The Undertaking (9 page)

It served
the living by caring for the dead.

But save this handful of the marginalized—poets and preachers, foreigners and undertakers—few people not under a doctor’s care and prescribed powerful medications, really “appreciate” funerals. Safe to say that part of the American Experience, no less the British, or the Japanese or Chinese, has been to turn a blind eye to the “good” in “goodbye,” the “sane”
in “sadness,” the “fun” in “funerals.”

T
hus, the concept of merging the highest and best uses of land, which came to me high over California, seemed an idea whose time had come. The ancient and ongoing duty of the
land to receive the dead aligned with the burgeoning craze in the golf business led, by a post-modern devolution, to my vision of a place where one could commemorate their Uncle Larry
and work on their short game at the same time—two hundred acres devoted to memories and memorable holes; where tears wept over a missed birdie comingled with those wept over a parent’s grave. A
Golfatorium
! It would solve, once and for all, the question of Sundays—what to do before or after or instead of church. The formerly harried husband who always had to promise he’d do the windows “next weekend”
in order to get a few holes in during good weather, could now confidently grab his golf shoes and Big Berthas and tell his wife he was going to visit his “family plot.” He might let slip some mention of “grief work” or “unfinished business” or “adultchild issues still unresolved.” Or say that he was “having dreams” or was feeling “vulnerable.” What good wife would keep her mate from such important
therapy? What harm if the cure includes a quick nine or eighteen or twenty-seven holes if the weather holds?

So began the dialogue between my selves: the naysayer and the true believer—there’s one of each in every one of us. I read my poems in L.A., chatted up the literary set, waxed pithy and beleaguered at the book signings and wine and cheese receptions. But all along I was preoccupied by
thoughts of the Golfatorium and my mother dying. When, after the reading at the Huntington Library, I asked the director where would she go if she had four days free in Southern California, she told me “Santa Barbara” and so I went.

T
here are roughly ten acres in every par four. Eighteen of those and you have a golf course. Add twenty acres for practice greens, club house, pool and patio, and
parking and two hundred acres is what you’d need. Now divide the usable acres, the hundred and eighty, by the number of burials per
acre—one thousand—subtract the greens, the water hazards, and the sand traps, and you still have room for nearly eight thousand burials on the front nine and the same on the back. Let’s say, easy, fifteen thousand adult burials for every eighteen holes. Now add back
the cremated ashes scattered in sandtraps, the old marines and swabbies tossed overboard in the water hazards and the Italians entombed in the walls of the club house and it doesn’t take a genius to come to the conclusion that there’s gold in them there hills!

You can laugh all you want, but do the math. Say it costs you ten thousand an acre and as much again in development costs—you know, to
turn some beanfield into Roseland Park Golfatorium or Arbordale or Peachtree. I regard as a good omen the interchangeability of the names for golf courses and burial grounds: Glen Eden and Grand Lawn, like Oakland Hills or Pebble Beach could be either one, so why not both? By and large we’re talking landscape here. So two million for property and two million for development, the club house, the greens,
the watering system. Four million in up-front costs. Now you install an army of telemarketers-slash-memorial counselors to call people during the middle of dinner and sell them lots at an “introductory price” of, say, five hundred a grave—a bargain by any standard—and
cha-ching
you’re talking seven point five million. Add in the pre-arranged cremations at a hundred a piece and another hundred
for scattering in the memorial sandtraps and you’ve doubled your money before anyone has bought a tee time or paid a greens fee or bought golf balls or those overpriced hats and accessories from your pro shop. Nor have you sold off the home lots around the edges to those types that want to live on a fairway in Forest Lawn. Building sights at fifty thousand a pop. Clipping coupons is what you’d be.
Rich beyond any imagination. And that’s not even figuring how much folks would pay to be buried, say, in the same fairway as John Daly or Arnold Palmer. Or to have Jack Nicklaus try to blast out of your sandtrap. And
think of the gimmicks—free burial for a hole in one, select tee times for the pre-need market. And the package deals: a condo on the eighteenth hole, six graves on the par-three on
the front nine, dinner reservations every Friday night, tennis lessons for the missus, maybe a video package of you and your best foursome for use at your memorial service, to aid in everyone’s remembrance of the way you were, your name and dates on the wall of the nineteenth hole where your golf buddies could get a little liquored up and weepy all in your memory. All for one low price, paid in
a way that maximized your frequent flier miles.

T
he impulse to consolidate and conglomerate, to pitch the big tent of goods and services is at the heart of many of this century’s success stories. No longer the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, we go to supermarkets where we can buy meats, breads, motor oils, pay our light bill, rent a video, and do our banking, all in the one stop.
Likewise the corner gas station sells tampons and toothpaste (of course, no one comes out to check your oil, nor can the insomniac behind the glass wall fix your brakes or change your wiper blades). Our churches are no longer little chapels in the pines but crystal cathedrals of human services. Under one roof we get day care and crisis intervention, bible study and columbaria. The great TV ministries
of the eighties—the Bakkers and Swaggarts and Falwells—were theme parks and universities and hospital complexes that flung the tax-free safety net of God over as much real estate as could be bought. Perhaps the tendency, manifest in many of today’s mega-churches, to entertain rather than to inspire, to wow rather than to worship, proceeds from the intelligence, gained generations back, that the
big top needed for the tent revival and the three-ring circus was one and the same. Some of these televangelists went to jail, some ran for president, and some rode off into the sunset of oblivion.
But they seemed to be selling what the traffic would bear. A kind of one-stop shopping for the soul, where healing, forgiveness, a time-share in the Carolinas, musical ministry, water parks, and pilgrimages
to the Holy Land can all be put on one’s Visa or Mastercard.

In the same way the Internet is nothing if not an emergent bazaar, a global mall from which one can shop the shelves of a bookstore in Galway, order a pizza or some dim sum, talk dirty to strangers bored with their marriages, and check the demographics of Botswana all without budging from—this would have sounded daft twenty years ago—the
“home office.”

Thus the paradigm of dual-purpose, high-utility, multitasking applications had taken hold of the market and my imagination.

This had happened to me once before.

Years back before the cremation market really—I can’t help this one—heated up, I dreamed a new scheme called “Cremorialization.” It was based on the observation that those families who elected to cremate their dead, much
as those who buried theirs, felt a need to memorialize them. But unlike earth burial where the memorial took the form of a stone—informative but silent and otherwise useless—those who reduced the dead to ashes and bone fragments seemed to be cheered by the thought that something good might come of something bad, something useful might proceed from what they saw as otherwise useless. Such notions
have root in what has been called the Protestant ethic that honors work and utility. The dead, they seemed to be saying, ought to get off their dead ashes and be good for something beyond the simple act of remembrance.

This is the crowd who can always be counted on to say “such a shame” or “what a waste” when they see a room full of flowers at one end of which is a dead human body. The same flowers
surrounding a live human body hosting a tea for the visiting professor are, for the most part, “perfectly lovely.”
Or when the body amid the gladioli is one recovering from triplets, say, or triple bypass surgery, the flowers are reckoned to be “how very thoughtful.” But flowers surrounding a casket and corpse are wasteful and shameful—the money better spent on “a good cause.” This notion, combined
with cremation, which renders the human corpse easily portable—ten to twelve pounds on average—and easily soluble with new age polymers and resins, brought me to the brainstorm years ago of the dead rising from their ashes, doing their part again—Cremorialization. Rather than dumbly occupying an urn, what old hunter wouldn’t prefer his ashes to be used to make duck decoys or clay pigeons? The
dead fisherman could become a crank-bait or plastic worms, perhaps given, with appropriate ceremony, to a favorite grandson. The minister’s wife, ever the quiet and dignified helpmate, could be resurrected as a new tea service for the parsonage, her name etched tastefully into the saucers. Bowlers could be mixed into seethrough bowling balls, or bowling pins, or those bags of rosin they are always
tossing. Ballroom dancers could be ocarinas, cat lovers could be memorial kitty litter. The possible applications were endless. The ashes of gamblers could become dice and playing chips, car buffs turned into gear shift knobs or hood ornaments or whole families of them into matching hubcaps. After years spent in the kitchen, what gourmand could resist the chance to become a memorial egg-timer,
their ashes slipping through the fulcrum in a metaphor of time. Bookends and knickknacks could be made of the otherwise boring and useless dead. And just as the departed would be made more valuable by becoming something, what they became would be more valuable by placing the word “memorial” in front of it.

W
e always kept the ashes in a closet—those that weren’t picked up by the family or buried
or placed in a niche. After ten years I noticed we’d accumulated several dozen unclaimed
boxes of ashes. It seemed as if nobody wanted them. I wondered about the limits of liability. What if there were a fire. I tried to imagine the lawsuits—old family members turning up for “damages.” There are, of course, damages that can be done even to a box of ashes. We’d call every year around Christmastime
to see if the families of these abandoned ashes had come to any decision about what should be done, but more often than not we’d be left holding the box. One Christmas, my younger brother, Eddie, said we should declare it The Closet of Memories and establish a monthly holding fee, say twenty-five dollars, to be assessed retroactively unless the ashes were picked up in thirty days. Letters were
sent out. Calls made. Old cousins and step-children came out of the woodwork. Widows long-since remarried returned. The Closet of Memories was near empty by Easter. Eddie called it a miracle.

What I called it was amazing—the ways we relate to a box of ashes—the remains. And all that winter and spring I’d watch as people called to claim their tiny dead, how exactly it was they “handled” it. Some
grinned broadly and talked of the weather, taking up the ashes as one would something from the hardware store or baggage claim, tossing it into the trunk of their car like corn flakes or bird seed. Some received the package—a black plastic box or brown cardboard box with a name and dates on it—as one would old porcelain or First Communion, as if one’s hands weren’t worthy or able or clean enough
to touch it. One elderly woman came to claim the ashes of her younger sister. The younger sister’s children could not be bothered, though their aunt valiantly made excuses for them. She carried her sister’s ashes to the car. Opened the trunk then closed it up again. Opened the back door of her blue sedan then closed that, too. She finally walked around to the front passenger seat, placed the parcel
carefully there, paused momentarily, then put the seat belt around it before getting in and driving away. For several it was a wound reopened. And they were clearly perturbed that we should
“hassle” them to take some action or else pay a fee. “What do I want with her ashes?” one woman asked, clearly mindless of the possibility that, however little her dead mother’s ashes meant to her, they might
mean even less to me.

The only mother who mattered was my own. And she was dying of a cancer that reoccurred a year and a half after the surgery that the doctors assured her had “got it all.” They had removed a lung. We’d all put away our worst fears and grabbed the ring the surgeons tossed that said “everything was going to be all right.” They were wrong. A cough that started at Thanksgiving
and was still there at Valentine’s Day sent her to the doctor’s at my sister Julie’s insistence. The doctors saw “an irregularity” in the x-rays and suggested a season of radiation treatments. I supposed this irregularity must be different than the one for which laxatives and diuretics are prescribed. But by June, her body made dry and purple from the radiation, it still had not occurred to me that
she would be dying. Even in August, her voice near a whisper, a pain in her shoulder that never left, I clung to the user-friendly, emotionally neutral lexicon of the oncologist, who kept our focus on the progress of the “irregularity” (read tumor) instead of the woman dying before our eyes, whose pain they called “discomfort”; whose moral terror they called “anxiety”; whose body not only stopped
being her friend, it had become her enemy.

I never pursued Cremorialization. The bankers and bean counters couldn’t be swayed. One said I was probably ahead of my time. He was right. Strange ads turn up in the trade journals now that promise to turn the cremains into objects of art, which bear a uniform resemblance to those marble eggs that were all the rage a few years ago. Oh, once I dumped
a fellow’s ashes into a clear whiskey bottle that his wife had wired to work as a desk lamp. “He always said I really turned him on,” she says and still signs her Christmas cards
Bev and Mel.
Likewise the widow of a man I fished with brought back his ashes after she remarried and asked me to scatter them on
the Pere Marquette—the river where we’d fished the salmon run for years. She’d put them
in a thermos bottle, one of those big pricey Stanley ones, and said it would be less conspicuous in the canoe than the urn I’d sold her. “Camouflage” she called it and smiled the smile of loss well grieved. But once I got him downstream to one of our favorite holes, I couldn’t let him go that way. I buried him, thermos bottle and all, under a birch tree up from the riverbank. I piled stones there
and wrote his name and dates on paper, which I put in a flybox and hid among the stones. I wanted a place that stood still to remember him at in case his son and daughter, hardly more than toddlers when he died, ever took up fishing or came asking about him.