Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt

Things sure have changed. For the better, I can’t say, but I know when I was a boy my mother insisted I wear a suit for just about every occasion. I can remember wearing a suit on the boardwalk at the shore during family vacations. Can you imagine putting on a suit to go get ice cream? But, growing up as the son of an undertaker, I don’t so much remember having to wear my suit for every outing as I do having my father tie my necktie for me.

I would struggle into the starched white shirt with the detachable collar, and then pull on my ill-fitting little dark blue suit. I grew too fast and it always seemed the sleeves were a little too short and the cuffs of the pants a little too high above the tops of my wingtips. Then, tie in hand, I would run to find my father so he could tie it for me.

“What kind of knot are we going to do today, Sport?” he’d ask. “Windsor or Prince Albert?”

“Dad,” I’d protest. “Just do the normal!”

“All right, Sport,” he’d say, twinkle in his eye. “You know the drill.”

I’d lie down on the couch or the floor and he would hover over me, tongue peeking out the side of his mouth as he laboriously swirled the ends of the tie around into the fancy knots my hands could never seem to master. Then, when he was finished, he’d say, “All done, Sport,” and I’d hop up and off I’d go, all pressed out in my little suit.

I was so used to this almost daily ritual, that sometimes when I lie on my back, to this day, I expect to see my father’s face above mine, the scent of his Old Spice aftershave, his large hands fumbling with my tiny tie.

I could never understand why my mother scolded my father for tying my tie. If she caught my father in the act she would say, “For heaven’s sake, stop it, George!” or, “That’s terrible, George, it’s our son!”

And my father would invariably reply, “What, Mary? It’s the only way I know how to do it on someone else! If you don’t like it, you do it then.”

My mother would then grow silent because she didn’t know how to tie a tie, and the issue would be dropped.

It wasn’t until later in life that I figured out what my mother was talking about.

My father enlisted in the Army at age 18 and served for three years in a graves registry unit before the two bombs were dropped. I can only imagine how horrific his job was as the Allied forces plowed through Europe and he followed in the war machine’s gruesome wake. The job, he told me, gave him compassion for the families of the soldiers he bagged and tagged and then buried under French soil. When the war ended, and he was discharged, he opened up a funeral home in his home state and married my mother. I think helping others deal with death must have been his way of coping with the atrocities he saw during the war.

My father confirmed my theory right before his death in a rare candid conversation. My mother had long since died, and my father lay dying of pancreatic cancer in a nursing home. He told me that he couldn’t stand the fact that “The only thing I could do was collect their tags and properly identify them while their family was about to see a sedan pull up outside their house somewhere in America.”

We talked and reminisced some more. I asked him if he remembered how he used to make me lie down to tie my ties when I was a little boy.

“Yeah, I remember,” he replied.

“Could you really not do it unless I was lying down?” I asked him.

“Hell, no!” he had replied. “I can tie my own tie without lying down. I did it just to get a rise out of your mother!”

“So all those years—”

He cut me off. “Yup, all those years I was just giving your mother a hard time.”

We both had a good laugh.

I tied a Windsor knot in his necktie less than a week after our conversation.

CHAPTER 50 Thaleia

Contributed by a fisherman

People are insatiably curious about the particulars of the business I work in. I still haven’t figured out if it’s the mystery surrounding death or the sheer fact that most people are generally ignorant of the basic workings of the business. I get bombarded with all sorts of crazy questions. When I am with a group of people I don’t know I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut when the subject of work comes up because I know the questions that are going to follow. No, the dead do not sit up; no, I have never seen a dead person move, it’s impossible; and yes, I am a man who can do makeup. Then the stupid ringer question always follows: “Do you believe in ghosts?”

I hate this question because not only do I feel compelled to answer truthfully, but it opens up a whole other line of questioning. I tell people that not only do I believe in ghosts, but I can prove their existence. This floors them…always.

“How can you prove it?” the offended party then asks.

“Well, for starters, my wife refuses to sleep at home alone—”

Thus begins my dissertation on how I know ghosts exist. It’s really simple. Allow me to explain: