I deal with people at their most vulnerable and emotionally volatile. People deal with grief in many different ways. Some deal with it with grace and others… don’t. The one thing I’ve learned in a trial-by-fire way is that an undertaker has to know how to handle difficult people. Most of them are just pushy and rude, but what about a customer who goes beyond? I had one who I honestly thought was going to kill me.
When the man showed up at my office, I knew immediately things weren’t going to go smoothly. He arrived nearly an hour late, reeking of booze, and didn’t bother taking his sunglasses off as he stalked into the office, sitting down opposite me at the conference table, leaving me standing, hand extended. I slowly withdrew my hand and sat down. I gave a slow nod at the man, who sat in his chair and stared at me behind his shades with an arrogant expression. I took note of the black leather vest with a riding club logo emblazoned on it.
I introduced myself and he gave me a one-word answer for his name. I doubt it was his real name unless his mother named him after something in the reptile family. “Okay,” I replied, and made a note.
We sat in silence and stared at each other before he decided to break the silence with a well-rehearsed, poetic verse. “This is some fucked up shit, man,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows and took the bait. “What is?”
“My old lady dyin’ is what.”
He reclined back in his chair, and folded his massive tattoo-covered arms.
“Well, Snake,” I checked my worksheet, “your mother was 83. Looks like she had a nice full life.”
He ignored me. “You know I just couldn’t go see her in that place,” he said, referring to the nursing home she was in. “Place stank like piss and all those old people, near death, just sitting around in their chairs waitin’ to die. I couldn’t see Ma there. Haven’t seen her in six or seven years.”
He was letting me see where his hostility and resentment were bubbling up from. Clearly, he was overcome with feelings of guilt and remorse. Believe it or not, that’s common in most people. They ask themselves, “Could I have visited the person or called them more?” With this particular gentleman, acute guilt coupled with the fact that he was a bear of a person and had an aggressive personality.
I had to play it cool.
I got him talking, calmed his feelings, and made some progress in the arrangements. We were about halfway through when Snake became agitated.
He stood up so suddenly that his chair crashed over. “I want to see Ma now!” he yelled, poking a meaty finger into the burled walnut conference table. I stared at the sunglasses covering his eyes, trying to appear cool though my heart was racing. The room was silent except for the chain at his waist clinking against the table.
“Your mother is in the preparation room. You can’t see her right now,” I said. “Maybe later.”
I moved my writing hand under the table so Snake couldn’t see it was shaking.
He leaned all the way across the table and put his finger right in my face. I could see the veins bulging out of his forearms. “Maybe you didn’t hear me correctly, Junior.”
His whiskey-scented breath washed over my face. “I haven’t seen Ma in eight years. I’m seeing her now!” He made a fist and pounded it on the table to accentuate his point. The table shook.
I only weigh a hundred and fifty pounds soaking wet and have the physique of an infant, but I remained seated and spoke to Snake in the most authoritative tone I could muster. “Snake,” I said firmly, “you need to sit down right now. I told you, your mother is being prepared and you can’t see her until later. And if you continue to act this way this conference is over.” I closed my notebook, clicked my pen, and stared at him with a questioning look on my face. “What will it be?”
Snake’s finger was back in my face and it inched closer. Each finger was about the size of a hotdog and his nails were bitten to the quick. I thought for sure my windpipe was about to get crushed by his toilet-seat-size hands, but I continued to stare at him. My heart was in my throat and I couldn’t swallow. I eased my hand to the right where the telephone was sitting. I figured I could at least dial the “9” and one of the “1’s” before he ripped my head from my body. The meaty finger retreated and he quietly picked his seat up and lowered himself into it.
“Shall we continue?” I asked as if I were asking what the weather was like.
He nodded and hung his head.
I opened my notebook and clicked my pen. “So, where did we leave off?”
Five minutes later his shades were off. Ten minutes after that, he cracked a joke. On his way out he shook my hand and apologized for “being such a jerk,” and re-introduced himself as Dean. He offered his hand and I shook it.
Sometimes I need to pat an old lady’s hand and cry with her, and other times I need to stare down a 275- pound biker. The job is unpredictable like that, but the fact remains that I need to know how to handle difficult situations and difficult people. And, believe me, there is no shortage of difficult people.
CHAPTER
25 The Comedian
I have been a comedian my entire life. Funeral directing was my backup plan, still is, but until my comedy act can start paying the bills, I have to go out on night calls. It’s one thing to be up in the middle of the night hauling one of the dearly departed from bed, and an entirely different thing to be up at that same time of night in a smoky dive, clutching a whiskey-smelling microphone in front of a tough crowd. The latter gets my juices flowing a lot more than the former.
Death isn’t a laughing matter. But laughter does help the healing process. That’s my philosophy.
An older woman who showed up at my mortuary awhile back is still firmly planted in my memory—partly because she appeared in my life the same day I scored my first paying comedy gig (a hundred smackeroos) and mostly because she is not the type that one forgets. The woman had the innate toughness of someone who has lived a long time in a short number of years—you could see it in her face. Nary a tear was shed as she looked me straight in the eye and shook my hand firmly. She had come to see me because her only daughter was dead.
I ushered Mrs. Smith into my office. She walked with the slightest of limps, hardly using the cane she carried. Her gray hair was wound into a tight bun and perched upon the top of her head like a bird’s nest in danger of falling off. She hefted her plump rear end into one of the chairs facing my desk, folded her hands on the top of my faux-mahogany desk, and began to talk.
Mrs. Smith’s daughter was only 40 years old. She had died due to complications of diabetes. She was the only child, and Mrs. Smith’s husband had died a number of years ago. That much she told me. She didn’t fill me in on the when, where, or how. She had relatives in Florida, where she was going to be moving as soon as she buried her daughter.
It had been a long, hard, trying road and she was glad it was over. Apparently, toward the end things had gotten pretty bad. “I used to look like Jane Fonda before my daughter got sick,” Mrs. Smith said. “Now look at me!” She laughed sharply and sat back in her chair, pleased with her joke. I had yet to speak, but knew we were going to get along fine.
“Mrs. Smith, can I get you a refreshment? Coffee, tea, mineral water, soda… Manhattan?”
“Finally! A man after my own heart! Knob Creek, three cubes, no peel,” she rasped.
“Would you like that shaken or stirred, Mrs. Bond?”
She cackled. “I don’t care as long as it has lots of booze in it!”
“The only kind I know how to make.”
Her stony facade cracked and the floodgates opened. Mrs. Smith started regaling me with stories about her youth, when she and her husband had been an acrobatics team for the circus. “How I got this damned limp!” she exclaimed, pointing into the air and then tapping her bum leg. Then she proceeded to tell me the story of the nasty fall that had ended her career and nearly killed her husband. It was a long drawn-out saga that ended with, “I wanted to stay with the circus and the only thing I could do was become the bearded lady. That’s when my husband developed an affection for the sauce.” She leaned over the desk, pointing her cigarette at me, and whispered conspiratorially, “Me too! But it hasn’t killed me, only pickled me.”
The tales went on and on. Tales about her daughter, family trips, and her career teaching gymnastics with a
