Furnishing Eternity

by David Giffels

  “Um, Dad?” I’d say. “What difference does it make if I’m not also resistant to rot?”

  He also, for some reason, was fixated on the question of whether the lid should have a lock. He felt that it should. I wondered why.

  I had done some research into the practical matters of caskets, a process that had led me to an odd revelation about just how available they are. It makes obvious sense. Virtually everyone needs one eventually. Most families have to purchase them on short notice, under terrible duress. But it’s not something you think of in terms of the general consumer market.

  And yet there they are, all over the Internet. Walmart and Costco and Amazon and Overstock.com sell coffins. So do specialists: Dignified Caskets and Kismet Caskets and Millionaire Casket and Cowboy’s Last Ride Casket Company of Early, Texas. One seller, Casketstore.com, offered a range of themed mural designs, the death boxes airbrushed like midlife-crisis muscle cars. On its site, I found a golfer’s casket (“Fairway to Heaven”), a NASCAR casket (“Race Is Over”), and a motorcyclist’s casket (“The Last Ride”). For the deceased trucker: “The Last Haul.” For the outdoorsman: “Gone Fishing.”

  I even discovered a company called J&D’s Foods that pitched a bacon sarcophagus with this description:

  Is there a better way to show your love of bacon forever than to be buried wrapped in it? We don’t think so.

  This genuine bacon casket is made of 18 Gauge Gasketed Steel with Premium Bacon Exterior/Interior, and includes a Memorial and Record Tube, Adjustable Bed and Mattress and Stationary and Swingbar handles. It also includes a bacon air freshener for when you get that buried-underground, not-so-fresh feeling.

  But for all that, I could find only one instructional book on coffin construction, and its amateurish, rudimentary approach (not to mention the jacket photo of the author costumed like a Halloween undertaker, in stovepipe hat and black suit) reaffirmed just how much I would need my dad’s expertise.

  He seized the opportunity and had pretty much taken executive ownership of the project. His engineering grid sheet now was labeled at the top in his block script:

  Project: CASKET

  Designer: ME

  But the more we sketched and planned, the more we realized how much we didn’t know. And when I say “we,” I don’t mean mutually. I mean separately, we each had a lack of knowledge. My contribution to the lack of knowledge was plain ignorance: I didn’t know what I didn’t know. His was something more like wisdom, the Socratic paradox: he knew enough to know that he did not know enough. So I arrived at Hummel Funeral Home’s chapel near downtown, armed with a list of my dad’s questions:

  How do you elevate the upper body?

  How should the handles be configured?

  Is there a standard size?

  Does it need to lock?

  I had many questions of my own, a growing number of which were unanswerable matters of philosophy and self-doubt. This project was beginning to substantiate the single most troublesome truth of my dad’s mortality: I flat-out do not know how I will ever get by without him.

  I arrived on a sunny afternoon not long after the first planning visit on my dad’s porch. The place was quiet. Funeral homes are always quiet, I suppose, but they represent nuanced subsets of quietude. There is the somber musical quiet of calling hours, with their measured coffee-breath conversation and featherbed soundtracks. There is the choked quiet of the consultation, a discomforting calm between the twin storms of death and standing in the reception line. And then there is this: the mundane quiet of a workday afternoon, when everyone is either out on the job or here, pushing paper, proofing prayer cards, waiting for the phone to ring.

  One of the other funeral directors answered the door and offered me a seat in Paul’s office while he went to fetch him. The office seemed purposely humble and decidedly parlor-esque, with out-of-fashion honey-toned wood paneling, an acoustical tile ceiling, and blue carpeting. The padded armchair I sat in was of the type one might find in a great-aunt’s living room. I felt remarkably comfortable here. I guessed this was why they called it a funeral “home.”

  Paul arrived, dressed in a dark blue suit, crisp white shirt, and blue-and-gold-striped necktie. I was glad I’d chosen the chinos. He greeted me cheerfully. He was tall and pleasant, with neatly combed dark hair. He had the demeanor of a ward councilman who has no higher political aspirations, a demeanor of service. Like his father and my own father, Paul bears a mystique of mischief, something hiding in the corners of his eyes, a hair-trigger smile. His profession requires, probably desperately, a humor that’s ever present even when not expressed, along with an acute instinct for immediate calibration of tone and mood. Day after day, he has to read an audience spontaneously and know what to say and what not to say. Day after day, he has to represent the nation of death and translate for the new immigrant. He had told me not long before that all he ever thinks about is death, and not in a heavy or depressing way, but simply as a matter of occupation and preoccupation. He had told me about driving with his wife and young daughters on the way to a family vacation, how his wife had begun to quietly cry, and when he asked why, she said she had a sudden dread of a car wreck and, glancing toward the backseat, asked, “Can you put two children in the same casket?” And because he’s him, he knew the answer: that the question by necessity cannot be just emotional for him, it’s also pragmatic. His father, after a lifetime of this, is one of the warmest and most lighthearted men I know, yet unhardened enough that I’d seen him weep at funerals of close friends.

  As we started talking about caskets, Paul told me he’d heard of lots of people wanting to do what my dad and I were embarking on. Even he, an avid woodworker, had given it some thought. “People talk about building it,” he said, “but life gets in the way.”

  In truth, he’d had only one instance in his career when a family had provided a homemade casket, and that was a case of financial desperation. The family couldn’t afford to buy a manufactured coffin, so a few of them had gotten together and quickly hammered pieces of half-inch plywood into a crude box.

  “I was really worried it would fall apart,” Paul confided.

  But from a legal and regulatory standpoint, the homemade box was perfectly acceptable. Before I dove into my recent research, my own sepulchral acumen derived mainly from: 1) attending Catholic and Protestant ceremonies; 2) the deluxe boxed set of HBO’s Six Feet Under; and 3) the Treasures of Tutankhamun tour. So I figured bodies had to be embalmed, housed in some sort of state-sanctioned, decorative, satin-lined casket, and buried in a commercial cemetery. I figured there were a lot of rules. In fact, there are very few. Embalming is not required, Paul told me. And for most cemeteries, the only real restriction on the casket is that it fits inside a vault—the container, usually concrete, that a casket goes into before being lowered into the ground, the purpose of which is mainly to prevent the earth from sinking as body and casket decompose. Paul told me that Catholics have become more and more open to cremation, and his funeral home had recently made a major investment in a crematory. The culture was changing. Only a few years before, the first organic cemetery in Ohio had opened, about forty-five miles from where Paul and I were sitting.

  But tradition remained. Paul’s family business gets most of its caskets from a furniture maker in Ohio’s nearby Amish country. In fact, he told me, I could expect that day to meet the Amish fellow who made the deliveries, as he was on his way in the big transport van and due to arrive any minute.

  Paul stood up from behind his desk and invited me to follow him through the hallway and into the casket room. It was about what I’d expected: muted and reverential, well lit, polished, and stark. On the wall were cutaway samples of the casket offerings, one after another in varying tones of polished wood, ocher to cinnamon to coffee bean, their names reading like a sixth-grade social studies quiz:

  Adams

  Roosevelt

  Truman

  Madison

  Jefferson

  Wi
lson

  Taft

  Harding

  Harrison

  The caskets offered by Hummel ranged in price from $1,595 to $8,995. A vault would cost another $1,075 to $10,495. The numbers alone encouraged me. For whatever questions my pursuit might prompt, thrift will never be in doubt. There’s no way my coffin will cost anywhere near that range. At most, I figured, the final tally will be in the hundreds, not thousands.

  These presidential caskets exuded a uniform regimentation, each of the same basic rectangular shape and size, with similar ornamentation and equipment. Paul went back to his office and returned with a tape measure. We sized up a standard box: 29 inches wide, 84 inches long, 22 inches high. That would be a good template, Paul said, certain to fit inside the vault, the standard dimensions of which offered the only real size restriction. He alerted me to take the handles into account when calculating the width—they’d add a couple inches of clearance to either side. Paul crossed his wrists at his waist to show me how the elbows, in the standard funeral pose, represent the widest point, and to be aware of that when planning the interior space.

  This was all useful knowledge. Paul informed me what happens when a very tall person has to fit into a standard casket (bend the knees) and why a plastic pan is standard at the bottom of the box (“Bodies leak,” he said). And he answered my dad’s question: no, the lid doesn’t need a lock. But a simple latch is a good idea, because you don’t want the thing flapping open at the wrong time.

  As we stood looking over the glossy, ornate samples, I noticed a handsome, more rustic casket on the floor at the other side of the showroom.

  “I like that one,” I said.

  “You’d like the price, too,” he said. “Two thousand dollars.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s a cremation casket. It’s fiberboard. Come take a closer look.”

  He went over to the box and lowered himself to one knee. He started to open the lid, then suddenly closed it and put his free hand to his mouth. “Ooh—someone’s in there!”

  Stunned, I shrank back. He looked up at me, paused, then cracked a big grin. I shook my head and thought of a bad word that I shouldn’t be thinking in a funeral parlor.

  After we were finished in the main casket room, he led me into an adjacent room, where shelves displayed cremation vessels for humans and pets. Hummel’s most recent expansion has been into pet cremation, a thriving trend in the mortuary world. Paul told me that one of the most surprising revelations has been that people are far, far more likely to break down emotionally when making arrangements for the burial of a pet than for the burial of a parent.

  “Really?” I said. “Why?”

  “I think with a parent, they’ve lived a long life, and if they were ill, they were in the hands of a medical professional. With a pet, it’s the owner that made the decision to end the life.”

  * * *

  We were finished with the tour, and the Amish casket guy still hadn’t arrived. Paul and I lingered for a while in the lobby, catching up on each other’s kids and our own lives. We talked about trying to get a lunch date together with our dads, maybe a field day to Amish country, where we could visit the factory. Our time had run long, and Paul decided to check and see if our visitor was close. He made a call on his cell, chatted a few moments, chuckled, and bade his Amish friend farewell.

  “You may as well go. He’s gonna be a while,” he said. “He’s at the Apple store.”

  7: THE POSTULANT

  * * *

  When my mother was a very young woman, barely old enough to make a decision, she made one: she joined a convent. And although she lasted only a few months, barely a season, this fact is an integral part of her personal legend, a parallel to my father having dated a Playboy Bunny, a moment of life experience that doesn’t ultimately define anything yet nonetheless becomes a defining part of the puzzle of a person. She stayed long enough to realize it was not the life for her, and when she finally made the request for her release, Mother Superior warned her that if she left, she could never return, which probably came across as more comforting than Her Reverence intended.

  My grandmother picked up my mom at the convent, and on the car ride home, she said, low and flat, “I think you made the right decision,” and without further comment slipped my mother the jade ring she’d left back home with all the other pretty things she wasn’t allowed to wear.

  It seems to me that she spent most of her life trying things out. One year she was platinum blond; another year she bought a Vespa scooter. She had a disco phase and a country phase and a Liza Minnelli phase. She always boasted that she “knew herself,” but that self was always changing. Whatever it was that defined her moment, it defined her moment completely. Until it didn’t anymore.

  Although she’d recovered fully from her own cancer treatment by the time my father and John were dealing with theirs, the radiation had left her gouged out and increasingly miserable. She had trouble swallowing and therefore ate next to nothing, subsisting on Ensure and Manhattans sweetened with cherry brandy. She was bony and hunched. She refused most of her doctors’ advice, wouldn’t take her medications, put it all in God’s hands. She was her same affectionate self, but for three years or so she carried a mantle of pain, and when she shared her feelings on the matter, it was more often than not about how she was ready for God to take her.

  And so the heart attack that struck her one Thursday night seemed at first like another of her self-definitions, as though she was trying on death for size. She started to recover, then slipped, battling back and forth for three weeks. At one point, lying in her hospital bed, feeling a little better, she simpered and croaked to my brother Ralph, “You know how I said I was ready to die? I’m not.”

  Which was heartrending to hear, because it implied an agency she no longer possessed. But I’ll admire her for it nonetheless, her audacious concoction of fatalism, fickleness, and humor.

  Then suddenly, sooner than any of us could have expected, we—her family—were ringed around her hospital bed, watching it happen in slow hungry gasps, death pecking at her. That day seems now like a backward unreeling of night, of washed-out afternoon and blurred morning and back into black night. Nearly a dozen of us—my brothers and my sister, our spouses, our kids, my dad—were packed into an antiseptic space not big enough for any of this. All of us were punch-drunk from having been there most of the night, blurred now in a morning sun cut in slices by the slatted blinds, on the strain of strange anticipation, analyzing each gasp and the long spaces in between, measuring and measuring.

  In the middle of this, a knock at the door. A priest.

  My mother was no stranger to priests, nor to praying. As with everything else in her life, she did her praying to the extreme. She’d had my father build her a morning kneeler, at which she perched each day with her carefully handled prayer book and one of the hundreds of rosaries she had accumulated. The rosaries were everywhere, a trail of colored and opaque beads and thin metal crosses in stiffened plastic packages—on the kitchen counter, on the living room side table, on the bedroom dresser, in the room where she did her crosswords. Every spectrum of blue, pink, green, cream, ebony, and red. Every patron saint, Ambrose and Patrick and Monica and John Bosco, all the Francises, all the Lost Causes, Our Lady of Every Possible Thing, and of course the ubiquitous Mother Mary, her own patron: Madonna was her given name. They came in mail-order packages and jewelry boxes, ordered from vow-of-poverty missions and the Vatican itself. In fact—to my father’s great pride and comfort—the nurse reported checking in on my mother the night before and hearing what would become her last words: a full recitation of the rosary. Eyes closed, she’d incanted the old familiar series of Our Fathers and Hail Marys and the Glory Bes and the Mysteries—joyful, luminous, sorrowful, glorious—before slipping back into this final sleep. And she had been paid a visit the day before by a dear friend of my parents, a retired priest, bighearted and warm, who had come to give her his own final blessing.

/>   “Nice to see you,” he’d said.

  “Nice to see you,” she’d said.

  By then, it appeared, though none of us could say for sure, that when she spoke, which was in more and more infrequent flashes of consciousness, she was parroting, not engaging in actual conversation. This could be true, but I choose not to believe it, because in the final exchange I had with her, the last thing I said was “I love you,” and she answered with her eyes open and radiant: “I love you.”

  The priest who’d knocked wavered tentatively in the doorway. He seemed as nervous as he did determined. Like he was selling annuities on commission.

  I saw my dad’s face. I saw that this was exactly what he wanted, that he seemed almost spirited by the sudden appearance.

  “Yes. Please. Come . . .”

  He entered.

  “Let’s pray,” the man said earnestly.

  Ralph was directly in my line of sight. Catching my big brother’s glance in a church-type situation, even one this severe, prompted a momentary impulse to suppress laughter. (When you’ve shared a childhood bedroom with someone, stifling laughter is a basic bodily function.) I could almost see my mom’s scolding eye. We dropped our heads. Then a voice cut us short, gravity returning.

  “What is her name?”

  My dad, who sat exhausted in a chair at the bedside, answered in a choked voice, “Her name is Donna.”

  “You’re the husband?”

  “Yes.”

  The priest reached for his hand. “Let’s say a Hail Mary,” he said, and we began in unison.

  I was standing at the end of the bed and reached out and held her foot, because it was within reach. Under the rough blanket, it felt bloated and hard. My mom’s feet were supposed to be the way they’d always been, the way they always will be to me: calloused and carefree, in a pair of wooden-soled Dr. Scholl’s exercise sandals, her toenails painted red. Now they were in acrylic hospital socks with rubber no-slip zags, and despite those socks and the blanket, the foot felt cold to me.