The Funeral Home Visit

The person who met us at the funeral home door was hardly funereal. I guess I was expecting the obsequious pale-faced plastered-hair funeral director I’d always known in one form or another in all the various places. Our funeral home contact person looked like a young Midwestern farmwife, plump with an open and honest face, warm and hospitable. She couldn’t have been much, if any, over 30. She walked us through the forms and asked us what we wanted done with the cremains.

Now that is one ugly word: cremains. It sounds like the creamy remains of something, like fluids coldly cleaned up after sex.

Some people like to put them in urns, she gently suggested. Did we want to look at urns?

Now I have no more intention of putting my dead husband in a jar on a mantle than I do of squatting naked in the town square. But my curiosity got the best of me. “Whaddya got?” So we go to see the urns. What else do we have to do?

While the rest of the town is filing into the stadium for the big college homecoming game, we file into a room filled with different types of caskets, which would have been pretty creepy had our pleasingly plump Pollyanna funeral rep not warned us beforehand what to expect. We pass all the body boxes, then she pulls aside a curtain, and there are the urns.

There were urns with all kinds of things on them—angels, anglers, and antlers. There was an urn decorated with an American flag. I looked around for a Velvet Elvis one, but was disappointed. I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but this is worse than I imagined.”

Then Pollyanna mischievously tells us about having the cremains carbonized into diamond jewelry. “Oh, you have got to be kidding!” I laugh.

“Well, that puts a whole new spin on ‘Who are you wearing?’” Barbara quips. We all burst into laughter and can’t stop.

“I’m wearing my dog Fifi,” I mimic a British actress holding out her arm to show off her Harry Winston ring. “And my Aunt Ethel,” I say tossing my hair back to show off my imaginary earrings.

We calm down enough so that the minimal arrangements are made, as Bill wanted. We will get to see him tomorrow laid out after organ harvesting is complete later today. We have the turtleneck and tweed jacket he was going to wear to the ballgame with us. He won’t have on any pants under the blanket they’ll have on him, but then again, there’ll be PVC pipe in his legs and hips. Besides, Bill would like going commando into the afterlife.

I start laughing again as I remember standing with my little niece at the open casket of my grandfather. Knowing that children often get overlooked in their parents’ grief, I asked my six-year-old niece if she had any questions she wanted to ask. She looked at Papaw in his casket with the blue satin blanket over him, then looked up at me with earnest blue eyes and asked, “Where’d they put his legs?”

This whole death thing is surreal. Laughter and prayer seem to be the only way to get through it.