Mortuary Confidential
Page 10
I thought she was talking about one of those gray aluminum assistance devices. “We don’t have any walkers but we do have a wheelchair at the funeral home that I could bring along. Is it for one of your parents?” I spread my hands and looked at her. She lit a new cigarette with the tip of its predecessor and crushed the old one out. “Would the wheelchair be all right?”
“Oh my, Derek, you’re so silly!” She waved her fresh cigarette in the air with one hand and reached across the desk and squeezed my hand with her other. “No, my parents don’t need a wheelchair; they’re perfectly capable of walking on their own. You know, a walker to lead the cortege. Walker walks in front of the hearse and all.”
I processed what she was saying before answering. “I’m sorry, Abby, it’s just your accent. I’m having a little trouble understanding you.”
She laughed, and stuck her cigarette between her lips so she could take both of my hands in hers. I noticed she was very comfortable invading my personal space. “Greg used to tell people all the time that my finest and most frustrating feature was my accent. And then he’d say”—she put a husky timbre in her voice, which made it even harder for me to understand—“‘Abby, why can’t you learn to talk American?’ God, I’m going to miss him saying that.” She cackled and let go of my hands. “And some other things I won’t repeat to you.”
I blushed
“I’m from Cheapside, you know, and I’ve found most of you Americans have trouble understanding the accent, but I can’t understand the Americans from the southern states. Talk about talking through molasses! I can’t understand them to save my life.” She stabbed her cigarette in the air to accentuate her point.
“I can understand you pretty well, Abby. I’m just not sure what you mean by a walker.”
“Oh, I guess you don’t have them here in America then. Come to think of it,” she grabbed her chin, “I’ve never actually seen one here in the States. A walker is the chap that walks in front of the hearse and leads the family members out of the drive of the residence toward the cemetery.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You want me to walk in front of the hearse out of your driveway while you walk behind the hearse with your family?”
“Yes, and a couple of friends will accompany us too, I’m sure.”
I had never heard of such a thing, but I acquiesced. “Okay Abby, I’ll lead the hearse. I’ll be your walker.”
“Beautiful. Everything’s set then?”
“I believe so. See you on Tuesday.”
I went to shake hands. Abby wanted a hug.
What have I gotten myself into? I thought after she left. I had never heard of anything as ridiculous as picking the family up at the house with the hearse, much less walking in front of the hearse through a neighborhood, and I couldn’t very well ask someone else to do my dirty work. The walker would have to be me.
Four days later I found myself walking in front of our black Cadillac hearse, leading it out of Abby’s driveway and in the general direction of the cemetery. Abby, dressed head to toe in black, accompanied by her tiny British parents, and a couple of friends and neighbors trailed behind. It made for quite a somber procession. Halfway out of her neighborhood, I didn’t feel so ridiculous anymore and began to think that maybe the Brits were onto something. The custom had a certain restrained dignity to it. When my little procession reached the edge of Abby’s development, I hopped into the hearse and they piled into the limousine for the rest of the journey to the cemetery.
I learned something from Abby, and I learned it literally. Undertaking is more than just talking the talk.
CHAPTER 23 Death Knell of Jefferson and Adams
Contributed by a collegiate baseball player
The second and third presidents of our fine country—authors of American democracy, visionaries, patriots, businessmen, politicians, and most of all, citizens—separated each other in death by mere hours. Thomas Jefferson died first, at his home Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia, and then John Adams a few hours later, at his home hundreds of miles away in Quincy, Massachusetts, muttering the false words, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” These two men, though fierce political rivals, were connected with each other and the utopian republic they had created on such a deep level that not only did they pass away within hours of each other, but they died on July 4, 1826—the fiftieth anniversary of our nation’s split from British tyranny.
Some people think the story of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams amazing, ironic, or even fanciful, but after working as a mortician for the better part of my adult life, I have found that death works in mysterious ways. People are connected on many different levels that can defy social, economic, and political backgrounds. And after dealing with the Peal family, I found that these connections can transcend time, distance, and even space, but most of all, logic and reason.
I received a call from a convalescent home at about one o’clock in the morning notifying me Ida Peal had died. I loaded up my SUV and went and got her. On the way back to the funeral home I stopped at a café and got a cup of coffee to go, drank it, and then set to work embalming. I had barely begun when the phone in the morgue rang. It was my answering service, relaying a message from the convalescent home I had just come from. I was to call them back immediately.
What could be so pressing? Perhaps I had left my pager or glasses there, but I was puzzled as to why they wouldn’t wait until a more sane time of day to call and let me know. I called them back anyway. The nurse on duty informed me that Evan Peal had died. Evan was Ida’s husband.
I retraced my steps to the convalescent home and picked Evan up. I laid him out on another embalming table beside his wife and used a Y valve to split the hose coming from the embalming machine into two hoses. I injected the embalming fluid into them at the same time.
Later that day I met with Evan and Ida’s grandniece. Her name was Omen. She explained to me that her now-dead mother had been a flower child of the ‘60’s, hence the unusual name. I took down the biographical information Omen provided. The details chilled me.
Ida and Evan had been married sixty-seven years. They had married in ‘37, both at the age of 21 on June 21st. I blinked twice and checked my calendar. Today was the 21st of June. I called my secretary to confirm Ida’s date of death because she had died right around midnight. Sure enough, she had died at 12:06 in the morning. I asked Omen for their birthdays. Their birth dates were both the same, but one month apart—Ida being the elder Taurus of the pair.
When Omen left I was mulling over the husband and wife who had been married for sixty-seven years and separated each other in death by only about three hours. In my tenure as an undertaker I have seen a lot of strange things, but this really took the grand prize. Frankly, it kind of bothered me. My visit to Monticello when I was a boy popped into my head. I vaguely remembered that Thomas Jefferson had died on the same day as someone else. I hopped on the Internet and found that other person had been John Adams and that they had died on the fiftieth anniversary of our nation’s independence. It made me feel a little better to realize that other people had that deep connection, too.
I read on, wanting to learn more, and eventually stopped at the epitaph on Thomas Jefferson’s tombstone. His year of birth was followed by the letters “O.S.”
O.S.?
It only took me a minute more to find out that the letters stood for “old style.” His birth had been recorded under the old British-used Julian calendar before the Gregorian calendar became widely used in 1752, and thus, we Americans used the Julian calendar until the British stopped. I was curious about the difference between the calendars and dug a little deeper. Apparently, the conversion rate from Julian to Gregorian is the addition of eleven days for when Thomas Jefferson was born; we would know him to be born on April 13, 1743. For the years 1900-2100, the conversion is the addition of thirteen days. I did the math figuring my, my wife’s, and my daughter’s birthdays by the Julian calendar. I figured a couple more dates and
then added thirteen days to the Peals’ marriage/death date. I was floored. If their death date had been Julian and was being converted to Gregorian by the addition of thirteen days, they would have died on the 4th of July, the same day as Jefferson and Adams.
I told Omen about my findings three days later at the dual wake and she replied, “I’m not surprised. My mother, God bless her soul, was a transcendental. She smoked a little too much reefer, and dropped a bit too much acid, but she always told me things in this universe are all interconnected. I mean, look, I’m 37 years old now, and 1937 was the year my great-aunt and uncle were married. My mother told me my Aunt Ida’s name was Sanskrit in origin and Ida means “insight.” That is why she named me Omen. Apparently she had a premonition.” She laughed.
I chuckled too, but uneasily.
As I watched the Peals’ caskets being lowered on top of each other, I wanted to think it all coincidence, but the words of John Adams I had found on the Internet echoed in the back of my mind: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
The evidence to me is that death is not random. Death is the product of an underlying energy that transcends countries, ethnicities, men and women, and even the human race. For whom will death’s knell toll next?
CHAPTER 24
The Killer Customer
Contributed by a scratch golfer
People love to tell me, “It must be nice. Your clients never complain.” Then they smile, wink, and nod at me, proud of their little joke. I don’t argue with them, but there couldn’t be a statement farther from the truth. The business is all customer relations and rapport. True, the dead don’t complain, but their families sure can.
I deal with people at their most vulnerable and emotionally volatile. People deal with grief in many different ways. Some deal with it with grace and others… don’t. The one thing I’ve learned in a trial-by-fire way is that an undertaker has to know how to handle difficult people. Most of them are just pushy and rude, but what about a customer who goes beyond? I had one who I honestly thought was going to kill me.
When the man showed up at my office, I knew immediately things weren’t going to go smoothly. He arrived nearly an hour late, reeking of booze, and didn’t bother taking his sunglasses off as he stalked into the office, sitting down opposite me at the conference table, leaving me standing, hand extended. I slowly withdrew my hand and sat down. I gave a slow nod at the man, who sat in his chair and stared at me behind his shades with an arrogant expression. I took note of the black leather vest with a riding club logo emblazoned on it.
I introduced myself and he gave me a one-word answer for his name. I doubt it was his real name unless his mother named him after something in the reptile family. “Okay,” I replied, and made a note.
We sat in silence and stared at each other before he decided to break the silence with a well-rehearsed, poetic verse. “This is some fucked up shit, man,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows and took the bait. “What is?”
“My old lady dyin’ is what.”
He reclined back in his chair, and folded his massive tattoo-covered arms.
“Well, Snake,” I checked my worksheet, “your mother was 83. Looks like she had a nice full life.”
He ignored me. “You know I just couldn’t go see her in that place,” he said, referring to the nursing home she was in. “Place stank like piss and all those old people, near death, just sitting around in their chairs waitin’ to die. I couldn’t see Ma there. Haven’t seen her in six or seven years.”
He was letting me see where his hostility and resentment were bubbling up from. Clearly, he was overcome with feelings of guilt and remorse. Believe it or not, that’s common in most people. They ask themselves, “Could I have visited the person or called them more?” With this particular gentleman, acute guilt coupled with the fact that he was a bear of a person and had an aggressive personality.
I had to play it cool.
I got him talking, calmed his feelings, and made some progress in the arrangements. We were about halfway through when Snake became agitated.
He stood up so suddenly that his chair crashed over. “I want to see Ma now!” he yelled, poking a meaty finger into the burled walnut conference table. I stared at the sunglasses covering his eyes, trying to appear cool though my heart was racing. The room was silent except for the chain at his waist clinking against the table.
“Your mother is in the preparation room. You can’t see her right now,” I said. “Maybe later.”
I moved my writing hand under the table so Snake couldn’t see it was shaking.
He leaned all the way across the table and put his finger right in my face. I could see the veins bulging out of his forearms. “Maybe you didn’t hear me correctly, Junior.”
Junior? Oh shit, I’m going to die!
His whiskey-scented breath washed over my face. “I haven’t seen Ma in eight years. I’m seeing her now!” He made a fist and pounded it on the table to accentuate his point. The table shook.
I only weigh a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet and have the physique of an infant, but I remained seated and spoke to Snake in the most authoritative tone I could muster. “Snake,” I said firmly, “you need to sit down right now. I told you, your mother is being prepared and you can’t see her until later. And if you continue to act this way this conference is over.” I closed my notebook, clicked my pen, and stared at him with a questioning look on my face. “What will it be?”
Snake’s finger was back in my face and it inched closer. Each finger was about the size of a hotdog and his nails were bitten to the quick. I thought for sure my windpipe was about to get crushed by his toilet-seat-size hands, but I continued to stare at him. My heart was in my throat and I couldn’t swallow. I eased my hand to the right where the telephone was sitting. I figured I could at least dial the “9” and one of the “1’s” before he ripped my head from my body. The meaty finger retreated and he quietly picked his seat up and lowered himself into it.
“Shall we continue?” I asked as if I were asking what the weather was like.
He nodded and hung his head.
I opened my notebook and clicked my pen. “So, where did we leave off?”
Five minutes later his shades were off. Ten minutes after that, he cracked a joke. On his way out he shook my hand and apologized for “being such a jerk,” and re-introduced himself as Dean. He offered his hand and I shook it.
Sometimes I need to pat an old lady’s hand and cry with her, and other times I need to stare down a 275-pound biker. The job is unpredictable like that, but the fact remains that I need to know how to handle difficult situations and difficult people. And, believe me, there is no shortage of difficult people.
CHAPTER
25 The Comedian
Contributed by an open-mic night comedian
I have been a comedian my entire life. Funeral directing was my backup plan, still is, but until my comedy act can start paying the bills, I have to go out on night calls. It’s one thing to be up in the middle of the night hauling one of the dearly departed from bed, and an entirely different thing to be up at that same time of night in a smoky dive, clutching a whiskey-smelling microphone in front of a tough crowd. The latter gets my juices flowing a lot more than the former.
Death isn’t a laughing matter. But laughter does help the healing process. That’s my philosophy.
An older woman who showed up at my mortuary awhile back is still firmly planted in my memory—partly because she appeared in my life the same day I scored my first paying comedy gig (a hundred smackeroos) and mostly because she is not the type that one forgets. The woman had the innate toughness of someone who has lived a long time in a short number of years—you could see it in her face. Nary a tear was shed as she looked me straight in the eye and shook my hand firmly. She had come to see me because her only daughter was dead.
Mrs. Smith’s daughter was only 40 years old. She had died due to complications of diabetes. She was the only child, and Mrs. Smith’s husband had died a number of years ago. That much she told me. She didn’t fill me in on the when, where, or how. She had relatives in Florida, where she was going to be moving as soon as she buried her daughter.
It had been a long, hard, trying road and she was glad it was over. Apparently, toward the end things had gotten pretty bad. “I used to look like Jane Fonda before my daughter got sick,” Mrs. Smith said. “Now look at me!” She laughed sharply and sat back in her chair, pleased with her joke. I had yet to speak, but knew we were going to get along fine.
“Mrs. Smith, can I get you a refreshment? Coffee, tea, mineral water, soda… Manhattan?”
“Finally! A man after my own heart! Knob Creek, three cubes, no peel,” she rasped.
“Would you like that shaken or stirred, Mrs. Bond?”
She cackled. “I don’t care as long as it has lots of booze in it!”
“The only kind I know how to make.”
Her stony façade cracked and the floodgates opened. Mrs. Smith started regaling me with stories about her youth, when she and her husband had been an acrobatics team for the circus. “How I got this damned limp!” she exclaimed, pointing into the air and then tapping her bum leg. Then she proceeded to tell me the story of the nasty fall that had ended her career and nearly killed her husband. It was a long drawn-out saga that ended with, “I wanted to stay with the circus and the only thing I could do was become the bearded lady. That’s when my husband developed an affection for the sauce.” She leaned over the desk, pointing her cigarette at me, and whispered conspiratorially, “Me too! But it hasn’t killed me, only pickled me.”