Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt

An older woman who showed up at my mortuary awhile back is still firmly planted in my memory—partly because she appeared in my life the same day I scored my first paying comedy gig (a hundred smackeroos) and mostly because she is not the type that one forgets. The woman had the innate toughness of someone who has lived a long time in a short number of years—you could see it in her face. Nary a tear was shed as she looked me straight in the eye and shook my hand firmly. She had come to see me because her only daughter was dead.

I ushered Mrs. Smith into my office. She walked with the slightest of limps, hardly using the cane she carried. Her gray hair was wound into a tight bun and perched upon the top of her head like a bird’s nest in danger of falling off. She hefted her plump rear end into one of the chairs facing my desk, folded her hands on the top of my faux-mahogany desk, and began to talk.

Mrs. Smith’s daughter was only 40 years old. She had died due to complications of diabetes. She was the only child, and Mrs. Smith’s husband had died a number of years ago. That much she told me. She didn’t fill me in on the when, where, or how. She had relatives in Florida, where she was going to be moving as soon as she buried her daughter.

It had been a long, hard, trying road and she was glad it was over. Apparently, toward the end things had gotten pretty bad. “I used to look like Jane Fonda before my daughter got sick,” Mrs. Smith said. “Now look at me!” She laughed sharply and sat back in her chair, pleased with her joke. I had yet to speak, but knew we were going to get along fine.

“Mrs. Smith, can I get you a refreshment? Coffee, tea, mineral water, soda…Manhattan?”

“Finally! A man after my own heart! Knob Creek, three cubes, no peel,” she rasped.

“Would you like that shaken or stirred, Mrs. Bond?”

She cackled. “I don’t care as long as it has lots of booze in it!”

“The only kind I know how to make.”

Her stony façade cracked and the floodgates opened. Mrs. Smith started regaling me with stories about her youth, when she and her husband had been an acrobatics team for the circus. “How I got this damned limp!” she exclaimed, pointing into the air and then tapping her bum leg. Then she proceeded to tell me the story of the nasty fall that had ended her career and nearly killed her husband. It was a long drawn-out saga that ended with, “I wanted to stay with the circus and the only thing I could do was become the bearded lady. That’s when my husband developed an affection for the sauce.” She leaned over the desk, pointing her cigarette at me, and whispered conspiratorially, “Me too! But it hasn’t killed me, only pickled me.”

The tales went on and on. Tales about her daughter, family trips, and her career teaching gymnastics with a bum leg at her studio. I laughed along with her, all the while performing my job of taking notes and gathering information for the funeral service.

Mrs. Smith seemed to delight in throwing out cheesy one-liners about the death profession. such as “You’re the last person to let someone down!” and “I bet people are just dying to get in here!” Then she would give her sharp, biting laugh that ended in a coughing fit from a lifetime of chain smoking, a habit she continued while in my office. My ashtray overflowed with lipstick-printed slim cigarettes.

While we were making arrangements, she kept saying “There’s something I want to tell you that I can’t remember.” Then she would get sidetracked on her life’s story. By the end of all her stories I had managed to get all the funeral details hammered out.

Once again she said to me, “There’s something I want to tell you that I can’t remember.”

“That’s all right,” I told her. “I’ll go over the price agreement with you and if you remember later, you can call me.”

I discussed all the itemized charges on the price agreement and had gotten to the total when she burst out, “I know what I wanted to tell you!”

I raised my eyebrows.

She leaned over the desk and whispered clandestinely to me as if there were other people who might overhear, “She doesn’t have any legs.”

Without missing a beat I stared back at her and whispered, “Same price.”

She sat back and laughed so hard tears came to her eyes. She started coughing and slapping her leg and I couldn’t tell where the coughing began and the laughter ended. I waited patiently with a big stupid grin on my face.

After Mrs. Smith composed herself and I was walking her out of the funeral home, she shook my hand and said soberly, “Thank you, Mr. Joke. You have made this so easy. I was really dreading coming in and doing this even though my daughter—” her voice cracked, “is in a much better place. I haven’t laughed this hard in ages. I really needed it. To be frank with you, I’m dreading moving to Florida. My cousins are all a bunch of stuffed shirts.”