by Alan Emmins
I am heading into San Francisco, but this doesn’t mean that the drought on death has come to an end. Far from it. But instead of moping around worrying about the progress of my book, and generally praying for death, I’ve decided to cheer myself up with a visit to a funeral home.
Inevitably, in the midst of all this, I have begun to wonder about my own death. How will it come about and when might that day be? The more I see of it, the more certain I become that I will never commit suicide. As I now live in Denmark, where very little happens in the way of crime (at least when compared to the UK or the USA), it is very unlikely that I am going to be murdered. I no longer drive. In Copenhagen we tend to mince around on our bicycles. I haven’t heard any news reports of six-bike pile-ups claiming the lives of all its riders. The odds that my death will be a natural, gray-haired, toothless, and incontinent one are wonderfully high. So what then? What are my options once I have filled the bedpan for the last time? I am expecting to find the answers at the Halsted N. Gray Funeral Home.
Before I go any further I will just say, to give you a little more insight into my character, that I have very few problems with spending money. Which … well, there is a problem in that I generally don’t have that much, but still, I am happy to spend, spend, spend. Take Apple computers for example. By my own standards, I am truly amazed that every time Apple comes out with a new laptop I am quickly able to identify (in my mind) a real need for it, as in the case of the recent European launch of the new MacBook Air. Which is odd as my existing MacBook is but six months old. But you understand, I can’t fit my current model into an A4 envelope, hence I have rather successfully established the “need.”
Anyway, the point of this sideways ramble is that it takes very little to get me to draw, sword like, my wallet from my pocket. If the salesman is capable of forming words, I’m buying, baby.
So here I stand in the showroom of Halsted N. Gray Funeral Home, agog, as I stare wide-eyed at what is, one day at least, a purchase more necessary than any other I have ever made. I am not agog because I am faced with a technological wonder. I am not in awe at the way caskets have developed over the last few decades. I can’t, for example, slide one into an envelope. I could, though, given the size of the casket that stands before me, throw a party in one, but that only begs the question, Why would I?
Why, then, does my jaw refuse to close?
It’s because (and this is one of the few areas where Apple could learn a thing or two) sitting on top of the casket is a little beige card that in a gold serif font informs me that the casket, the thing that will one day contain a dead body and be buried out of sight and smell six-feet-under, actually comes with a twenty-five-year guarantee.
Splendid! Wrap one up!
A twenty-five-year guarantee? Of all the incentives to attach to a casket, this one is genius. Though it begs more questions. Let’s start with, “Am I losing my mind?” and move swiftly on to, “Did they see me coming?”
Somebody once told me that owning a gym is a good line of business, because 80 percent of the people who pay for the facility never turn up and actually use it. You can oversell your capacity and never worry about it. It’s free money. The twenty-five-year guarantee on a casket strikes me as the same thing.
This particular casket looks like the starship Enterprise, and while it comes without the dodgy dialects and funny-shaped ears, it does come with a far-reaching price tag of eighteen thousand dollars plus tax.
The casket is way too lavish for my liking, certainly not the kind of vessel I can ever see myself being buried in. It’s big and gold and sparkly. In fact, is that … yes, it looks like glitter. My daughter has a penchant for making boxes covered in glitter. I don’t want to sound like I don’t love my daughter or her craft activities, she is after all only five years old, but glittery boxes are generally bloody ugly. But one thing I must concede: I have met the kind of people who might purchase such a cashet faux pas. I can hear one of his colleagues reading the epitaph:
In life he was a pretentious,
overbearing, attention-seeking ass.
In death he remains a pretentious,
overbearing, attention-seeking ass.
It seems to me that the dead were, at least in times of yore, respected and slightly feared. As a child I always saw the dead as being surrounded by light footsteps and careful whispers. We know too well that death is coming for us and can, if it so chooses, come out of the blue, when we are far from ready, and so we handle death, at least we did, with care. We paid Death his due respect and tried to stay on his good side. If we laughed or sneered at his victims we did it from a distance, in private. But in this new era of death-as-entertainment, it seems to me that one of Death’s key functions is to make a mockery of the bereaved. Not through the death itself of a loved one, but through the checkout line that the bereaved have to pass through. I mean really, how does someone selling a casket with a twenty-five-year guarantee keep a straight face? And pushing the twenty-five-year con to one side for a minute, what is the purpose of an eighteen-thousand-dollar deluxe burial home? Gary Lee Ober was nearly skeletonized after a month. Imagine two months, or even three. Do you really care at that point if there are bugs in your box? The eighteen-thousand-dollar deluxe burial home is probably supplying lavish living quarters for the very bugs you are trying to avoid. So why would you put somebody in such a thing only to bury it deep underground? Are you going to take photos and show them at tea parties? Probably not. Is it a question of peace of mind?Is it guilt? Does mere handing over of large sums of cash at the “death stall” make up for all the times you let your dear departed down?
I am told that people don’t want to be seen as cheap in the face of death. Is that so? Well, I do! I want a flat-edged, austere, red oak box. I will arrange it all beforehand if that’s what I need to do to ensure that I am not sent into the ground in some oversized, shiny, copper-coated monster. In fact, I will deal with it right now.
NOTE TO NEXT OF KIN
Apologies for the air of morbidity, but I have a few things I would like to clear up. Should death strike me unwittingly anytime in the near, or distant, future, I would like you to adhere to my few simple requests:
Put me to the flame immediately. Waste no time. Get me straight in there. I do not want to be put on display, with the upper half of my rigor-mortis-stiffened body poking out so that people can come and weep at the sight of me lying there … dead. I do not want to be groomed, made up, or hairstyled. My container should be of plain wood; if it could be something along the lines of my current living room cabinet, that would be most agreeable. In fact, if said cabinet is indeed still around, fold me over and put me in there. My ashes are then to be buried in Copenhagen, where I imagine my children and grandchildren to be living. I do not want my ashes in an urn; please just place them, containerless, into the ground. I would like a plain concrete headstone, one foot by one foot. On this I would like the words Alan Emmins 1974–XXXXand not one syllable more. For this task I appoint you the handsome budget of two thousand Great American Dollars.
You should consider this a legal document.
Yours,
Alan Emmins
My requirements have nothing to do with being cheap. I just don’t want the hoo-ha. I want to take up as little space as possible with a marker so that my children or grandchildren know where to place the occasional bunch of lilies. The rest of the money that would normally be spent on a funeral I would recommend being spent on some kind of celebration, involving lashings of champagne and many toasts proclaiming what a splendid guy I was.
But luckily for Graham, who stands here with me now in the showroom of the Halsted N. Gray Funeral Home, the average person doesn’t want what I want. They want eighteen-thousand-dollar carnival floats and two days of mourning services in the chapel. They want hair and makeup, a nice suit, and some gentle background music. They want twenty-five-year guarantees.
“This here is the rental casket,” Graham tells me with a wave of his
arm as he nods toward a highly polished, decorative, and open-topped ballroom of a casket. “This is used when people want a cremation, but they want to display the body for a memorial service beforehand. They can rent this casket for that purpose. If families want an immediate cremation with no service, this is the minimum container required.”
The minimum container is an unornamented oblong of chipboard. There are no shiny handles or guarantees. Game on! Now we’re getting somewhere. Although, back up if you will. It may be minimal in all ways, and hacked together from no more than two floorboards, but it still costs $545. How can this be?
I feel a little disgusted by the prices. It seems a bit shameful. Why should these things cost so much? I can’t help but think that the funeral industry is preying a little on the bereaved. I’ll even concede to the twenty-five-year guarantee, but why can the caskets not just focus on function as opposed to being so very caught up on form? Then they would cost a quarter of the price.
Still, they don’t cost a quarter of the price, and those shocking numbers lead me to feel that people are being duped. Regardless of their wealth and station while alive, they are being sold opulence when dead.
Sure, we have moved on over the years. People are no longer buried with their pets for company. Superstition has been pushed aside for things more tangible. The personal items of the dead have been replaced by items with price tags. Items that belong to a billion-dollar industry.
“How does the average person go about choosing a casket?” I ask Graham as he walks me around.
“A lot of it is eye appeal. We have many different types of wood. We have mahoganies—a lot of families find the wood to be warmer.”
Graham is what you might expect in a funeral director. He is tall and slim and immaculately dressed. I doubt that even Neal could find a speck of dust on this guy. His manner is slow and calculated. His speech is soft, as if I myself have recently died and he’s about to break it to me.
“But it’s such a bizarre thing to me,” I whisper to Graham as I look around the fifty-casket showroom. “The caskets are just so extravagant, considering what they’re used for and where they’re going to go. I mean, it’s just … They just have so much decorative—”
“Some do, yes,” he interrupts. “But like this one, for example, it doesn’t at all,” says Graham, pointing to a wooden casket next to him. “This is actually very plain. It’s beautiful, it’s mahogany. It’s like a piece of furniture.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say.
I consent. The wood is beautiful. It is like a piece of furniture, but that’s the part that I just don’t get. Do I need to bring attention to the fact that it is not a piece of furniture, it’s a casket! It will not be dined upon or used to display the best china. It’s a box that’s going in the ground with someone inside rotting like a bowl of fruit left in the sun for three months.
“We have copper and bronze …” says Graham, moving on. “Solid copper here.”
Most of the caskets are the kind that have a split top so that the upper half can be left open for display. Most really could be put to better use floating down an avenue with Miss Funeral Home 2009 perched on the top, waving to the crowds on either side of the street. I guess I’m just a bit blown away by this room. I can’t imagine how somebody in the midst of grieving feels when confronted by such a sight, or by such prices. Does it help them grieve to have to focus on so much choice; does it take their minds off their recent loss? Or does it just seem a bit ridiculous?
“What about this guarantee?” I ask Graham as we pass another gilded envelope with a number 25 on it. “It’s a pretty safe guarantee to offer when you consider the dead are unlikely to bring any faults to the attention of the manufacturer?”
“Yeaaah,” Graham says, and to my absolute delight he says it somewhat reluctantly.
As we leave the casket showroom we pass through a small room where the urns are on display. The sight of them confirms that I do not wish to have one. They range in price from $300 to about $1200. There is a nice star-spangled cookie tin for just $575.
“Do many people go for that star-spangled thing?”
“Well, we’ve only just brought that in, so …”
Graham takes me up a wide, carpeted stairway where he continues showing me the facilities. It’s a big, big place. Like a grand old house. Along with the offices, the embalming facilities are upstairs. They seem so sterile with the tiled walls and halogen lights. By contrast, the four in-house chapels on the ground floor, which vary in splendor and decor according to available budget, are all about coziness. There are dried flower arrangements and candles, chairs set out in neat rows, and low, gentle music in the background. The carpets are dark and so thick that they muffle sound. When I see somebody approaching Graham and me with a walk that offers very little movement above the waist, and with a somber look on her face, who has actually gone to great efforts to look like a banshee with her long wiry hair, I realize that I have it all wrong: the funeral business is, in fact, not without humor.
It’s also not without profit. Business-information site ibisworld.com reports that the funeral home industry turned over some $16.6 billion in 2005.
It seems one noise the dead can make is, “Cha-ching!”
And that is fine. There are plenty of people out there to help with the transaction. Like Neal, who did once consider becoming a mortician and who should maybe add this option to his current service. At the minimum he could start offering caskets, maybe even sell them from the back of his truck.
CRIME SCENE CASKETS: TAILORED TO FIT WHATEVER’S LEFT.
GOING ONCE … GOING TWICE … GONE
Why do people have to stop dying when I’m in town? How many days do I have to go without a suicide? Without a murder? Every day I wake up and am annoyed that I am not already awake: that I wasn’t woken up at three in the morning because fifteen people were mowed down with a submachine gun in a McDonald’s. I am panicking. I call Neal every two hours to see what’s going on. Naturally, he is getting annoyed with my constant haranguing. But with every passing day, hour, and minute I get more irritated that people aren’t killing themselves. Whenever my phone does ring I stare at it wide-eyed, mouthing the words, Please be dead! Please be dead! Please be dead! But, alas, they are, invariably, alive.
This morning, leaving Starbucks, I let the door slam in somebody’s face. I didn’t even react, I just moved on. Three days ago I would have leaped out of my seat at such insolence. Today I find myself simply disappointed that the glass in the door didn’t shatter and slice the vital arteries of the woman who stood there staring at me in consternation. Did she not know that I have a book to write? That I can’t write about dead people if they are still alive? And if I’m honest with myself, that’s what all my panic and fear comes down to: this is my first commissioned book and I need people to die in order to complete it. I came here with the intention of highlighting how people use death and I have in the process become all the things that I despised before landing.
My phone rings.
“Hey, it’s me,” my ex-wife says through the phone.
“Hey, how are you? How’s the worm?”
“We’re good. You don’t sound too happy, though. Is everything okay?”
“No, it’s a nightmare. Nobody has died for eight days. I’ve flown and driven all this way and all I’m doing is watching fucking movies and drinking coffee. It’s costing money to be here and—”
“Yeah, but, Alan, come on!”
“I know all about ‘come on,’ Christine, but what am I going to do if nobody dies? I have nothing to write about. How am I supposed to finish this book if—”
“But do you really feel comfortable complaining about that?”
“What does comfort have to do with it?”
“I thought you wanted to highlight that attitude as a bad thing,” she reminds me. “Do something else. I can understand you’re frustrated if all you’re doing is watching movies every day. Do some research or somethi
ng.”
“I know, I know…. And I am, too. Tonight I am going to a bereavement-counseling session.”
“Well, that could be a good interview, no?” Christine asks encouragingly.
“I’m not interviewing anybody. As a rule they don’t let journalists in. So I called up and told them that my dad had died. I’m going to sit in on a group session to—”
“Alan, for God’s sake!” Christine gasps in horror. “What are you thinking of?”
Sadly, I don’t really know. Half of me is shocked by my behavior, knotted with compunction; the other half of me is on my knees, hands together and looking at the sky. I have started to feel out of my depth. Not just with the task of writing a book about death, but at finding myself confronted by my own shallowness. Taken away from my friends and family, I have no compass to guide me. I don’t understand how I got so lost. I certainly hadn’t been expecting it. Is it just because I’ve been surrounded by death? Is it watching people crawl out of the woodwork to sell off the possessions of relatives who decomposed on the sofa for a month? Is it the con of twenty-five-year guarantees? Suicide? Murder? Putty knives? Songs about scabby knees and hanging heads?
I think at this point Christine’s phone call has just saved me from crossing a terrible line. Misrepresenting myself to people suffering the most terrible loss and grief would be an outrageous leap.
I take the piece of paper with the phone number and address for tonight’s counseling session and I tear it up. I place it in a trash can on the sidewalk.
“Why don’t you give Rachel a call,” Christine suggests. “Go out for dinner again?”
She is right. My dependence on death is eating away at my character. I do need a change. When we finish talking, I take Christine’s advice and call Rachel.
“Walnut Creek? You’re still in Walnut Creek?” Rachel asks, incredulous.
“Waiting for people to die, believe it or not,” I say, thinking that I heard another question and lacking the enthusiasm to correct myself when the real question sinks in.
