When my son Michael was six years old, a family a few streets over from us was in the process of moving to another house in town. The father of the household owned several handguns and stored them in his basement in square milk crates. The family had a seven-year-old boy, and he and his nine-year-old cousin were assisting in the move by carrying small items into waiting pickup trucks. The two little guys came across the container of guns, and like most inquisitive little boys, each armed himself for a make-believe shoot-out. The nine-year-old shot his cousin in the forehead, just above the left eye, with a .38 caliber police special that should not have been loaded. The incident caused lifelong resentment among family members, and I’m sure the boy who lived will never forget the accident.
As I prepared the seven-year-old for burial, I saw many things that reminded me of my own son. The dirty fingernails from a hard day of playing in the dirt; scrapes on both knees, perhaps from falling off of a bicycle or scooter; and mussed, sweaty, and unruly blonde hair. I glanced over at the department store bag that contained the boy’s burial clothing—new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles underwear and the cutest little suit and tie—items that my own son sometimes wore. This silent little fellow lying on the preparation room table required little restoration for his wound. I inserted a ball of mortuary wax about the size of jawbreaker into the almost perfectly round bullet hole, and then smoothed and feathered it into the natural skin of his forehead. The exit wound in the rear of head was more extensive, but I tightly sewed together the ragged skin of the scalp. When I placed the little guy in his casket, I dropped his head deep into the casket pillow to hide the ugly exit wound.
After an experience such as this one, I hid my only handgun in the trunk of my car, under the spare tire. I hid it so well that when I traded in that particular car for a new one a few years later the gun inadvertently went with the car.
I suppose many families are like ours, not realizing the everyday dangers that can lead to death. Once I realized another danger when I met with an extremely distraught husband and father to arrange for the funerals of his wife and four-year-old daughter. The evening before, the gentleman’s wife was relaxing in the bathtub and his daughter peeled off her clothes to get in the tub too. In her haste to climb into the tub, the girl snagged a plugged-in blow-dryer with her foot, and the appliance splashed into the water, electrocuting both mother and daughter.
In my house, we always had a plugged-in blow-dryer resting on the countertop in the bathroom. When my own daughter was about the same age, she sometimes took a bath with my wife. After I talked with the grieving father, I immediately told my wife to unplug our blow-dryer and put it in the vanity cabinet.
This particular case was the first time I was asked to place a mother and her child together in the same casket. I happened to think that it was a nice touch, and I was supportive of the husband. The cemetery, however, was not amused. The cemetery superintendent had wanted to sell the husband two graves, not one. After some negotiation, I convinced the cemetery sexton to go along with the husband. It was not a particularly hard sell—the sexton had a daughter about the same age, so he understood. Since this experience, I have placed a child and parent in the same casket several times.
No matter how old the child is, the grieving is painful. A twenty-four-year-old recent college graduate’s car slid on a rain-soaked country road and collided with a signpost. Attached to the post was a square piece of yellow steel with the S-curve warning emblazoned on it. The square was just substantial enough to blast through the windshield and cut into the young man’s forehead. He died instantly, with tremendous damage to his face. The car then careened into a ravine, violently tossing the defenseless occupant to and fro inside and causing even more damage to his lifeless body. When I first saw him, the decedent was broken and torn from nearly head to toe, which made for a very time-consuming restoration.
Following the embalming, I encased his limbs in plastic to ensure against leakage, and then I dressed the entire body in a “union suit,” a one-piece, form-fitting, thick-ply plastic garment that covers the deceased from neck to toes. After filling in the traumatic facial and scalp defects with wax, I then glued those areas and allowed them to dry. Because there were so many lacerations, this was a three-hour job then followed by cosmetics and insertion of hair from the back of the head into a wax scalp bed.
After dressing the body and placing him in the casket, I called his parents to see whether they wanted a private viewing to approve of my efforts. They approached their dead son’s casket on tiptoes, as if careful not to wake him, and wearing that familiar look of devastation that I have witnessed far too many times. As they neared, their output of tears increased—but strangely enough, there was not a howl or a wail or a scream or a sob. The emotional outbursts I had been expecting did not come. Instead, both stood hand in hand in front of the casket and stroked their son’s hair and cheeks.
I cautioned the mother that his cheeks were freshly waxed and had cosmetics on them, but she didn’t heed my warning and continued to stroke her son, eventually rubbing off a lot of my handiwork. She then turned to me and declared that she wanted to see his injuries firsthand. She demanded that I remove the cosmetics and the wax so that she could see for herself the trauma that had caused his death.
At first I was rather irate at such a notion. However, that feeling left me when I remembered that this was her child. How can you say no to the mother who carried him in her body, nourished him at her bosom, changed countless dirty diapers, and endured so many sacrifices and setbacks? If she wished to see what had caused his demise, then so be it.
I excused myself from the chapel and gathered up paper towels and a spatula to begin to undo what I had thought was a triumphant restoration. I slowly began to peel off the natural-looking cosmetics and wax, soon revealing a forehead with a wide gash from the right eyebrow upward into the hairline. When I uncovered the right cheek the result of jagged windshield glass against skin became visible.
After a few more moments, lucky for me, the mother asked me to stop. She and her husband had seen enough. Deep down, I was glad that I would be able to salvage some of my previous efforts. But then I was stunned when the mother told me that she was considering leaving her son unrestored for all to see, especially his friends, so that they might witness the damage that can take place as a result of careless, alcohol-impaired driving.
We sometimes assume that a mother’s grief at losing a middle-aged child might be a bit less because an adult child has at least experienced some of what life has to offer. Well, not always. I sat down several years ago with a wealthy seventy-five-year-old widow to arrange services for her fifty-six-year-old son, who was an alcoholic. He had been married and divorced three times, had no children, and was the black sheep of his mother’s well-to-do and socially prominent family. The woman was in complete denial about her late son’s alcoholism and proclaimed that his liver failure was due to other circumstances. After arranging for an evening visitation, a funeral mass the next day, and selecting an expensive solid copper casket, she revealed that I should prepare for a large crowd consisting only of society’s upper crust.
She was correct. At the visitation, the parking lot began to swell with many Cadillacs, Mercedes-Benzes, and even a Bentley or two. Society’s best had indeed arrived to pay their respects to a deceased man whom everyone had assumed to be a productive manager with his family’s very successful insurance business. In reality, according to associates of the deceased, the gentleman had spent his days in bars, drinking with unsavory associates, and his nights in the furnished condo his family provided.
The moment of truth occurred when some of his alcoholic buddies made their way toward the casket, shook hands with the mother, and remarked within earshot of her friends, “Too bad about Jim, but what did you expect? He was a drunk, just like us.” The mother attempted to save face: “You must be thinking of someone else.” Surely her momentary embarrassment must have been eclipsed only by the shame she
endured upon her next visit to the country club.
Perhaps the most enraging and heart-wrenching case was that of a two-year-old child whose parents were estranged. The child had been in the care of his mother and her new boyfriend, who described the toddler’s death as an accident. When I called the medical examiner’s office to arrange for the release of the body, the morgue secretary told me that the coroner had ordered an autopsy and was investigating the case as a homicide.
As I placed the cute little scamp on the preparation room table, I immediately recognized the same signs of abuse that I have unfortunately observed far too many times—facial bruising; bruises on each arm that matched the shape of adult fingertips; and two telling, perfectly round bruise outlines on the chest—about the size of quarters and matching the buttons you might see on a child’s jumper or bib overalls.
I covered the bruises with makeup and placed the child in a thirty-six-inch white fiberglass casket, larger than necessary to accommodate the toys and trinkets I knew his family would place inside with him. I awaited the family’s arrival. The father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and others showed up en masse, and the touching, familiar cries began. The mother soon arrived with her boyfriend, and the crowd in the chapel parted to allow her access to her deceased son. All the while, those in attendance, myself included, studied her to gauge her reaction. She stood over her child and began speaking to him, asking him why he had to die and saying she was so sorry he had to be in this place. Her boyfriend never left her side and followed her around like a lost puppy.
When I was alone with the mother for a few moments, she asked me why there were cosmetics on her son’s face. When I explained that I had needed to cover the bruising, she seemed to be astonished. She attempted to explain what had happened: she was supposedly at the store with her mother while her boyfriend was home alone with her child. On her return, she found the ambulance in her driveway and saw her son being rushed outside. He had supposedly fallen over backward from a chair onto a carpeted floor. Then the story changed to a hardwood floor. Then it changed again. She didn’t really know what had happened, because she was in the bathroom at the time, not out shopping at all.
I’m no detective, but it quickly became obvious that she was covering up for her boyfriend. I was puzzled as to why the two were even allowed on the street, since any child’s home death is always suspected as a possible murder. I had to commend the child’s father for his restraint. I was tempted to allow my old-school neighborhood justice to kick in; take the boyfriend out to the garage; beat him senseless with a baseball bat; and explain to the investigating authorities, “He must have fallen down on the garage floor.” But the coward was eventually taken into custody, and from what I heard later, he definitely received his fair reward in prison. Inmates have children too, and they usually despise child killers.
A divorced forty-five-year-old woman wailed and sobbed over the death of her twenty-two-year-old daughter, the victim of an auto accident. The girl had been riding with an inebriated male friend who ran the car off the roadway and into a strand of trees. The impact ejected both from the vehicle. The male was thrown clear and landed softly in the confines of a farmer’s freshly plowed field. But the girl flipped in midair and was hurled back-first into a century-old tree trunk. The trajectory and speed of impact tore her heart from its moorings and resulted in her death approximately ninety seconds later.
Except for a few minor cuts on her face from the windshield, the twenty-two-year-old was very viewable. After filling the cuts with wax, followed by some Mary Kay cosmetics, she was easily restored to her former appearance. When I escorted her mother into the funeral home chapel, I could feel her knees buckling and her whole body begin to tremble. She asked for a chair so that she might sit in front of her daughter’s casket. But after a few moments of silence, she began what sounded like a chant. She recited, “She’s gonna get up; she’s gonna get up,” over and over, sometimes increasing in volume, as if to summon the Lord above to again breathe life into her reposing daughter.
CHAPTER TEN
The National Funeral Directors Association estimates the average funeral bill at nearly $8,000, including funeral services; a steel casket; a burial vault; and certain other items, such as cemetery charges, the obituary, and flowers. Obviously, when limited services are performed or when the customer selects direct cremation, the cost is much lower. But it turns out that a funeral bill is the third largest lump-sum expense a consumer faces in life: you buy a house, you buy a car, and you get stuck with a funeral bill.
Most consumers have a pretty good idea of what they should pay for a home, and most of us purchase cars more often than we arrange for a funeral, so we are fairly knowledgeable about new vehicle prices. So why don’t consumers know anything at all about funeral prices? Because we do not want to consider the death of our loved ones. We abhor the thought and attempt to block it out of our minds. “We never discussed death in our family” and “We just never talked about such things”—those are refrains I have heard so many times over the years when I sit down with a family to make funeral arrangements. We are afraid of death and deny it in our society.
After I published my first book, I contacted AARP: The Magazine to inquire about running an advertisement to sell my book to their members and readers. The advertising manager told me that the magazine published no advertising relating to death in any manner. I said perhaps “he had his head in the sand” by denying the inevitable. He said the magazine desired advertising that was positive for seniors and that promoting a book about death and end-of-life issues would be too much of a downer for senior readers.
Whether or not it’s a downer, at some point we all have to come to terms with what we’re going to do with our loved ones.
IT’S NOT A COFFIN
Burying a dead human body deep in the ground has always been the best way to rid society of a potentially serious physical and psychological health hazard. Leaving it outdoors to be ravaged by nature’s elements seems repulsive and disrespectful to us. The strong stench, the bloating, the rapid liquefaction, the insect and small animal activity, the rampant bacterial growth, and the possibility of disease have all moved us to dispose of our dead as quickly and efficiently as possible. That usually means depositing the body either several feet beneath the earth’s surface or in a tightly sealed, above-ground crypt.
The deceased loved one is the focal point of any funeral, yet much attention is given to the stately steel or wooden container where the deceased is reposing. In most cases, the deceased is nattily attired and posed as if sleeping in a bedlike box designed to look attractive and comfortable. That bedlike box is a casket, not a coffin.
In the death-care field, we distinguish between the terms coffin and casket. To us, a coffin is a wooden box that is wide at the shoulders and narrow at the hips, a style last used in the 1930s. Count Dracula slept in a coffin, and cabinetmakers in the Wild West made coffins. To a funeral director, the term coffin is as outdated and inappropriate as referring to an automobile as a horseless carriage.
Today’s caskets are mostly the same design as in the l930s, but they are usually constructed of sheet metal and designed to emulate the look of costly, handcrafted hardwood caskets. An abundance of steel forging and automobile manufacturing techniques have made their way into casket making. Current innovations include more ornate interiors, pinstripes, and special corner applications for the exterior, but the rectangular box of steel, copper, bronze, or hardwood we are familiar with today has not changed very drastically over the past seventy years.
The casket, then, can be constructed of the most rustic materials or the most expensive metals—and anything in between. Just like cars, casket offerings start out as basic squares with few frills and can become elaborately crafted units with velvet interiors and leather-wrapped carrying handles.
TYPICAL RETAIL PRICE RANGES OF CASKETS
Cloth-covered wood $300–$500
20-gauge steel (non-sealer) $500–
$995
18-gauge steel (sealer) $1,200–$3,800
16-gauge steel (sealer) $3,900–$6,500
Stainless steel (sealer) $3,500–$7,000
Solid copper (sealer) $4,400–$9,500
Solid bronze (sealer) $4,500–$17,000
Solid bronze with 14-carat gold plating $29,000–$35,000
TYPICAL RETAIL PRICE RANGES OF WOOD CASKETS
Selected hardwood veneers $1,600–$3,400
Solid pecan $3,200–$3,800
Solid maple $3,200–$5,000
Solid oak $2,900–$5,000
Solid cherry $3,500–$7,500
Solid mahogany $7,500–$9,500
The cheapest caskets are made of thick cardboard or particleboard and covered with doeskin. Their interiors are fitted with low-grade crepe and cotton wadding, with correspondingly inexpensive pillows. Such caskets are used for both in-ground burials and pre-cremation viewings. They are sometimes referred to as paupers’ caskets, as some funeral homes also use them for indigent decedents when they expect little or no payment.
Cloth-covered wood is the next step up, with particleboard covered in blue-, gray-, or burgundy-embossed cloth. The interiors of these are also inexpensive, and sometimes they have a filler of wood shavings in lieu of bedding, which is covered by the interior material. Still featured in funeral homes’ display rooms, they serve a useful purpose—they are readily burnable when cremation follows a visitation and they look so cheap that families turn away in horror and instantly upgrade to more expensive models.
The next category of caskets is twenty-gauge steel. Gauges range from twenty, the thinnest, to eighteen and sixteen, the thickest and therefore the most expensive. All twenty-gauge caskets are virtually shaped the same but are available in a variety of exterior and interior colors. As prices rise, trim options increase as well—two-tone color schemes, better interior materials, and even swing bar handles on the outside.
Does This Mean You'll See Me Naked? Page 9