Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt

“She’ll tell my mother and even though I haven’t spoken to that woman in twenty-nine years, I know she is going to come north, playing the mother card, and demand my ashes,” he cautioned me. “Curt, under no circumstances are you to give them to her. I have made Jacques the executor of my estate; the beneficiary of every earthly possession I have, and have had my lawyer draw up an affidavit that says Jacques gets my remains. Promise me you’ll give them to him.”

I promised him.

With a twinkle in his eye, he added, “I’ve also done a lot of thinking—this disease makes you do that—about my urn. Will you bottle me?”

“Huh?” I replied, shocked.

“You know, put me in one of your wine bottles and cork me. I figured since I like to drink wine, and I like to drink your wine, it’ll be perfect. Besides, it looks less threatening than,” he did air quotes with his fingers, “an urn.” He rolled his eyes in the fashion that only women and gays can.

I laughed, but Charles assured me he was serious.

“All right,” I acquiesced. “I’ll bottle you. You want a label?”

“Nah, just cork me.”

That conversation was the beginning of the end.

Wes did all he could for him over the four years, but at the time our knowledge of HIV wasn’t what it is now, and Charles withered and died.

On the day of his death, Wes’s care stopped and mine started.

I fulfilled Charles’s wish and cremated his earthly remains. I also dropped the letter to his aunt in the mail.

Two weeks passed. I finally found it within me to take one of the empty glass wine bottles and the corker to the funeral home. Human cremains can range in color from white to gray to even a pinkish color. Charles’s were gray. I ran a magnet over the cremains to pick up any metal fragments and then ran them through the processor that crushes any big bone chips and turns them into the type of “ashes” the general public would be familiar with, fireplace-looking ashes.

I put the bottle under the funnel of the transfer machine and poured the ash from the transfer can until the wine bottle was full, setting aside the small amount left over for myself. I was going to scatter them next time I was in Napa, Charles’s favorite wine region. I corked the green glass bottle and set it on a shelf in my office.

Charles sat on my shelf for at least another week while Jacques summoned the courage to come pick up his former partner. It was during this time that I was sitting at the reception desk in the lobby, breaking the receptionist for lunch, when a pleasant-looking elderly woman walked in. The woman, who was quite plump, was dressed neatly in a light pink, old-lady-type pantsuit. She strolled up to the reception desk.

“Hello,” she said in a Southern drawl.

I curiously stared at her big hair, but only for a moment. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Constance de Baptiste.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Okay.”

“I’m here to take my Charles back to the family plot in L’isiana.”

I paused, stunned, and my heart stopped beating as Jacques walked in the front door behind her, but I recovered enough to say to Charles’s mother, “Okay, ma’am. Why don’t you take a seat over there and I can help you in five minutes. A gentleman who has an appointment to pick something up has just arrived. It shouldn’t take long.”

“That will be just fine, young man,” she said.

Charles’s words echoed through my head, Curt, under no circumstances are you to give them to her, as Jacques walked up to the counter, and for a moment Mrs. de Baptiste and her son’s lover were side by side, though neither knew it. Charles didn’t keep any pictures of his family around, so Jacques couldn’t know what she looked like, and Mrs. de Baptiste had no idea what her son’s lover of almost twenty-two years looked like. They glanced at each other the way strangers do, then Mrs. de Baptiste walked across the lobby and plunked all of herself down in one of our couches and opened a magazine.

I held my hand in such a way that my pointing finger was shielded from Mrs. de Baptiste as I pointed to her and mouthed Charles’s mother. Jacques’s eyes got real wide and his mouth dropped open in an “Oh, my gosh” expression.

“Could I get you something to drink while you wait, ma’am?” I called over Jacques’ shoulder.

“Dear no,” she replied. “I won’t even be that long. But thank you.”

She went back to her magazine and I hunched over the counter so Jacques and I could talk in conspiratorial tones.

“That’s really her?” he asked. “No joke?”

“Seriously. It’s Charles’s mom.”

“I expected some hillbilly with no teeth wearing overalls!” Jacques exclaimed.

“Shhh! She’ll hear you, but yes, she is quite unlike what I pictured. And she speaks like she’s very well educated.”

“I never would have thought it,” Jacques said, shaking his head. “Charles always made them sound like they were backwoods type people.”

“Just backwards thinking people,” I said.

Jaques repeated, “I never would have thought it.”