Mortuary Confidential

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CHAPTER 41 Feathers and Fridges Contributed by a community philanthropist

I began handling Mrs. Bingen’s family about ten years ago when her son unexpectedly died. I just happened to be assigned to make the funeral arrangements that day. It was a tough funeral, the kind that tears at the emotional fabric of the soul. Tragic death. Young man. Mrs. Bingen and I connected on an emotional level during the time we were together. It’s never a joyous occasion when you need the services of a member of my profession, but it’s nice to find someone you can trust to make sure your loved one is taken care of properly. Mrs. Bingen found me and from that point on I’ve been handling all of Mrs. Bingen’s family.

Those ten years since her son’s death were tough ones. I handled her parents, an aunt, and finally, her husband. I think the strain of all the deaths combined with her advancing age may have affected her mind. Towards the end of that ten-year stretch, I really didn’t even know her anymore; she got a little loopy.

One morning I pulled into the parking lot of the funeral home and I could’ve sworn I saw Mrs. Bingen leaving in the backseat of a taxi. I waved. The woman in the taxi didn’t. I pushed the thought from my mind and went inside.

“Hi Fiona,” I greeted the receptionist as I usually did.

“Er, Ken,” she said. “I have something for you.” She held out a battered shoebox.

“What is it?” I demanded. I was suspicious it was some kind of prank.

“Some strange lady just dropped it off. Said you’d know what to do with it.” Fiona shrugged.

“What was her name?”

“Mrs. Birmingham, I think.” She shrugged again. Fiona shrugs a lot, like she’s never sure about anything. “She was talking really fast, and not making too much sense. Kept saying, ‘Ken will know what to do.’”

“Was her name Bingen?”

“Could have been.” She shrugged. “Like I said, she was talking really fast.”

I took the shoebox and took a peek inside. There, lying in a bed of crumpled newspaper, was a dead green bird. It was pretty good sized, maybe the length of my hand. I showed the contents of the shoebox to Fiona.

“Eww,” she said and wrinkled her nose. “A dead bird!” The tone of her voice suggested that this woman had brought a dead bird to a bakery instead of a mortuary. I didn’t bother pointing that out to Fiona.

“Did she say what she wanted me to do with this?” I asked Fiona, who had now pushed her chair back from her desk to get as far away from the shoebox and the offending bird as possible.

She offered me one of her patented shrugs. “She said she was moving to Illinois and that, ‘Ken will—’”

I finished the sentence, “Know what to do with it. Okay, okay, I get it.”

I called the most recent number I had for Mrs. Bingen. The number had been disconnected. So I pulled up files from the past ten years when I had handled her relatives and found some phone numbers. I called a couple of Mrs. Bingen’s distant relatives listed in the files. Nobody had a forwarding phone number or address, but I left my phone number with each of them. I had no idea what she wanted me to do with her bird, but I knew I’d hear from her eventually, so I left the bird in the box and labeled it and put it on a shelf in our walk-in refrigerator and kind of forgot about it. We got busy at work, I started some remodeling in the house, and one of my dogs cut his paw on a piece of glass and needed twenty stitches.

About six weeks after Mrs. Bingen dropped her dead bird off, something jogged my memory and I remembered the bird in the refrigerator. I couldn’t leave it there. If the State Board happened to do one of their inspections, they would fine the funeral home for having an animal in the refrigerator, so I went down and retrieved my little charge. The bird at this point was mummified. I took it home in its shoebox, put it on the windowsill in my garage, and once again forgot about it.

Another six weeks passed, or maybe more, and I arrived and greeted Fiona in the same manner I always did.

“Ken, got a message for you,” she said. “Mrs. Birmingham called.”

“Bingen?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. She sounds nuts.”

“She leave a number?”

“No. She just said that someone would be here tomorrow to pick the bird up and drive it to Illinois so she could bury it in a pet cemetery near her new house.”

I laughed, relieved, thankful I hadn’t taken the initiative of having the bird cremated or burying it myself. “Alright. Thanks, Fiona. We get all kinds, don’t we?”

“We sure do,” she replied.

I wrote myself a note, and when I got home that night I put the note under my keys so I would remember to retrieve the bird before I left for work the next day. In the morning I went out to the garage; the door was slightly ajar, almost like it hadn’t closed properly. That’s strange, I thought, and hoisted up the door. My two dogs greeted me from inside the garage. They weren’t supposed to be in the garage. The chocolate Lab ran over, panting and wagging his tail. He was pleased with himself. A green feather hung out of the side of his mouth.

I snatched the green feather from Remus’s jowls and stared at it, incredulous.

Frantic, I ran over to the window and found the shoebox on the ground. It was torn to shreds. My two little angels must have discovered the open door during the night and raided the place. When I picked up the tattered shoebox, the smarter of the two, Vixen, a Rhodesian Ridgeback, cowered in the corner. I was sure she was the one that led the raid, and she was ashamed. Not Remus, he’s the mischievous (and stupid) one. Remus pranced and danced around me happy as a lark, almost as if to say, Yeah, it was me. I ate that bird and it was delicious!

“No!” I cried. I had saved the stupid bird for this woman for the better part of three months and my two dogs had ruined it! Why hadn’t I put the bird in my car last night? Why hadn’t Mrs. Bingen called a day earlier? Why hadn’t one of the workmen closed the garage properly? Visions of cremating my two little angels flashed briefly before my eyes, but looking at their cute faces, Vixen’s shame, and Remus’s sheer idiocy made me forgive them. There was only one thing I could do. I hopped in my car and sped off toward the pet store.

Halfway there I realized there was no way I could buy Tweety bird and then break its neck. I loved animals too much. So I altered my course and drove the back roads looking for some kind of road kill bird to put in the shoebox.

I searched and searched and found no dead birds on the side of the road. Then I went home and searched through my dogs’ droppings hoping to find some evidence of the bird. There was none. Defeated, I went to work and tried to think up a lie to tell the driver who was coming for the bird.

The driver never came for the dead bird, and I never heard from Mrs. Bingen again. To this day, I’m still not sure, what I would have said to the driver when he or she arrived. But I still keep the green feather I snatched from Remus’s mouth in my desk drawer.

CHAPTER 42 Till Death Contributed by a Harley rider

Unfortunately, the occasion on which I had to meet one of the strongest, most caring people I have ever known, as well as someone I easily call my best friend, involved the death of that person’s husband. Tragic, yes, the husband’s death, but in reality—not to get too philosophical—we’re all actively dying. Some of us just slip into the great beyond with greater suddenness than others, and Kristy’s husband was one of those unfortunates.