The Funeral Planner (40 page)

“Are you?” he asks, glancing at my T-shirt. “Then I guess I’m not.”

A chill runs down my spine as I pull up to the gate. I had let the fire rage and now I felt it quickly extinguished by the words rolling off his tongue. Well, I’ve come full circle, I suddenly realize. Wasn’t it a year and a half ago that Seth dropped me off at the airport for Tara’s funeral, and I, too, though less succinctly, carried out the same objective? But this was different, I had thought. Where did I go wrong? And why was I suddenly blaming myself ?

“I had a great time. Thanks. We’ll be in touch.” He pecks me on the cheek and dashes out of the car with his carry-on luggage.

“Victor, wait.” He turns around. “You know what? Um, forget about the advertisers for the blog. I’ll handle it myself.”

“Okay,” he says, nodding. “Bye.” And he resumes his run inside.

I stare after him, confused, my heart bleeding from yet another wound, this time a wound not from the dead, but from the living.

Organizational Strategy: The Resurrection of Lights Out

R
ichard and I work the bar serving drinks and chitchatting. Close to the register sits a pad of yellow legal paper with notes scribbled all over it under the heading of Table of Contents. I’ve got a red pen stuck behind one ear and a yellow Magic Marker behind the other ear as I pour Wally his usual. Richard’s at the other end of the bar listening to Rocky.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I had to clean out my brother’s closet?” asks Rocky. “Picnic it was not. My mom couldn’t handle it. Just seeing his old baseball mitt tore her apart. He was the all-star pitcher, ya know, all through college. Did I tell you that? He had such a bright future. My father made sure he had to be out of town when we opened up the closet. He couldn’t even come within ten feet of Glenn’s bedroom without losing it. It was…an emotional mess.”

I pull my pen from behind my ear and thoughtfully jot some notes on the pad.

“Did your parents ever recover?” asks Richard.

“Yeah,” says Rocky, then he finishes the last of his beer. “A few years later, they rented out his room to a college kid and they became this sort of minifamily. They all kind of saved each other. Hey, thanks for listening, man. I gotta run.” Rocky winks at Richard and starts to head out the door.

I lift a finger toward Rocky. “Um, Rocky, I didn’t get any…”

Rocky shakes his head. “Sorry, Maddy. No mail today.”

“Okay, thanks. I was just wondering…because sometimes you forget to put the mail in the mailbox and then sometimes you forget to bring it to the bar. But that’s cool. It’s not like I don’t have enough to read here between books on death and blogs on funerals, ya know.”

Rocky offers a perfunctory nod. “Right,” he says, and leaves.

“You know,” says Richard. “Sometimes loss is not about the dead. A lot of times it’s about the living.”

I stare at him. “Do you see that sign?” I point to a handwritten note on the cash register: “No Conundrums Allowed.”

Richard grins. “I forgot. Look, sometimes you have to confront your pain by faking the death of someone who’s hurt you in order to move on.”

I quickly change the subject because, well, it’s too friggin’ painful. “Hmm. Thanks. But you know what, Richard? I think we should have a section on how to Confront the Closet. You know, how do you deal with grief when you have to face the articles that represented the very life of the deceased? It was hard enough with Uncle Sam. I can’t imagine how it must be for a parent who loses a child or for a couple who loses a spouse, even if it’s a couple that only just started to have a life together after bonding over athletic activities like bowling and Eskimo rolls and…other stuff…but then it ended for some unknown reason…”

“Impossible,” pipes in Wally. “Grief is a can of worms. And if you can hand me a road map on that one, by golly, bring it on. Could have saved me years. Instead—I let the moths destroy everything in the closet. And now I’m helping Sally through it.”

“How are you helping her?” asks Richard.

“I let her talk about every single memory that comes up from every single piece of clothing. Takes a long time. We’re just getting through his socks right now.” Wally sips his drink. “Joe had a lot of socks…and every one of them tells a story.”

I frown, wondering what kind of stories all those socks could tell.

Richard cocks his head toward me. “What are the chapter headings so far?”

I read from our list. “Okay, not in any particular order…here we go—How to Connect with Survivors, Lessons on Paraphrasing, The Role of Experience Design, Criteria for Designing Authentic Customized Tributes, Human Tribute Stories, Pet Tribute Stories, Life Celebration Suggestions for the Soul, Estate Planning, Syndicating Pre-Needs, and…I just added Confronting the Closet…oh, and there’s the Directory of Resources.”

“I say add it to the list. Closets are dark and scary enough as it is, man,” says Carl, who’s been listening to the ping-pong conversations at the bar. Carl operates the local bowling alley; he hands me a bowling shirt with my name on it. “Here ya go, Maddy. She’s all yours—on the house.”

“Thanks,” I reply, delighted with the addition to my wardrobe.

Richard ponders this for a moment and then in one swift motion he hits the mute button on the remote for the television set, lifts a small iron rod and bangs an iron dinner bell. A ring bellows through the restaurant and bar. Everyone stops, frozen in place, and looks up toward the bar where Richard stands.

“All in favor of a chapter on cleaning out the closet of a loved one who’s passed, raise your hand.”

The entire clientele raise their hands. Richard and I share a look. As everyone drops their arms and goes back to their business, I make a note on the pad. Richard punches the mute button again, allowing the sounds on the television to return to life.

“Okay, we’ll work on that chapter tonight,” he says.

“Great,” I say. Then I see the clock. “Oops, I forgot to roll last call.” I hit the mute button on the remote for the television set again, lift the iron rod and tap the dinner bell. No one hears it. I tap again, louder this time. Everyone stops and looks my way.

“Sorry to interrupt again,” I announce. “But tonight is last call on handing in those Tribute Stories for Pets, Friends, Lovers, Businesses, Beliefs, and, well, anything that constitutes a loss. Oh, and that includes living and breathing lovers who leave you for no good reason, especially after they’ve given you the impression that everything is swell…so, um, where was I? Oh, yeah, the most moving and descriptive tales will be in the pamphlet. Pens and paper are in the straw hat at the end of the bar. And don’t forget to add your names and the city you’re from.”

People pull out notebooks, scraps of paper with their already written stories. Some head to the bar for paper and pen. Lana, a girl in her early twenties and part-time college student, hands me her story on lined loose-leaf paper. “I wrote about my horse, Jet, who passed away last year. Thanks for doing this, Maddy. It felt really good to write about him. I hope you use it.”

“Hey, thank you, Lana, for participating,” I reply. “I’m glad it made you feel better.” I add her story to the folder lying next to the register. As Lana exits the bar, I turn around to pull down one of the many books on the sociology and psychology of grieving that now line a shelf next to the liquor bottles. I open the book to where a bookmark rests and start reading where I left off. I pull the yellow Magic Marker from behind my other ear and highlight a passage: “Sharing your grief with others is a crucial and necessary function of healthy grieving.” I think about that, and glance over at Richard, then I close the book and start writing on my pad.

Dear Madison,

I must share and mourn the death of my lover with you. He lost it in an Eskimo roll on the Huron River—no, scratch that—he was destroyed by an army of giant ten-pins in a bowling alley—

“Hey, Maddy. Can I have a Hefivisen when you get a chance?”

I look up. The young, strapping Pete Gallagher, a blond, blue-eyed electrical engineer from Grass Valley, smiles at me over the bar. He sits down with his sports section of the
Detroit Free Press
under his arm. I bring him his beer. “How’s the log cabin coming, Pete?”

“Good. I’m done with the outer framework and starting on the fireplace now. Hey, you want to go stone hunting with me sometime?”

I think it over. “I’m not ready yet.”

“That guy really took it out of you, huh?”

I immediately sit down next to Pete, my obsession with loss superceding any obligatory bartending duties. “How do you know when it’s right?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out. But this book says, when you know you don’t have to question it.”

“What book?”

Pete opens up his newspaper, a camouflage for his true literary interests. Inside is the latest self-help book on relationships, titled
The Menu of Relationships: How to Order Up What You Want.

I nod. “Huh. How many of those self-help relationship books have you read?” I ask, peering at its contents.

“I think this is my thirty-seventh one.”

I nod. “Fair enough. Let me know if you find any answers.”

Donny walks into the bar with a scruffy beard around his face and bad sunburn. Everyone cheers. I look at Richard. “Did I miss something?”

Richard winks at me and raises a shot glass. “To Donny, winner of ‘How Long Can You Stay on the Lake?’ Answer: Eleven days, twelve hours and thirty-six minutes. To Donny, one martini boat special on the house comin’ up—that is after you wipe some of that grime off your face.” Richard tosses him a disposable shaver, and the people in the bar cheer again.

Donny smiles, lifting his hands for a moment of quiet. “Thank you, all, for your support. I couldn’t have done it without Wally’s pontoon boat, Lillian’s homemade pies, Sally’s homemade lemonade or Eagle’s Nest’s burgers. Thanks again. And don’t forget about Rusty Uzzle’s Hermit Crab Race next week. Ten bucks a crab and all the proceeds go to the school. Beers are on me.”

After serving a round of beers, I duck into the office to check my e-mails—still nothing from Victor. But I do find an e-mail from Norm Pearl telling me a check is in the mail for five thousand dollars for five months of advertisements on my blog. I smile, muttering, “Yeah, Norm!” I check the Lights Out blog where a banner ad promotes “Pearl Living—affordable work-live spaces from Chicago to New York.” Under the Express Yourself category, I find eight more stories about dead pets, twelve stories about funerals and six more opinions about the state of funeral practices in this country. I print them out and then take them behind the bar to show Richard.

“You are not going to believe this,” I tell him. “According to Stan Hope in Oklahoma, the Tribute in a Box funeral home down there figured out how not to show their customers the casket price list.”

“He has to show the CPL and the general price list, otherwise it’s a ten-thousand-dollar fine for every violation,” Richard states indignantly.

“Apparently, they get away with it by claiming their caskets are all customized. But they really aren’t, according to Stan. Only when a customer buys a casket do they stitch the departed’s initials on the interior cloth. On top of that, this guy says TIAB tells their clients they can’t guarantee extra care and attention on embalming and cemetery maintenance if caskets are purchased from third-party suppliers. So everyone in the town is too intimidated to go elsewhere when TIAB owns the only cemetery around for miles.”

Richard shakes his head.

I continue reading from the printouts. “Check this out. A woman writes from Grass Lake that TIAB insinuated embalming was mandatory under state law. When she found it wasn’t, she asked for her money back and they refused. Oh, and here’s the clincher. TIAB has created an Executive Memorial Society to give discounts to executives. No wonder he ran me out of business.”

“He can’t do that,” says Richard.

“Apparently, under the ‘religious groups and memorial societies’ section of the funeral rule, he can…and does.”

“That’s just not right. People need to know about the FTC’s Funeral Rule and what their rights are.”

“You’re right. I’m going to post the entire Funeral Rule on the blog. And I’m going to highlight ‘misrepresentations.’ In fact, let’s have a topic of the week to bring it to the forefront.”