecate like living persons do, which discombobulated me for a long time. That was my introduction to funeral wakes, to coming face to face with a dead man in a coffin, and to the concepts of formal and traditionalist death.