The Undertaking Read online

  I was counting my blessings.

  To have such a day for my first transcontinental flight, to have someone else paying for the ticket and the expenses and to be proffering stipends I’d gladly pay taxes on, to say that I was the poet and I had the poems that people in California were paying to hear—these were good gifts. My mother was dying back in Michigan, of cancer. She had told the oncologists, “Enough, enough.” They had discontinued the chemotherapy. I was running from the implications.

  I was scared to death.

  From Detroit we first flew over Lake Michigan then the grainy Midwest and Plains states, then the mountains and valleys of the Great West, and finally the desert west of Vegas and Reno until, in the distance, I could make out the western edges of the San Bernardino Mountains. The Mojave was all dry brown below until, just before the topography began to change from desert to mountain, I saw an irregular rectangle of verdant green. It was the unspeakable green of Co. Kerry or Virgin Gorda purposely transposed to the desert and foothills. I could only hazard a guess at its size—a couple hundred acres I reckoned, though I had no idea what altitude we were flying at. Had we already begun our final descent? The captain had turned on the seat belt sign. All of our seat backs and tray tables were forward.

  “Must be a golf course,” is what I said to myself. I could see geometrically calculated plantings of trees and irregular winding pathways. “Or a cemetery. Hell!” I remember thinking, “This is California, it could be both!”

  In the Midwest we think of California as not just another state and time zone but as another state of mind, another zone entirely, having more in common with the Constellation Orion than with Detroit or Cleveland or Illinois.

  And then it came to me, the vision. It could be both!

  I’ve been working in secret ever since.

  It is no especial genius that leads me to the truth that folks in their right minds don’t like funerals. I don’t think we need a special election or one of those CNN polls on this. Most folks would rather shop dry goods or foodstuffs than caskets and burial vaults. Given the choice, most would choose root canal work over the funeral home. Even that portion of the executive physical where the doctor says, “This may be a little uncomfortable,” beats embalming ninety-nine times out of every hundred in the public races. Random samplings of consumer preference almost never turn up “weeping and mourning” as things we want to do on our vacations. Do you think a funeral director could be elected president? Mine was and is and, godhelpus, ever will be The Dismal Trade. We might be trusted (the last ones to let you down my father used to say) or admired (I don’t know how you do it!) or tolerated (well, somebody has to do it) and even loved, though our lovers are often a little suspect (how can you stand to have him touch you after …?). But rare is that man or woman who looks forward to funerals with anything even approaching gladness, save perhaps those infrequent but cheerful obsequies for IRS agents or telemarketers or a former spouse’s bumptious attorney.

  What’s worse, all the advertising in the world won’t ever make it an expandable market. Mention of our ample parking, clearance prices on bronze and copper, easy credit terms, readiness to serve twenty-four hours a day does little to quicken in any consumer an appetite for funerals in the way that, say, our taste for fast food can be incited to riot by talk of “two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onion on a sesame seed bun.” How many of us don’t salivate, Pavlovian, when someone hums the tune that says, “You deserve a break today”? A drop in the prime rate will send shoppers out in search of the “big ticket” items—homes, cars, and pleasure craft—but never funerals. Chesty teenagers with good muscle tone dressed in their underwear and come-hither looks can sell us more Chevys than we need, more perfume than we need, more Marlboros than we need, more cruises, more computers, more exercise equipment; more and better, and fewer and better and new and improved and faster and cheaper and sexier and bigger and smaller; but the one funeral per customer rule has held for millennia, and we don’t really need a study to show us that for most folks even the one and only is the one too many.

  Thus we regard funerals and the ones who direct them with the same grim ambivalence as those who deliver us of hemorrhoids and boils and bowel impactions—Thanks, we wince or grin at the offer, but no thanks!

  There are some exceptions to this quite ponderable truth.

  As always, the anomalies prove the rule.

  Poets, for example, will almost always regard any opportunity to dress up and hold forth in elegiac style as permissible improvement on their usual solitude. If free drink and a buffet featuring Swedish meatballs are figured in the bargain, so much the better. A reviewer of mine quite rightly calls poets the taxidermists of literature, wanting to freeze things in time, always inventing dead aunts and uncles to eulogize in verse. He is right about this. A good laugh, a good cry, a good bowel movement are all the same fellow to those who otherwise spend their days rummaging in the word horde for something to say, or raiding the warehouses of experience for something worth saying something about. And memorable speech like memorable verse calls out for its inscription into stone. Poets know that funerals and gravesides put them in the neighborhood of the memorable. The ears are cocked for answers to the eternal adverbs, the overwhelming questions. “And may these characters remain,” we plead with Yeats, in his permanent phrase, “when all is ruin once again.”

  And there are elements of the reverend clergy who have come to the enlightenment that, better than baptisms or marriages, funerals press the noses of the faithful against the windows of their faith. Vision and insight are often coincidental with demise. Death is the moment when the chips are down. That moment of truth when the truth that we die makes relevant the claims of our prophets and apostles. Faith is not required to sing in the choir, for bake sales or building drives; to usher or deacon or elder or priest. Faith is for the time of our dying and the time of the dying of the ones we love. Those parsons and pastors who are most successful—those who have learned to “minister”—are those who allow their faithful flocks to grieve like humans while believing like Jews or Christians or Muslims or Buddhists or variants of these compatible themes. They affirm the need to weep and dance, to blaspheme and embrace the tenets of our faiths, to upbraid our gods and to thank them.

  Uncles find nickels behind our ears. Magicians pulls rabbits from out of hats. Any good talker can preach pie in the sky or break out the warm fuzzies when the time is right. But only by faith do the dead arise and walk among us or speak to us in our soul’s dark nights.

  So rabbi and preacher, pooh-bah and high priest do well to understand the deadly pretext of their vocation. But for our mortality there’d be no need for churches, mosques, temples, or synagogues. Those clerics who regard funerals as so much fuss and bother, a waste of time better spent in prayer, a waste of money better spent on stained glass or bell towers, should not wonder for whom the bell tolls. They may have heard the call but they’ve missed the point. The afterlife begins to make the most sense after life—when someone we love is dead on the premises. The bon vivant abob in his hot tub needs heaven like another belly button. Faith is for the heartbroken, the embittered, the doubting, and the dead. And funerals are the venues at which such folks gather. Some among the clergy have learned to like it. Thus they present themselves at funerals with a good cheer and an unambiguous sympathy that would seem like duplicity in anyone other than a person of faith. I count among the great blessings of my calling that I have known men and women of such bold faith, such powerful witness, that they stand upright between the dead and the living and say, “Behold I tell you a mystery….”

  There are those, too, who are ethnically predisposed in favor of funerals, who recognize among the black drapes and dirges an emotionally potent and spiritually stimulating intersection of the living and the dead. In death and its rituals, they see the leveled playing field so elusive in life. Whether we bury our dead in Wilbert Vaults, leave them in trees to be eaten
by birds, burn them or beam them into space; whether choir or cantor, piper or jazz band, casket or coffin or winding sheet, ours is the species that keeps track of our dead and knows that we are always outnumbered by them. Thus immigrant Irish, Jews of the diaspora, Black North Americans, refugees and exiles and prisoners of all persuasions, demonstrate, under the scrutiny of demographers and sociologists, a high tolerance, almost an appetite, for the rites and ceremonies connected to death.

  Furthermore, this approval seems predicated on one or more of the following variables: the food, the drink, the music, the shame and guilt, the kisses of aunts and distant cousins, the exultation, the outfits, the heart’s hunger for all homecomings.

  The other exception to the general abhorrence of funerals is, of course, types of my own stripe whose lives and livelihoods depend on them. What sounds downright oxymoronic to most of the subspecies—a good funeral—is, among undertakers, a typical idiom. And though I’ll grant some are pulled into the undertaking by big cars and black suits and rumors of riches, the attrition rate is high among those who do not like what they are doing. Unless the novice mortician finds satisfaction in helping others at a time of need, or “serving the living by caring for the dead” as one of our slogans goes, he or she will never stick it. Unless, of course, they make a pile of money early on. But most of us who can afford to send our kids to the orthodontist but not to boarding school, who are tied to our brick and mortar and cash-flow worries, who live with the business phone next to our beds, whose dinners and intimacies are always being interrupted by the needs of others, would not do so unless there were satisfactions beyond the fee schedule. Most of the known world could not be paid enough to embalm a neighbor on Christmas or stand with an old widower at his wife’s open casket or talk with a leukemic mother about her fears for her children about to be motherless. The ones who last in this work are the ones who believe what they do is not only good for the business and the bottom line, but good, after everything, for the species.

  A man that I work with named Wesley Rice once spent all of one day and all night carefully piecing together the parts of a girl’s cranium. She’d been murdered by a madman with a baseball bat after he’d abducted and raped her. The morning of the day it all happened she’d left for school dressed for picture day—a schoolgirl dressed to the nines, waving at her mother, ready for the photographer. The picture was never taken. She was abducted from the bus stop and found a day later in a stand of trees just off the road a township south of here. After he’d raped her and strangled her and stabbed her, he beat her head with a baseball bat, which was found beside the child’s body. The details were reported dispassionately in the local media along with the speculations as to which of the wounds was the fatal one—the choking, the knife, or the baseball bat. No doubt these speculations were the focus of the double postmortem the medical examiner performed on her body before signing the death certificate Multiple Injuries. Most embalmers, faced with what Wesley Rice was faced with after he’d opened the pouch from the morgue, would have simply said “closed casket,” treated the remains enough to control the odor, zipped the pouch, and gone home for cocktails. It would have been easier. The pay was the same. Instead, he started working. Eighteen hours later the girl’s mother, who had pleaded to see her, saw her. She was dead, to be sure, and damaged; but her face was hers again, not the madman’s version. The hair was hers, not his. The body was hers, not his. Wesley Rice had not raised her from the dead nor hidden the hard facts, but he had retrieved her death from the one who had killed her. He had closed her eyes, her mouth. He’d washed her wounds, sutured her lacerations, pieced her beaten skull together, stitched the incisions from the autopsy, cleaned the dirt from under her fingernails, scrubbed the fingerprint ink from her fingertips, washed her hair, dressed her in jeans and a blue turtleneck, and laid her in a casket beside which her mother stood for two days and sobbed as if something had been pulled from her by force. It was the same when her pastor stood with her and told her “God weeps with you.” And the same when they buried the body in the ground. It was then and always will be awful, horrible, unappeasably sad. But the outrage, the horror, the heartbreak belonged, not to the murderer or the media or the morgue, each of whom had staked their claims to it. It belonged to the girl and to her mother. Wesley had given them the body back. “Barbaric” is what Jessica Mitford called this “fussing over the dead body.” I say the monster with the baseball bat was barbaric. What Wesley Rice did was a kindness. And, to the extent that it is easier to grieve the loss that we see, than the one we imagine or read about in papers or hear of on the evening news, it was what we undertakers call a good funeral.

  It served the living by caring for the dead.

  But save this handful of the marginalized—poets and preachers, foreigners and undertakers—few people not under a doctor’s care and prescribed powerful medications, really “appreciate” funerals. Safe to say that part of the American Experience, no less the British, or the Japanese or Chinese, has been to turn a blind eye to the “good” in “goodbye,” the “sane” in “sadness,” the “fun” in “funerals.”

  Thus, the concept of merging the highest and best uses of land, which came to me high over California, seemed an idea whose time had come. The ancient and ongoing duty of the land to receive the dead aligned with the burgeoning craze in the golf business led, by a post-modern devolution, to my vision of a place where one could commemorate their Uncle Larry and work on their short game at the same time—two hundred acres devoted to memories and memorable holes; where tears wept over a missed birdie comingled with those wept over a parent’s grave. A Golfatorium! It would solve, once and for all, the question of Sundays—what to do before or after or instead of church. The formerly harried husband who always had to promise he’d do the windows “next weekend” in order to get a few holes in during good weather, could now confidently grab his golf shoes and Big Berthas and tell his wife he was going to visit his “family plot.” He might let slip some mention of “grief work” or “unfinished business” or “adultchild issues still unresolved.” Or say that he was “having dreams” or was feeling “vulnerable.” What good wife would keep her mate from such important therapy? What harm if the cure includes a quick nine or eighteen or twenty-seven holes if the weather holds?

  So began the dialogue between my selves: the naysayer and the true believer—there’s one of each in every one of us. I read my poems in L.A., chatted up the literary set, waxed pithy and beleaguered at the book signings and wine and cheese receptions. But all along I was preoccupied by thoughts of the Golfatorium and my mother dying. When, after the reading at the Huntington Library, I asked the director where would she go if she had four days free in Southern California, she told me “Santa Barbara” and so I went.

  There are roughly ten acres in every par four. Eighteen of those and you have a golf course. Add twenty acres for practice greens, club house, pool and patio, and parking and two hundred acres is what you’d need. Now divide the usable acres, the hundred and eighty, by the number of burials per acre—one thousand—subtract the greens, the water hazards, and the sand traps, and you still have room for nearly eight thousand burials on the front nine and the same on the back. Let’s say, easy, fifteen thousand adult burials for every eighteen holes. Now add back the cremated ashes scattered in sandtraps, the old marines and swabbies tossed overboard in the water hazards and the Italians entombed in the walls of the club house and it doesn’t take a genius to come to the conclusion that there’s gold in them there hills!

  You can laugh all you want, but do the math. Say it costs you ten thousand an acre and as much again in development costs—you know, to turn some beanfield into Roseland Park Golfatorium or Arbordale or Peachtree. I regard as a good omen the interchangeability of the names for golf courses and burial grounds: Glen Eden and Grand Lawn, like Oakland Hills or Pebble Beach could be either one, so why not both? By and large we’re talking landscape here. So two million for property and two
million for development, the club house, the greens, the watering system. Four million in up-front costs. Now you install an army of telemarketers-slash-memorial counselors to call people during the middle of dinner and sell them lots at an “introductory price” of, say, five hundred a grave—a bargain by any standard—and cha-ching you’re talking seven point five million. Add in the pre-arranged cremations at a hundred a piece and another hundred for scattering in the memorial sandtraps and you’ve doubled your money before anyone has bought a tee time or paid a greens fee or bought golf balls or those overpriced hats and accessories from your pro shop. Nor have you sold off the home lots around the edges to those types that want to live on a fairway in Forest Lawn. Building sights at fifty thousand a pop. Clipping coupons is what you’d be. Rich beyond any imagination. And that’s not even figuring how much folks would pay to be buried, say, in the same fairway as John Daly or Arnold Palmer. Or to have Jack Nicklaus try to blast out of your sandtrap. And think of the gimmicks—free burial for a hole in one, select tee times for the pre-need market. And the package deals: a condo on the eighteenth hole, six graves on the par-three on the front nine, dinner reservations every Friday night, tennis lessons for the missus, maybe a video package of you and your best foursome for use at your memorial service, to aid in everyone’s remembrance of the way you were, your name and dates on the wall of the nineteenth hole where your golf buddies could get a little liquored up and weepy all in your memory. All for one low price, paid in a way that maximized your frequent flier miles.