The Undertaking Page 17

  There was a time when it was easier to change caves than to drag the dead guy out. Now it’s not so easy. There’s the post office, the utilities, the closing costs. Now we have to remove the dead. The sooner the better is the rule of thumb, though it’s not the thumb that will make this known.

  This was a dour and awful chore, moving the dead from place to place. And like most chores, it was left to women to do. Later, it was discovered to be a high honor—to bear the pall as a liturgical role required a special place in the procession, special conduct, and often a really special outfit. When hauling the dead hither and yon became less a chore and more an honor, men took it over with enthusiasm.

  In this it resembles the history of the universe. Much the same happened with protecting against the marauding hordes, the provision of meaty protein sources, and more recently, in certain highly specialized and intricate evolutions of food preparation and child care.

  If you think women were at least participant and perhaps instrumental in the discovery of these honors, you might better keep such suspicions to yourself. These are not good days to think such thoughts.

  But I stray again. Back to business.

  Another thing you’ll see most every casket doing is being horizontal. This is because the folks that make them have taken seriously the demonstrated preference of our species to do it on the level. Oh, sure—it can be done standing up or in a car or even upside down. But most everyone goes looking for something flat. Probably this can be attributed to gravity or physics or fatigue.

  So horizontal things that can be carried—to these basic properties, we could add a third: it should be sturdy enough for a few hundred pounds. I’m glad that it’s not from personal experience that I say that nothing takes the steam out of a good funeral so much as the bottom falling out.

  And how many of you haven’t heard of this happening?

  A word on the words we’re most familiar with.

  Coffins are the narrow, octagonal fellows—mostly wooden, nicely corresponding to the shape of the human form before the advent of the junk food era. There are top and bottom, and the screws that fasten the one to the other are often ornamental. Some have handles, some do not, but all can be carried. The lids can be opened and closed at will.

  Caskets are more rectangular and the lids are hinged and the body can be both carried and laid out in them. Other than shape, coffins and caskets are pretty much the same. They’ve been made of wood and metal and glass and ceramics and plastics and cement and the dear knows what else. Both are made in a range of prices.

  But casket suggests something beyond basic utility, something about the contents of the box. The implications is that it contains something precious: heirlooms, jewels, old love letters, remnants and icons of something dear.

  So casket is to coffin as tomb is to cave, grave is to hole in the ground, pyre is to bonfire. You get the drift? Or as, for example, eulogy is to speech, elegy to poem, home is to house, or husband to man. (I love this part, I get carried away.)

  But the point is a casket presumes something about what goes in it. It presumes the dead body is important to someone. For some this will seem like stating the obvious. For others, I’m guessing, maybe not.

  But when buildings are bombed or planes fall from the sky, or wars are won or lost, the bodies of the dead are really important. We want them back to let them go again—on our terms, at our pace, to say you may not leave without permission, forgiveness, our respects—to say we want our chance to say goodbye.

  Both coffins and caskets are boxes for the dead. Both are utterly suitable to the task. Both cost more than most other boxes.

  It’s because of the bodies we put inside them. The bodies of mothers and fathers and sons, daughters and sisters and brothers and friends, the ones we knew and loved or knew and hated, or hardly knew at all, but know someone who knew them and who is left to grieve.

  In 1906, John Hillenbrand, the son of a German immigrant bought the failing Batesville Coffin Company in the southeastern Indiana town of the same name. Following the form of the transportation industry, he moved from a primarily wooden product to products of metal that would seal against the elements. Permanence and protection were concepts that Batesville marketed successfully during and after a pair of World Wars in which men were being sent home in government boxes. The same wars taught different lessons to the British, for whom the sight of their burial grounds desecrated by bombs at intervals throughout the first half century suggested permanence and protection were courtesies they could no longer guarantee to the dead. Hence, the near total preference for cremation there.

  Earth burial is practiced by “safe” societies and by settled ones. It presumes the dead will be left their little acre and that the living will be around to tend the graves. In such climates the fantasies of permanence and protection thrive. And the cremation rate in North America has risen in direct relation to the demographics and geographics of mobility and fear and the ever more efficient technologies of destruction.

  The idea that a casket should be sealed against air and moisture is important to many families. To others it means nothing. They are both right. No one need to explain why it doesn’t matter. No one need explain why it does. But Batesville, thinking that it might, engineered the first “sealed” casket with a gasket in the 1940s and made it available in metal caskets in every price range from the .20 gauge steels to the coppers and bronzes. One of the things they learned is that ninety-six percent of the human race would fit in a casket with interior dimensions of six feet six by two feet high by two feet wide—give or take.

  Once they had the size figured out and what it was that people wanted in a casket—protection and permanence—then the rest was more or less the history of how the Hillenbrand brothers managed to make more and sell more than any of their competition. And they have. You see them in the movies, on the evening news being carried in and out of churches, at gravesides, being taken from hearses. If someone’s in a casket in North America chances are better than even it’s a Batesville.

  We show twenty-some caskets to pick from. They’re samples only. There are plenty more we can get within a matter of hours. What I carry in blue, my brother Tim, in the next town, carries in pink. What I carry tailored, Tim carries shirred. He carries one with the Last Supper on it. I’ve got one with the Pietà. One of his has roses on the handles. One of mine has sheaves of wheat.

  You name it, we’ve got it. We aim to please.

  We have a cardboard box (of a kind used for larger appliances) for seventy-nine dollars. We also have a mahogany box (of a kind used for Kennedys and Nixons and Onassises) for nearly eight grand. Both can be carried and buried and burned. Both will accommodate all but the tallest or widest citizens, for whom, alas, as in life, the selection narrows. And both are available to any customer who can pay the price.

  Because a lot of us tend to avoid the extremes, regardless of how we elect to define them, we show a wide range of caskets in between and it would look on a chart like one of those bell curves: with the most in the middle and the least at either end. Thus, we show three oak caskets and only one mahogany, a bronze, a copper, a stainless steel, and six or seven regular steels of various gauges or thicknesses. We show a cherry, a maple, two poplars, an ash, a pine, a particle board, and the cardboard box. The linings are velvet or crepe or linen or satin, in all different colors, tufted or ruffled or tailored plain. You get pretty much what you pay for here.

  I should probably fess up that we buy these caskets for less than we sell them for—a fact uncovered by one of our local TV news personalities, who called himself the News Hound, and who was, apparently, untutored in the economic intrigues of wholesale and retail. It was this same News Hound who did an expose on Girl Scout Cookie sales—how some of the money doesn’t go to the girls at all, but to the national office where it was used to pay the salaries of “staff.”

  It was a well-worn trail the News Hound was sniffing—a trail blazed most profitably by Jes
sica Mitford who came to the bestselling if not exactly original conclusion that the bereaved consumer is in a bad bargaining position. When you’ve got a dead body on your hands it’s hard to shop around. It’s hard to shop lawyers when you’re on the lam, or doctors when your appendix is inflamed. It’s not the kind of thing you let out to bids.

  Lately there has been a great push toward “pre-arrangement.” Everyone who’s anyone seems to approve. The funeral directors figure it’s money in the bank. The insurance people love it since most of the funding is done through insurance. The late Jessica, the former News Hound, the anti-extravagance crowd—they all reckon it is all for the best to make such decisions when heads are cool and hearts are unencumbered by grief and guilt. There’s this hopeful fantasy that by prearranging the funeral, one might be able to pre-feel the feelings, you know, get a jump on the anger and the fear and the helplessness. It’s as modern as planned parenthood and prenuptial agreements and as useless, however tidy it may be about the finances, when it comes to the feelings involved.

  And we are uniformly advised “not to be a burden to our children.” This is the other oft-cited bonne raison for making your final arrangements in advance—to spare them the horror and pain of having to do business with someone like me.

  But if we are not to be a burden to our children, then to whom? The government? The church? The taxpayers? Whom? Were they not a burden to us—our children? And didn’t the management of that burden make us feel alive and loved and helpful and capable?

  And if the planning of a funeral is so horribly burdensome, so fraught with possible abuses and gloom, why should an arthritic septuagenarian with blurred vision and some hearing loss be sent to the front to do battle with the undertaker instead of the forty-something heirs-apparent with their power suits and web browsers and cellular phones? Are they not far better outfitted to the task? Is it not their inheritance we’re spending here? Are these not decisions they will be living with?

  Maybe their parents do not trust them to do the job properly.

  Maybe they shouldn’t.

  Maybe they should.

  The day I came to Milford, Russ Reader started pre-arranging his funeral. I was getting my hair cut when I first met him. He was a massive man still, in his fifties, six-foot-something and four hundred pounds. He’d had, in his youth, a spectacular career playing college and professional football. His reputation had preceded him. He was a “character”—known in these parts for outrageous and libertine behavior. Like the Sunday he sold a Ford coupe off the used car lot uptown, taking a cash deposit of a thousand dollars and telling the poor customer to “come by in the morning when the office is open” for the keys and paperwork. That Russ was not employed by the car dealer—a devout Methodist who kept holy his Sabbaths—did not come to light before the money had been spent on sirloins and cigars and round after round of drinks for the patrons of Ye Olde Hotel—visiting matrons from the Eastern Star, in town with their husbands for a regional confab. Or the time a neighbor’s yelping poodle—a dog disliked by everyone in earshot—was found shot one afternoon during Russ’s nap time. The neighbor started screaming at one of Russ’s boys over the back fence, “When I get my hands on your father!” Awakened by the fracas, Russ appeared at the upstairs window and calmly promised, “I’ll be right down, Ben.” He came down in his paisley dressing gown, decked the neighbor with a swift left hook, instructed his son to bury “that dead mutt,” and went back upstairs to finish his nap. Halloween was Russ’s favorite holiday, and he celebrated in more or less pre-Christian fashion, dressing himself up like a Celtic warrior, with an antlered helmet and mighty sword that, along with his ponderous bulk and black beard and booming voice, would scare the bejaysus out of the wee trick-or-treaters who nonetheless were drawn to his porch by stories of full-sized candy bars sometimes wrapped in five-dollar bills. Russ Reader was, in all ways, bigger than life, so that the hyperbole that attended the gossip about him was like the talk of heros in the ancient Hibernian epics—Cuchulainn and Deirdre and Queen Maeve, who were given to warp-spasms, wild couplings, and wondrous appetites.

  When he first confronted me in the barber’s chair, he all but blotted out the sun behind him.

  “You’re the new Digger O’Dell I take it.”

  It was the black suit, the wing rips, the gray striped tie.

  “Well, you’re never getting your mitts on my body!” he challenged.

  The barber stepped back to busy himself among the talcums and clippers, uncertain of the direction the conversation might take.

  I considered the size of the man before me—the ponderous bulk of him, the breathtaking mass of him—and tried to imagine him horizontal and uncooperative. A sympathetic pain ran down my back. I winced.

  “What makes you think I’d want anything to do with your body?” I countered in a tone that emphasized my indignation.

  Russ and I were always friends after that.

  He told me he intended to have his body donated to “medical science.” He wanted to be given to the anatomy department of his alma mater, so that fledgling doctors could practice on him.

  “Won’t cost my people a penny.”

  When I told him they probably wouldn’t take him, on account of his size, he seemed utterly crestfallen. The supply of cadavers for medical and dental schools in this land of plenty was shamefully but abundantly provided for by the homeless and helpless, who were, for the most part, more “fit” than Russ was.

  “But I was an all-American there!” Russ pleaded.

  “Don’t take my word for it,” I advised. “Go ask for yourself.”

  Months later I was watering impatiens around the funeral home when Russ screeched to a halt on Liberty Street.

  “OK, listen. Just cremate me and have the ashes scattered over town from one of those hot-air balloons.” I could see he had given this careful thought. “How much will it cost me, bottom line?”

  I told him the fees for our minimum services—livery and paperwork and a box.

  “I don’t want a casket,” he hollered from the front seat of his Cadillac, idling at curbside now.

  I explained we wouldn’t be using a casket as such, still he would have to be in something. The crematory people wouldn’t accept his body unless it was in something. They didn’t handle dead bodies without some kind of handles. This made tolerable sense to Russ. In my mind I was thinking of a shipping case—a kind of covered pallet compatible with fork-lifts and freight handlers—that would be sufficient to the task.

  “I can only guess at what the balloon ride will cost, Russ. It’s likely to be the priciest part. And, of course, you’d have to figure on inflation. Are you planning to do this very soon?”

  “Don’t get cute with me, Digger,” he shouted. “Whadayasay? Can I count on you?”

  I told him it wasn’t me he’d have to count on. He’d have to convince his wife and kids—the nine of them. They were the ones I’d be working for.

  “But it’s my funeral! My money.”

  Here is where I explained to Russ the subtle but important difference between the “adjectival” and “possessive” applications of the first-person singular pronoun for ownership—a difference measured by one’s last breath. I explained that it was really theirs to do—his survivors, his family. It was really, listen closely, “the heirs”—the money, the funeral, what was or wasn’t done with his body.

  “I’ll pay you now,” he protested. “In cash—I’ll pre-arrange it all. Put it in my Will. They’ll have to do it the way I want it.”

  I encouraged Russ to ponder the worst-case scenario: his wife and his family take me to court. I come armed with his Last Will and pre-need documents insisting that his body get burned and tossed from a balloon hovering over the heart of town during Sidewalk Sale Days. His wife Mary, glistening with real tears, his seven beautiful daughters with hankies in hand, his two fine sons, bearing up manfully, petition the court for permission to lay him out, have the preacher in, bury him up on the hi
ll where they can visit his grave whenever the spirit moves them to.

  “Who do you think wins that one, Russ? Go home and make your case with them.”

  I don’t know if he ever had that conversation with them all. Maybe he just gave up. Maybe it had all been for my consumption. I don’t know. That was years ago.

  When Russ died last year in his easy chair, a cigar smoldering in the ashtray, one of those evening game shows flickering on the TV, his son came to my house to summon me. His wife and his daughters were weeping around him. His children’s children watched and listened. We brought the hearse and waited while each of the women kissed him and left. We brought the stretcher in and, with his sons’ help, moved him from the chair, then out the door and to the funeral home where we embalmed him, gave him a clean shave, and laid him out, all of us amazed at how age and infirmity had reduced him so. He actually fit easily into a Batesville casket—I think it was cherry, I don’t remember.

  But I remember how his vast heroics continued to grow over two days of wake. The stories were told and told again. Folks wept and laughed outloud at his wild antics. And after the minister, a woman who’d known Russ all her life and had braved his stoop on Halloween, had had her say about God’s mercy and the size of Heaven, she invited some of us to share our stories about Russ. After that we followed a brass band, holding forth with “When the Saints Go Marching In,” to the grave. And after everything had been said that could be said, and done that could be done, Mary and her daughters went home to the embraces of neighbors and the casseroles and condolences, and Russ’s sons remained to bury him. They took off their jackets, undid their ties, broke out a bottle and dark cigars and buried their father’s body in the ground that none of us thought it would ever fit into. I gave the permit to the sexton and left them to it.