Good Mourning (22 page)

When I got back to my office, a flash of anxiety jolted through me.
What am I
doing
here?
I thought to myself, looking at my desk, which was covered in papers and a binder filled with urn photos. I knew after our session that Sue was right—I wasn't going to change these people. But I guess I was still a smidge hopeful that I might be able to change
me
and not let all the crazy mess with my head. It was no use, though. I was in too deep. Six feet under . . . at least.

THIRTEEN

This Job Is Killing Me

M
y father loved cheesy sayings. He was practically famous for them. One of his favorites was, “Choose a job you love, and you'll never work a day in your life.” I know, I know, obviously Dad didn't invent this line—but he was an ardent repeater, and really
did
live his life that way. He left the apartment every morning in good spirits and returned home just the same. I never remember him staring at his phone or checking e-mails in off hours, either. On my fifteenth birthday, there was a disaster at the office—a major deal was on the verge of falling through. Dad didn't sweat it, though. For him, the bigger disaster would have been missing me blow out my candles.

I inherited many traits from my dad, but his ability to separate his work life from his personal life was not one of them. I loved my job when it came to helping clients plan
services, but I was at the end of my rope with the staff. Between the affair drama, Tony's growing obsession with the bottom line, and the constant scrutiny of the union bosses, who now had their eyes on me, I could no longer do my job. Not the way I wanted to, anyway. Going to work in the morning started to feel like . . . well . . .
work
. I had always promised myself I'd never be one of those people you see walking around Manhattan like zombies, practically on a drip feed of Starbucks and who knows what else. I was friendly with plenty of people who bragged about how many hours they'd banked at the office that week, who wanted ­everyone to know they were “so busy” they could never put their phones away, not even during Thanksgiving dinner, or as one girlfriend of mine experienced, during sex. (If there were ever a good reason to leave a man with throbbing blue balls, that has got to be it.)

There was no getting around it: Crawford was wearing me down. Even the therapist told me there was no hope for things to get better. Tony had taken to avoiding me completely, making both of our jobs harder. Plus, I was back to shift work—late nights and early mornings that made it almost impossible for me to follow up with clients, since they came into Crawford during normal daytime hours. Even the clients seemed like they were changing. Maybe everyone was just in a funk because the economy was still in the tank, but as clients had tightened their Chanel purse strings, they'd also become somewhat . . . cranky. I'd been lucky; for
most of my time at Crawford, clients had treated me respectfully, some even sending me thoughtful, handwritten thank-you notes after services. I'd never in my life had someone treat me like I was below them; suddenly, it was like I was a minion for pissed-off customers to dump their baggage on. It was an awful eye-opener, and I wondered if I was just getting a taste of what Monica had been dealing with for years.

The shift started with one family, the Whitmans, whom I had known from prep school. Mr. Whitman's son had been in my tennis classes back in elementary school. He and his sister were classic spoiled brats; they once refused to play tennis because their nanny had forgotten to pack their rackets and the club's rackets weren't their preferred brand. I'm talking about eight-year-olds, here.

Mr. Whitman had come in to plan his father's funeral. I greeted him warmly, the way I always greeted clients, but he barely even looked me in the eye, much less recognized me from all the summers my family had spent at tennis matches and charity parties with his. But it wasn't my job to remind him—and if he was anything like his son, I knew I'd want this over as quickly as possible. Mr. Whitman refused to sit down, meaning I had to stand as well to write down his requests for his father's services. He shouted out orders, almost like he was angry, although I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt that it was just the grief talking.
Deep breaths
, I told myself, trying to keep my Italian temper at
bay. What I really wanted to do was tell Mr. Whitman to take his dead father, and his attitude, elsewhere.

The service was standard. I didn't go out of my way like I normally did to make it special. Mr. Whitman didn't want my suggestions, and he certainly didn't want me pulling off any sweet surprises, which most clients loved. As I stood in the hallway, guiding the few visitors into the viewing room, I wondered if Mr. Whitman Senior had the same personality as his oh-so-charming son. That could explain the rows of empty chairs.

I poked my head into the viewing room—totally normal procedure—to make sure that everything was running ­smoo­thly. It looked fine, so I turned to walk back down the hall when I bumped into Mr. Whitman. “What are you doing here?” he shouted at me. I could feel my face burning up.
Breathe, Lizzie. Breathe
.

“I'm just checking in to make sure you have everything you need,” I said. “Is there anything else I can do for you, Mr. Whitman?”

He looked at me with disgust.
“The worst part of this funeral is you
,
”
he said, little flecks of spit landing on my face.

I wiped my cheek, startled, but unwilling to show Mr. Whitman that I was upset. “Okay, I'll be right downstairs if you should need—”

“I don't want you up here. You got that?”
he said, his bottom lip quivering. I'd seen plenty of clients struggle with loss, but this was out of control.

I shut myself in my office for the rest of the service.
I guess everyone grieves differently
, I told myself, trying to shake the confrontation off.
But what a dick.

Business continued to tank. It wasn't that people weren't dying; that's one of the perks of working in funerals—you never have to worry about a demand shortage. The problem with Crawford, though, was that it was by far the most expensive place to bid adieu to a loved one. With the economy in the tank, suddenly people who wouldn't have even asked how much a casket cost were haggling down the prices—and in a lot of cases, taking their business elsewhere. Crawford might have been the best, but it wasn't the only player in the game.

I wasn't the only staffer losing faith. Monica took to calling out sick at least once a week, and some of the part-timers had moved on to different funeral homes after getting fed up with Tony constantly canceling their shifts because business was so slow. Inventory, which I'd never gotten the impression was a big deal, suddenly became a numbers crunch—and my responsibility. “Where can we cut?” Tony said, dumping the list on my desk now that I'd been unofficially demoted and was barely working with clients. “Find more ways to cut.” Then he walked away, leaving me to figure out which would be worse to lose: tissues or toilet paper. A year earlier, orders had included sewing kits, tissue packets, and tiny bottles of hand sanitizer, all with customized Crawford labels, but now we were back to basics.
This is what my job
has become
, I thought, growing increasingly bored . . . and uninspired.

“I can't do this anymore,” I said to my mom over lunch. We met at a small French café around the corner from Crawford, since it didn't matter anymore if I skipped out for a couple of hours. Nobody even noticed.

“I'm not going to tell you to quit,” she said, sipping her cappuccino. “But trust me, Elizabeth, it never hurts to consider more than one option in your life. You've proven yourself here. You can move on.”

I had been holding on so tightly to this idea that I had to prove everyone wrong, to show them that my job at Crawford was really important and not just a phase. But now that I
had
done it, what was I clinging to? What was I trying to prove?

“I've been thinking about leaving New York,” I said. In reality, the thought had vaguely passed my mind, usually when I was walking home in a stupor after a long, frustrating shift. This was the first time I had said it out loud. I braced myself for Mom's reaction.

“I think that would be great for you,” she said.

I was so shocked, I dropped my fork.
Is she really supporting me in this?
I thought. I had expected her to say that was crazy, that I needed to get serious about my life. But here she was telling me to go. Knowing that my mom finally trusted me to make the right decisions in my life gave me a boost of confidence, and in a
flash, what had seemed like an insane notion became a sorta-­kinda amazing option.

A few days later, I was in my office, looking at a map of Europe on my computer.
Where could I go?
I thought, scanning the familiar cities.
What will I do?
I was in the middle of imagining myself planning grand funerals in Paris when one of the receptionists called in to say that we had a family coming in that afternoon to plan a service for their daughter, who had been a young trader on Wall Street. “They found her body in a flower bed,” said the receptionist, sounding like she might cry. I was so used to death by that point that I thought,
Oh, kind of nice that she lay down in a pile of flowers in her last moment
.
Kind of poetic.

Then I found out how she got in the flower bed: she jumped. From a seventeenth-floor balcony.

There had actually been a cluster of suicides, all on the same day. Apparently, a bunch of stocks were sent plummeting after a technical glitch occurred. It was corrected shortly after—maybe even just a matter of hours, if not minutes—but the error was enough to make some traders think that they had lost big money for their clients. If there were ever one thing that proved just how strung out New Yorkers had become, it was the fact that people were
killing themselves
over
other people's money
. They weren't living on the edge—they were working on the edge. And one gust could push them over.

We had another suicide call that same week. This time, it
was a lawyer at a big-time firm. He killed himself by sucking on a bunch of helium balloons and sticking his head in a bag. The family—like most families in cases of suicide—was a mix of sad, shocked, and protective. Their son had done everything right: summa cum laude undergrad, Harvard Law, got hired as an associate at one of the most famous law firms in the country. This was supposed to be when they could finally relax. They had laid a good egg, and he had hatched into the type of upstanding guy that his Jewish mom could set up with any socialite from the synagogue. Now he was dead, and they were left trying to figure out how to keep his cause of death under wraps.

The service was quiet and family only. They didn't invite any of the other associates or the partners from the firm, even though just about everyone in the field had heard
something
about what happened—whether it was the real version of events or not. Not that it mattered. Everyone was so busy hanging on to their jobs for dear life that they probably wouldn't have left the office to go to the service anyway. I saw this with Max firsthand—he wasn't just glued to his desk, he was cemented to the thing. Max had always been the one who was close to Mom, but now that she and I were on the same page again, Max was the one we were left worrying about. “How is he?” I'd ask.

She'd just shrug. “I'm starting to think they have him chained up over there.”

Too many people around me weren't living any more
than the bodies I saw every day in caskets. One of the worst examples was Paul Wagner, a Wall Street guy who had preplanned his funeral back when people were shelling out the big bucks. He bought one of the $90,000 caskets, had expensive flowers ordered—the works. When he actually bit the bullet—not literally, in this case—we braced ourselves for a flood of friends and family. Surely a man with that kind of bank was well connected and would have people flocking to say good-bye. At least that's what I thought. The only person who showed up was his assistant. One person. The guy, who looked to be in his fifties, came in and signed the guest book and then said a private good-bye to the man who had employed him for the past twenty years. It was a small gesture with a major payoff: Paul had written in his will that his eight-figure estate was to be ­divided equally between anyone who signed the guest book at his funeral.

Still, there was something deeply sad, not about death, but about seeing someone die so alone. My dad's funeral had been so packed, people clogged not just the viewing room but the hallway
and
the foyer. There was so much love surrounding him that it was obvious his was a life well lived. What could be worse than dying and barely anyone caring? None of Paul's clients bothered to come, and he had made them millions. Making people rich doesn't make them your friends.

As I became more and more disillusioned with Craw
ford—and more and more aware that a shitty job can literally suck the life out of you—I thought about what leaving Crawford would mean. I saw so many problems with the funeral business, but at Crawford, it had become impossible to fix them. It was clear that I had come to the end of the line, and after thinking about my options, I finally had the perfect plan: business school . . . in London. I had been there over a dozen times, I loved the city, and . . . well . . . I spoke English. (Plus let's all just agree that a British accent is pretty damn sexy on a man.)

“I think business school is a fabulous plan,” said Mom. She, Gaby, and I were having dinner at her place, noshing on stuffed salmon and fennel.

“Yes, and you need to clear your energy of Crawford,” said Gaby, in the very Zen way she talks, like a yoga instructor. “Besides, I needed a better excuse than another party to fly out to London. Now I have one!”

“You aren't upset about me moving away?” I asked.

“Upset? The opposite,” said Mom. “If you go to business school, I'll even pay for it. It's about time you got out of this city and . . . you know . . .
lived
a little. Maybe you'll even find a new passion.”

I gave Mom a look and laughed. I was sure a small part of her—okay, fine, maybe a big part—was still hoping that I would change directions and go into consulting or some other career, but it wasn't happening. I loved the death business; helping families plan amazing funerals was my calling,
and I wasn't about to give it up. What I really wanted to do was take some of the fear out of death for people and learn to run a business that didn't rely on hustling clients in a vulnerable time, but rather making that time
easier
. I had learned a lot at Crawford—that was for sure. But I also had the feeling that there just had to be a better way to do death.