Coffin Corner

Shopping for my mother's casket

Liberace as a casket salesman, The Loved One (1965)

Many thanks to all of you for reading these past 11 months. I’m very grateful that you’re interested in this newsletter, and I hope I’m keeping it interesting, both archival and new stuff. This coming year I plan to post more original work, in between the freelance assignments and a novel I’m threatening to finish. A special shout-out to all of the paying subscribers who have helped make this worthwhile, and I promise to foist more content upon you. Please add your comments and share if you like what you’re seeing. Thanks again everyone for subscribing!

To start the new year, it seems appropriate to begin with death. All of us will go through the process of burying a parent, if you haven’t done so already. I originally wrote this following my mother’s funeral in 2003. Her passing was tragic, of course, followed by a brutal amount of grieving. But shopping for her coffin, that was a memorably bizarre experience. This story was first performed at the Purple Onion nightclub in San Francisco, and later published in The Fray. I also told a version at my dad’s memorial, because it was the same funeral home, and why not? Happy New Year!

The mortuary sits across the street from my high school. It’s an odd juxtaposition when you’re 16, to look out the classroom window, and already see where you’re going to end up. 

I knock on the door. The funeral director recognizes me and shakes my hand. We all have the image in our heads of the kindly undertaker. A tall man dressed in black, with a deep voice of reassurance. My undertaker, however, is wearing a rumpled green suit, and breathes through his mouth.

His name is Ted.  He was a few years behind me in school, a pudgy kid with a ruddy face, and pigeon-toed feet. When he ran down the hallway to class, you could hear the scraping of his corduroys. On the football field, his pants would struggle in vain to cover his ass.

I’m sure he’s now a responsible citizen. But all I can think of, is that my mother will be buried…by Buttcrack Ted.

While we’re waiting for the rest of my family, I have to ask him a question. This has obsessed me since I was a kid. My hometown in southeastern Montana was a roiling hotbed of calm. Therefore, every single citizen eventually got their picture in the paper. Front-page news such as a surly teenager shoveling snow, or a woman winning a blue ribbon for her cheese and marshmallow bean salad.

Whenever it happened, this funeral home carefully clipped the item and mailed it to you, laminated in plastic, attached with a little note: “With Our Compliments.”

It always struck me as an excellent marketing ploy, targeting both ego and guilt, and seemed to say, Go ahead, soak it up, bask in the media glare. But when a loved one passes on…who are you going to call?

So I ask Buttcrack Ted. Does the funeral home still do this? He chuckles, a little too loudly. “Nope! Plastic’s too expensive. Now we just mail the clipping.”

“C’mere, Jack, you live in California, you might appreciate this.” I follow him down a hallway, listening to see if his pants make a noise, which they don’t. We turn into a chapel. The back wall is decorated with flowers, interspersed with taxidermied heads of deer and other creatures, all facing a casket, like a Nativity scene for carnivores. A rifle hangs on a hook. Leaning against the coffin is a poster-sized photo of the deceased. The old liver-spotted guy wears hunting orange, fearlessly holding up the head of a freshly killed mountain sheep. This is a shrine to his life.

Buttcrack Ted gestures to the tableau, waiting for my reaction, convinced he’s offended my sensibilities. As if the moment I crossed the California state line, I started wearing drawstring pants and getting tofu enemas.

I probably have changed a lot since moving to the Golden State. Over the years, I certainly have acted like a jerk, hustling and jiving and acting smarter than I am, measuring my self-worth in search results, lying about my past and dropping names and befriending pushy, competitive pricks, just because they might help my career. Like most Americans.

So what’s a few dead animal heads? The chapel looks like any cowboy bar I grew up in. Except the moose head would be decorated with Christmas lights. With a beer can shoved in its mouth.

Buttcrack Ted seems disappointed at my nonchalance. My father and brother and sister soon arrive, and BT swings into professional mode, gathering us together and adopting a practiced demeanor that says, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” 

He’s wasting his time. My family has always been a laser beam of realism and frugality. Today we are determined to deal with the funeral arrangements without spending one more dollar than necessary. It sounds cold, but not unusual. In this part of the country it’s all about keeping a stiff upper lip. Shrugging your shoulders is considered an extreme emotion. In fact, on the Montana state flag, it actually reads “Oro y Plata,” which is Spanish for, “Never praise a child in public—it’ll just go to his head.”

Buttcrack Ted walks us to a closed door with a sign reading, Casket Showroom. “You can spend as much time as you want. Don’t worry. We have all day.” He grandly ushers us inside. 

The door shuts behind us. My family immediately fans out like a clan of industrious monkeys, tapping the caskets, touching and poking the fabrics. I’m surprised my father and brother aren’t on the floor with a flashlight, saying things like, “Well I’ll be goddamned. It’s just U-bolts and flange washers!”

There’s a coffin for every price range and level of perceived grief. The no-frills model, constructed of what looks like cardboard, is completely stripped down, bare bones. Which, in a few months, is what you’ll have. Bronze, copper, stainless steel, 16, 18, 20 gauge steel. “Non-rusting” finishes. Many coffins are named for the local ranch geography. The Yellowstone. The Tongue River. The Farmstead. I look for something more realistic, like a casket called The Bank Foreclosure. But I guess they want to keep it upbeat.

You can even order optional “casket corners,” little pieces of decorative plastic that snap onto the corners of the coffin, to reflect the hobby of the deceased. As long as your hobbies are hunting, fishing, or waving the flag.

Within about 30 seconds, a cloud of cynical black humor develops over the room. It’s reassuring to see it in the family DNA. My brother wiggles a casket corner, depicting a mallard duck in flight, and smirks: “Hey, doesn’t THIS look nice?” My sister stands in front of a Barbie-doll pink coffin called The Duchess, with pink interior, and scowls: “She would NOT like this.” My father examines a baby-blue casket called The Powder River Blue. “That sure doesn’t look like the Powder River,” he grumbles. He points his stinky cigar at a brown coffin: “It looks more like that!”

I huddle everyone together and tell them I heard my mother once say, she didn’t want to be buried in a coffin. Her exact words were, “I want the worms to get me.”

We all ponder this fact for a moment. It’s obvious. We have to go for a wooden model. Wood is porous. Worms could conceivably bore through it. But which one? The Autumn Oak, or the Ambassador Cherry? We settle on the Regency Pecan. Nobody remembers that my mom was allergic to nuts. But it’s a little late for that now. And we’re getting sick of being in this room. 

We open the door and find Buttcrack Ted, who is shocked to see us. “Done already? That wasn’t more than ten minutes! Okay, good deal.” He claps his hands. “Let’s go in the boardroom and we’ll write the obituary!”