My parents and I got out of the car and walked through the glass door of the funeral home into its front office, followed by Bonnie, Jim, Brenda, and Jeremy. We were greeted by the owners, Steve and Nanci, who gently shook our hands and spoke to us in hushed tones, which is something that I think must be in the rule book for all funeral directors.
Rule 1. Fill up hearse with gas.
Rule 2. Keep bottle of Lysol in car at all times (just in case).
Rule 3. Talk quietly in case family is still in denial and does not realize yet that the person you have in your care will not be waking up any time soon.
Rule 3½. Keep Tic Tacs in pocket to provide a better quiet talking experience for both parties.
They led us all into the area beyond the office, which was dim and comfortable. The only thing that made it seem slightly awkward was all of the funeral stuff lying around. I took a seat in a leather armchair while my in-laws sat on the couch next to me. My parents paced around a little, as if wanting to be mobile for anyone who might need their assistance. In the soft light of the room, my vision seemed to blur and I looked in disbelief at all of the photo albums and catalogs of products that I would have to choose from.
From what I understood in the hum of quiet conversation going on around me, we needed to come up with a general game plan, starting with the visitation that would take place the next day. My in-laws had already picked up a few catalogs, and not wanting to seem like I wasn’t going to participate, I picked one up as well, looking at headstones while again wondering how in the hell I could possibly be here.
“So,” Steve began with a sympathetic lean to his head, “have you given any thought to how you would like the service to go? Flowers? Casket? Viewing?”
Wait. Service? You lost me already.
I think my husband and I were, unfortunately, like a lot of people. We really hadn’t talked about what we wanted, should one of us decide to make an early exit. Comfortably delusional, thinking that nothing could happen to us at a young age, we assumed that we had plenty of time to get into the “casket vs. cremation” debate and were still sizing each other up to make sure that we wanted to be entombed together.
After all, it says “till death do you part.” After that, who knows? What if, once the other person is gone, you meet someone else with a flashier plot?
Even if you have had that discussion, that doesn’t guarantee that those wishes will be carried out. I know some widows who had to sneak a tablespoon of their husband’s ashes out of the urn so they could sprinkle them where he specified, all because his mother felt sure he’d rather be collecting dust while sitting on her mantel next to her collection of porcelain dogs.
Bottom line: Final wishes are never as final as we think they are.
So not only were Brad and I the first people in our circle of friends to get married and the first to have kids, we were first to have to bury the other one. What can I say? We were ahead of our time. And since we had never really talked about our final wishes and I hadn’t gone to a lot of funerals myself, I found myself winging it at the most inopportune moment.
As I bumbled my way through the funeral planning, I kept wondering if he was looking down at me thinking, “You knew me for thirteen years, and this was the best you could come up with?”
Up until that point, I had only been to a handful of funerals and almost all of them had been in Louisiana, where my family is from. And let’s face it, those people do funerals right. I mean, you can’t beat the food. Usually there’s a band. And most of the time the mourners sit around drinking and telling embarrassing stories about the deceased. Because he can’t really do anything about it now and there’s nothing we Southerners like better than laughing at the expense of someone else…living or dead.
As had been the case at the hospital, I concentrated on making this whole experience more comfortable for everyone else. After all, it was going to be hell for me and that I couldn’t avoid. So I figured I might as well be as accommodating as possible to the rest of the family. Not only that, but I’m not a person who thrives on conflict, even though I secretly admire people who do. And at that point, I was even more scared than usual. Scared of the funeral being an epic failure. Scared of entering territory that was so uncharted for me. Scared of saying something that would make people angry with me because I was afraid of being abandoned at a time when I desperately needed support (however it might come) the most.
So as Steve gently prodded me for answers, I looked to my parents and my in-laws like a lost, helpless kitten.
“I don’t know. Mom? What do you think about the flowers? Bonnie, here’s the urn catalog so that you can look at what you’d like for your half of the ashes. Dad? Do you have any thoughts about the casket? Sure, I can find his suit somewhere in his closet.”
Just as I had been with the kids, I was fairly impressed with how the whole thing was going. Everyone seemed to feel like they had a piece of the action and as if their opinions mattered, and this made all of the parties involved as happy as they possibly could be, given the situation. And working on being the Perfect Widow gave me something else to think about—I could concentrate on my actions instead of why I was really there. I felt sure that if I could keep that up, someday I would be inducted into the Surviving Spouse Hall of Fame with a special award in Grace under Pressure.
I just didn’t realize that by trying to be that perfect, I was putting a lot of pressure on myself—pressure that would eventually need to be released.
• • •
While we were doing that planning, I had no idea that viewings were optional. I’ve been to quite a few funerals since Brad died, and most of them have had me thinking, “Why did we have a viewing?” I don’t like viewings. Never have. I know you’re thinking, “Who does?” But I’m telling you that every viewing I’ve been to has left me with a churning stomach and a light head. I don’t like to be around things that are supposed to be breathing but aren’t. Hell, I didn’t even take biology in high school because I couldn’t stand to look at a dead frog.
Why would I want to stand around and look at my dead husband?
But as we were putting Brad’s funeral together, I didn’t have a clear picture of all that was available or optional. I didn’t know I had so many choices. And since I didn’t have a clear picture of exactly what he wanted, thanks to his procrastinating nature and his impatience with paperwork, I was pretty much willing to go with the flow of whatever my parents and in-laws suggested.
I was fortunate that neither my parents nor Brad’s had the energy or the attitude to fight about what should and shouldn’t be done, even though the two couples had completely different styles. It almost seemed like, in some ways, we were planning two different funerals. Oh sure, I could have voiced my opinion about what I knew Brad would want, what he would find funny, and what was the most “him.” But since funeral planning is a group affair, with people expressing their opinions about what is right, what is “proper,” and what the other people attending might expect, very little of it had to do with me.
In reality…very little of it had to do with him.
Many relationships start changing as we enter the Widowhood, and memorial planning is often the catalyst that begins that evolution. This is because a handful of friends and family members usually start flexing their “I knew him best” muscles, and the widow has to decide whether it’s worth the fight to put him in the basketball shorts he loved for the viewing, or give in and let her mother-in-law put him in the uncomfortable suit he hasn’t worn in ten years.
Whether the widow is up for an epic battle of “hereafter wardrobe” all depends on her mental state at the time. Some of us are angry and itching for a fight, ready to smack someone over the head with a hymnal because they suggested we sing “Amazing Grace” instead of “How Great Thou Art.” Some of us are pleasers and are just trying to get through this whole thing with a minimum of
hurt feelings and possible arrests. And then there’s the group that is so medicated at this point that they’re one step away from drooling on the casket order form and trying to decide which carnival games would be the most fun at the visitation.
I tried my best to go a little “on the cheap” because I knew that’s what Brad would have wanted. This was the man who saved every cardboard box we’d ever owned because he couldn’t stand to pay for a new one on the off chance we might need to ship something. Who saved Kool-Aid containers to store and recycle every nut, bolt, and nail that came across his path. Who couldn’t stand the thought of actually paying twenty-five dollars for an oil change when it would take him a mere four hours on a Saturday to do it himself.
If it would have been at all appropriate, I would have had everyone attending wear sweats, and we would have all sat around in beanbag chairs sipping beer and eating hot wings, while playing the dozens of PlayStations I had brought in for the occasion. But since this didn’t seem possible, I decided to try to take control where I could. And not buying things we didn’t need was something I knew Brad would have appreciated.
As I looked at catalog after catalog of flowers, urns, and caskets, I could hear him in my head saying, “What are you thinking of, looking at that flower arrangement for five hundred fifty dollars? Don’t you know you’re just going to throw it away? Don’t you know you still have to feed all of these people? Don’t you know you’re going to have a hefty wine bill for the next couple of years?”
“Catherine?” my mother asked, breaking me out of the silent conversation I was having with Brad. “What would you think if instead of having a big flower arrangement from the family, we just had him holding four roses, one for you and each of the kids?”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Jim?” I heard Bonnie ask my father-in-law, as she sat on the couch and flipped through the catalog of large standing arrangements. “Why don’t we get this big flower arrangement from the family?”
At this point, Steve pulled my dad aside and spoke to him in his hushed way. My dad nodded in agreement. I would later find out that as our tastes and apparently our floral budgets were different, Steve was suggesting two separate bills—one for us and one for my in-laws. I have a feeling that that little moment saved us what could have been a grand meltdown, and it made me wonder what Steve had witnessed in his years of funeral planning to suggest it.
I’m betting it wasn’t pretty.
I had decided to go with cremation and to split Brad’s ashes between his parents and me. No one asked me to do it…it just seemed like the right thing to do. Brad loved Colorado, but he considered Pennsylvania home. I also figured that if his family had their own ashes, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting their approval for what I wanted to do with my half.
Ah, yes. My sneaky widow ways.
Because I was planning on burying my half, I needed an urn, and assuming that his parents were planning on doing the same, they needed one of their own. So I sat there at the ripe old age of thirty-one looking at hideous Japanese urns that would probably cause Brad to haunt me for the rest of my days if I bought one. I put so much pressure on myself to find just the “right thing” that was so “him”…not really thinking about the fact that we were going to bury it and no one would ever really see it. Truly…I could have stuck him in a pickle jar and probably no one would have known.
“Do you have any urns with the Steelers logo on them?” my brother-in-law suddenly asked Steve, as my parents and I looked for the plainest urn we could find for my half of the ashes. “Or something in the shape of a football?”
“Can’t you just drink a bottle of Bud Light and put him in that?” I blurted out before I could really think it through.
This comment was met with silence and a wide-eyed stare from everyone in the room.
“This one is pretty,” my mother-in-law said, turning back to the catalog in her lap. “This one with the road etched in it. Brad loved to drive on those windy roads back home.”
I bit my tongue before I started recounting all of the havoc that he and his buddies had created way back when on those country roads. How he wore holes in the tires of his Trans Am by coming to a dead stop while going eighty miles an hour so he wouldn’t miss a turn. How he would dodge the deer in the road like he was playing a life-sized video game.
How we once went “parking” in a field off an old dirt road because he had convinced me that it had the most fireflies.
All of those images flashed through my mind as I nodded to her.
“It’s perfect,” I said.
It was as we were looking at options for caskets that that surreal “I can’t believe I’m here” feeling washed over me once again. Caskets were what old people wore. They were for people who had lived their lives. They weren’t for people who were just getting started. They weren’t for thirty-four-year-old men who were just on their way to work. They weren’t for young fathers or older brothers. They weren’t supposed to be for anyone I knew.
What in the heck were we doing there?
Brad wouldn’t want a casket! Caskets are clunky and made you look fat. And since I’d decided to have him cremated, I really didn’t think that he cared at that point how plush the interior lining was or how the shinier chrome would make him look a little more well-to-do for the viewing. If anything, he might have liked something a little more streamlined with a spoiler (this was the man who once wanted to lower my minivan and put sport wheels on it). But unfortunately that wasn’t an option.
“You know, we do have one other option,” said Steve, seeing me struggle and trying his best to be helpful. “You can rent the casket for the viewing instead of purchasing one.”
My ears perked up. Renting a casket? This was brilliant! We’d use the casket for a few hours and then someone would vacuum it, spray in some Febreze to get rid of that used formaldehyde smell, and prepare it for the next “customer.” It was like the Hertz of funeral services!
I was one step away from rifling through my purse to see if I had a coupon.
We finished with all of the decisions and paid the man, my dad graciously putting the bulk of the bill (except the extraneous flowers and my in-law’s urn choice) on his credit card. I made a deal with him that I would pay him back later, once my financial situation had been somewhat straightened out, a promise he waved away as if he was used to putting thousands of dollars in funeral services on his MasterCard.
We left the funeral home, my in-laws and my family going our separate ways. Not realizing that when they flew out they would be attending a funeral, my in-laws left to find appropriate dark-washed attire, and my parents and I headed home to pay the babysitter and make sure she hadn’t been tied to a tree in the time that we had been gone.
Steve and Nanci sent us out the door with two enormous picture frames, suggesting that we put together collages of Brad’s life for guests to look at when they arrived at the viewing the next night and the funeral the day following. Now, I know there are some widows who pored over pictures of their husbands the moment each of them took their last breath. But I was not one of them. I was more than happy to hand over albums and old loose pictures to some creative, scrapbooking family friends and leave them huddled in my dining room while they laughed and cried at pictures of Brad from toddlerhood to fatherhood.
But I couldn’t help them. And I felt so guilty about it. What kind of a woman can’t look at pictures of the man she loves right after he dies? What kind of woman looks down at the floor as she passes the pictures in the hall of him holding each one of his children? What kind of woman doesn’t download the last pictures she’s taken of her husband off her camera so that she can look at them on the computer…and then delete them to make more room for the future?
That would be me. Over here.
Unfortunately, memorial planning does not really care how painful these things are for you. Its
main job is to kick-start the grieving process. Things need to be done now or the food in the fridge will start to smell bad and your extended family will never leave.
And for some reason that evening, as our friends pasted pictures into those frames that were supposed to tell the story of Brad’s life but didn’t even come close, my mother kept gently asking me over and over again for the most current pictures of him. I had a suspicion that she was keeping something from me because I knew she wouldn’t be nagging me about them unless she really needed them. But I was so frustrated that she kept requesting this from me that I finally broke what was, up until then, my Perfect Widow form, and I blew up.
I had been surrounded by people for days, making conversation I didn’t want to make, but it would have been frowned upon if I didn’t. I had smiled and nodded so much that my cheeks were sore and I felt like the Perfect Widow bobblehead doll. I had just been my most accommodating at the funeral home, agreeing to suggestions I didn’t understand, holding my tongue about things I knew would rock the boat, and paying thousands of dollars for a party Brad wouldn’t even be able to attend.
I had had enough.
“Why? Why do you need that now? I don’t want to look at them. I don’t even want to look near them. Why can’t you just leave it alone?”
Her eyes watered. “Because Steve needs them to make sure he makes Brad look like himself for the visitation,” she said.
I suddenly realized that if I didn’t want my husband to look like Marilyn Manson lying there in his casket, I’d better suck it up and start flipping through some pictures.
Picking up our digital camera, I started viewing the photos that were still stored on it. Brad had given it to me just three weeks before for my birthday, and I had taken tons of pictures of him and the kids as I tried to figure out how to use it, pictures I wouldn’t download and delete until months later because I couldn’t stand the thought that I would never take another picture of him. There he was. Smiling. Laughing. Holding the kids. Going about his life with no idea of what was about to happen next.
Confessions of a Mediocre Widow Page 6