I Can’t Take Him Anywhere
My grandfather ran a funeral home after he left the armed services. He was also instrumental in setting up the ambulance service for North West Indiana. My grandmother told me he always drove like he was on an emergency run, and she refused to drive with him as she got older. I think he just liked to drive fast, and he did it well too. Grandpa did everything to the best of his ability and would accept no less from his children and grandchildren.
He had sold the funeral home before I was born so I was never able to see the quality his work. But my mother and her siblings would often tell stories about the kind of work he did. They said he had magic hands and could make even the worst looking deceased look like they were asleep. On several occasions he apparently made the deceased look better in death than they had in life.
My grandfather had exacting standards, and he wasn’t afraid to tell anyone what they were or how to achieve them. I can close my eyes and hear his deep voice rumble, “The trick to a funeral is to make them look like they are asleep. If they look dead you need to start over, because dead isn’t good enough.” Whenever I go to a funeral, I always look at the body to see if they look dead or if they look asleep. Somehow I think I miss part of the point of a funeral because I am critiquing the body. The deceased person almost always look dead and find myself vaguely disappointed.
My training in identifying a good mortician job began with the first funeral I went to with Grandpa. We walked into the funeral home. There were mourners everywhere. People dressed in nice clothes standing around talking, telling the widow how nice her husband looked and what a good job the funeral home had done.
This didn’t mean anything to me until Grandpa walked up to the casket. He looked down at the body and said, “What an awful job, they should ashamed of themselves.” He pointed to body and waved his fingers over the man’s face. “Annie look at this, you can see where the makeup doesn’t match his skin tone. It’s too light and it emphasizes his sunken eyes and you can see the bruising around them.”
My grandfather was not a quiet man. In fact he had a deep powerful voice that tended to carry…very well. As he continued his critique of the awful job, people heard, and they turned and looked. It was unsettling to have so many people looking at us with that vaguely disapproving look that adults get when you do something inappropriate. Grandpa on the other hand was oblivious to the looks; he was too engrossed in his explanation of what the funeral home had done wrong. He finished his examination and then went to pay his respects.
I remember trailing behind him up to this stranger. He took her hands into his and told her how sorry he was for her loss. She wiped her eyes and gazed up at Grandpa for a minute then said, “I wish you were still in the business Raymond. He looks dreadful, and I know you would have never let him be seen like that.” The interesting thing is that Grandpa often got that reaction at funerals, especially from people who had known him when he ran the funeral home.
