I was losing my humor.
“I always thought it looked deep,” Dad said.
“It’s deep,” Paul confirmed. He stepped toward the casket and set the edge of his palm against the side, about two thirds of the way up. “This is about where the box part usually ends. Then the lid is curved.”
We’d been so careful to make sure the box was wide enough to accommodate the span of my bent elbows, but we’d given little thought to its depth. And it occurred to me then that the reason this had not registered was that I’d never climbed inside it. If I’d done so, I probably would have realized just how deep down in the container I lay. On my back, I am not even a foot high. But really—who thinks about these things?
I’d recently learned that John Donne, the English poet, priest, and semi-weirdo, slept in his own coffin in an attempt to embrace and contextualize his mortality. I’d found myself moving through something like a no-man’s-land, with this coffin as a seemingly brazen, outward confrontation with mortality, even as I harbored a private internal resistance to that confrontation. It was nearly finished, yet I still couldn’t imagine my place inside it.
Paul’s call continued. He nodded, listening, then gestured to me to write some numbers down. “Thirty wide, yeah. Eighty long. And twenty-two and a quarter deep. Hmmm. What about a steel vault?”
They chatted a moment more, then ended the call.
“She’s going to get some more information and call me back,” Paul said.
Turning back to the casket, he explained that our problem was compounded by the fact that our version was rectangular, with a flat top, while commercial caskets have curved tops. So the vaults are arched, meaning the low end of the arch is even lower than the twenty-two-and-a-quarter-inch peak.
Paul looked at the lid. “I wonder if you could set it upside down, with the high part facing in.”
Dad grimaced. Paul continued to stare at the box. “You know what else?” He placed his hand on the top edge. “You could cut it down.”
I was feeling weak in the knees. The idea of taking a saw to this thing made me queasy. But I was already thinking about the practical reality: the chances of running a saw cut all the way around and having it meet back up with its starting point were nil. I already knew we had some inequalities in the dimensions. Making such a radical adjustment now was a recipe for disaster.
“Or,” Paul said, “you could always be cremated.” He grinned, but not in his joking manner. This was something closer to salesmanship.
“Gina would never go for that,” I said. An avid watcher of Forensic Files, she has a distinct fixation on the possibility that one day my body may need to be exhumed. Plus, it would prove that I was wrong about all this.
His phone chirped. He answered. “Hey, Bob.” It was the owner. Paul listened and nodded, asking questions, giving the measurements again, shaking his head, asking more questions. Finally, he turned on the speakerphone.
The disembodied voice of Bob informed us that the box we’d built would fit inside a “composition vault,” which is slightly larger than a basic concrete vault.
“Does it cost more?” I asked.
“Two hundred dollars more—it’s thirteen hundred and ninety-five dollars,” Paul said.
I looked at my dad. “So we made a two-hundred-dollar mistake.”
“Basically, yeah.”
Paul turned off the speaker, bantered with Bob, thanked him, and hung up.
“So,” I asked, “let’s say I live another forty years. How do we know these dimensions will still be standard?”
“This is a conservative industry. We don’t change,” Paul said.
Not for the first time, I took selfish comfort in the fact that whatever was wrong with this casket will not be my problem in the moment when it really matters. If the box doesn’t fit in the vault, if the lid has warped, if the bottom falls out, I will be in no condition to deal with it. For some reason, in these musings, I always assume Gina will be the one managing the arrangements, and I feel a complicated mix of comfort—there’s no one I’d trust more—but also an awareness of the irony that it was our mutual ongoing dispute that led to this coffin in the first place, and that she’d be dealing with its ultimate consequence. In a way, I could say I’d won.
26: WAREHOUSE
* * *
Dad and I set off the next morning for Amish country, looking for handles. Paul had assured us that if we dropped in at the small woodworking factory that supplied his funeral home with most of its caskets, the owner—a man who went by the name of Junior Yoder—would probably furnish us with a pair of handles for the sides. “Just tell him I sent you,” Paul had said.
I’d ordered all the casket hardware way back at the beginning of the process, including the brackets for the side handles. The cardboard delivery box from the woodworking mail-order company had sat on the floor of Dad’s workshop, flaps open, with many of the pieces still in their individual plastic packaging, the box filling with dust throughout the process. Now, resting in the console between the two front seats of my dad’s SUV, was one of the hinged brackets. We hoped to obtain a pair of long wooden rails that would fit in its opening.
Ohio is home to nearly seventy thousand Amish people, the largest concentration in the United States. Most live in rural Holmes County, about an hour south of Akron, an area my dad and I had visited together many times. We knew our way around fairly well, and we also knew not to be surprised when we found ourselves lost, following a road that we thought was the right road, even as it led us to a dead end. Faced with the conundrum of which way to turn, we collaboratively decided that left felt most correct, and by “collaboratively,” I mean I suggested going right and Dad was sure we should go left. We did. Soon, passing whitewashed houses, clotheslines flapping with blue shirts and trousers, and farm fields being plowed by teams of horses, we found our way to the little town of Dundee. We ate lunch in a general store, then headed up the road to the Behalt Casket Company. Like almost every authentic commercial venture I’d ever encountered in Amish country, this cluster of buildings was neat and unadorned.
We parked—the only car in the lot—and entered through the front door. The big office was sparse and entirely undecorated, but it was fronted by a long, substantial front desk and counter paneled in rich-looking wood. A woman sitting behind it, dressed in an apron and white bonnet, was talking on the telephone. She smiled and held up a finger, signaling us to wait. Dad rested his hand on the counter, admiring it.
The woman finished her call and turned her attention to us. “Well, hello. How can I help you?”
“We’re here to see Junior Yoder,” I said. “We’re friends of Paul Hummel.”
“Oh,” she said. “Junior’s off today.”
I explained what we’d come for, and she got back on her phone and asked someone named Miriam to come down to see us.
“This is beautiful work,” my dad said, sliding his hand across the counter. “Quarter-sawn oak?”
“Yes,” the woman replied. “All quarter-sawn oak. Made right here.”
Soon a young woman, also in an apron and head cap, appeared in the doorway at the end of the counter. “Hello,” she said quietly. “I’m Miriam. Junior’s not here today. How can I help you?”
“Well,” I said, “we’re building a casket. And we’re hoping to find a set of handles, six feet, that will fit this.” I offered her the bracket.
She looked at it, turning it over slowly in her hands, inspecting the opening. “Oh. Well. We don’t usually . . .” She looked to the woman at the counter.
“Maybe someone upstairs would know?” the woman said.
Miriam nodded and went back through the door. Beyond its opening, I could see the beginning of a warehouse, shelves stacked with caskets. I turned to the woman. “Do you think we could look around while we’re waiting?”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “Help yourself.”
My father and I passed through the doorway and entered a vast warehouse. We we
re the only ones present. It was quiet and dimly lit. An open garage bay at the far end offered a distant view of the overcast spring sky. The shelves I’d seen were stacked with steel caskets, wrapped in clear plastic with labels on the ends. To our left were long, deep rows, like library shelves, of wooden caskets stored on their ends, countless dozens, one after another after another.
We drifted toward them and entered one of the rows, moving through the shadowy corridor, deeper and deeper, marveling at the variations and the workmanship, the glossy finishes, the rich tones of wood—brown, red, blond.
“How do they do a curve like this?” my dad said, running his hand admiringly across the lid of one of the upended boxes.
“I don’t know,” I said. “How do they do any of this?”
We completed one row and entered another. This was the first time I’d seen caskets outside the funeral process—the choosing, the viewing, the service, the cemetery. We were experiencing them as products in a warehouse, in storage, waiting to be ordered and shipped, as though they were mass-produced filing cabinets or truck bumpers. And yet despite the emotionally neutral setting, they exuded an unexpectedly deep tone of humanity. First, in their craft. I don’t know how much automation was part of their manufacturing process, but there was an immediate sense of quality and detail that can be attributed only to careful handwork. Dad and I had been working on a single box for some three years, off and on, and I knew how much labor and intricacy had been involved. Each one of these had been built by someone. Each had been designed, joined, sanded, buffed.
More so, however, was the sense of what they would become, the fact that each of these—and there were more than I could count—would be, for a brief yet intense period, the focal point of some family’s grief, and that the casket itself was not such a throwaway thing. Each of these would be chosen individually and would provide a vessel—maybe for comfort, maybe for pain, probably for both.
Down one of the rows, we came across a small coffin, proportioned and finished like the others, but unmistakably for a baby. My father and I looked at it for a long moment.
In another opening, we encountered a box laid down in position on a rolling cart.
This one was different—handsome but more rustic. It was a basic rectangle with a flat top and a matte finish. Instead of being a hinged lid, the top was a joined plank affixed with wooden pegs.
“I like this one,” my father said, his eyes brightening. “This is really neat. This is what I want to be buried in.”
He bent down and started working one of the pegs loose. The cart began to roll and I quickly stepped in front of it, stopping it with my palms before it crashed into the domino row of caskets stacked just beyond. Undaunted, Dad removed the pegs and pulled up the lid to peek inside. It was bare, not all frilly and puffy like the usual commercial casket. Just a simple box, yet with the same attitude of craft and attention as the others.
I heard footsteps approaching the stairs above us.
“Ooh.” Dad fumbled to get the lid back into place and started working the pegs back in, but he didn’t have it on right, and he hurriedly tried to jar it into place. “Help!” he hissed through a half-grin/half-grimace.
I leaned down and worked one corner while he worked another. His ball cap fell off his head, tumbling across the lid and onto the floor. The lid slipped back into place. I grabbed the cap and tossed it to him. He mashed it onto his head, adjusted it, and we exited the row of caskets just as Miriam was coming off the staircase, carrying a long pair of oval-shaped unfinished red oak rods.
“These are the ones we use on most of our caskets,” she said. “They look like they’ll fit in your bracket.”
We followed her back into the office area. I tried the bracket on one of the bars, and it fit just fine. Miriam conferred with the woman behind the counter, who said we could buy the pair for forty dollars. This was far less than the price my dad had gotten previously from a local lumberyard.
I thanked them and paid, and off we went, back up the broken road, past the long furrowed fields and the “Eggs for Sale” signs, to the highway and home.
27: EVERYTHING LINGERS
* * *
I thought the death of my mother, and the death of my friend, and the death in some ways of my youth, would teach me something. In fact, I expected it. I believe in the ability of the mind to order things. I believe in it the way some people believe in ghosts.
What seems truest to me now is that death is a shattering. Grief is the chaos of wreckage. Only life can find the pattern, and only in its own sweet time. What I remember from the long season of loss was wanting each day to pass as quickly as possible. To get beyond it. I guess I missed the fact that the by-product of this wish was for my own life to rush by. I don’t think I’ll ever be beyond it. It just becomes part of the pattern.
As I thought about the long process of working on the casket, which was now a coat of finish away from being done, I returned to the memory of the long summer afternoon I’d spent alone in my dad’s barn. John had been gone for a month, my mom had been gone for a year, my shoulder hurt from the sanding, and my mind roamed free.
Life is short.
That phrase had kept recurring, always in John’s voice, always in the way he’d said it that night he’d told me we were going to New York together.
I’d resisted it because it was so trite and obvious and seemed to offer no new insight. It was the kind of statement he and I would have rejected, expecting something better. But it kept coming back. And deep into that afternoon in the barn, as “Life is short” played and replayed—a mantra—it began to spawn its own hard truth. Mainly that death wasn’t interested in teaching me anything. It could only unlock what was already inside. That time is not for wasting, but restlessness does not enhance it. That old friends make best friends. That wisdom is nothing more than a lifetime of mistakes made. That the longer we live, the less certain we are of anything, especially our own selves. That staring into the silence, thinking a voice will speak back to me, is really just an exercise in staring into the silence. And that depriving myself of certain songs because they hurt too much doesn’t make them hurt less.
A long spell of not listening to Radiohead, the Clash, certain Wilco albums, most of Ryan Adams’s catalog, and the song “Kung Fu Fighting” (don’t ask) as some sort of grief-avoidance strategy was just plain self-depravation. My mother’s advice—Don’t become lonely—helps me understand that sadness is a better companion than it gets credit for. So I started listening again, allowing the questions offered by the songs we’d shared.
Why, I wonder, is my heart full of holes?
Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?
And you may ask yourself—well, how did I get here?
One of the last things John gave me was the introduction to a new band whose CD sat next to the recliner where he spent the final weeks of his life. Parquet Courts, the group was called. I hadn’t heard of them. But I went out and got the record, and I liked it, in part because they embodied the myth of New York City that John and I had so willingly bought into—a Brooklyn band, clumsy and clever, full of downtown affectation and earnest hyperactivity—but mostly because I admired John’s continued passion for discovery even as his breath was failing. He could still teach me things. Parquet Courts would prove, in the short time that followed, to be prolific in a never-not-working sort of way. Under three years following John’s death, they released two more full-length albums, an EP, and two additional records under their alter ego, Parkay Quarts. In the song “Berlin Got Blurry” from their 2016 album, Human Performance, singer Andrew Savage intones a line that seems delivered straight from John in the sort of communication I still craved from him:
Nothing lasts, but nearly everything lingers in life.
* * *
If John remained a constellation of songs and ideas, my mother remained a constellation of artifacts, her presence defined by her countless rosaries and novena candles, by he
r crossword books and closets full of sweaters and skirts. For a very long time after her death, one year, two years, this was mostly how I reconnected to her—not by spiritual residue but by literal touch, thumbing the green-jeweled golden cross of the St. Patrick’s rosary I kept close by in my writing space, pulling down a volume of her OED, looking up words I liked to imagine she had left just for me, using the leftover prayer cards from her funeral as my bookmarks. My dad kept her wedding ring in a little cup in the room where she said her morning prayers, and sometimes I went in there and slipped it onto my pinkie just to feel it. One day when I was visiting, I spotted the old copy of Nine Stories on a bookshelf and asked Dad if I might keep it. He pulled it down and gave it to me.
These things kept her literal. They kept her exact. They kept her from fading. The words and stories in the books would always be the same. The rosary would always have its five decades, each bead hard and round. It was the memories that were more troublesome, the way they slipped around and changed shapes. I got things wrong and out of place. For a long time, I was stuck only on the misery of her final years, her defeated, deflated self, and this became the story of her in my mind. The rest of her essence was somewhere in the corners. Maybe this was a way of protecting myself from the things I missed the most. Maybe it was a way of blaming her for dying. Eventually, though—in great part through those ongoing Sunday-dinner conversations with my father—the rest of her began finding its way back.
“Except for those last couple of years, we had a whole lot of fun,” he said one night as we sat with our Manhattans at the kitchen table, drawing out the word “whole” as though filling it up with everything that I’d forgotten belonged there.
In time, missing pieces did work their way back in. I remembered the school lunches she used to pack for me in a brown paper bag with my name on the front in her schoolteacher’s cursive, salami and cheese on white bread with yellow mustard, wrapped in waxed paper, and a snack-size bag of taco-flavored Doritos. I remembered a long car trip when she sat in the passenger seat reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s and came across Holly Golightly’s line “Light me a cigarette, darling,” the way she lifted her head midsentence to read it aloud with such delicious aplomb that I’m certain, had the car not been moving with such speed and purpose, she would have insisted we stop so she could purchase a pack of Picayunes and try it on for size. I remembered her ravenous laughter as we watched Inspector Clouseau blundering across the evening TV screen, or Steve Martin and Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live skit. I remembered the way she used to mimic David Byrne’s hand-chopping motion from Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” video. I remembered the New Year’s Day afternoon when I accompanied my parents to the bar where they’d celebrated the previous night so she could retrieve a lost earring, how the owner welcomed them with flowing beard and burly arms and poured me a 7UP with a maraschino cherry for free.
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