Thursday, my cousin decided we should all go out with her to find a suitable casket and make sure she is buried next to her mom. In all there were six of us shuffling awkwardly around her in the funeral home – seven when her boyfriend showed up to pump out the tea, water and broth from her small intestine.
She’d been fighting a losing fight with appendix cancer which had spread to grow a tumor completely blocking off her small intestine. Anything she ingested had to be pumped out.
If you can imagine an irritable and emaciated Janis Joplin, then you have a pretty good idea what it would have been like to meet her. The funeral home director guy is a class act, though and manages not to get shaken at all somehow.
“I don’t want to get into all the paper work and money stuff today,” she cuts him off, seated across his desk with the rest of us scattered around behind her. “I just want to see some caskets and headstones – do you have some brochures I can take home and look over tonight?”
He shows us into the casket room, adjacent to his office with about 10 caskets inside shelved two deep along the walls. We all enter the room behind her with some trepidation. I hear my 91 year-old grandmother mutter “Why is she doing this?” before she goes in ahead of me.
My cousin immediately goes to a solid mahogany one and slides her hand along its side. “I like this one!” she says. The funeral director tells her she has expensive tastes and that is the priciest one he carries. She lets him know that her half-brother will cover it and its not a problem, but starts eyeing a poplar one next to it with engraved scenes from The Last Supper around the sides – it’s about half the cost of the first one she went to. She goes over to our grandmother and wraps an arm over her shoulders, “Which one would you pick?”
My grandmother points out a light blue one directly under the mahogany casket and says she likes that shade of blue. We have the director open it up so she can examine the lining. She asks for a brochure on this one and the director leaves us to find one.
“I wanna get in it” she says with a grin, bracing herself against it and trying to lift up one of her booted legs into it. My mother is the closest one to her and manages to keep her from going in and we all chuckle nervously. “Okay, okay,” she says, “I’m just gonna sit on the side then and feel the bottom, alright?” On her way down she “accidentally” falls backward into the casket just as the director is coming back in the room.
I hear myself say “Oh no, she fell in,” trying to cover for her and all the rest of us. The director is visibly shocked, and tells us this is a first for him. He said he’d seen lots of weird things in his career but has never seen a soon-to-be-deceased drop into the casket of her choice. He is grinning and shaking his head the remainder of our visit.
Surprisingly, caskets don’t have the thick-pillowy bottom we all thought they did. They have a thin foam pad held up by a movable grate of thin metal strips. “This is hard!” she shouted as we hoisted her out. “I can’t lay on that for the rest of my life!”
The director said we could get her a feather mattress to put in over that. “Yeah,” she growled back at him. “I think you better.”
