Well, I guess we all do. Because that means...well...you know...There's a fascinating documentary on Netflix right now. "Obit." It's about the five-or-six-member department at the New York Times that is specifically dedicated to writing obituaries. Talk about a job where you face mortality every single day.
When it comes to people passing on, you now have to know how to express your sympathies in social media because that's where that news is generally shared in 2018. Indeed, my home town of Mount Vernon, New York actually has a Facebook page dedicated to mourning people who have moved on. Not to New Rochelle. To Heaven.
Somehow, I always know the right words to put down in these situations. I have participated in a few memorial services. I work from the adage that you never ever tell somebody that you "know how they feel." Oh, no, you don't because we are all unique individuals with even more unique emotions.
Other than that, I can handle this inevitability of life. I'll comfort you in any way you need. I'll write any eulogies that are needed. I'll come to any kind of memorial service.
Just don't ask me to come to a wake. With an open casket.
As much as I loved Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" when I was a kid, the above scene creeps me out to this day. Snow White "stretched out," as my father would say, in a glass casket. A scary prospect to see when you're five years old. I wondered how she could breathe in this thing.
Kids these days are coddled too much with regard to life's nasty twists and turns. Overly protected against the simplest of hardships. But, with regard to children being subjected to the harshness of funerals and all the morbid trappings, I applaud the restraint. And only wish my family had the sense to show some when I was a wee tot.
Inexplicably, I was dragged to a funeral parlor wake at the age of four. The dead guy was a distant relative who had been older than dirt. Nevertheless, I was in tow when we went to see him reposing in that mahogany box. Naturally, I was told that he was "just sleeping." So, boldly, I climbed up and tried to flip open his eyelids.
Hello, Mom, Dad. What the hell were you thinking? I didn't know any better.
And so you should have, too.
A few short years later, it was back to the same undertaker in very different circumstances. The corpse in residence was much younger and much closer to us all: my father's 45-year-old brother. I was petrified by it all. I refused to go into his house. I was so traumatized that I easily could have been shuttled off to some friend's house for an afternoon of Popeye and the Three Stooges while the mourning was conducted.
But, no. I was suited up by my father's cousin, replete with cuff links! All the while, she told me that I needed to go to the wake and the funeral to show my support for the rest of the family. How do you argue that when you're six???
I lingered in the waiting room of the funeral parlor for what was probably an eternity. I was asked repeatedly when I was going to go up and see my uncle. The dead uncle. For Pete's sake, doesn't being in the same building get me off the hook?? No, they all wanted me to go up and kneel and say my respects. And, of course, the eyelid trick was going to be completely retired.
To make this pilgrimage to the casket, I would have to walk a straight line from the door. So, as I would amble up, I would see nothing but the dead uncle "just sleeping." If I closed my eyes during the walk, I would most certainly fall over a folding chair. And, worse, a quickly folding older relative. That would not work.
I hit on a solution with another distant cousin who was about my age. He would walk in front of me all the way up to the casket, blocking my view. As soon as we arrived at our destination, he would step and...ta da. Len is at the casket.
Well, the scheme worked, but the end result was still horrible. In front of me was a young man, only slightly older than my dad. Dead. There were constant sobs behind me. The vision has stayed me for all these years. I even dream about it to this day. And it all effectively swore me off funerals and wakes for life.
Oh, I've been to a few. Both my grandparents. Parents of some friends. When I was a teenager, another uncle died. On the first night of the wake, the power went off in the funeral parlor. My father and I started looking in the backrooms to find the fuse box. I opened one door to find some guy holding a flashlight while a cosmetician combed some dead lady's hair. I ran out of there like I was one of the Little Rascals in a haunted house.
All of the aforementioned scenarios prompted the funeral decisions I made when both my parents passed away. I never saw either of them in repose. Seriously. With my dad, it was easy. I did not have a wake. I told everybody to meet us at Ferncliff Cemetery at high noon for a brief graveside service. It was like the wild, wild West and we were burying the sheriff.
When my mother died, the avoidance of seeing them in death's ugly grip was a little harder. Oh, she didn't believe in wakes, so it was very easy to respect her wishes there. But life...and bureaucracy...threw me a bit of a curveball.
I must backtrack a bit. In Mom's last year of her time here, cigarettes and her life-long refusal not to smoke them left her in a very weakened state of emphysema. Yet, it would be a broken hip and pneumonia from hospital immobility that would ultimately stop her heart on New Year's Eve. My very first act of the new year would be to sign a "Do Not Resuscitate" order. She would die "officially" about a week later.
And then precipitate that one last adventure for us together. Here comes the curveball.
In what can only be categorized as another example of "life's absurdities," I had gone down to Montefiore Hospital with the expressed intent of telling my mother that it was okay to let go and move on.
Except when I got down there, she was already gone. Gone gone. Not the metaphor. She wasn't there. The bed was empty.
Nobody at the nursing station could give me a straight answer as to where my mother had meandered off to, given that she had been in a week-long coma and not really up for excessive wandering. But they did tell me she had passed away in the middle of the night and that they had tried to reach me by phone and then by telegram.
By telegram? Was it suddenly 1938? These are snafus that I would explore legally over the next few years. But, for now, Mom was gone. And whereas I could account for her soul, I certainly had no clue where her body was. But I was assured that all was okay and that I should go ahead and commence with making the necessary arrangements.
I was a lucky only child. Neither one of my parents wanted elaborate funerals. And that was my mom's wish in capital letters. No wakes. No visitations. No gawking. I certainly...and gladly...honored their wishes.
As a result, I went to my office the next morning. There was nothing else to do. And my mother would have appreciated my efforts to maintain a "routine." And then the call came in from the undertaker.
"Er, we hate to bother you but we can't get your mother out of the Bronx?"
Huh? What?
"Somehow she wound up at the County Coroner's office and they won't release her to us until she is properly identified?"
You're kidding?
I never knew where the Bronx County morgue was. I learned that January afternoon. As I stood on a loading dock where the previous night's collection of frozen stiff homeless bums would be dumped down for their own ignoble ends, I decided that I better do this identification pretty darn quickly. And get my mother back to Westchester where she belonged.
Unlike what you may have seen in the movies, Mom was not pulled out on a slab from a refrigerator. There was no dramatic pulling back of a sheet. When you identify a body, you do so from a photograph that they show you.
As they flashed the snapshot in front of me, I admittedly looked at it very quickly. And, as long as the lady in the photo wasn't Black or Asian, that would be my mother.
It was her. Thank goodness this was some years ago and there was no prompting to take a selfie.
So, yes, I did see my mother in death. Probably for no more than five seconds. And that image was embedded in me all over again. Yep, no funeral parlors for me as long as I can avoid.
Oh, if I have to go, I go. But I'm always in the same place in that room. Way in the back. Looking anyway but at the front.
From time to time, I've thought about whether I did myself an emotional disservice by not having the funeral process for either parent. Indeed, I really didn't want my last memory of them being one where they are not alive. Instead, I have photos all over my house. Lots of dead relatives in them. But, in the pictures, they are as vibrant as the last time I saw them.
And that's the way I want it. Because this is how it works for me. Hell, it's taken me this long to watch "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" again.
Dinner last night: Lasagna.
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