DIATRIBE
This Isn’t About My Mother
By Kent Doyle
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Illustration by Ira Blutrech
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Let’s get the guilt trip out of the way up front. I loved my mother, and quite a bit of the time I liked her. She was president of the PTA and a Den Mother. She wasn’t a drunk or an addict, and far as I can remember she never struck me in anger. Fifteen years of expensive Freudian analysis never inspired me to admit wanting to have sex with her. But this column has little to do with my mother and everything to do with her funeral. She died three years ago, and hers was the only burial I have heretofore planned or paid for.
It was not an untimely passing. In her eighties, my mother had been in a downward spiral of failing health and diminishing awareness for too long. She and I had both been hoping for her death for over a year. So goodbye Mom. Now let’s talk about the funeral.
My two brothers and I were raised in a family that was essentially devoid of religious practice. No weekly church attendance, no studying for confirmation, no praying for health or for winning lottery tickets. Even during the four years that Buffalo made it to the Super Bowl, not a single candle burned inside the Doyle household. So when my brothers and I trudged off to the funeral parlor to make final arrangements for our mother, my expectation was that we’d sign up for something simple, tasteful, and modest (read: budget).
I came to find out that purchasing a funeral has more in common with buying a used car than you might expect. No aspect of the process is truly straightforward. They greet you at the door with ritual expressions of sorrow about the dearly departed. The Funeral Director (tall, with a dark suit and somber tie) assumes the lead role. It was as if we had placed an order with central casting for a funeral director. He actually referred to my mother as the “dear departed” and projected profound sorrow at her departure. It crossed my mind that he had never heard of my mother, much less met her, before that morning. But, okay, we all have our shtick and who am I to make light of his. I’m here to get along and go along.
Except that we’re all talking in very low voices and I can’t figure out why. My mother is here somewhere. She is undoubtedly in the building, but in some basement refrigerator, and we sure as hell aren’t going to wake her up. Maybe the low tones help the Director move through his series of thinly disguised questions designed to peg our aggregate income levels. Having calculated in his head what I’m sure is an accurate estimate, he moves us on to the casket room.
There are 20-odd caskets in this room, and the worst one is nicer than any piece of furniture in my living room. I earn my first withering look from my older brother by asking what to me seems like a perfectly reasonable question: “What happened to the traditional plain pine box?”
We see multiple units, and a few more withering looks are followed by a couple of scornful ones when I ask: “How much?” at the end of each box’s list of features. The cheapest casket costs more than most of the cars I’ve owned in my life, and the appointments are sumptuous. But actual annoyance doesn’t settle in until after we’ve heard about the inner-spring mattresses. Above a certain price point, each casket has an inner-spring mattress, which we’re encouraged to test by hand. Did I mention that my mother is dead? If the casket we choose has ten-penny nails driven up through the bottom, it’s not going to make any difference.
Eventually we select something in dark oak with a copper shroud. Very attractive. But the cost is about what I paid annually in college tuition for my ex-wife’s kid.
The Director’s explanation of the hermetic-seal feature is all it takes to get me from annoyed to seething. For an extra grand or two, we can add an airtight guarantee to our mother’s casket. I always thought that the grass in cemeteries was especially lush because the caskets weren’t airtight, and I’m okay with that. But we go for the seal, and I wonder where I lost control of the meeting.
Back to the office to pick out our “crypt.” It’s the law in Florida that every casket, including our “Restful” model, has to be enclosed in a cement crypt before getting planted. “Strong cement lobby,” I think, and I don’t mention the fact that I’m pretty confident Mom will get plenty of rest whether or not she is encased in cement.
It came as no surprise to me that crypts are offered at a variety of price points, but I do have to admit being caught off guard by the “warranty options.” “Your basic crypt comes with a 25-year warranty,” said the Director. “But you can raise that as high as a hundred years.”
Have I been spontaneously transported to an episode of The Twilight Zone? We’re talking about a warranty on a concrete box that gets buried six feet underground, and never gets dug up. “About how many warranty claims do you get a year?” I ask.
By this time the Director has pegged me as a wiseass, and my brothers have resorted to pretending that I’m not in the room. But none of that prevents an answer from coming my way: “I’m not sure,” the Director says with the animated straight face of a guy who has won more than his fair share of poker games. “I’ll check that out and get back to you.”
The final activity of the day (other than handing over credit cards) is selecting the location of our plot. My brothers and the Director are chatting up a storm about prospective plots as we tool around in a twelve-passenger golf cart. By mutual agreement, I have been relegated to the back, rear-facing seat, and my mind is wandering. I don’t return to earth until they have pretty much made up their minds and ask me to approve the view.
The view?
My natural assumption is that they’re talking about the view for people who come to visit the grave, and I remind my brothers that it doesn’t really matter because none of us lives within a thousand miles of the cemetery. At which point my older brother informs me that, no, they’re talking about my mother’s view! I spent 20 years growing up with a bunch of lapsed Presbyterians, only to discover that when the heat is on they’re not taking so many chances.
Shocked now beyond any desire I felt at the beginning of this endeavor to acquiesce, I go ahead and solidify what I know will become years of brotherly resentment. “We are paying fifty-five hundred bucks for a hermetically sealed copper and oak box,” I said. “Then another twelve hundred to put the box in a steel reinforced cement enclosure, and a final grand to have the whole thing buried in a six-foot deep hole. There is no view. She’s dead.”
