currently reading: The American Way of Death, Revisited by Jessica Mitford
books bought
The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism by Kristin Dombek
Mister Monkey by Francine Prose
Fragments of Sappho, trans. Anne Carson
The American Way of Death, Revisited by Jessica Mitford
Nobody is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey
Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
books received
Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results by Josh Gondelman (e-galley, out 9/17)
Dusty Pink by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman
books finished
Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez
Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe
The Selfishness of Others by Kristin Dombek
Hey you,
I picked up Jessica Mitford’s exposé on the funeral industry last weekend at the Harvard Book Store warehouse sale. I can’t remember where I’d heard about it before—Mary Roach’s Stiff or one of Caitlin Doughty’s books, I bet. (She is obviously a predecessor to both writers.)
Mitford wrote the first edition of the book in 1963 and finished the Revisited version right before she died in 1996. It is perhaps an understatement to say she did not think very highly of the funeral industry:
Funeral men constantly seek to justify the style and the cost of their product on the basis of “tradition,” and on the basis of their theory that current funeral practices are a reflection of characteristically high American standards. The “tradition” theory is a hard one to put across, as we have seen; the facts tend to run in the opposite direction.
After sharing some common defenses from members of the funeral industry, she continues:
Yet, just as one is beginning to think what dears they really are—for the prose is hypnotic by the reason of its very repetitiveness—one’s eye is caught by this sort of thing in Mortuary Management: “You must start treating a child’s funeral, from the time of death to the time of burial, as a golden opportunity for building good will and preserving sentiment, without which we wouldn’t have any industry at all.” Or this in the Natural Funeral Service Journal: “Buying habits are influenced largely by envy and environment. Don’t ever overlook the importance of these two factors in estimating the purchasing possibilities or potential of any family…”
It’s pretty dark! They try to get you at every step of the process. They upsell, they lobby, they lie. (It’s to an extent that reminded me of the stunts pulled by hospitals and health insurance companies to get as much money from the public as possible, as detailed in Elizabeth Rosenthal’s great book An American Sickness.)
I’ve been to three funerals. There was my grandmother’s, most recently; it was a few years ago in October and hot hot hot out and I had maybe the flu. My grandfather died around a year and a half before she did. It’s interesting; in Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes writes that his mother’s death proved harder on him than his father’s, although he’d anticipated the opposite:
I had always imagined that his would be the harder death, because I had loved him the more, whereas at best I could only be irritatedly fond of my mother. But it worked the other way round: what I had expected to be the lesser death proved more complicated, more hazardous. His death was just his death; her death was their death.
In my case, my grandfather’s funeral felt like my grandparents’ funeral. There were a lot of people there. My grandmother was not one of them; she was too far gone with dementia, bedridden. I don’t know if anyone ever told her that he was dead. Whenever she asked where he was, one of us would tell her he was out running errands. That sounds cruel until you compare it to the absolute depravity of dementia. When she died there wasn’t much of a service at all.
Mitford writes, “The funeral director knows that under the law of virtually every state, the funeral bill is entitled to preference in payment as the first charge against the estate.” So in the event that you die and don’t have enough money to pay off all of your debts, the funeral people get first dibs at whatever money is in your estate. This sounded outrageous to me and I thought maybe this wasn’t still true twenty years later, so I looked up the law in Massachusetts and New Jersey and New York. And it’s not true in Massachusetts—technically. The first payment the estate makes here is for “costs and expenses of administration” of the estate. The second is for “reasonable” funeral expenses. In New York and New Jersey and most other states, yeah, they do have first dibs. That’s an incredible amount of power for the funeral people to have! And it’s made all the more dangerous by the fact that they know they have that power over you. Or, more specifically, over your grieving family.
The first funeral I went to, of course, was my dad’s. I don’t remember very much about it. I remember sitting in the front row of the church with my mom and my sister. Yesterday on the phone with my mom I asked her who paid for his funeral. The estate, she said, and I said yes but remind me who was in charge of the estate again?
I promise I didn’t mean to write another dead dad thing. In fact I wrote like 2000 words on true crime, but then I got bored, lost my own train of thought. I’ve been distracted by the Mitford book, by the time of year.
The thing about this story is that the background is very sad. It’s a bureaucratic tragedy and a family drama and there’s nothing redeeming about it, nothing in the end that makes anyone’s suffering worth it. Which is why I mostly don’t talk about it—telling people my dad died when I was a kid generally bums them out more than enough.
But I do want to talk about it!
My parents got divorced when I was four, because my dad started acting strange, not at all like the person she’d fallen in love with.
After the divorce went through he was diagnosed with dementia.
After.
My mom told me you can’t get (re)married if you have dementia; you’re not considered of sound mind.
I don’t know if his laryngeal cancer was before the dementia or after it but for as long as I can remember him he could only whisper. I’ve never been able to imagine what it must’ve been like in the operating room, knowing there was a chance he could wake up and never be able to say another word again.
My dad’s family never liked us. As far as I know, it’s because my mom was significantly younger than my dad, and also because she was significantly more Jewish. It’s possible that’s not the full story; I don’t imagine I’ll ever know for sure.
My dad’s niece, Gaiana, got control of his estate, my mom told me. She put him in a nursing home. I hated visiting him there, dreaded it. I was scared he would die while we were there in the room with him.
He got worse, faster than anyone thought he would. We lived in New Jersey and Gaiana lived in, I think, Delaware. She wasn’t around to take care of him. My mom sued to get her removed. Then my dad’s nephew, Eric, got control. Eric took my dad out of the nursing home and moved the two of them into my dad’s house, which is where he died.
I don’t know if he was alone I don’t know what room he was in I don’t know the last thing he said I don’t know the last thing he said to me I don’t know if he remembered he had two daughters I don’t know if he was scared.
I don’t know how to talk about my parents, both of them together; I don’t know which tense to use.
Which of the following is correct?
A) My mom and dad are both Geminis.
B) My parents were both Geminis.
C) My mom is a Gemini and so was my dad.
I guess the obvious answer is C), but at my age, people don’t tend to think dead dad right away. They say things like, Was? What is he now, an Aries or something? Funny stuff! I imagine this will become less of a problem the older I get.
If you died today, where would you go? I’m not talking about anything metaphysical. Where would you be buried? Or what would happen to your ashes? It’s hard not to think about it, reading Mitford’s book.
I assume I’ll be buried in New Jersey. I don’t just mean if I die today; I assume that will be true even if I live here in Boston forever and continue to love it as much as I do, and I do love it here, I love it like I love my ex-boyfriends, very much, terribly, sometimes inexplicably, for reasons unknowable and unexplainable. Even if I move somewhere else and fall madly in love with that place. Jersey girl into the Jersey earth. It isn’t that it particularly matters to me—it is really all I can imagine.
My dad is buried in New York, in the family plot. His family plot. It’s a Catholic cemetery. (For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why his headstone was the only one anyone seemed to leave stones on—I didn’t know it was a Jewish thing, I thought it was just a death thing. In retrospect I think it was also a wonderful way to say fuck you to his family.) It’s very beautiful there. It’s on a hill and if you go all the way to the top you can see the Hudson River.
I gave you all of that background so I can tell you this one thing: his name isn’t on his headstone. His last name is, but only because it’s on the family plot. Everyone else buried there gets their first and last name and their birth and death year chiseled into the back. But his family never paid for his name to be added. When I was 14 or so, I thought about trying to save up the money to pay someone to add it myself. But of course I didn’t own the grave, of course I couldn’t ask someone to engrave a random headstone, no matter that my last name was on it too. And of course the money never was the point, anyway. The finality of it, the simple cruelty of it—it feels unbearable to think about.
Visiting his grave a few years ago I saw Gaiana’s name had been added to it.
My mom told me that he, like a lot of people with dementia, would have brief periods of lucidity. In these moments he would beg her to let him play in traffic, to let it be done with.
Eric was not much better than Gaiana, except that he was geographically closer. My dad had a will and left everything to my sister and I, which didn’t matter as much as you’d hope it would. A few days after the funeral we drove past my dad’s house and saw a lot of cars in the driveway. Eric was having a tag sale. I remember: we went inside; the house looked mostly empty; there was a man with a cash box; there were people carrying around my stuffed animals.
A year after my dad died, Eric was still living in his house. My mom found out he wasn’t doing the minimum things he was supposed to do in order to maintain control of the estate, and so she sued. Then a lawyer was assigned to be in charge of it.
Yesterday on the phone with my mom she asked me what I remembered about the funeral, and I said very little, and she said, Do you remember begging me to take you home, to let you go home, to please mom get me out of here I want to go home? No, I said, I don’t remember that.
Jessica Mitford was cremated and didn’t have a funeral service. The entire thing cost $533.31, according to Wikipedia. The average funeral price then was between $7,000 and $10,000.
Today my dad is sixteen years dead, and I am doing the same nothing I do every year, feeling the same restlessness, the awful loneliness of it. Reciting a passage from Bough Down in my head like tonguing a sore tooth, over and over: “June and I am on a ship in the dark, looking for the horizon. I am sorry but all I can hear you say is jump, and you whisper it. I am trying so hard to be unfaithful.”
Sixteen years is precisely two-thirds of my life.
I hope he would’ve liked me—but what does that mean? He’s dead.
Your friend,
Smalls