emotional outbursts I had been expecting did not come. Instead, both stood hand in hand in front of the casket and stroked their son’s hair and cheeks.
I cautioned the mother that his cheeks were freshly waxed and had cosmetics on them, but she didn’t heed my warning and continued to stroke her son, eventually rubbing off a lot of my handiwork. She then turned to me and declared that she wanted to see his injuries firsthand. She demanded that I remove the cosmetics and the wax so that she could see for herself the trauma that had caused his death.
At first I was rather irate at such a notion. However, that feeling left me when I remembered that this was her child. How can you say no to the mother who carried him in her body, nourished him at her bosom, changed countless dirty diapers, and endured so many sacrifices and setbacks? If she wished to see what had caused his demise, then so be it.
I excused myself from the chapel and gathered up paper towels and a spatula to begin to undo what I had thought was a triumphant restoration. I slowly began to peel off the natural-looking cosmetics and wax, soon revealing a forehead with a wide gash from the right eyebrow upward into the hairline. When I uncovered the right cheek the result of jagged windshield glass against skin became visible.
After a few more moments, lucky for me, the mother asked me to stop. She and her husband had seen enough. Deep down, I was glad that I would be able to salvage some of my previous efforts. But then I was stunned when the mother told me that she was considering leaving her son unrestored for all to see, especially his friends, so that they might witness the damage that can take place as a result of careless, alcohol-impaired driving.
We sometimes assume that a mother’s grief at losing a middle-aged child might be a bit less because an adult child has at least experienced some of what life has to offer. Well, not always. I sat down several years ago with a wealthy seventy-five-year-old widow to arrange services for her fifty-six-year-old son, who was an alcoholic. He had been married and divorced three times, had no children, and was the black sheep of his mother’s well-to-do and socially prominent family. The woman was in complete denial about her late son’s alcoholism and proclaimed that his liver failure was due to other circumstances. After arranging for an evening visitation, a funeral mass the next day, and selecting an expensive solid copper casket, she revealed that I should prepare for a large crowd consisting only of society’s upper crust.
She was correct. At the visitation, the parking lot began to swell with many Cadillacs, Mercedes-Benzes, and even a Bentley or two. Society’s best had indeed arrived to pay their respects to a deceased man whom everyone had assumed to be a productive manager with his family’s very successful insurance business. In reality, according to associates of the deceased, the gentleman had spent his days in bars, drinking with unsavory associates, and his nights in the furnished condo his family provided.
The moment of truth occurred when some of his alcoholic buddies made their way toward the casket, shook hands with the mother, and remarked within earshot of her friends, “Too bad about Jim, but what did you expect? He was a drunk, just like us.” The mother attempted to save face: “You must be thinking of someone else.” Surely her momentary embarrassment must have been eclipsed only by the shame she endured upon her next visit to the country club.
Perhaps the most enraging and heart-wrenching case was that of a two-year-old child whose parents were estranged. The child had been in the care of his mother and her new boyfriend, who described the toddler’s death as an accident. When I called the medical examiner’s office to arrange for the release of the body, the morgue secretary told me that the coroner had ordered an autopsy and was investigating the case as a homicide.
As I placed the cute little scamp on the preparation room table, I immediately recognized the same signs of abuse that I have unfortunately observed far too many times—facial bruising; bruises on each arm that matched the shape of adult fingertips; and two telling, perfectly round bruise outlines on the chest—about the size of quarters and matching the buttons you might see on a child’s jumper or bib overalls.
I covered the bruises with makeup and placed the child in a thirty-six-inch white fiberglass casket, larger than necessary to accommodate the toys and trinkets I knew his family would place inside with him. I awaited the family’s arrival. The father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and others showed up en masse, and the touching, familiar cries began. The mother soon arrived with her boyfriend, and the crowd in the chapel parted to allow her access to her deceased son. All the while, those in attendance, myself included, studied her to gauge her reaction. She stood over her child and began speaking to him, asking him why he had to die and saying she was so sorry he had to be in this place. Her boyfriend never left her side and followed her around like a lost puppy.
When I was alone with the mother for a few moments, she asked me why there were cosmetics on her son’s face. When I explained that I had needed to cover the bruising, she seemed to be astonished. She attempted to explain what had happened: she was supposedly at the store with her mother while her boyfriend was home alone with her child. On her return, she found the ambulance in her driveway and saw her son being rushed outside. He had supposedly fallen over backward from a chair onto a carpeted floor. Then the story changed to a hardwood floor. Then it changed again. She didn’t really know what had happened, because she was in the bathroom at the time, not out shopping at all.
I’m no detective, but it quickly became obvious that she was covering up for her boyfriend. I was puzzled as to why the two were even allowed on the street, since any child’s home death is always suspected as a possible murder. I had to commend the child’s father for his restraint. I was tempted to allow my old-school neighborhood justice to kick in; take the boyfriend out to the garage; beat him senseless with a baseball bat; and explain to the investigating authorities, “He must have fallen down on the garage floor.” But the coward was eventually taken into custody, and from what I heard later, he definitely received his fair reward in prison. Inmates have children too, and they usually despise child killers.
A divorced forty-five-year-old woman wailed and sobbed over the death of her twenty-two-year-old daughter, the victim of an auto accident. The girl had been riding with an inebriated male friend who ran the car off the roadway and into a strand of trees. The impact ejected both from the vehicle. The male was thrown clear and landed softly in the confines of a farmer’s freshly plowed field. But the girl flipped in midair and was hurled back-first into a century-old tree trunk. The trajectory and speed of impact tore her heart from its moorings and resulted in her death approximately ninety seconds later.
Except for a few minor cuts on her face from the windshield, the twenty-two-year-old was very viewable. After filling the cuts with wax, followed by some Mary Kay cosmetics, she was easily restored to her former appearance. When I escorted her mother into the funeral home chapel, I could feel her knees buckling and her whole body begin to tremble. She asked for a chair so that she might sit in front of her daughter’s casket. But after a few moments of silence, she began what sounded like a chant. She recited, “She’s gonna get up; she’s gonna get up,” over and over, sometimes increasing in volume, as if to summon the Lord above to again breathe life into her reposing daughter.
CHAPTER TEN
The National Funeral Directors Association estimates the average funeral bill at nearly $8,000, including funeral services; a steel casket; a burial vault; and certain other items, such as cemetery charges, the obituary, and flowers. Obviously, when limited services are performed or when the customer selects direct cremation, the cost is much lower. But it turns out that a funeral bill is the third largest lump-sum expense a consumer faces in life: you buy a house, you buy a car, and you get stuck with a funeral bill.
Most consumers have a pretty good idea of what they should pay for a home, and most of us purchase cars more often than we arrange for a funeral, so we are fairly knowledgeable about new vehicle prices. So why don’t consumers know anything at all about funeral prices? Because we do not want to consider the death of our loved ones. We abhor the thought and attempt to block it out of our minds. “We never discussed death in our family” and “We just never talked about such things”—those are refrains I have heard so many times over the years when I sit down with a family to make funeral arrangements. We are afraid of death and deny it in our society.
After I published my first book, I contacted
