I hesitated. Technically, this meant I had won, and I wondered if it was tactically prudent to protest further.
In truth, her level of conviction was far greater than mine, and generations deep. She is half-Sicilian and had an old-country Grandma Lucia, who, after the death of her husband, threw herself sobbing and shrieking into his casket and wore all black for ten years. So this woman, my wife, has an elaborate, high-concept, hot-blooded Mediterranean approach to the whole ceremony of death, and the casket, to her, plays the same role as the rented white limousine in a wedding procession. (Never mind that we departed our church in my dad’s leased brown Impala.) I think she found the possibility of hurling her grieving self into a glorified refrigerator carton undignified.
We rejoined the siblings. They had settled in around a gray steel number with a silver crepe interior and long handles suspended from ornate chrome fittings that looked like Dodge Ram hood ornaments. “Sterling,” it was called, manufactured by the Zane Casket Company of Zanesville, Ohio. It cost $2,020. The undertaker told us it was eighteen-gauge steel, and I took special note of this, calculating the fact that at the time I was driving a car that hadn’t cost much more than $2,020 and wondering if the quality of steel in this vessel was greater than that of my actively rusting Volkswagen out in the parking lot.
Gina’s brother, the one who’d taken the lead in these arrangements, pointed out that the gray metal was reminiscent of a battleship, and everyone latched onto this point, so eager for some connection to Dad’s legacy. Of course. It looks like a ship. It’s what he would have wanted, and we nodded as though we’d found our epiphany.
This is the hardest part, isn’t it? Making a decision for a parent in the hope not that you have made the “right” choice but, rather, the choice he would have thought was the right choice. The difference between those two is the difference between being someone’s child and being your own self—a subtle divide most of us struggle with well beyond the keen of adolescence. What does it mean to be making decisions for the person who first made all your decisions for you, then taught you to make decisions for yourself? What is the sliding scale of “right”? And what if you’re wrong?
Also, it was in the lower-middle price range. That helped.
The funeral took place a few days later. As had been the case at my mother-in-law’s funeral a year almost to the day before, I was assigned to deliver the eulogy. Everyone else who might have been qualified had declined on grounds that they were afraid of breaking down at the pulpit. Did my appointment indicate their perception of my emotional deficiency? Regardless, I accepted the job and set about the paralyzing task of composing a proper eulogy.
For a writer, the trouble with composing a public tribute is that it eliminates the one thing all writers secretly know is the real truth of the vocation: self-exaltation. We write because it allows us to reveal our hidden awesomeness. The eulogy, however, is the one subgenre that requires perfect humility. You give yourself over not only to honoring the deceased but also to honoring everyone else’s memories of the deceased. When the deceased had seven children, seventeen grandchildren, and fourteen great-grandchildren, that’s a formula for implosion.
A year before, I’d made the mistake of sending out a group email asking family members to share their memories of Gina’s mom. Almost all of them centered on her kitchen table, which felt to me like a windfall—a tangible central image with a shared meaning. A conceit! A motif!
From there, it all went to shit.
“Her pizza,” a grandchild wrote. “It was the best.”
“Her movie-night popcorn,” offered one of the sisters.
“Her cream pie,” another grandchild insisted.
“You have to mention her sauce,” my brother-in-law wrote.
“Her midnight sandwiches,” Gina followed. “I loved her midnight sandwiches. She always shared them with me.”
And so on, such that the text began to look more like a Perkins menu than an encomium for the dead. It seemed like the greater the attempt to encapsulate the meaning of a life, the more scattered and ragged that meaning became, even for this simple woman whose legacy was sandwiches and pie.
With the passing of Augustus Owsley, the same issue arose. How to contain the memory of the man? Is it simply a matter of careful arrangement within the logical corners of a box? Does the container have any meaning at all, or does it mock meaning?
Nonetheless, I put on a suit and tie—itself a container entirely foreign to my natural self, but one that Gina will surely dress me in when I die—and I delivered the formal address of remembrance, quilted together from time-softened anecdotes and images, and we adjourned to the cemetery, where the $2,020 eighteen-gauge steel box with silver crepe interior was placed on the rolling mechanism that would lower it into a place where none of this would matter anymore.
* * *
Not long before this, I was having drinks with friends at a downtown bar. It was late enough that I had no idea what time it was. A woman approached. She was carrying a small square cardboard box, about the size of a tissue box. She set it on the table as she addressed my friend Bob, who was sitting across from me.
“Hey, do you remember me? I’m so-and-so—so-and-so’s friend.”
Bob’s hesitant expression broke into recognition and he greeted her. “Yeah! How are you?” he said.
“I’m doing great,” she said. “We’re out barhopping with my daughter. It’s her twenty-first birthday. We’re celebrating.”
She touched the box in a manner that resembled one thing and one thing only—a mother’s touch—and the effect was as though the room had just tilted slightly in a way all of us felt simultaneously.
“Well, we’re off,” she said. “Just wanted to say hello.”
She picked up the box and followed her entourage through the room and out the door, off to the next stop.
Bob settled his gaze on me. “That was her daughter,” he said, though he didn’t need to. “In that box.”
For a long time, I lingered only on the oddness of this encounter. But I knew from the moment it happened that the meaning was not mine. Though I could comment, I couldn’t judge. A mother had chosen a way to embrace and celebrate her daughter’s memory. The daughter, I later learned, had committed suicide in her late teens. I have no doubt that the mother’s deliberate method of commemoration is a much richer decision than whether to go with the cherry or the mahogany finish. I think that’s when I started to wonder how I might take control over my own final passage.
And if I’m honest: I wouldn’t mind if someone took me barhopping in the afterlife.
* * *
“I want to be buried in a cardboard box.”
“You are not going to be buried in a cardboard box.”
Gina and I had been married twenty-five years, over half our lives. Certain words or ideas triggered between us a rich, elaborate shared history, often spinning into well-practiced banter. As with much of the daily (and nightly) interaction of a longtime married couple, just because it’s not spontaneous doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. So whenever the subject of funerals comes up in social conversation, Gina will almost invariably fire up the anecdote machine.
“Oh, don’t even get us started on coffins,” she’ll say, itching for someone to get us started on coffins. “David wants to be buried in a cardboard box. Do you know that a funeral home will sell you one?”
And somehow this topic that would appear to represent a rift between us proves in fact to be something that connects us more strongly. Our argument binds us like opposing magnet poles.
So I’ll then move forward, going on about the silliness of Gina caring about the accommodations of the corpse at all, insisting that my body, when I’m finished with it, can be thrown to the coyotes or tossed into the Dumpster behind Hobby Lobby. I toss off these bons mots as though they’ve just occurred to me, and the only person in the room who knows how road-tested these lines are is Gina, which is to say that only one person
truly knows me and my motivations, and she’s the one person I’m trying to suggest doesn’t understand me. And she understands that I’m doing this, and I understand that she understands that I’m doing this.
That’s what half a life together feels like.
I eventually learned that the cardboard box I saw that day was not in fact a legitimate coffin. It was, in the words of the funeral director, a “cremation receptacle,” used to transport the body to the crematorium and whose chief attribute, I’m guessing, was that it was flammable or, at the very least, disposable. Upon learning this, I dug around some more and determined that there are very cheap pauper’s caskets, under a thousand dollars, often made of low-cost pressboard or high-grade cardboard, and that they are far less expensive than the Sterling, or anything else in its category, allowing me not only to stick to my position but also to back it up with something that sounded like research.
Which is really just proof that my well-crafted, highly evolved protest is evidence that I do indeed give a very large shit about what happens to my body after I die. I just don’t know what I want done with it. And no one knows this better than Gina.
And so it came to pass: on a March night, we were gathered as a family at the home of my brother’s girlfriend to celebrate my dad’s seventy-ninth birthday. We were all there: my mom, my dad, their four kids and significant others, their grandchildren. Our family parties are always loud and loose, and as the evening unfolds, they get louder and looser: a game of some sort playing on the big TV, children running pell-mell, adults howling, all of it louder and louder. Depending on location, there might be a dangerous dog involved, or a megaphone, or a parrot screeching with primal urgency. We are, if nothing else, a loud people. It’s worth noting the irony that this party, which at least in part acknowledged the remarkable good health of my father as he bore down on his eighties, featured a menu of greasy fried chicken and artery-clogging pizza and free-flowing booze. Life and death, good health and imminent mortality, are always in a state of mingling, like laughing and crying, closer than we might realize.
My father’s semi-legendary oldest brother, past ninety, insisted on keeping his driver’s license and car after moving to an assisted care facility specifically so he could drive somewhere off-site to smoke cigars all day. This thing that was supposed to kill him was the thing that made his life worth living.
I was sitting across the kitchen counter from my dad as conversation swirled around us. Somehow or other, the subject of funerals came up.
“David says he’s going to be buried in a cardboard box,” Gina began. “There’s no way I’m letting him be buried in a cardboard box.” Then, playing a slightly unconventional opening pattern, she preempted the counter-move, jumping right in with: “Did you know you can buy a cardboard casket?”
My dad latched on. “Really? A cardboard box? Can you decorate it?”
I looked at him, and something about his interest set off an old trigger. If there’s anything that has connected us over the course of my lifetime, it is the idea of decorated boxes—birdhouses, barns, and most notably, the ramshackle Tudor Revival semi-mansion that he helped me and Gina save from the threshold of condemnation, and which I, for better and for worse, and thanks in great part to him, have been renovating ever since. Gina and I have raised our two children in a drafty twenty-room manifestation of the Family Disease.
My fondest memories of him are of watching him and helping him, learning from him. The last thing I did before moving out of the family home and setting off on my own was to construct an oak file box with finely mitered and fitted corners, built from short planks of A-grade lumber, scraps I’d squirreled away while working as a construction grunt on high-end residential jobs, a box whose antique cup handles I’d selected from one of my dad’s fanciful bins of architectural salvage, whose very screws were vintage, collectible, with square brass heads, a box whose finish I’d buffed and rubbed, applying coat after coat, a box whose progress he’d watched and on whose finer points (glue choice, router settings, joinery technique) he’d consulted, a box whose significance was, to me, vital. This box was not just the place where I expected to organize all the writing I was planning on doing in my just-beginning life, but a testament to all I had learned, and evidence that I still needed his help. It was my ritual of departure, my setting-off point, and it returned necessarily to him. As I stood there in that kitchen, leaning on the counter, that box was back home in my attic office, full of ideas and failures and hopeful passages.
“You and I should build my casket,” I said.
The corners of the old smile pulled into place. I knew exactly what that meant.
4: AN OLD-ISH SOUL
* * *
Although we were born just three months apart, Gina’s soul has always been older than mine. As the last of seven children, she was nurtured as much by her siblings as by her parents, who, by the time she came along, were tired and already busy becoming grandparents. She was raised therefore on the glory of seventies AM radio, on Aerosmith and the funk of “Brick House” and Sly and the Family Stone. Her sisters, all married by the age of twenty, gave her wine coolers and hand-me-down bell-bottoms and hard-won lessons about men, work, eye shadow, and the politics of dancing. They lived in tight quarters, in an old house with only one bathroom. The wisdom was hard to avoid.
Her family history is a tapestry of old-country hardship and Appalachian Gothic. She had a Sicilian grandfather who, as a boy, was sold to a chicken farm, where he survived by eating the livestock’s feed. He grew up, became a police officer, eventually fled Mussolini, took a ship to America, followed rumors of factory work to Akron, Ohio, and found a job in a tire mill, where he was mocked mercilessly for his accent and his obesity. He lived alone for five years before being reunited with his family, but by then he was a broken man.
Gina had a Cherokee grandmother in Kentucky who, while still a young mother, committed suicide, leaving her widowed husband to carry on working in a coal mine and raising three boys, eventually migrating to Akron for work in a factory. Late in his life, ninety-some years old, he sat alone with me one Sunday in Gina’s parents’ living room, mostly blind and deaf, rambling about the time he rented a furnished house and, upon discovering the mattress full of bedbugs, hauled it out to the front yard, doused it with kerosene, and set it ablaze.
“So don’t you ever go thinking you’re smarter than anyone else,” he finished.
Perhaps tellingly, I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by that, but I was certain he knew things I didn’t.
From the start, Gina’s personal narrative was woven with death and loss in a way that mine was not. I watched her Polish-Russian uncle climb sobbing into the casket of his beloved wife at her calling hours, literally embracing his grief. I’d never seen such a spectacle, yet glancing nervously around the room I realized many there had observed Grandma Lucia perform the same hysteric ritual years before. The night her mother died—the first of either of our parents to pass away—Gina, having witnessed the death, came home so heavily burdened that she crawled on her hands and knees up the stairs. Forty-five years old, she was reduced to a helplessness closer to that of an infant or an ancient. She climbed into the bathtub, a grasp for comfort, and I brought her a glass of wine and handed it to her silently, not knowing what else to do.
I tried to help, and I remember feeling like she suddenly knew a new language I was unable to interpret. Like the foreigner who smiles extra-vigorously to try to convey meaning without words, I became overly solicitous, fumbling for whatever I could offer. Gina’s mother, an inveterate bargain hunter, had bought a fancy nightgown on sale at a department store and instructed her daughters that she wanted to be buried in it. For years, we’d stored it for her in a closet at our house. As the funeral approached, Gina’s sisters decided together that they wanted to prepare their mother’s body for the viewing, to dress her and apply her makeup and set her hair—apparently people do this?—and the undertaker made the arrangements. For
Gina, this was a particularly meaningful therapy, as her mother had always come over to our house on Saturdays to have her hair styled in fat rollers while they drank coffee and visited.
In preparation for this grooming, Gina asked me to retrieve and iron the gown, which I did, feeling empowered by the responsibility. On the morning she was to go to the funeral home, I very carefully draped the garment over the passenger seat so it wouldn’t wrinkle, only to find my poor wife shocked and rattled by her mother’s funeral garb laid out in the unmistakable shape of a body, a ghost riding shotgun.
Still, I tried.
I was aware that the person I knew best in the world had new intelligence that I could understand solely through her. I’d experienced only the losses of grandparents and pets, the training wheels of grief. I was always slow in coming of age, and I always regarded Gina as wiser and deeper in this regard.
When we were dating in college, I would come over to visit at her parents’ house after class. Often I would join her in her daily viewing of Dark Shadows reruns on the black-and-white portable television in the kitchen. It was her favorite program then, so it was little surprise that her favorite series much later would be Six Feet Under, both shows suggesting an appetite for the macabre. With the Cure and Depeche Mode in her record collection, a bookshelf full of Stephen King, a Ouiji board in the closet, and a black pillbox hat with a little veil that she wore sometimes to club shows, accompanied by a long black cigarette holder, she displayed just enough darkness to shade her otherwise sweet demeanor.
She had been interested in my coffin long before I stumbled into the idea of building it, and I have to believe she understood what I was up to better than I did myself.
5: WINGMEN
* * *
“Call me.”
The text was from my friend John, back home in Ohio. It appeared on Gina’s cell phone as she sat across from me at a little sidewalk café in Montauk, Long Island, where we were attending a wedding. She repeated the two words to me, and we looked at each other in the late-morning sunshine, perplexed and a little concerned.
Furnishing Eternity Page 3
