Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt

Ida and Evan had been married sixty-seven years. They had married in ‘37, both at the age of 21 on June 21st. I blinked twice and checked my calendar. Today was the 21st of June. I called my secretary to confirm Ida’s date of death because she had died right around midnight. Sure enough, she had died at 12:06 in the morning. I asked Omen for their birthdays. Their birth dates were both the same, but one month apart—Ida being the elder Taurus of the pair.

When Omen left I was mulling over the husband and wife who had been married for sixty-seven years and separated each other in death by only about three hours. In my tenure as an undertaker I have seen a lot of strange things, but this really took the grand prize. Frankly, it kind of bothered me. My visit to Monticello when I was a boy popped into my head. I vaguely remembered that Thomas Jefferson had died on the same day as someone else. I hopped on the Internet and found that other person had been John Adams and that they had died on the fiftieth anniversary of our nation’s independence. It made me feel a little better to realize that other people had that deep connection, too.

I read on, wanting to learn more, and eventually stopped at the epitaph on Thomas Jefferson’s tombstone. His year of birth was followed by the letters “O.S.”

O.S.?

It only took me a minute more to find out that the letters stood for “old style.” His birth had been recorded under the old British-used Julian calendar before the Gregorian calendar became widely used in 1752, and thus, we Americans used the Julian calendar until the British stopped. I was curious about the difference between the calendars and dug a little deeper. Apparently, the conversion rate from Julian to Gregorian is the addition of eleven days for when Thomas Jefferson was born; we would know him to be born on April 13, 1743. For the years 1900-2100, the conversion is the addition of thirteen days. I did the math figuring my, my wife’s, and my daughter’s birthdays by the Julian calendar. I figured a couple more dates and then added thirteen days to the Peals’ marriage/death date. I was floored. If their death date had been Julian and was being converted to Gregorian by the addition of thirteen days, they would have died on the 4th of July, the same day as Jefferson and Adams.

I told Omen about my findings three days later at the dual wake and she replied, “I’m not surprised. My mother, God bless her soul, was a transcendental. She smoked a little too much reefer, and dropped a bit too much acid, but she always told me things in this universe are all interconnected. I mean, look, I’m 37 years old now, and 1937 was the year my great-aunt and uncle were married. My mother told me my Aunt Ida’s name was Sanskrit in origin and Ida means “insight.” That is why she named me Omen. Apparently she had a premonition.” She laughed.

I chuckled too, but uneasily.

As I watched the Peals’ caskets being lowered on top of each other, I wanted to think it all coincidence, but the words of John Adams I had found on the Internet echoed in the back of my mind: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

The evidence to me is that death is not random. Death is the product of an underlying energy that transcends countries, ethnicities, men and women, and even the human race. For whom will death’s knell toll next?

CHAPTER 24 The Killer Customer

Contributed by a scratch golfer

People love to tell me, “It must be nice. Your clients never complain.” Then they smile, wink, and nod at me, proud of their little joke. I don’t argue with them, but there couldn’t be a statement farther from the truth. The business is all customer relations and rapport. True, the dead don’t complain, but their families sure can.

I deal with people at their most vulnerable and emotionally volatile. People deal with grief in many different ways. Some deal with it with grace and others…don’t. The one thing I’ve learned in a trial-by-fire way is that an undertaker has to know how to handle difficult people. Most of them are just pushy and rude, but what about a customer who goes beyond? I had one who I honestly thought was going to kill me.

When the man showed up at my office, I knew immediately things weren’t going to go smoothly. He arrived nearly an hour late, reeking of booze, and didn’t bother taking his sunglasses off as he stalked into the office, sitting down opposite me at the conference table, leaving me standing, hand extended. I slowly withdrew my hand and sat down. I gave a slow nod at the man, who sat in his chair and stared at me behind his shades with an arrogant expression. I took note of the black leather vest with a riding club logo emblazoned on it.