Funeral Director!

My sister married Bobby and he became a funeral director. They divorced many years ago but for over twenty plus years he and I, mostly joking, went at it over the funeral business. When we would visit them he would show me around the funeral home and to tell the truth it’s a pretty fascinating place. Some folks would rather not ever think about it but the last time I checked the death rate was 100% for every person, eventually. Until Jesus comes back and interrupts this established statistic, it will continue.

His boys grew up running in and out of the casket room. Sometimes they would jump up and lay down in one of the displays. Talk about morbid! But I was forever and a day kidding Bobby about the cost and the way services were sold and all the hoopla that goes on at a time when families are at their weakest and most vulnerable. Of course he would always tell me about closure and the history and the value of saying goodbye and all of that Egyptian embalming and blah, blah, blah. I always kidded him about his handshake since it seemed to me when he got hold of my hand by practice and default he went into his funeral director sad squeeze mode and was always trying to comfort me. We had lots of laughs.

I always wanted him to show me the cheapest box they had. It was one kept out of sight, essentially a cardboard box with some felt on it, reserved for those buried by the state or the poorest in the community. He would get hostile when I told him that was exactly the box I wanted along with one of my favorite quilts. It was all in fun but we both knew we had strong feelings about all of this.

Now Bobby could tell some stories. Like the one he told about his first time to go fetch a body by himself. He had to travel over 200 miles and he had never done this duty by himself and on his way back in the middle of the night the body in the back of the hearse began to make noises. To say the least he was very unnerved. He had bad things happen at funerals and people who showed up drunk and many crazy situations that comes with being involved in this type of work.

One day we were visiting them on a weekend. He asked if I wanted to go with him Saturday morning to remove a casket from an above ground mausoleum to relocate it to a regular grave. There had been some type of family squabble and those who won wanted their loved one in the ground, dust to dust, and all of that. Of course I wanted to see this. We arrived at the cemetery and the workers were already chipping away at the face plate on the crypt.

Once they got the marble plate removed I could see the bronze casket inside. Since the plate had been cemented in there was quite a lot of residue and it appeared that the casket had been tightly squeezed into the space. They used hammers and chisels for some time but were making very little progress. Finally, one of the workers asked Bobby if he thought they might tie a rope to their pickup truck and attach it to the casket to see if they could ease it out. He agreed since he did not want to be tied up on this all day. They connected the rope and began to try to move the casket out of its resting place. It was not cooperating so they pulled harder. It finally began to lurch forward a little but was not making much progress. The driver decided perhaps they could jerk it a little and it would move. They did and it did but not without messing up the beautiful handles on the casket and scrapping it up pretty badly. Once loaded on the pickup the loved one was driven across the cemetery and let down into the freshly dug grave.

On the way home I explained to Bobby how this experience was in essence the truth behind it all. There you had your $5,000 box being jerked and towed by a pick-up truck. No fancy sermons, no sad music, just a bunch of huffing and puffing workers trying to get it done. He disagreed of course but it was what it was. I thought as we were leaving, “What a ride that old dude got today!” More later……………..