The Undertaking Read online

  I am not suggesting that the professionals in Medicine or Pastoral Care or Government or Business have done all they could for our frightened and needy and endangered species. That so many are living and dying without the most basic creature comforts and protections in a country that has them in abundance is a scandal and a scourge. We have been far too tolerant of pain and suffering when it isn’t our own. We are far better at fixing parts than people, far better at saving souls than comforting sinners, far better at killing than caring for the wounded.

  Nor have we amateurs been much better—we parents and spouses and siblings and friends, we sons and daughters—we turn from the dying of the ones we love, as if their dying made them strange, abandoning them to the clean hands of trained professionals who regard the unfixable human condition as a waste of precious and highly priced time.

  Is it possible to assist the ones we love with their dying instead of assisting with their killing?

  I pose these questions not because I have an answer but because it seems we are there again. The rape victim in the back alley with coat hanger for whom the courts legalized abortion now is the pain-wracked incapacitant, in extremis, gone past the point of pulling a trigger or taking a pill, half comatose with morphine, beyond all hope, pleading for his or her right to assistance with the suicide they never got around to. This image is not a fiction. People are living this way. They are the exceptions, the painful cases—maybe the pitiful five percent, like the five percent of abortions performed for rape or incest or the sake of the mother’s life.

  Is there a way to care for these needy people without declaring another open season, a general Right to Die or Right to Choice or Right to Assisted Suicide?

  Are we obliged to resolve the issue of assisted suicide the way we have never managed to resolve the issue of abortion? Must we join our teams again, get out the placards and the megaphones?

  On all sides of the issue of assisted suicide there are those who caution against comparisons to the abortion debate. They caution against confusing the issue when what they mean to say is that such comparisons confuse the politics and the special interests. The comparison, in fact, clarifies the issues—they are both about how the living define the value of life and the meaning of death and the relative worth of each. Both issues are about borders and boundaries and “being” itself. And they both are about money and politics and special interests and the people who make their living off divisions in the citizenry. Assisted suicide and abortion are as near to mirror images of the same existential concerns as life in this century will provide. And if a review of the last quarter century living with safe and legal abortion does not tell us exactly how to settle the current debate, it surely tells us how we shouldn’t.

  Left to the courts, we’ll get a late-century version of Roe v. Wade—a half-baked contraption of a court decision that has utterly divided people of goodwill and careful thought on both sides of the issue of abortion and turned them into para-legals, pseudo-litigants, armchair lobbyists, and dangerous zealots. “Why,” as one supreme court justice has already asked, apparently learning from past mistakes, “would you want to leave the decision in the hands of nine attorneys?”

  Left to chance, if we cower from the difficult issues, we get Kevorkian or a variation on his pathological if oddly cartoonish theme. Maybe a new and improved version of Triple S? But this time, maybe Suicide Support & Supply. The logo still works, the slogan holds: Don’t leave a mess call TRIPLE S! The kitchen magnets could be mass mailed to nursing homes, retirement villages, homeless and battered spouse shelters, support groups for Alzheimers and multiple sclerosis and muscular dystrophy and Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Word would get around. Why should Kevorkian have a corner on the market? And why only pathologists or doctors? Why not the clergy, why not academics, why not tradespeople and farmers and retired politicians and the press? They all know misery when they see it. They all know what it takes to kill. When it comes to killing and to mercy, what makes M.D.’s more qualified than D.O.’s Ph.D.’s, C.P.A.’s, M.B.A.’s or S.O.B.’s? If someone’s going to assist you, after all, in your one and only suicide, oughtn’t you to have, at least, a choice? Wouldn’t you rather a priest than a proctologist? Wouldn’t you rather a philosopher than a brick mason? Wouldn’t you rather a poet than an undertaker? And wouldn’t you rather make a donation than pay a fee? And why would it possibly make any difference?

  And why only lethal injection or poison gas? Why not hanging? It’s tidy enough. “Stand here. Chin up. There now. Press here.” Or why not electrocution? “Sit here. Relax. Take a deep breath. Press here.” Or those little but lethal hand-held air hammers they use in the slaughter house for cattle on kill day? “Look up, close your eyes, now squeeeeeeze.” And why, for crissakes, why not guns? They’ve more than proven themselves reliable. They are the weapon of choice for most of the century. Why not pearl-handled, silver-bulleted, hair-triggered, .22 caliber Smith & Wessons? Pressed under the right earlobe, the entrance wound is tiny, the severence of the spinal cord is immediate and humane, and the exit wound, if indeed there is any, leaves no mess at all. Open caskets would be no problem. Perhaps a trash can lid, lined with bullet-proof netting could be held by the patient in his or her left hand to catch the debris and the silver bullet. It could be called, in the style of Dr. Kevorkian’s wordsmithing, a Sanitron. Would there be any market for these bullets and shell casings, set tastefully in commemorative pendants or earnings or ankle bracelets, for surviving family members? Would people be willing to pay for such things?

  And why only the terminally ill? If there is a right to die, a right to death with dignity, a right to be free of meaningless existence, free of pain and torment and tortuous hurt, then who gets to say that right belongs to some of the citizenry and not to all of it. Why not alcoholics? Why not the adult children of alcoholics? Why not the teenage grandchildren of alcoholics? Why not victims of sexual abuse or spousal abuse, of broken marriages or broken hearts or tax audits? Is their pain not real? Is their torment unworthy? Is there someone in the court or the congress or the church who has the say about which painful case is painful enough? Do we treat terminal people or terminal parts?

  If the courts have broadly interpreted “the life of the mother” clause of their abortion rulings to include the economic life of the mother, the social life of the mother, the emotional life of the mother, the educational life of the mother, in order to extend the term and circumstances under which a woman might legally seek to terminate her pregnancy, should we reasonably expect the same courts to limit the exercise of a right to assisted suicide to anything narrower than life itself, which is, demonstrably, a terminal condition? And since my daughter is equally vulnerable to deadly depression as she is to unwanted pregnancy, is it wishful thinking to suppose she’d have to seek parental consent for the termination of one and not the other? Is she not entitled to privacy? Autonomy? Equal protection under the law? And why all these women? Is there a message there? Before Dr. Jack, nine out of ten attempted suicides were women while five out of every six successful (maybe “completed” is a better word) suicides were men. Men were simply better at it. Unless, of course, one figures (on the axiom that a negative multiplied by a negative renders a positive) that failure at suicide is the mathematical equivalent of success. But among Kevorkian’s devoted fatalities, fully seventy-five percent are women. Their average age of fifty-seven years situating them on one edge or the other of the empty nest and menopause. Is this the leveled playing field or gendercide? Is it sexism or affirmative action? Playing favorites or gender-norming? Or is it one of those Women’s Issues men are supposed to keep quiet about, the way they were told to about abortion, as if it were the gender, not the species that reproduces.

  Hard pressed to explain the imbalance himself, Dr. Jack, with characteristic indifference to his audience says, “It just seems that the ladies were asking for it.” The truth perhaps, but told in the impolitic idioms of an age of chivalry and cardigan sweaters by a lat
e-century, oddly cavalier, heroically challenged idealogue.

  Are these the messes, the really bad ones, now: the questions we’d rather nobody asked?

  The answers we each have are only our own. In the best case scenario, a majority rules. The majority can be dead wrong, of course, and often is. It’s the chance one takes on democracy. But just as we can’t only have the abortions we want or understand or could defend, we won’t just have the “easy” assisted suicides. For every victim of rape or incest or life-threatening pregnancy who seeks an abortion there are several victimized by inconvenience or financial difficulties or emotional vexations. For every pain-wracked cancer patient there will be several deeply melancholic or acutely disturbed or bitterly indifferent but otherwise able-bodied applicants for assisted suicide. And just as we can’t withhold the guaranteed abortion rights of a woman aborting one of twin fetuses because she doesn’t feel she can afford two babies, emotionally or financially, we will not be able to withhold the guaranteed rights to assisted suicide to the young father who loses a job or the young woman who finds her husband in love with another. Where abortion is available on demand, should we really expect to moderate or regulate assisted suicide?

  Where choice is enshrined we must suffer the choices.

  Where life is sacred we must suffer the life.

  Unvexed by the existentials, should we not expect the marketplace to take over? The questions devolve from whether or not to who is entitled to who’s going to pay to cash or charge? to do you take American Express?

  Of course, I can be wrong, too, and often am.

  And I am preparing for the possibility. Both Dr. Jack and I are thinking of clinics—obitoria he calls them—because if I cannot beat him, I can surely compete with him. I can outkevork him. It’s good for everyone. It keeps the prices down. And my guess is that once he has made his point, he’ll be too busy with talk shows and lecture tours to really stay home and take care of business.

  I confess it has occured to me that a tastefully unimposing annex to my current emporium here in Milford might be the obvious and proximate preference of my townspeople. Two or three thousand barrier-free, nonthreatening square feet, say, with plenty of big pillows in earthtone natural fabrics, a kind of “parlor” with New Age music piped in, a staff of appropriately frumpy helping professionals trained to assist with “end of life” (the locally fashionable euphemism) decisions, exclusively motivational wall-treatments (Love is Forever or Just Do It imposed on a watercolor landscape of the Dolemites), reminiscent in decor and concordance of nothing so much as one’s kindergarten classroom. And maybe a two- or three-unit crematorium attached, since, if we can believe the records here in Oakland County, nine out of every ten assisted suicides is burned. Of course, in our obitorium, we’d offer choices—about disposition of the body, caskets, urns, types of services, officiants, music. Along with traditional burnings and burials, we’d offer scatterings in outer space, or virtual entombments in cyberspace. And certainly the method of medicide should be a choice—pistols or poisons or plastic bags, hangings or bridge jumps or natural gas, and whether to do it on-site or at home or in one of our several designer locations—we have gardens, waterfalls, parks, and gazebos, all within walking distance. And whether to video or not is, naturally, a personal decision. And there would be several easy payment plans from which to, well, choose.

  By a happy coincidence, our current holdings here in Milford take up most of a block at the corner of Liberty and First Streets, making The First Liberty Clinic an aptly patriotic, almost churchy corporate name. Or maybe just The Libertorium? Or how about Serenity Social Services, Inc.—Triple S, again. Don’t leave a mess, etcetera.

  Then someone will have to be in charge of establishing federally mandated minimum standards for Meaningful Living, below which, it might prudently follow, Social Security checks will be discontinued. Once life is meaningless, it oughtn’t to be a burden on the taxpayers. And just as our generation of policymakers has found that abortion is more cost effective than paying welfare, our children’s generation (already in arrears with our national debt) will find Medicide far better a bargain than Medicare. This will not require anyone to take their voluntary leave of this life, but it may help to educate them as to their options/duties as a citizen. I bet there’ll be no shortage of bishops and politicos and actuarial agents in the next generation willing to serve on such a panel.

  “The slippery-slope argument!” someone always says—as if to name it is to nullify it. As if things don’t go from bad to worse. As if gravity did not exist.

  Most of us just want to keep our balance.

  Except, of course, for Dr. Kevorkian, whom history will record as a prophet. His attorney has suggested a Nobel Prize. His oils on canvas are all the rage. Can his own talk show be far behind?

  Maybe Uncle Eddie was right all along. Maybe the handwriting’s on the wall. Maybe it’s only a matter of time. Maybe it’s not worth bothering over. He seems happier. He gets more sleep. He has more time to spend with the family. He has no regrets.

  He seems resigned to his decision to shut down Triple S. He gave away the novelty items, split the checkbook with his wife, his golfing buddy, and his golfing buddy’s wife. He had the 800 number disconnected. And one night, months later, puzzling with the letters of its now familiar digits, he noticed how they might have spelled NOTHING. Nothing at all.

  Jessica, the Hound and the Casket Trade

  This would normally be the place to say (as critics of the American funeral trade invariably do), “I am not, of course, speaking of the vast majority of ethical funeral directors.” But the vast majority of ethical funeral directors is precisely the subject of this book.

  —JESSICA MITFORD, THE AMERICAN WAY OF DEATH, FOREWORD, P. VIII

  She went to a long-established, “reputable” undertaker. Seeking to save the widow expense, she chose the cheapest redwood casket in the establishment and was quoted a low price. Later, the salesman called her back to say the brother-in-law was too tall to fit into this casket, she would have to take the one that cost $100 more. When my friend objected, the salesman said, “Oh, all right, we’ll use the redwood one, but we’ll have to cut off his feet.”

  —IBID. CHAPTER TWO, P. 24

  The same mortician who once said he’d rather give away caskets than take advantage of someone in grief later hung billboards out by the interstate—a bosomy teenager in a white bikini over which it read Better Bodies by Bixby (not the real name) and the phone numbers for his several metro locations.

  I offer this in support of the claim that there are good days and there are bad ones.

  No less could be said for many of the greats.

  I’m thinking of Hemingway’s take on Pound when he said, “Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt of it.” But ought we be kept from “The River-Merchant’s Wife” by his mistaken politics? Should outrage silence the sublime?

  The same may be asked of Mr. Bixby’s two memorable utterances.

  Or, as a priest I’ve long admired once said, “Prophesy, like poetry, is a part-time job—the rest of the time they were only trying to keep their feet out their mouths.” I suppose he was trying to tell me something.

  Indeed, mine is an occupation that requires two feet firmly on the ground, less for balance, I often think, than to keep one or the other from angling toward its true home in my craw.

  I sell caskets and embalm bodies and direct funerals.

  Pollsters find among the general public a huge ambivalence about funeral directors. “I hope you’ll understand it if I never want to see you again,” the most satisfied among my customers will say. I understand.

  And most of the citizenry, stopped on the street, would agree that funeral directors are mainly crooks, “except for mine … ,” they just as predictably add. “The one who did my (insert primary relation) was really helpful, really cared, treated us like family.”

  This tendency, to abho
r the general class while approving of the particular member is among the great human prerogatives—as true of clergy and senators as it is of teachers and physicians. Much the same could be said of Time: “Life sucks,” we say, “but there was this moment …,” or of racial groups: “Some of my best friends are (insert minority) …,” or of gender: “(Insert sex)! You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them!”

  Of course, there are certain members of the subspecies—I’m thinking lawyers, politicians, revenue agents—who are, in general and in particular, beyond redemption and we like it that way. “The devil you know’s better than the one you don’t …” is the best we can say about politicians. And who among us wants a “nice” divorce attorney or has even one fond memory involving the tax man? Really, now.

  But back to caskets and bodies and funerals.

  When it comes to caskets I’m very careful. I don’t tell folks what they should or shouldn’t do. It’s bad form and worse for business. I tell them I don’t have any that will get them into heaven or keep them out. There’s none that turns a prince into a frog or, regrettably, vice-versa. There isn’t a casket that compensates for neglect nor one that hides true love, honorable conduct, or affection.

  If worth can be measured by what they do, it might help to figure out what caskets “do” in the inanimate object sense of the verb.

  How many here are thinking “handles”? When someone dies, we try to get a handle on it. This is because dead folks don’t move. I’m not making this part up. Next time someone in your house quits breathing, ask them to get up and answer the phone or maybe get you some ice water or let the cat out. He won’t budge. It’s because he’s dead.