The Undertaking (3 page)

H
ere then is that binding loosed, the not so solemn promise kept, the pledge paid up, the undertaking done.

TL

Milford, Michigan

13 June 1996

E
very year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople. Another two or three dozen I take to the crematory to be burned. I sell caskets, burial vaults, and urns for the ashes. I have a sideline in headstones and monuments. I do flowers on commission.

Apart from the tangibles, I sell the use of my building: eleven thousand square feet, furnished and fixtured with an abundance of pastel and
chair rail and crown moldings. The whole lash-up is mortgaged and remortgaged well into the next century. My rolling stock includes a hearse, two Fleetwoods, and a minivan with darkened windows our pricelist calls a service vehicle and everyone in town calls the Dead Wagon.

I used to use the
unit pricing method
—the old package deal. It meant that you had only one number to look at. It was a large
number. Now everything is itemized. It’s the law. So now there is a long list of items and numbers and italicized disclaimers, something like a menu or the Sears Roebuck Wish Book, and sometimes the federally-mandated options begin to look like cruise control or rear-window defrost. I wear black most of the time, to keep folks in mind of the fact we’re not talking Buicks here. At the bottom of
the list there is still a large number.

In a good year the gross is close to a million, five percent of which we hope to call profit. I am the only undertaker in this town. I have a corner on the market.

The market, such as it is, is figured on what is called
the crude death rate
—the number of deaths every year out of every thousand persons.

Here is how it works.

Imagine a large room into
which you coax one thousand people. You slam the doors in January, leaving them plenty of food and drink, color TVs, magazines, and condoms. Your sample should have an age distribution heavy on baby boomers and their children—1.2 children per boomer. Every seventh adult is an old-timer, who, if he or she wasn’t in this big room, would probably be in Florida or Arizona or a nursing home. You get the
idea. The group will include fifteen lawyers, one faith healer, three dozen real-estate agents, a video technician, several licensed counselors, and a Tupperware distributor. The rest will be between jobs, middle managers, ne’er-do-wells, or retired.

Now for the magic part—come late December when you throw open the doors, only 991.6, give or take, will shuffle out upright. Two hundred and sixty
will now be selling Tupperware. The other 8.4 have become the crude death rate.

Here’s another stat.

Of the 8.4 corpses, two-thirds will have been old-timers, five percent will be children, and the rest (slightly less than 2.5 corpses) will be boomers—realtors and attorneys likely—one of whom was, no doubt, elected to public office during the year. What’s more, three will have died of cerebral-vascular
or coronary difficulties, two of cancer, one each of vehicular mayhem, diabetes, and domestic violence. The spare change will be by act of God or suicide—most likely the faith healer.

The figure most often and most conspicuously missing from the insurance charts and demographics is the one I call The Big One, which refers to the number of people out of every hundred born who will die. Over the
long haul, The Big One hovers right around … well, dead nuts on one hundred percent. If this were on the charts, they’d call it
death expectancy
and no one would buy futures of any kind. But it is a useful number and has its lessons. Maybe you will want to figure out what to do with your life. Maybe it will make you feel a certain kinship with the rest of us. Maybe it will make you hysterical.
Whatever the implications of a one hundred percent death expectancy, you can calculate how big a town this is and why it produces for me a steady if unpredictable labor.

T
hey die around the clock here, without apparent preference for a day of the week, month of the year; there is no clear favorite in the way of season. Nor does the alignment of the stars, fullness of moon, or liturgical calendar
have very much to do with it. The whereabouts are neither here nor there. They go off upright or horizontally in Chevrolets and nursing homes, in bathtubs, on the interstates, in ERs, ORs, BMWs. And while it may be that we assign more equipment or more importance to deaths that create themselves in places marked by initials—ICU being somehow better than Greenbriar Convalescent Home—it is also
true that the dead don’t care. In this way, the dead I bury and burn are like the dead before them, for whom time and space have become mortally unimportant. This loss of interest is, in fact, one of the first sure signs that something serious is about to happen. The next thing is they quit breathing. At this point, to be sure, a
gunshot wound to the chest
or
shock and trauma
will get more ink
than a CVA or ASHD, but no cause of death is any less permanent than the other. Any one will do. The dead don’t care.

Nor does
who
much matter, either. To say, “I’m OK, you’re OK, and by the way, he’s dead!” is, for the living, a kind of comfort.

It is why we drag rivers and comb plane wrecks and bomb sites.

It is why MIA is more painful than DOA.

It is why we have open caskets and all read
the obits.

Knowing is better than not knowing, and knowing it is you is terrifically better than knowing it is me. Because once I’m the dead guy, whether you’re OK or he’s OK won’t much interest me. You can all go bag your asses, because the dead don’t care.

Of course, the living, bound by their adverbs and their actuarials, still do. Now, there is the difference and why I’m in business. The
living are careful and oftentimes caring. The dead are careless, or maybe it’s care-less. Either way, they don’t care. These are unremarkable and verifiable truths.

M
y former mother-in-law, herself an unremarkable and verifiable truth, was always fond of holding forth with Cagneyesque bravado—to wit: “When I’m dead, just throw me in a box and throw me in a hole.” But whenever I would remind
her that we did substantially that with everyone, the woman would grow sullen and a little cranky.

Later, over meatloaf and green beans, she would invariably give out with: “When I’m dead just cremate me and scatter the ashes.”

My former mother-in-law was trying to make carelessness sound like fearlessness. The kids would stop eating and look at each other. The kids’ mother would plead, “Oh
Mom, don’t talk like that.” I’d take out my lighter and begin to play with it.

In the same way, the priest that married me to this woman’s daughter—a man who loved golf and gold ciboria and vestments made of Irish linen; a man who drove a great black sedan with a wine-red interior and who always had his eye on the cardinal’s job—this same fellow, leaving the cemetery one day, felt called upon
to instruct me thus: “No bronze coffin for me. No sir! No orchids or roses or limousines. The plain pine box is the one I want, a quiet Low Mass and the pauper’s grave. No pomp and circumstance.”

He wanted, he explained, to be an example of simplicity, of prudence, of piety and austerity—all priestly and, apparently,
Christian virtues. When I told him that he needn’t wait, that he could begin
his ministry of good example even today, that he could quit the country club and do his hacking at the public links and trade his brougham for a used Chevette; that free of his Florsheims and cashmeres and prime ribs, free of his bingo nights and building funds, he could become, for Christ’s sake, the very incarnation of Francis himself, or Anthony of Padua; when I said, in fact, that I would be
willing to assist him in this, that I would gladly distribute his savings and credit cards among the worthy poor of the parish, and that I would, when the sad duty called, bury him for free in the manner he would have, by then, become accustomed to; when I told your man these things, he said nothing at all, but turned his wild eye on me in the way that the cleric must have looked on Sweeney years
ago, before he cursed him, irreversibly, into a bird.

What I was trying to tell the fellow was, of course, that being a dead saint is no more worthwhile than being a dead philodendron or a dead angelfish. Living is the rub, and always has been. Living saints still feel the flames and stigmata of this vale of tears, the ache of chastity and the pangs of conscience. Once dead, they let their relics
do the legwork, because, as I was trying to tell this priest, the dead don’t care.

Only the living care.

And I am sorry to be repeating myself, but this is the central fact of my business—that there is nothing, once you are dead, that can be done
to you
or
for you
or
with you
or
about you
that will do you any good or any harm; that any damage or decency we do accrues to the living, to whom your
death happens, if it really happens to anyone. The living have to live with it. You don’t. Theirs is the grief or gladness your death brings. Theirs is the loss or gain of it. Theirs is the pain and the pleasure of memory. Theirs is the invoice for services rendered and theirs is the check in the mail for its payment.

And there is the truth, abundantly self-evident, that seems, now that I think
of it, the one most elusive to the old in-laws,
the parish priest, and to perfect strangers who are forever accosting me in barber-shops and cocktail parties and parentteacher conferences, hell-bent or duty-bound to let me in on what it is they want done with them when they are dead.

Give it a rest is the thing I say.

Once you are dead, put your feet up, call it a day, and let the husband or
the missus or the kids or a sibling decide whether you are to be buried or burned or blown out of a cannon or left to dry out in a ditch somewhere. It’s not your day to watch it, because the dead don’t care.

A
nother reason people are always rehearsing their obsequies with me has to do with the fear of death that anyone in their right mind has. It is healthy. It keeps us from playing in traffic.
I say it’s a thing we should pass on to the kids.

There is a belief—widespread among the women I’ve dated, local Rotarians, and friends of my chidren—that I, being the undertaker here, have some irregular fascination with, special interest in, inside information about, even attachment to,
the dead.
They assume, these people, some perhaps for defensible reasons, that I want their bodies.

It is
an interesting concept.

But here is the truth.

Being dead is one—the worst, the last—but only one in a series of calamities that afflicts our own and several other species. The list may include, but is not limited to, gingivitis, bowel obstruction, contested divorce, tax audit, spiritual vexation, cash flow problems, political upheaval, and on and on and on some more. There is no shortage of
misery. And I am no more attracted to the dead than the dentist is to your bad gums, the doctor to your rotten innards, or the accountant to your sloppy expense records. I have no more stomach for misery that the banker or the lawyer, the pastor or the politico—because misery is careless and is everywhere. Misery is the bad
check, the ex-spouse, the mob in the street, and the IRS—who, like the
dead, feel nothing and, like the dead,
don’t care.

W
hich is not to say that the dead do not matter.

They do. They do. Of course they do.

Last Monday morning Milo Hornsby died. Mrs. Hornsby called at 2 A.M. to say that Milo had
expired
and would I take care of it, as if his condition were like any other that could be renewed or somehow improved upon. At 2 A.M., yanked from my REM sleep, I
am thinking, put a quarter into Milo and call me in the morning. But Milo is dead. In a moment, in a twinkling, Milo has slipped irretrievably out of our reach, beyond Mrs. Hornsby and the children, beyond the women at the laundromat he owned, beyond his comrades at the Legion Hall, the Grand Master of the Masonic Lodge, his pastor at First Baptist, beyond the mailman, zoning board, town council,
and Chamber of Commerce; beyond us all, and any treachery or any kindness we had in mind for him.

Milo is dead.

X’s on his eyes, lights out, curtains.