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.
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.