The Undertaking Read online

  The impulse to consolidate and conglomerate, to pitch the big tent of goods and services is at the heart of many of this century’s success stories. No longer the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, we go to supermarkets where we can buy meats, breads, motor oils, pay our light bill, rent a video, and do our banking, all in the one stop. Likewise the corner gas station sells tampons and toothpaste (of course, no one comes out to check your oil, nor can the insomniac behind the glass wall fix your brakes or change your wiper blades). Our churches are no longer little chapels in the pines but crystal cathedrals of human services. Under one roof we get day care and crisis intervention, bible study and columbaria. The great TV ministries of the eighties—the Bakkers and Swaggarts and Falwells—were theme parks and universities and hospital complexes that flung the tax-free safety net of God over as much real estate as could be bought. Perhaps the tendency, manifest in many of today’s mega-churches, to entertain rather than to inspire, to wow rather than to worship, proceeds from the intelligence, gained generations back, that the big top needed for the tent revival and the three-ring circus was one and the same. Some of these televangelists went to jail, some ran for president, and some rode off into the sunset of oblivion. But they seemed to be selling what the traffic would bear. A kind of one-stop shopping for the soul, where healing, forgiveness, a time-share in the Carolinas, musical ministry, water parks, and pilgrimages to the Holy Land can all be put on one’s Visa or Mastercard.

  In the same way the Internet is nothing if not an emergent bazaar, a global mall from which one can shop the shelves of a bookstore in Galway, order a pizza or some dim sum, talk dirty to strangers bored with their marriages, and check the demographics of Botswana all without budging from—this would have sounded daft twenty years ago—the “home office.”

  Thus the paradigm of dual-purpose, high-utility, multitasking applications had taken hold of the market and my imagination.

  This had happened to me once before.

  Years back before the cremation market really—I can’t help this one—heated up, I dreamed a new scheme called “Cremorialization.” It was based on the observation that those families who elected to cremate their dead, much as those who buried theirs, felt a need to memorialize them. But unlike earth burial where the memorial took the form of a stone—informative but silent and otherwise useless—those who reduced the dead to ashes and bone fragments seemed to be cheered by the thought that something good might come of something bad, something useful might proceed from what they saw as otherwise useless. Such notions have root in what has been called the Protestant ethic that honors work and utility. The dead, they seemed to be saying, ought to get off their dead ashes and be good for something beyond the simple act of remembrance.

  This is the crowd who can always be counted on to say “such a shame” or “what a waste” when they see a room full of flowers at one end of which is a dead human body. The same flowers surrounding a live human body hosting a tea for the visiting professor are, for the most part, “perfectly lovely.” Or when the body amid the gladioli is one recovering from triplets, say, or triple bypass surgery, the flowers are reckoned to be “how very thoughtful.” But flowers surrounding a casket and corpse are wasteful and shameful—the money better spent on “a good cause.” This notion, combined with cremation, which renders the human corpse easily portable—ten to twelve pounds on average—and easily soluble with new age polymers and resins, brought me to the brainstorm years ago of the dead rising from their ashes, doing their part again—Cremorialization. Rather than dumbly occupying an urn, what old hunter wouldn’t prefer his ashes to be used to make duck decoys or clay pigeons? The dead fisherman could become a crank-bait or plastic worms, perhaps given, with appropriate ceremony, to a favorite grandson. The minister’s wife, ever the quiet and dignified helpmate, could be resurrected as a new tea service for the parsonage, her name etched tastefully into the saucers. Bowlers could be mixed into seethrough bowling balls, or bowling pins, or those bags of rosin they are always tossing. Ballroom dancers could be ocarinas, cat lovers could be memorial kitty litter. The possible applications were endless. The ashes of gamblers could become dice and playing chips, car buffs turned into gear shift knobs or hood ornaments or whole families of them into matching hubcaps. After years spent in the kitchen, what gourmand could resist the chance to become a memorial egg-timer, their ashes slipping through the fulcrum in a metaphor of time. Bookends and knickknacks could be made of the otherwise boring and useless dead. And just as the departed would be made more valuable by becoming something, what they became would be more valuable by placing the word “memorial” in front of it.

  We always kept the ashes in a closet—those that weren’t picked up by the family or buried or placed in a niche. After ten years I noticed we’d accumulated several dozen unclaimed boxes of ashes. It seemed as if nobody wanted them. I wondered about the limits of liability. What if there were a fire. I tried to imagine the lawsuits—old family members turning up for “damages.” There are, of course, damages that can be done even to a box of ashes. We’d call every year around Christmastime to see if the families of these abandoned ashes had come to any decision about what should be done, but more often than not we’d be left holding the box. One Christmas, my younger brother, Eddie, said we should declare it The Closet of Memories and establish a monthly holding fee, say twenty-five dollars, to be assessed retroactively unless the ashes were picked up in thirty days. Letters were sent out. Calls made. Old cousins and step-children came out of the woodwork. Widows long-since remarried returned. The Closet of Memories was near empty by Easter. Eddie called it a miracle.

  What I called it was amazing—the ways we relate to a box of ashes—the remains. And all that winter and spring I’d watch as people called to claim their tiny dead, how exactly it was they “handled” it. Some grinned broadly and talked of the weather, taking up the ashes as one would something from the hardware store or baggage claim, tossing it into the trunk of their car like corn flakes or bird seed. Some received the package—a black plastic box or brown cardboard box with a name and dates on it—as one would old porcelain or First Communion, as if one’s hands weren’t worthy or able or clean enough to touch it. One elderly woman came to claim the ashes of her younger sister. The younger sister’s children could not be bothered, though their aunt valiantly made excuses for them. She carried her sister’s ashes to the car. Opened the trunk then closed it up again. Opened the back door of her blue sedan then closed that, too. She finally walked around to the front passenger seat, placed the parcel carefully there, paused momentarily, then put the seat belt around it before getting in and driving away. For several it was a wound reopened. And they were clearly perturbed that we should “hassle” them to take some action or else pay a fee. “What do I want with her ashes?” one woman asked, clearly mindless of the possibility that, however little her dead mother’s ashes meant to her, they might mean even less to me.

  The only mother who mattered was my own. And she was dying of a cancer that reoccurred a year and a half after the surgery that the doctors assured her had “got it all.” They had removed a lung. We’d all put away our worst fears and grabbed the ring the surgeons tossed that said “everything was going to be all right.” They were wrong. A cough that started at Thanksgiving and was still there at Valentine’s Day sent her to the doctor’s at my sister Julie’s insistence. The doctors saw “an irregularity” in the x-rays and suggested a season of radiation treatments. I supposed this irregularity must be different than the one for which laxatives and diuretics are prescribed. But by June, her body made dry and purple from the radiation, it still had not occurred to me that she would be dying. Even in August, her voice near a whisper, a pain in her shoulder that never left, I clung to the user-friendly, emotionally neutral lexicon of the oncologist, who kept our focus on the progress of the “irregularity” (read tumor) instead of the woman dying before our eyes, whose pain they called “discomfort”; whose moral ter
ror they called “anxiety”; whose body not only stopped being her friend, it had become her enemy.

  I never pursued Cremorialization. The bankers and bean counters couldn’t be swayed. One said I was probably ahead of my time. He was right. Strange ads turn up in the trade journals now that promise to turn the cremains into objects of art, which bear a uniform resemblance to those marble eggs that were all the rage a few years ago. Oh, once I dumped a fellow’s ashes into a clear whiskey bottle that his wife had wired to work as a desk lamp. “He always said I really turned him on,” she says and still signs her Christmas cards Bev and Mel. Likewise the widow of a man I fished with brought back his ashes after she remarried and asked me to scatter them on the Pere Marquette—the river where we’d fished the salmon run for years. She’d put them in a thermos bottle, one of those big pricey Stanley ones, and said it would be less conspicuous in the canoe than the urn I’d sold her. “Camouflage” she called it and smiled the smile of loss well grieved. But once I got him downstream to one of our favorite holes, I couldn’t let him go that way. I buried him, thermos bottle and all, under a birch tree up from the riverbank. I piled stones there and wrote his name and dates on paper, which I put in a flybox and hid among the stones. I wanted a place that stood still to remember him at in case his son and daughter, hardly more than toddlers when he died, ever took up fishing or came asking about him.

  The world is full of odd alliances. Cable companies buy phone companies, softwares buy hardwares. Before you know it we’re talking to the TV. Other combinations are no less a stretch: the “motor home,” “medicide.” By comparison, a cemetery-golf course combo—a Golfatorium—seems, fetched only as far as, you will excuse, a nine iron.

  Furthermore, cemeteries have always been widely and mistakenly regarded as land wasted on the dead. A frequent argument one hears in favor of cremation relies on the notion, an outright fiction, that we are running out of land. But no one complains about the proliferation of golf courses. We’ve had three open in Milford the last year alone. And no one in public office or private conversation has said that folks should take up contract bridge or ping pong or other less land-needy, acreage-intensive pasttimes and dedicate the land, instead, to low-cost housing or co-op organic gardens. No, the development of a golf course is good news to the real estate and construction trades, reason for rejoicing among the hoteliers, restaurateurs, clothiers, and adjoining industries who have found that our species is quite willing to spend money on pleasure when the pleasure is theirs. Land dedicated to the memorialization of the dead is always suspect in a way that land used for the recreation of the living seldom is. There seems to be, in my lifetime, an inverse relationship between the size of the TV screen and the space we allow for the dead in our lives and landscapes. With the pyramids maybe representing one end of the continuum, and the memorial pendant—in which ashes of your late and greatly reduced spouse are kept dangling tastefully from anklet or bracelet or necklace or keychain—representing the other, we seem to give ground grudgingly to the departed. We’ve flattened the tombstones, shortened the services, opted for more and more cremation to keep from running out of land better used for amusement parks, off-street parking, go-cart tracks, and golf courses. A graveyard gains favor when we combine it with a nature walk or historical tour, as if the nature and history of our mortality were not lesson enough on any given day. We keep looking for community events to have in them—band concerts, birdwatchings—meanwhile, the community events they are supposed to involve, namely funerals and burials, have become more and more private spectacles. It is not enough for it to be only the repository of our dead and the memories we keep of them, or safe harbor for the often noisome and untidy feelings grief includes; comfort and serenity are not enough. We want our parks, our memorial parks, to entertain us a little, to have some use beyond the obvious. Less, we seem to be telling the dead, is more; while for the living, enough is never quite enough.

  So the combination of golf and good grieving seems a natural, each divisible by the requirement for large tracts of green grass, a concentration on holes, and the need for someone to carry the bags—caddies or pallbearers.

  There will of course be practical arguments—when are you going to actually “do” the burials? Can people play through a graveside service? What is the protocol? Is there a dress code? What about headstones, decoration day, perpetual care? And what, godhelpus, about handicaps? What will the hearse look like? Must we all begin to dress like Gary Player?

  When my mother was dying I hated God. Some days when I think of her, dead at sixty-five, I think of how my father said, “These were supposed to be the Golden Years.” She bore and birthed and raised nine children because the teachings or the technologies of her generation did not offer reliable “choice.” The daughter of a music teacher, she understood everything but “rhythm.” It is the strength in numbers I’m the beneficiary of now. The God of my anger was the God she knew—the fellow with the beard and archangels and the abandonment issues. The practical joker with a mean streak, pulling the chair out from under us, squirting us with the boutonniere, shaking our hands with the lightning-bolt joy buzzer and then wondering why we don’t “get it”; can’t we “take a joke”?

  My mother, a Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman Catholic, had her heaven furnished with familiar pieces: her own parents, her sister, friends of her youth. Her vision was precise, down to the doilies.

  So checking into the Miramar—an old oceanfront hotel south of Santa Barbara, with blue roof tiles over white clapboard, I wanted to hide, for four days only, from the facts of the matter. I remember waking to the sound of pelicans, gulls, and cormorants diving into the blue water, the listless lapping of the waves. The Pacific was pacific. I needed peace. I sat on the deck overlooking the beach. Taut bodies jogged by in primary colors or walked with their designer dogs in the morning light. No one was dying in Santa Barbara. I began to make notes about the golf course-cemetery combo. Would calling it “St. Andrews” be too bold? Would people pay more to be buried on the greens? Would a bad divot be desecration? What about headstones? They’d have to go. But what to replace them with? Memorial balls? These and other questions like them quarreled like children for my attention. I ordered coffee. A grilled cheese sandwich. I avoided the temptation to float in the water. The undulent ocean glistened with metaphor. To sit and watch the sea was good. Everything was going to be all right. By sunset I was transfixed by the beauty. I’d worked out the details of my plan—the location, the capitalization, the ad campaign, the board of directors. Why shouldn’t our cemeteries be used for fun and fitness? Pleasure and pain were soluble. Laughing and crying are the same release. I didn’t know which I should do next, laugh or weep.

  My mother believed in redemptive suffering. The paradigm for this was the crucifixion of Christ, an emblem of which she kept in most rooms of our house. This was the bad day against which all others were measured. She was a student of the fifteenth-century mystic Thomas à Kempis whose Imitation of Christ she read daily. “Offer it up for the suffering souls,” is what she would say when we’d commence our carping over some lapse in creature comforts. I think it was a Catholic variation on the Protestant work ethic. If you’re going to be miserable, her logic held, you may as well be miserable for a good cause.

  Who were these suffering souls? I’d ask myself.

  Likewise, people of the Irish persuasion have a special knack or affliction for searching out the blessing in every badness. “Happy is the grave the rain falls on,” they say as they stand ankle deep in mud, burying their dead, finding the good omen in the bad weather. Thus, in a country where it rains everyday, they have proclaimed the downpour a blessed thing. “Could be worse,” they say in the face of disaster or “The devil you know’s better than the one you don’t,” or when all else fails “Just passing through life.” Invasion and famine and occupation have taught them these things. They have a mindset that tolerates, perhaps to a fault, God’s little jokes on the likes of us.


  So when, as a chid, I’d find myself hungry or angry or lonely or tired or brutalized by one of the brothers, among my mother’s several comforts was the subtle spiritual dictum to “offer it up for the suffering souls.” By patient acceptance of pain I could assist in the universal business of salvation. The currency of hurt became the currency of holiness the way you’d change pounds sterling to greenback dollars. God was the celestial bank teller who kept track of the debits and credits to our accounts. Those who died in arrears went to Purgatory—a kind of bump-and-paint shop for the soul, where the dents and dings and rust of life on earth could be fixed before going on to Heaven. Hell was a Purgatory that never ended, reserved for the true deadbeats who not only didn’t pay their tolls but didn’t figure they owed anyone anything. Purgatory was for rehabilitation. Hell was for punishment, perpetual, eternal, cruel and unusual. The chief instrument of both locales was fire—the cleansing, if painful, flames of purgatorio, the fire and brimstone recompense, for pleasures ill-got and self-indulgent, of the inferno.

  I think sometimes that this is why, for most of the last two millennia, the western Church has avoided cremation—because fire was punitive. When you were in trouble with God you went to hell where you burned. Perhaps this created in us feelings about fire that were largely negative. We burned the trash and buried the treasure. This is why, faced with life’s first lessons in mortality—the dead kitten or bunny rabbit, or dead bird fallen from its nest on high—good parents search out shoe boxes and shovels instead of kindling wood or barbecues. It is also why we might witness burials, but cremation, like capital punishment, is hidden from us. Of course, Eastern thought has always favored fire as a purifier, as the element that reunites us with our elements and origins. Hence the great public pyres of Calcutta and Bombay, where dead bodies blacken the skies with smoke from their burning.