Good Mourning (12 page)

I was surprised when the cardinal's casket was brought into one of the smaller viewing rooms on the fourth floor. The newspapers had already written about the cardinal's death—surely there would be crowds. But as it turned out, only a few select members of the clergy were allowed to view the body. Everyone else was waiting at St. Patrick's Cathedral, where the funeral was taking place. I watched as the clergy members covered the casket in a special white cloth called a “pall” with a big cross on it, and then as it was loaded into a hearse. At the cathedral, more than 750 mourners, plus 150 church dignitaries, said good-bye to the cardinal. The whole place was lit up with incense and candles, and the next day, the
New York Times
headline read: “For a Modest Cardinal, a Farewell Full of Majesty.”

There
was
something special about being around people who believed in something so strongly. By the time my mom's mom died, she was completely at peace with the fact that her life was ending. She had been a devout Catholic since she was a kid and seemed to just trust that heaven and everything else she had been praying for would be waiting for her when it was all over. I wondered a bit, too, if she was excited to see my grandfather again. I wished I could believe so strongly in something—but then again, I had my own “church”: the church of adventure. (We're currently accepting members, FYI.)

Maybe it was my father's love of exploration and the outdoors, but I always felt most connected to him, and most spiritually alive, when I was out
living
 . . . whether horseback riding in Langmusi, China; trekking on an elephant in Thailand; or watching the Great Migration in Tanzania. But mostly I felt him at the country house in the Berkshires, looking over the lake where we used to go sailing and knowing that if there is an afterlife, he'll be the first person to greet me when I get there. I thought about Gaby's question that day on Madison Avenue: what happens to us when we die? And I realized that I didn't have to believe in a heaven or have all the answers. I just needed to trust in my gut that my father was still here with me, in whatever way I needed him to be.

THE CATHOLICS
were pretty straightforward with their funerals. A little prayer. A little standing up, and sit
ting down, and standing up again. The occasional kneel and song. You know, standard. The Hare Krishnas? They were a whole other ball game. My first Hare Krishna service was of, well, epic proportions. The body came straight from the hospital—a man, in his forties, who was almost
five hundred pounds
. He had died of a heart attack, a fact that was shocking to no one but sad nonetheless.

“We're going to need a double-wide casket for this one,” whispered Tony.

There's actually a company called Goliath Casket (I swear) that makes coffins for the big-and-tall crowd. We didn't keep them on hand, so it had to be special-ordered. “I'll call them right away,” I told him.

That's when the Hare Krishnas showed up. When I first saw the body, which was being kept in the prep room until the casket arrived, there was no way to tell who this person had been. He was just a man covered in a sheet—the hospital didn't bother to cover him more than that before putting him in a body bag. But as it turns out, he was a Krishna, and his friends were gathering outside Crawford, anxious to get inside and bathe him, which was their custom. Hare Krishna funerals, I learned, were pretty much the same as Hindu funerals. And that meant that before Bill did anything to the body, a ritualistic washing was in order.

“This guy is a Krishna?” I said to Bill in a low voice. Until then, most of the Hare Krishnas I'd encountered were people with shaved heads sitting on cardboard mats in
Union Square or the Columbus Circle subway stop, chanting and smiling as all of the miserable commuters gave them dirty looks. I don't know what I was expecting—flowers? Robes? Girls with tambourines?—but not
this
.

“Looks like it,” said Bill. After decades in the funeral business, pretty much nothing could faze the man. It wasn't his first Hare Krishna rodeo.

“Aren't they supposed to be vegetarians?” I asked. “Have you ever seen a five-hundred-pound vegetarian?”

Bill laughed. “I don't know any vegetarians.”

At Crawford, we were happy to accommodate any religious requests—and some pretty weird nonreligious ­requests—as long as it made the clients happy. So when the Hare Krishnas walked into the foyer asking to see the body so they could give it a bath, Bill led them downstairs. “Just give me a few minutes,” he said, before disappearing into the embalming room. He had to clear out all the other bodies before they could come in and do their thing, not just for privacy's sake, but also because he didn't want water spraying all over the other corpses. That would have been terribly bad form.

This particular group of Krishnas was in normal clothes—simple, but nothing that made them stand out. Bill gave them aprons to put on and handed them a small stack of clean sponges. Usually he would close the prep room door, but the group seemed confused before they even started on the bath, so Bill decided to stay. It's a good thing
he did—they made a total mess of things! Not to play favorites, but the
chevra kadisha
Jews had the ritual baths down to a science, barely a drop of water on the floor. This group? By the time they were done, there were puddles—
puddles
—­everywhere, along with sandalwood, turmeric powder, and a new cloth that had to be wrapped around the body. (Not a super-easy thing to do with five hundred pounds of deadweight.)

Hare Krishnas tend to cremate bodies in simple coffins shortly after death, so Bill had to move fast with the embalming process after the Krishnas left. “I can't find a vein,” he said, hunched over the body. (The larger the person, the harder it was to find a precious vein to use for embalming.) “Come on, give me a vein, give me a vein. There we go!”

Bill made an incision and grasped a vein that led to the heart. The pressure forced a flush of blood to the heart, making it look like it was beating. “All cured!” he said.

“Bill!” I said. “Stop that!”

“I think we need some Otis!” he said, ignoring my fake protest. A minute later, Bill was watching the embalming fluid move through the clear tubes as Otis Redding sang through the speakers.

The rest of the process went as normal, and Goliath had speedily delivered the casket, so all that was left was actually getting the body inside. We were all about death with dignity, but there was no way around it: the only way to lift the body into the casket was to use the hoist in the basement
that was
usually
used to raise the caskets themselves. Bill and I looked down as other staffers worked the mechanics, wanting to be respectful in such a moment. It was easy enough to laugh at all the craziness that went down inside Crawford, but at the end of the day, that body—that was a person. And someone loved him. Many people, maybe.

I was kind of hoping to plan a wild Krishna service, but no dice. A few prayers, a few chants, and the whole thing was over. I couldn't help but notice how calm, even relaxed, everyone was. Maybe it was because the Hare Krishnas, like the Hindus, believe in reincarnation. I kind of did, too. Gaby and I met when we were barely five years old, and I always felt like I had known her for much longer—like we were connected from a previous life. My mom shared the same belief, that there are certain souls that find each other in every life. Like, have you ever gotten off a plane in a new place and felt like you had been there before? Happens to me all the time. There is something reassuring about the idea that life runs in cycles; life, death, life, death, over and over, so that we don't actually lose people, we just meet them in another form.

MUCH MORE
COMMON
than the Hare Krishna service were the Jewish ones, this being New York City and all. I regularly recognized Elaine's friends from her synagogue (not that she was particularly religious, either) attending this service or
that. “He had such chutzpah!” they'd say, shaking their heads in the back of the room. “A true mensch.” Jewish funerals ran like clockwork . . . usually. With all the Jewish services Crawford and other funeral homes in town conducted, you'd
think
that no one would ever screw up the funeral for a prominent Jewish rabbi. And I guess they didn't, if we're being literal here. They screwed up way before that.

I was in my office when Bill knocked on the door. “You hear what happened over there?” he said, shaking his head. “Disaster.”

“No! Tell me,” I said. It had been a boring morning, and I was glad to have a little gossip . . . until I heard what it was.

“They embalmed a rabbi. What a mess.”

I covered my mouth with my hands. Anyone who works at a funeral home knows that many Jews—especially conservative ones—don't get embalmed. So it was pretty clear that our colleagues had made a
big
whoops. “How the heck did that happen?” I asked.

“One of the guys over there, he made a mistake and wrote on the slip that the body should be embalmed,” said Bill. “You know, idiot move. So without thinking,
Oh this is a rabbi, maybe I shouldn't pump him with chemicals
, the embalmer just went ahead and did what the paper said.”

It was true that Jewish clients were starting to relax about a few things. It used to be that Jews would rarely be cremated, because of the belief that the messiah will come at some point and people will be resurrected. If you were cre
mated, you wouldn't have a body to come back in—which would be a shame, when all your friends were hanging out and you'd be missing the party. At least, that's one explanation. Some people focus more on Genesis 23, where Abraham went to great lengths to find a burial place, or “
achuzat kever
,” for Sarah. For them, it's more about following tradition. Others simply don't believe in desecrating the body—lots of Jewish cemeteries won't even accept bodies with tattoos—and cremating falls under that category for them. But Reformed Jews, like my dad's side of the family, often weren't so literal. I guess like most things in religion, it was all open to interpretation.

Even though Dad was Jewish, we had his body cremated; a couple of years before he died, he mentioned that when the time came, that's what he wanted. It was one of the only details about his death that we ever talked about, and I was glad that we had. But it was really the
only
detail—Mom, Max, and I were left mostly in the dark when dealing with the rest of Dad's send-off, and we never actually discussed what he wanted us to do with the ashes. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had said to sprinkle them over the lake near the country house, or another spot that he loved. Or he might have been perfectly happy to stay just where he is now, in an urn on my mom's bedroom mantel. We just never got that far, or rather, we didn't want to go that far. It would mean acknowledging the fact that he was going to die—and that was terrifying. We weren't the only family to
deal with a death in this way: I was shocked at how many people who came into Crawford had
no idea
what their loved one would have wanted. “We just didn't talk about it,” they'd say, usually looking down at the floor, or up at the ceiling, as if an answer might suddenly appear from either. The more I heard that phrase, the more I questioned:
Why is it we are so afraid to talk about something as inevitable as death?
After over a year at Crawford, death no longer seemed scary to me, probably because it was no longer a mystery.