The deceased man had left behind a wife and a wealth of memories, especially from their annual trip to Hawaii. At the funeral the next day, in recognition of his love for our fiftieth state, I was asked to play the music of Don Ho. His favorite song? “Tiny Bubbles.” Everyone in attendance received a small bottle of soap bubbles and the obligatory wand. As the mourners and family members passed the casket, they administered a bubbly tribute as the song wafted in the background.
Sometimes, associates of the deceased attempt to honor certain requests without considering the presence and possible opposition of family members. A motorcycle gang once approached me at a visitation and ordered me to take their late friend out of his casket and place him onto a chapel sofa so that he would appear to be relaxing with his buddies. I refused—and amazingly I had to explain to this band of drunks that perhaps the man’s parents and grandparents might take offense. The group’s mouthpiece adamantly claimed that the deceased had always insisted that he did not want to be in a casket for his visitation and asked me to place him on the couch immediately. After a few more minutes of explanations, the others finally conceded my point, apparently realizing how disrespectful such a move would have been.
Disrespect can take many forms. A young man killed in an auto accident reposed in his casket with gospel hymns playing softly in the background. His parents were very religious and appreciated the solemnity of Christian music for a churchlike atmosphere. But the decedent’s hoodlum friends requested that I instead play the rap CDs they had brought along. I looked over the cases and discovered warnings proclaiming that the talentless ramblings contained extremely explicit, profane, and sexually degrading lyrics, obviously inappropriate for a funeral. I showed the CDs to the parents, and to my surprise, they said to go ahead and play them. Well, after about three minutes into the first selection, the father frantically begged me to go back to the hymns. He and his family had probably never heard the bittersweet recollections of a “ho” shaking “the junk in her trunk” and feverishly fondling many male appendages until they “shot their spunk.”
When a fun-loving seventy-year-old attorney died, his widow expressed to me his desire to have no minister present. One of her late husband’s law firm partners would officiate at the funeral instead. Once everyone was seated in the chapel, I escorted the speaker to the podium, noting that he had clearly had a few too many martinis. Not overly concerned, though, I took my position outside the chapel doors to watch the ceremony on a closed-circuit television screen.
What I saw and heard was most amazing. This fellow began the ceremony with offensive jokes about Jews, blacks, homosexuals, and Mexicans. It turned out that this was the daily water-cooler banter of the deceased and his colleagues; therefore, such material was deemed perfectly appropriate for his funeral. His widow did not even seem offended. Quite a few attendees, however, succumbed to embarrassment and departed, red-faced, through the rear chapel door. Many more left in disgust as the speaker began an X-rated appreciation of various female attributes.
Honoring last requests is often a simple matter of inclusion. Over the years I have placed myriad items inside caskets—fishing rods, a bow and arrow, golf clubs (sometimes a whole set), golf balls, basketballs, autographed baseballs, baseball gloves, and other sports memorabilia, along with complete baseball, football, and basketball uniforms. Unloaded handguns, rifles, and shotguns often find their way into the casket—sometimes because the deceased was an avid hunter, but just as often because someone apparently didn’t want certain family members to take possession. I’ve included playing cards, bingo cards, lucky pennies, room keys from hotels in Las Vegas and other destinations, cigarettes, marijuana joints, pet rocks, favorite books, a tape recorder, a glass eye, sexual devices, jewelry (some expensive, some not), apples, oranges, buckeyes, walnuts, photographs, leaf collections, coin collections, Penthouse and Playboy magazines (once, an entire collection), and occasionally even a racier publication.
Then there are the dead animals—cremated remains of beloved dogs and cats or the recently euthanized dog, which is placed in a plastic bag and laid at the feet of the deceased.
One recent casket-depositing incident caused quite a furor. The late gentleman was thrice married and divorced, and all three of his ex-spouses insisted on attending the services. His current female companion abruptly requested that I remove one of those ex-wives from the funeral home as soon as possible. “Why?” I inquired. She informed me that the woman had just peeled off her panties and placed them in her late ex-husband’s hand.
The majority of gestures are loving, however. An elderly gentleman friend contacted me when his wife passed away. After the service and with the room empty of mourners, he and I approached the casket. He then handed me a $50 bill and requested that I slip it into his wife’s bra. Apparently it was a tradition of sorts—whenever she went someplace without him, he would playfully slip $50 into her bra so she would always have some money with her. This time would be no exception.
CHAPTER THREE
In most cases, the deceased human body is not the most pleasant sight to behold. Immediately after death, many changes begin to take place: discoloration, bowel and bladder evacuations, drainage from the mouth and nose.
Only once can I recall a time when a dead body was actually good looking. On Christmas Day, 1978, I was called to a newly constructed apartment complex to remove a twenty-four-year-old suicide victim. A young woman, apparently distraught over a recent breakup with her boyfriend, had hung herself in a clothes closet. This was long before CSI, Cold Case Files, and Drs. Henry Lee and Michael Baden. So the responding life-squad personnel cut the woman down and laid her on the bed, coincidentally just as a funeral director would—on her back, a pillow under her head, legs together, and hands across her abdomen, left over right. They had called the coroner, but he did not respond—it was 1978, remember. He simply phoned me and verbally released the body. Since there would be no autopsy, I could make the removal immediately.
The figure lying on the bed was at first breathtaking. She resembled Marilyn Monroe, and her breasts protruded straight upward from her chest like twin Mt. Fujis. There was no droop to one side, which is normal in death. There was no sheet covering her, because life-squad personnel and the police photographer were as utterly stunned as I was. The only other woman in the room was a paramedic. She touched them and testified that those breasts were indeed not God given but saline implants. I had never heard of such a thing. By 1970s standards, this young woman was something of a trendsetter.
A closer examination of her body revealed that, except for her breasts, there were the usual damning influences of death—her mouth and nose were full of foamy lung material; a deep, ear-to-ear gash reddened under her chin from her ligature of choice (a Venetian-blind cord), and the increasingly pungent odor of body wastes filled the room. So much for beauty. So much for leaving a good-looking corpse, as the actor John Derek said in the film Knock on Any Door. Within moments of death, that’s usually an impossibility.