HERE AND HEREAFTER

2012-02-05T01:11:00.000-08:00

PAULINE'S

THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN... BOWLING GREEN?

“She’s the one with the bun who looks like a grandma,” said the manicurist of the St. Regis hotel in Manhattan. The jaded employees of the grand hotel barely noticed the train of celebrities who normally paraded through reception and they were blasé about the international heads of states who’d slept there. But when Pauline Tabor waddled in on a bright March day, the manicurist and bellhop bounded up the stairs to catch a glimpse of one of the South’s most famous madams.

Pauline’s story began sixty-eight years before her trip to New York. Roughly thirty miles north of the small community where we lived in my father’s funeral home, a two-lane road stretched past tobacco farms, cow pastures, a slew of churches, and the surviving buildings that the Shakers once owned, to Bowling Green, Kentucky, a sleepy little university town.

Pauline was born to strict church-going parents in 1905. They made sure her virginity remained intact until her marriage at the age of 18 to a rogue who gave her two sons and nothing more except headaches and heartache from his carousing. Soon she was a divorced woman, a Sunday school teacher no less, with no means of support. She and her two children moved back into her childhood home. With her parents’ business swiftly failing thanks to the trickle down effect of the 1929 stock market crash, Pauline needed to contribute.

She knocked on the doors of the few commercial streets in Bowling Green, but faced the prospect of no work as the Great Depression deepened. She tried door-to-door selling, but housewives tried to steal her merchandise, dogs bit her, lonely men at home propositioned her, and the commission checks were always late.

With the help of an older man with whom she had a longstanding platonic relationship, she found her way to Louisville, Kentucky where she worked in a tobacco company until she was stricken with typhoid. For six months she languished and recovered so slowly that she had to call upon her parents to take her back to Bowling Green. Due to “damaged glands” she ballooned to two hundred and fifteen pounds, (15 5/14 stone) a burden upon her 5-foot, 6-inch frame.

Almost penniless, again Pauline slogged along with samples of cosmetics and silk stockings to the doors of Bowling Green’s residents. One day while tired and hungry she decided to treat herself to lunch in a downtown hotel. After she dined, the bellhop slipped her a note from a gentleman who had noticed her arrival. Pauline met him in his room and asked him for ten dollars. He responded, “Honey, I don’t want to buy you. I just want to rent you for a while. Five bucks and nothing more.” The deal was agreed and thirty minutes later she left the hotel “not feeling a bit unclean or guilty” and realized there was money to be made.

Miss May, the madam of a brothel in Clarksville, Tennessee kindly gave Pauline a two day crash course in whorehouse etiquette, health and safety, and how and when to grease palms of the people who ran the town. In addition, for the very short time Pauline remained a prostitute, Miss May taught her how to attract men in spite of her girth and lack of beauty.

Bad luck followed her in her first attempts to set up a brothel. One house was destroyed by fire, another by a flood from which she was rescued by a man who floated by her house in a raft. Finally, in 1944 she settled into her most famous home, a red brick house on Clay Street located daringly close to downtown Bowling Green.

When the house opened at six o’clock each evening Pauline expected routine. She inspected the girls’ grooming, cranked up the jukebox and opened the door. She required the girls to be flirtatious, seductive and to attract as many men as possible. If any one of the girls couldn’t muster enough bravado on a regular basis, she was out.

The turnover for each client was about twenty to thirty minutes. Money was collected first and stored safely away. The prostitute then carefully washed the man with soap and water. A certain amount of foreplay was included, the job was performed, the girl washed the man again, and herself, then they both dressed and went back downstairs.

A prostitute could service two to three men an hour. On busy nights, and most of them were, she could turn twenty to thirty tricks. When moralists accused prostitutes of being lazy, Pauline responded with, “Try working a twelve-hour shift in a busy house sometime.” No matter how busy the evening, Pauline knew exactly how much she was due. She split the proceeds fifty-fifty with each girl and any who tried to cheat her were swiftly kicked out the door, no second chances.

Every man who appeared at her door was screened before they entered and before they left. She measured drunkenness, meanness and mental illness; apparently she could tell by the look in their eyes. She owned revolvers and shotguns and threatened a deserving man if he was unarmed. If he was carrying and robbed her, she waited until he was in his car, then shot up his car aiming to damage.

Her clients were millionaires, politicians, policemen, lawmakers, teachers from the university, students and countless husbands whose marriages Pauline is certain she saved. One of her clients was known as the Peeping Tom Judge who paid Pauline for wardrobe space. For two years one of the prostitutes agreed to let him spy on her while he sat folded up in the chifforobe. One night, in a moment of excitement, he almost fell out. Pauline was furious and revoked his privilege forever.

Pauline’s girls were given beautiful clothes, health checks once a week and allowed one week off a month as long as they didn’t flaunt or haunt the downtown area. They were housewives looking to earn enough to feed their children, students paying their way through college, women earning seed money to set up legitimate businesses, and beauties from all corners of the South. Her rules included no lesbians, because in her experience they were jealous and fought too much, and no falling in love with clients. She offered personal advice, foremost of which was to make as much money as quickly as possible, save it, and then get out of the business before it was too late, before they became too old and the job “damaged their souls”. She was a strong advocate for legalizing and regulating prostitution.

Pregnancies occurred no matter the diligence in preventing them. Pauline’s best and most trusted abortionist was a black woman who used a bit of proper medicine, but relied most heavily on the folk cures handed down to her from her ancestors who were slaves.

Pauline was perhaps the only madam of her era who was required to end a strike of prostitutes. She hired a new girl who was homely. This flat-chested woman braided her hair in long plaits, and did nothing to hide her freckles, relying instead on a clean, scrubbed look. She felt that to compete with Pauline’s beautiful and seductive women she had to maximize her Lolita image. Customers flocked to her and virtually ignored the others. The girls went on strike until Pauline fired the woman to keep the peace.

Pauline particularly enjoyed the wealthy and lusty oilmen who reserved the house for a couple of days when they were in town. They spent freely and enjoyed themselves, unlike the politicians of which she said ‘didn’t know how to have a good time’. She allowed a few customers to fulfil their desire to be whipped and closed the house to other clients during marathon nights of screaming. A well-known Kentucky horse trainer requested an evening of horseplay, tied to the bedposts. At his command, he was whipped into such a violent frenzy that he broke free. When he got out of hand Pauline ran in and smashed him over the head with a heavy water pitcher. She charged him a fortune.

The madam indulged her love of antiques and decorated with Tiffany lamps, chandeliers, Gallé cameo glass and heavy ornate furniture. Her most valuable piece was a cabinet made by two brothers in Ohio County, KY in the mid 1700’s. Her beautiful bedrooms were always freshly wallpapered, every room a different colour and each room was meticulously colour coordinated, including the sheets. She created lush lawns and gardens. In the 1970s her antiques were valued at $500,000.

So it was all good, dirty fun and games. No. Not quite. You can’t run a notorious house of prostitution in the town in which you were born without tears and suffering. Bowling Green was only about 20,000 people strong in the 1940s. Downtown was merely more than a pretty park square with a smattering of shops lining a few blocks. Any friendships from her childhood, marriage, or life as a young woman were over. Her sons were sent to their grandparents for extended stays and suffered ridicule and embarrassment. Pauline Tabor couldn’t walk down the street without people pointing, staring, hissing and being subjected to punishing remarks from the group she called the ”Holy Joes”.

Money helped. When the hypocrites came to her in secret and asked for cash handouts she never rebuked them. Her charity knew no colour boundaries. Black families were grateful for the food, clothing and toys she provided at Christmas. Her own family members were not shy of asking favours. “When I first when into the business I would meet some of my family on the street and they would duck into a door to keep from speaking to me. But when I started making a little money they would go out of their way to see how sweet they could say, ‘Hi Pauline’. That’s when I started ducking in doors.”

Pauline retired a wealthy woman in 1968. She bought a 148-acre farm and became one of the nation’s first organic farmers. She even married again for a short time and after his death said that her bookmaker husband was “marvellous” and spoiled her.

Law enforcement and Holy Joes had tried to run her out of business for ages, but it was urban renewal that tore down the red brick house. When Pauline found out that a few men were selling the bricks, her anger led her to action. “If a couple of shrewdies figure to make a killing on the bricks of my house, by God I’ll not be upstaged. I’ll tell stories that bricks can’t voice.”

She did just that in her book, PAULINE’S – MEMOIRS OF THE MADAM ON CLAY STREET. She never named names, but told the truth, sometimes brutally, in a jolly and entertaining voice. The book was published in 1971 in a regular hardback edition. Also published was a special numbered edition covered in red velvet and enhanced with a brass lock and key. Years later I found a dusty old copy of the velvet book and read it in one sitting, drop-jawed and blushing.

After the publication of her book, the producers of The Dick Cavett Show flew Pauline to New York for an appearance on his nation wide television show. The staff at the St. Regis said she wasn’t famous - she was infamous. The producers settled her now 240 pound frame in a rocking chair, which suggested to the audience that a sweet old grandmother was going to entertain them with a few homespun tales of the South. Imagine the crew's, guests' and television audience’s reactions when Pauline frankly and explicitly described her forty-year career as a madam.

In 1982 she moved to Texas to live near her son. Pauline died in a nursing home at the age of eighty-seven. I was surprised that she wasn’t brought back to Bowling Green to be buried near the rest of her family. I thought there might have been a big bawdy memorial stone or an elaborate marble statue in her honour.

If there was one thing my father taught me it was that it doesn’t matter how big your life has been, or how small, how celebrated, or quiet. It comes to this.

Pauline Tabor

In Memoriam

2012-01-08T10:45:00.000-08:00

THE LORD AND MRS. APPLEYARD

Rows and rows of black hats

Lavender water

Handkerchiefs, hemstitched and dotted with embroidered violets

Sunday best pocketbooks snapped shut with a metal clasp

Face powder

Stockings, the thickness of flannel

Evening in Paris

Sturdy black shoes, swollen with imprints of bunions

A faint trace of lipstick

Cotton gloves hide brown spotted hands

Black lace

Death be not proud, and thankfully death be not so much for young people in our small town. When I was a child it seemed that only very old people died, and mostly old men. The widows trailed into the funeral home, offering a long line of support for the most recent addition to their clan, the newly widowed.

Mrs. Appleyard stood slightly apart. She was well acquainted with each of them, but was not yet a member of their society because Mr. Appleyard was alive and, if not kicking, then still shuffling along.

Mrs. Appleyard spoke aloud to Jesus quite a lot. She prayed with her eyes open, her head tilted towards the heavens, her hands spread and upturned as if she expected it to rain gold coins. I know this because for an entire year she was my Sunday school teacher. The longest year of my life. I’d have given anything to stay home and watch Tarzan and Shirley Temple films that broadcasters so inconveniently aired on Sunday mornings.

The Appleyards were a stalwart couple. They lived frugally, had no children and lived life in our community without a fuss. Married for over fifty years, Mrs. Appleyard always included her husband in her Sunday morning prayer. Mine was slightly different; please lord can this be over now, I’m hungry, sleepy, in need of a pee and a tap dance from the crinoline wearing Temple.

When Mr. Appleyard passed over yonder somewhere, and when he was laid out in our chapel, I felt badly for her. His burial suit looked stiffer than his alive suits, and his back seemed straighter lying in repose. I wondered if this pressed out version of him might bother her. He was always the rumpled type.

Sometimes…actually quite often, I lingered where I should not have been in the first place. I was stealing a Coke from the “hospitality” room when I heard the front door jingle jangle and my father greet Mrs. Appleyard in his low funeral voice. She had arrived early for the private viewing. My father would have been furious that I was downstairs at such a time, but there was no time to skedaddle up the stairs.

He escorted her to the chapel and then stepped away and into his office. Here was my chance to escape. There was no door to the chapel, just a huge, gaping space that I had to pass in order to get to the stairs. Mrs. Appleyard stood with her back to me. I’d become familiar with all of her church frocks, now she was draped in her new widow’s black. I began to back away, but when she raised her hands I knew there was a prayer coming and I couldn’t resist.

“Oh dear lord. I just want to thank you today. Thank you lord, thank you, thank you. Thank you for allowing me to finally put this bastard in the ground.”

2011-12-22T15:39:00.000-08:00

CHRISTMAS EVE AT THE FUNERAL HOME

We were two little girls looking for something to do on a quiet Christmas Eve in the funeral home.

Our father was downstairs working on a body. Upstairs, my sister and I sat on the floor in a little room my mother called “the children’s den”. If, for some reason, the floor collapsed beneath us we would have landed right atop our father’s big white porcelain embalming table. And on this night, this Christmas Eve, we would have been introduced to the elderly man who lay upon it.

We were supposed to be asleep, so we scooted near the small television wearing our matching red Christmas nightgowns and turned the sound down low as we searched the four channels to choose our evening’s entertainment. It was late, and one of the stations had already gone off the air. But wait, what was this? We paused when we heard the first dark chords of the opening music to A Christmas Carol. We looked at each other wide-eyed, for there was nothing we liked more than being scared. This sounded promising and like no other carol we’d heard. Our young lives spent entirely in a funeral home surrounded by the steady flow of the dead, and we still searched for ghosts, sought them out at every opportunity. If there was a haunted house to be explored, a ghost story to be heard, an abandoned farm to be analyzed, we were there. We even roamed the hallways of old hotels whenever we were on holiday, where we hoped to detect an undiscovered crime scene or possibly stumble upon an apparition.

We found our ghosts late that evening in a rerun of the 1951 film classic, A Christmas Carol. This man, this Scrooge, held our attention.

The Alastair Sim version of Dickens’s story was our first impression of London. We imagined the real England to be exactly like this film, completely colourless, where people spoke in different accents, all called London.

Huddled together on the floor with blankets and pillows we remained entranced with the story, when, just before Scrooge’s transformation, the UNDERTAKER appeared! This undertaker looked nothing like our handsome father.

And he was a thief!

Outrageous!

Even though we didn’t know exactly what it was that moved us so, we understood the redemption bit. The story was so well written and acted that we were in tears when old Scrooge bought the goose for the Cratchits.

And then, with impeccable timing, here came our own Bob Cratchit, our smiling provider, up from the lower floor of doom. He stood before us with his tie, a working hazard, tucked into his trousers, his hands shrivelled from the continuous flow of water and other unmentionable fluids. (He scoffed at the thick rubber gloves used in those days. So awkward.) Tired from his late night work, he shooed us off to bed, his duties not yet complete as he changed his undertaker’s hat for that of Santa’s.

Thus began my lifelong awe and love of Dickens. I read him every year and always include his carol on Christmas Eve. He had a long hand, err, longhand that stretched all the way to two uninitiated girls living in a small town, in a funeral home, at a time when we felt completely cut off from the world. Yes, his work is sentimental, but I quite like pages of sentiment when they are so beautifully, humorously and tragically drawn.

mine

One afternoon last year I came upon an old stone house in Hampstead, so dark, so dreary that it could have been Scrooge’s house. Then I saw the blue plaque. I ran home to call my sister.

“Guess whose house I walked by today?”

“Um, I don’t know.”

“Alastair Sim’s”

“Who’s Alastair Sim?”

“Scrooge!” I screamed, “Scrooge!”

2011-12-06T06:47:00.000-08:00

A Bicentennial of a Different Sort

The Resurrectionist

He stood on the edge of the mob at Tyburn while the human vultures descended upon the corpse of the executed.

He waited as the family fought to claim the body of the condemned from the sporting crowd. Not far from him, the undertakers fought each other to gain the attention of the deceased’s family. Less prominent surgeons fought to buy off the family and purchase the corpse, hoping to cut out the middleman – him - Joseph Naples, resurrection man.

As we shift into full gear for the Charles Dickens bicentennial, the Hunterian Museum recently hosted Kirsty Chilton’s lecture on a bicentennial of a different sort: The account of a man who two hundred years ago kept a diary of his life as one of the busiest resurrectionists of his time. A rare, grave, thing.

Naples’ career began ten years before his first diary entry in 1811. He was unlucky in his young professional life and made silly mistakes. He approached the wrong undertaker who turned him over to the authorities when he tried to sell him a corpse in 1801. Sent to Coldbath Fields House of Correction to serve a two-year sentence, he scrambled over the wall in a successful escape during the 1802 riots behind the prison.

As one of The Borough Gang, Naples worked in a team of eight who supplied London’s leading hospitals with corpses. In clear handwriting he recorded places, names, buying, selling, and prices. He wrote of the bodies of children and babies.

A typical entry:

“At 2 a.m. got up, the Party went to Harps, got 4 adults and 1 small, took 4 to St. Thomas. Came home, went to Mr. Wilson and Brookes. Dan got paid £8/8/0 from Mr. Wilson. I received £9/9/0402 from Mr. Brookes. Came over to the borough, sold small for £1/10. Received £4/4/0 for adult. At home al night”

In 1813 he was arrested again, but by this time his connections to prominent surgeons were so strong that he easily got bail. Arrested for the last time in 1819, it was believed he either finally became cleverer, or changed his name. As a colleague of his once said, “It’s safer to be in teeth.”

The diary reveals his body snatching duties and we come to understand more than a glimpse of his daily work life. Naples kept tabs on other grave robbers; there was in-fighting and fierce competition. His figure haunted funerals where he made notes of the locations of the freshest graves.

The gang also made up the shortfall in other cities in England and Scotland. Naples nonchalantly recorded the task of packaging bodies and preparing them for delivery to Edinburgh as if he were about to post a letter.

It was a seasonal occupation. The heat and overwhelming odours associated with the profession made it impossible to hold anatomy classes in the summer. Naples worked hard throughout the winter, stealing sixty bodies a month, or more. I thought how my undertaker father worried about the icy Southern ground of winter and constantly checked with his gravediggers, concerned he would have to delay a burial. I wondered if, when Naples’ shovel struck the earth, it was ever met with a fierce resistance.

Naples drew a simple, basic moon chart in his diary. Knowing when the moon was waxing and waning was important to his work; he wished to avoid the glare of a full moon, which would have clearly exposed him.

There are few references to his personal life, but here’s one: "Went to the pub, got drunk."

In the 1820’s work became more dangerous and difficult. Cemetery watchers planted in burial grounds with dogs and guns were a new fear for resurrectionists. And in an ironic and bitter turn, Naples and others were horrified to witness their colleagues stolen from their graves upon their death. Terrified they would suffer the same fate of those they had stolen, the resurrection men begged their relatives to promise they would be left undisturbed. They paid off surgeons, clergy and family to safeguard their own graves.

The 1832 Anatomy Act opened the way for body dealing rather than body snatching. The Act gave the surgeons and students legal access to corpses that were unclaimed after death.

It had been a lucrative career for most resurrectionists. One year Naples’ receipts totalled £1,394 8s and one of his associates was worth nearly £6,000 when he died. But many of the body snatchers threw their money away on alcohol, women and gambling. Naples fell into this group.

By the 1830’s, his grave robbing days behind him, Naples worked as a porter, little more than a servant, in the dissecting room at St. Thomas’s Hospital.

Joseph Naples died in 1843 of an alcohol related illness.

2011-11-13T03:03:00.000-08:00

“STIFFS IS VERY SCARCE”

“Today at the cemetery I found a tombstone with pictures on it! They had these oval brass frame things around them!”

My untameable glee gave my classmates the heebie-jeebies. In unison they slowly backed away from me. Undaunted, and fascinated by the two small mausoleums in our cemetery, I voiced my appreciation for the way the tombstones poked up around the stone buildings and complimented the overall design.

I counted angels and crosses and made up stories of the people buried beneath the shaded green carpet while my father went about his business. There was no escaping the smell of damp earth or the poignancy of an unkempt grave. The dirt of the cemetery was often caked in the soles of our shoes, the dust of fallen leaves clung to our socks, though, amazingly, the tops of my father’s shoes remained spotless and shiny.

I couldn’t fathom why cemeteries were associated with ghouls and zombies when they were always intended to be a place of peace.

In Victorian England cemeteries were newly landscaped, designed as a destination for contemplation, a lovely place for a stroll. A satisfying Sunday day out often included a visit to the cemetery, perhaps a picnic on the perfectly manicured grounds.

Yet, something wicked and dark haunted grieving families even before the Victorians designed their park and garden-like cemeteries. The peace was often shattered by a violation that struck fear and horror in the mourning public. The work of Resurrectionists, grave robbers, body snatchers, or “sack-um-up men” that thrived particularly in early 19^th century England is fairly well known. Scientists and surgeons created the demand that eventually became a colossal tumbleweed, collecting bodies along its way.

There is something deeply unsettling about a disturbed burial. There is something entirely sinister about being denied a burial at all. In the States, and most especially in the American South, the medical community boasted of their source of cadavers. In many cases there was no need for a body snatcher at all. Southern slaves fell under no laws; therefore, their owners could dispose of their property without the consent of their families. Slave-owners sold the bodies of deceased slaves to medical schools. These men, women, and children denied even the right to a burial were rushed post mortem to awaiting surgeons. Many of them were shipped north in barrels of whiskey to supply northern medical needs.

And still there were not enough bodies to go around.

A particularly blunt advertisement from a Dr. T. Stillman, directed at slave owners:

“To planters and others—wanted 50 Negroes. Any person having sick Negroes, considered incurable by their respective physicians, and wishing to dispose of them, Dr. S. will pay cash for Negroes affected with scrofula, or King’s evil, confirmed hypocondriasm, apoplaxi, diseases of the liver, kidneys, spleen, stomach, and intestines, bladder and its appendages, diarrhea, dysentery, etc. The highest cash price will be paid on application as above.”

And still there were not enough.

After the Civil War, myths and tales of needle men and black bottle men in Louisiana haunted the disenfranchised. The body count of these alleged murderers surpassed Scotland’s notorious Burke and Hare. Charity Hospital in New Orleans, the second oldest public hospital in the United Sates by only one month to New York’s Bellevue, was rumoured to go to great lengths to obtain cadavers.

Charity Hospital New Orleans

"I sure don't go out much at this time of year. You takes a chance just walkin' on the streets. Them Needle Mens is everywhere. They always comes 'round in the fall, and they's 'round to about March. You see, them Needle Mens is medical students from the Charity Hospital tryin' to git your body to work on. That's 'cause stiffs is very scarce at this time of the year. If they ever sticks their needles in your arm you is jest a plain goner! All they’s gotta do is jest brush by you, and there you is; you is been stuck.”

From Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales by Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer, Robert Tallant

Similar to the needle men in intent were the black bottle men; medical students who stood at the door of Charity Hospital where upon admission they administered a dose of lethal poison to incoming patients. In reality, the dose was cascara, black in colour, made dark brown when magnesia was added, a diuretic frequently given to patients after admission. But tales were that it was thought to speed death along its path and given to those on the brink. I don’t know, but where there’s smoke…

This then was the kernel of truth attributed to the tales of the “night doctors” that spread throughout the rural South. Emerged from the realities of medical experimentation, body snatching and murder, whites told African Americans gruesome tales of medical experimentation, taunting them with threats of kidnapping.

The exodus of freed slaves to the north hastened the crumbling of the South’s post war economy. Southern whites hoped to dissuade Freemen from moving to northern cities to work. In an era when superstitions were considered as real as a plate of biscuits with red-eye gravy, whites roamed African American neighborhoods at night to spread fear, covering themselves in white sheets, pretending to be spirits coming to claim them for dissection. The similarity in appearance of the night doctors and the white-robed Ku Klux Klan lead some individuals to refer to the night doctors as “Ku Klux doctors”.

The Devil in the Cemetery

2011-10-23T01:03:00.000-07:00

MOURNING QUILTS

I once asked my father, “What do you all talk about in the embalming room?”

A cynical streak must have run through me from an early age, or surely I wouldn’t have dreamed up the answer I expected to hear. I thought they swayed away from the conversation of death. Yesterday’s poker game, or the freshest man-gossip, like Luke’s new tractor, or the shocking news that Henry secretly bakes pies; these were the topics I imagined swished back and forth across the embalming table and its sheeted occupant.

With my ear to the closed door, not sure if they were aware of my presence by the groan of the floor when I shifted weight, I heard murmurs, the sort of low-voiced chorus men make. I stayed, straining to hear until my father inevitably cranked up the odd machines and when they began to hum, I ran away.

They worked at their unthinkable, unmentionable tasks remembering the person who lay before them and his or her place in the community. They spoke of her family, his last wishes, how big the funeral might be. They ran through the list of “survivors” - always thought that an odd word for family members – that would be read on the local radio news the following day. Mr. Thurmond is survived by….

Slowly, methodically, this father of mine and his employees brought to close another life.

The funeral business was and continues to be a predominantly male profession. Men work their grief with their hands. They dig graves, embalm, act as pallbearers, they are lifters of heavy funeral furniture; even the three florists in our town were men. They rush about constantly with “important things to do”. What then of the women?

I was thinking about this the other day when I read in the Sunday paper that crazy quilts are in vogue now. The crazy quilts fad brought to mind mourning quilts, the work of female hands that represented a way to busy their grief. Many women used the crazy quilt pattern to form mourning quilts, like this one from the late 19^th century in Kentucky.

The mourning quilt takes many forms and enters subgenre land. This Civil War era quilt of grief uses patches of men’s shirting and includes fabric from a uniform.

Slowly, methodically, fabric, needles, thread, stitching, stitching, stitching, women mourned through their fingers. Their contribution was sometimes thrown over a plain wooden coffin, or, crossing the prairie, when burial time was short and there was no means to build a coffin, the mourning quilt served as a shroud.

There were Memorial Quilts and even Deathwatch Quilts on which symbols of mourning were stitched as the family waits the final illness of the patriarch. A personal favorite mourning quilt is the Graveyard Quilt. The most famous made by Elizabeth Roseberry Mitchell in 1839 and part of the collection of the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort Kentucky.

In the center is a fenced graveyard with four coffins, each represents a deceased family member, upon which is stitched their name. There is space in the graveyard for thirteen coffins, one for each of Elizabeth's family members who are represented in the coffins around the border, probably basted on and therefore easier to remove. When a person died their coffin would be moved into the graveyard. According to family history Elizabeth made this quilt after the death of her two young sons. Quite a frank and finite way of depicting the life of a family and I swallowed a few times when I first saw it.

My father once told me that everything is political, even death and mourning. I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. Now I do. Jonathan Shannon was the first male winner of the American Quilter's Society Best of Show Award in 1993 with his quilt, "Air Show". A year later his new quilt, a mourning quilt, "Amigos Muertos" was rejected as an entry to the American Quilter’s Society. Shannon’s quilt commemorates artists lost to cancer and AIDS. The director of the show told Shannon that the quilt was considered to be upsetting and that it wasn't the sort of quilt that visitors to the show would want to see. In response Shannon wrote an open letter to quilt makers and received four thick binders full of replies of support – a turning point in the quilt-making world regarding the political aspects of death, mourning and the subject matter of quilting.

“Amigos Muertos” later won the National Patchwork Championship in England.

2011-10-02T09:30:00.000-07:00

DID YOU HEAR THE ONE ABOUT THE UNDERTAKER…

With Stevyn Colgan's kind permission

Oh the hilarity of growing up in a funeral home. The hours were long, the work was deadly brutal at times, but the sound of laughter often cut through the steel grey cloud of gloom we lived above.

My father had a knack of drawing in the oddest characters to work for him and over the years I watched them come and go. They were mostly male back then, except for the hairdresser and the shroud maker. It took a certain kind of person, an all-rounder, to heave-ho, dig graves, and otherwise dress up in their finest to open the door to the weeping public.

The buzz from preparing for a funeral is quite addictive, and when eventually it all fell quiet, that is, when the funeral home was not busy, the various rooms filled with card-playing, coffee-drinking, and joke telling, a myriad of scenes of grown men at play. I provided musical entertainment. Those piano and organ lessons really began to pay off; before I could reach the pedals of my father’s Hammond organ, I was already driving everyone to madness with my accomplished rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”. My father strode to and fro leaving a permanent imprint on the tatty carpet as he performed his rituals and tasks. As he breezed by, he never failed to command me with a hand movement to lower the volume.

I wasn’t always as conspicuous. You’d be surprised how quickly a group of men can forget the presence of a little girl lurking around the corner in another room. Once, a youthful employee accidentally dropped a bottle of embalming fluid, it fell to pieces when it hit the linoleum floor and, well, you can just imagine the mess - and the stink – good lord, the fumes could set nostril hairs alight! Out comes the mop and the next thing you know he’s turned the mop upright and begun waltzing around with it on the embalming room floor, skirting the scary furniture, pretending it’s his girlfriend. The men somehow found this hilarious. I could only cringe in my corner at the thought of my father discovering the irreverence.

Something has awakened the memory of the embalming fluid spewed all over the room, the bright puddle on the floor. I’ve written before about the overwhelming odor of the flowers that always permeated the funeral home. I’m able to conjure that fragrance in my memory in a second, and particularly as it melded with the pungent odor of the embalming fluid. In fact, I can’t really enjoy the fragrance of flowers without thinking of the image of the colourful bottles lined neatly on a shelf. Case in point. My friends Emma and Andy of The Frolick fame, discovered a cologne while on a recent trip to New York, which now, kind thanks to them, is mine.

Funeral Home Cologne – Carnation heavy, sweet, with a faint kick of formaldehyde.

There’s no formaldehyde in the cologne, but it’s there. For me, it’s there.

For some reason, people think I enjoy undertaker jokes and I’ve had to endure them all my life. They’re all bad, they’re all silly and I share with you the worst, but not the most distasteful, of the lot.

How do undertakers speak?

Gravely

Do undertakers enjoy their job?

Of corpse they do.

What did the undertaker say to his girlfriend?

I em balmy about you.

Did you hear the one about the undertaker who signed all of his letters 'Eventually yours'?

2011-09-12T08:50:00.000-07:00

LIVED ONCE, TWICE BURIED

I still remember what a thrill it was that first day I was able to string a few words together and read a sentence for the first time. It wasn’t long before many of life’s mysteries began to disappear like a cube of sugar on the tongue. Not only did books shed light, I was also quite taken with mundane things like my mother’s grocery lists. I felt I’d discovered her secret language. Then one day I was asked to produce my birth certificate at school. I removed it from my plaid satchel on the short walk to school and for the first time read:

Father’s Occupation: Undertaker

Didn’t the penny just drop! Reading it in black and white somehow brought to the fore the very lifestyle I had taken for granted. And that our home was only up a staircase from all of this undertaking business, well, it cast an entirely new light on the thing.

Just as I was being to understand it all, as best as a young girl could, my father thrust upon me a meeting with the most eccentric character in our town. She immediately began talking the Edgar Allen Poe talk… you know, favorite stories, memorable characters, nevermore, the dreary dreary and Lenore. The woman all but insisted I read his works. I realize now that it was dreadfully demanding of her, as I was too young to fully grasp Mr. Poe’s writings. However, I rose to the challenge and when I ran across The Premature Burial my little heart skipped a beat.

“The grave was carelessly and loosely filled with an exceedingly porous soil; and thus some air was necessarily admitted. He heard the footsteps of the crowd overhead, and endeavoured to make himself heard in turn. It was the tumult within the grounds of the cemetery, he said, which appeared to waken him from a deep sleep, but no sooner was he awake than he became fully aware of the awful horrors of his position.”

The questions, the worry, the browbeating that ensued! I entreated my father to defend his honour. Had he ever witnessed the kind of terror revealed in this shocking tale? “Of course not! The very idea!” said my father. I was then given a bare bones lesson on the effects of embalming.

He failed to inform me that reports of premature burials date back to the 14^th century. I wondered if he ever learned this gruesome history in mortuary school; he didn’t like to talk about it so I never asked.

In 1661 the story of a butcher from Newgate Market in London was published in a pamphlet called “The Most Lamentable And Deplorable Accident”. Mourners were horrified when they heard a shriek from his tomb, but by the time his rescuers reached him it was too late. It was just one of many stories about premature burial avidly read by the public at the time.

By 1700 paranoia about being buried alive ran rife and in 1790 the security coffin was designed. One type involved a tube that protruded from the coffin. Everyday the parson would stroll through the cemetery and have a sniff down the tube. If he didn’t smell the effects of decomposition after a few days, the grave was exhumed.

Bells and whistles! Bells and whistles! By the 19^th century safety coffins came equipped with bells, whistles, firecrackers, sirens and even rockets.

None were more popular than the Bateson Life Revival Device. A rope wrapped around the deceased’s wrist made for a worry-free burial. One tug on the rope and the iron bell securely mounted in a miniature bell tower onto the lid of the coffin sounded the alarm.

In 1902 Rufina Cambaceres a nineteen-year-old girl of Argentina died while dressing for her wedding.

Although it was an unusual occurrence, three doctors certified that she was indeed deceased. The next day she was buried despite the view of several of her relatives who thought she had only fainted. At their insistence her coffin was opened. They gazed in disbelief upon the tragic result. Rufina whose poor hands and face were marked with injuries had been buried alive. Scratch marks were found on the inside of the coffin.

Her parents, deeply aggrieved and heart-broken, erected a statue at the entrance to her mausoleum in the famous Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires as a warning against premature burial.

Perhaps the most vivid and recorded tale took place in Ireland. In 1705 the resurrectionists got wind of the recent burial of one Margorie McCall in Lurgan, Co Armagh. Margorie had been happily married to a doctor until she fell ill and succumbed to a fever. At her wake many of the mourners tried in vain to remove the valuable wedding ring she wore, but her hand, swollen from illness and death, would not allow it. After the wake she was buried quickly for fear the fever would spread.

The very night of her burial the grave robbers crept into the cemetery with their tools eager to claim the golden ring and steal her body to sell on to local surgeons. Digging through the freshly disturbed earth, they scattered the dirt until they hit the coffin. They removed the lid and their lanterns shone on Margorie and her ringed finger. At first they pulled and tugged at it, but her finger was so swollen they soon knew to continue was futile.

There was nothing left to do but try to hack off her finger because they certainly weren’t going to leave the ring for the surgeons. Just as Margorie’s finger began to draw blood she wakened from her stupor and sat upright, eyes wide open and began to scream bloody murder. It was said that the resurrectionists ran for their lives never to return to the trade again.

Margorie pulled herself up from her grave, walked through the cemetery - a sight of horror one might imagine - and continued home. She knocked on her own door, quickly opened by her husband and there she stood in her burial clothes, dripping with blood and her finger half hanging from her hand. The tale goes that her husband died of shock right on the spot. He was at some point buried in the same plot that his wife had once occupied. Margorie re-married and raised several children. When she did finally die she was buried in the same cemetery where she was first buried alive and where her tombstone reads:

2011-08-08T07:50:00.000-07:00

NIGHT VISITORS

Sitting up with the dead

People tell stories in the South of “sitting up with the dead”. These all night family vigils held before funeral parlors first opened their somber doors, and before the practice of embalming changed the face of death, placed the care of the deceased firmly in the hands of the survivors. Families made do in those days.

The coffin was brought to the parlor, or if they couldn’t afford a coffin they might have placed the body on the sofa or the dining room table. Tasks and rituals handed down for generations kept mourners busy and comforted. Often a bowl of water and a cloth set nearby was used to periodically bath the deceased’s face and hands. During hot weather a veil might have been placed over the coffin to protect it from flies. A flyswatter did the trick in lieu of an expensive veil.

Friends made a point of visiting to tell stories of the deceased and to comfort the bereaved.

The body was never left alone at night. Superstitions and fears prevailed. Relatives thought the devil might rush in and take the body away. And if not the devil, the rumours of body snatchers frightened the bejesus out of those who were suffering and thus vulnerable and emotional.

Family members took turns guarding the body, staying awake to be certain that their loved one was well and truly dead. Mistaken deaths were unusual, but not unheard of. Superstitions aside, the family also had real concerns and felt obliged to protect the body from rodents and dangerous burning candles, fireplaces and gas stoves.

Sitting up was such a strong tradition that when my father first opened his funeral home it was not uncommon for a family to request to spend the night. He could hardly refuse, although he was always slightly miffed. After all, what was his purpose if not to protect and serve? When I first became aware of this practice I had a gazillion questions. Where were they going to sleep? They don’t. Where and how would they eat? They brought their own food and ate in our little “hospitality” room. What in the world were they going to do all night? Fight off sleep. Other than that, who knew? Would my mother prepare breakfast for them? No. Once the night passed, they would go home to change clothes, freshen up and prepare for the funeral.

My father said that most of the people who wanted to spend the night at our funeral home had originally been born in the mountains, at least three or four hours away. Their need for ritual pulled and tugged at them; they wouldn’t dream of missing “the sitting up”. My mother thought that in some cases, people from out of town would rather stay with us for free than pay for a night in one of our town’s two hotels.

Most of the time I never saw the night visitors. But I often went to sleep knowing they were roaming around downstairs, floating from room to room, sitting in front of the casket. One night I forgot they were there. I slipped downstairs to get a Coke. When I reached the bottom of the stairs I heard them whispering. It scared me to death! I was wearing my nightgown and felt that sudden horror of being terribly exposed. And I knew if they caught sight of me I’d probably scare them to death. But I was already downstairs and I did want that Coke badly. I thought if I could carefully tiptoe past the chapel, I could then sneak into the room where the Coke machine sat humming away.

They were still speaking in low voices as I went past. I caught a glimpse of a teen-age boy with his long, thin legs stretched out over two of our wooden folding chairs. Three women huddled together. An older man sat straight up in his chair, fast asleep. They’d brought pillows and blankets. These were strewn across the chairs and looked strangely out of place. My father had turned out most of the lights and the night visitors sat in a faint creamy glow. I scurried past them to the room in the back, quickly pulled out a cold bottle and then snuck past them again on my way up the stairs.

The next morning I asked my father if they were still there. “No,” he said. “They left at dawn.”

2011-07-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

ye Sign of ye Naked Body & Coffin

From a trade card of a Fleet Street undertaker. 1710

When I walk along London’s streets and pass a funeral director’s shop front, I am compelled to peek through the window. Can’t help it, must be done. Funeral homes in the States are rarely shop fronts, my father’s was set in a rambling old house on a residential street, so I find it fascinating to read the advertising on the windows, to note that an undertaker has set up shop next to a pub, or a newsagent. When I peer through the glass I never see anything very interesting, the interior always looks a bit blah. Most of the time I can’t see anything at all, which I guess is how it should be, but I wonder if they could be just a bit more inviting.

My father or one of his employees would stand at the door and wave to people passing, or open the door and say things like, “Why hello there Bill, how the world are you?” That’s the kind of thing one could do in a small town. Bill always answered with, “Glad to be coming through your front door instead of the back.” Funeral home humour, you gotta love it.

I feel uneasy about the way funeral directors advertise these days. It all seems so transparent. The use of caring words, phrases, and lyrical descriptions intended to give us hope that the process isn’t going to be as bad as we anticipate. Advertising used to be more direct.

When undertaking became a specific trade in the 18^th century the businesses advertised aggressively and vigorously. In Hogarth’s Gin Lane one can just make out a shop sign in the form of a coffin hanging dismally in the air above the undertaker’s premises.

I guess it’s appropriate, if not necessary, for an undertaker to announce his presence to the locals.

And perhaps they can’t be blamed for offering you a complimentary household product that will remind you that they’re always there, lurking in the background.

My father did his share of advertising. I wish I’d had enough sense to keep the pens and pencils, calendars, balloons and fans that sprouted up like weeds around town over the years. I always began the school year with a satchel full of black pencils with the funeral home’s name boldly embossed in gold lettering. I passed them out to everyone and pretended not to see the rolling eyes, tried to forget the snickering.

To my utter surprise a friend of our family actually did keep a couple of things, one of which I didn’t remember at all. Telephone numbers that begin with letters was before my time. It looks like something you might see in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Behold the potholder.

2011-06-26T08:09:00.000-07:00

IN THEIR OWN WORDS – 19th Century Post Mortem Photographers

“We are prepared to take pictures of a deceased person on one hour’s notice,” 19^th century photographer’s advertisement

My father went through a period of filming his “work” with his 8mm camera. I grew up with the films thinking it a completely normal thing that we owned such an archive. His films of the dead in their caskets were transferred to first videotape and then DVD. My brother and I took on the project, made sure our family had a few images to remind us of our history and what our father did for a living, as if we needed one. The films never left our home and were never shown to anyone but our family. I broke that tradition when I included a few short clips on my website.

I discovered that my father’s little camera was a gentle intrusion compared to the way the photographers of the 19^th century worked to memorialize the dead. While few of us would choose to pass time pouring over photos of our loved ones on their deathbeds, the Victorians welcomed a way to preserve the memory of their deceased, and especially their children at a time of high infant mortality. Their photos were never meant for the public, but were expressly made for family members for their use in their own private albums, or were given to family members and intimate friends who couldn’t travel to the home of the deceased.

The men (I have yet to discover women) behind the scenes whose task it was to photograph the dead were artists, portrait painters and photographers who created daguerreotypes that ranged from the size of a locket, up to larger stereoscopic images.

In many instances it was both the photographer’s and family’s intentions to portray the deceased as simply sleeping. As an element in the quest of a “Good Death” it was the artistic duty of the photographer to stage death as an almost beautiful state. Props, lighting and positioning were used to reveal the essence of the deceased.

What is particularly astonishing is the amount of manipulation that went into setting up the photograph. Several photographers spoke openly about their procedures. In 1843 at the top of a building in Boston, two photographers, Josiah Hawes and Albert Southworth, set up a studio under enormous skylights. Southworth and Hawes produced daguerreotype portraits of many famous people among whom were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Daniel Webster.

The first two photos below are self portraits of Josiah Hawes. The third is an eerie little self portrait of Albert Southworth.

When they weren’t busy with celebrities, Southworth and Hawes, like many other studios, produced their share of post mortem photography. Southworth describes the process:

“You can bend [the corpse] till the joints are pliable, and make them assume a natural and easy position … you can carefully turn them over just as though they were under operation of an emetic. You can do that in less than one single minute, and every single thing will pass out, and you can wipe the mouth and wash off the face, and handle them just as well as though they were well persons.”

A Southworth post mortem daguerreotype:

Another daguerreotypist Gabriel Harrison describes his work:

“Gently we moved the death couch in the window in order to get the best light, though by a ray. What a face! What a picture did it reveal … The mother held up a white cloth to give me reflected light to subdue the shadows. All was still, I took the cap from the camera. About two minutes had elapsed, when a bright sun ray broke through the clouds, dashed its bright beams upon the reflector, and shedding, as it were, a supernatural light. I was startled—the mother riveted with frightful gaze, for at the same moment we beheld the muscles about the mouth of the child move, and her eyes partially open—a smile played upon her lips, a long gentle sigh heaved her bosom, and as I replaced the cap, her head fell over to one side. The mother screamed.

“She lives! she lives!” and she fell upon her knees by the side of the couch.

“No,” was my reply; “she is dead now, the web of life is broken.”

The camera was doing its work as the cord that bound the gentle being to earth snapped and loosened the spirit for another and better world. If the earth lost a flower, Heaven gained an angel.”

With that in mind, although this is not his daguerreotype, it perfectly depicts the scene.

And finally, in 1877 Charlie E. Orr wrote in the Philadelphia Photographer:

“Place the body in a lounge of sofa, have the friends dress the head and shoulders as near as in life as possible, then politely request them to leave the room to you and your aides, that you may not feel the embarrassment incumbent should they witness some little mishap liable to befall the occasion. If the room be in the northeast or northwest corner of the house, you can almost always have a window at the right and left of a corner. Granting the case to be such, roll the lounge or sofa containing the body as near into the corner as possible, raise it to a sitting position, and bolster firmly, using for a background a drab shawl or some material suited to the position, circumstance, etc. Having posed the model, we will proceed to the lighting, which, with proper care, can be done very nicely.”

* Quotations from Erin Silver’s Concordia Undergraduate Journal of Art History

2011-05-23T07:55:00.000-07:00

THE 1984 FUNERAL BIZ PANIC

Mr. Smith, a retired elementary grade six teacher had just passed away peacefully in the comfort of his own home. Mrs. Smith, who’d lived frugally with him for over forty years, had an exact sum of money set aside for their funerals. In the early 1970’s, in a small southern town, Mrs. Smith could give her husband a modest funeral for $395.00. The price of Mr. Smith’s funeral was the price of his coffin, one made of pressed wood covered in grey felt fabric, a first price, if you will.

Mr. Jones, one of the town’s bankers, had also died. His wife wanted the best, the most expensive casket available, a satin-lined copper. The cost of his funeral and the cost of his casket was one in the same, $3,000.00. The only difference in the two funerals was the type of casket and its price. Both prices included everything else, all additional services, including the kitchen sink.

My father had no idea what it actually cost him to provide a funeral. And he wasn’t alone, most funeral directors failed to itemize the services they provided. At that time the funeral business was truly a service business. Funeral directors in our neck of the woods were primarily community do-gooders. My father used to play one-upmanship with his rival to see which of them could offer the largest number of free services! Boy oh boy, funeral directors were lousy business people. All of that changed in 1984, but my father didn’t live long enough to witness the upheaval.

The Funeral Rule was enacted in 1984 under the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Funeral Rule ensures protection to those consumers who require adequate information concerning the goods and services they may purchase from a funeral provider. Funeral providers are obliged to comply with the Funeral Rule. They also lay down various consumer rights. Funeral Rule states that funeral industry goods and service providers must respect consumer rights.

US Legal, Inc.

For the first time in their lives many funeral directors had to work out what each item on their long list of services actually cost. My father never had a list of services. He sat down with each family and discussed want they wanted and very simply provided those things.

How many undertakers took stock and embarked on the blind leading the blind journey in 1984, I can’t tell you. The list of services most funeral homes provided included embalming, a hairdresser, nights of viewings, the registry book, memorial folders, the actual service, which included costs of the preacher, musician and extra manpower for larger funerals, it goes on. What exactly did one charge for the three or four hours spent in the embalming room? How to price a large funeral differently from a small one? Who knew? Panic.

Undertakers groaned and complained about the task before them to itemize their services, until, while trudging through the dark mire, all was illuminated. They discovered that the funerals at the lowest price weren’t pulling their weight; in fact, my father never recovered his costs from all of those $395 funerals. Gosh, that was silly, agreed those who had oared the same boat of doom.

Suddenly the federal government was the best friend the funeral industry ever had. Funeral directors began charging for every service they performed, rather than just knocking up the price of a casket by a couple or three notches, as they had for most of their careers. They realized that they couldn’t do things like make a mortgage payment or plan to buy a new hearse unless they recovered their costs.

There you have it: The how, when and why the price of a funeral went up and up and up and…

2011-05-07T03:27:00.000-07:00

THE DROWNING

Come the autumn when school began again we entered our elementary classroom and were assigned seats. At times we were given a choice, but more often were told to sit alphabetically. I always sat behind Linda Mayberry. One wouldn’t notice Linda Mayberry. In a classroom filled with twenty or so children born from farmers, factory workers, doctors, teachers, and me, the mortician’s daughter, we were a mixed bunch. It was unusual not to know what Linda Mayberry’s father did for a living.

No one ever came between the Mayb and the Mayf, so I sat behind her year after year and therefore became intimate with her back. Her hair was coarse and the colour of burned wheat. It fell in loose, thick ringlets just above her shoulders. Her hand-me-down cotton dresses washed to a faded tiredness hung loosely below her knees. In the winter when all the other girls switched to wool, Linda Mayberry dealt with the cold by adding a sweater to the same thin dresses. She sat with a slight stoop and walked like a boy – a tomboy in a dress, but she was small, petite even, and very still and quiet.

When she turned to pass a book, or test paper, she never made eye contact, never said a word. There was no opportunity to study her face until she, like all of us, was called to the front of the room to read aloud. She knew the words and read slowly, methodically, plodding along softly in a monotonous tone.

Her skin was flawless, smooth as anything, and swarthy, as if she spent a great deal of time in the sun. Her eyes were the saddest I’d ever seen, like they were lonely for a friend. Her thin-lipped mouth was either a straight line across her face, or slightly turned down. I never saw her smile.

Finally released for the summer, it seemed we escaped school by running out through the doors and directly into Spring Acres, the public swimming pool. Fed from a freshwater spring, the water was always take-your-breath-away icy, even on blistering late summer days.

At the end of this particular summer, I was surprised to see Linda Mayberry at the pool. Located on the outskirts of town, someone would have had to drive her there and then pay the fee to enter. It would have been a special treat. I’d never seen her there before, but there she was, alone and quiet in a bathing suit version of her dresses.

The pool rules included a ten-minute break each hour. She sat on a rough looking old towel, her ringlets heavy with water. Mid-way through the afternoon we noticed the lifeguards were acting strangely during the break. We waited for the whistle to blow, the signal that allowed us back into the water. But the whistle never blew again that day. Linda Mayberry was missing.

They found her at the bottom of the pool, tucked away in a corner in embryonic position. Linda Mayberry was curled up into such a small little ball that the lifeguard didn’t see her until she dove in for the hourly pool check.

My father was called and Linda Mayberry was brought to our house. As was our custom, I was allowed to see her after my father performed his duties, before her family arrived and before the townspeople came to pay their respects to a girl they barely knew, if at all. Someone had donated a crisp new dress, probably the first new dress she’d ever worn. Mildred the beautician tamed her hair. This was one of those occasions upon which my father was expected to perform better than his best. She looked natural; the highest compliment. I’m not sure he was ever paid for his services. One doesn’t dwell on money in the face of tragedy.

The lifeguard on duty that day crumbled under the stress and suffered a debilitating mental breakdown. She never returned to the pool or lifeguarding, and some say she never really recovered from what happened on her watch.

When school started that fall, another child sat in front of me. I don’t recall whom.

No one noticed Linda Mayberry until she drowned one afternoon in the Spring Acres pool.

2011-04-23T05:28:00.000-07:00

EMPTY COFFINS

I was loitering around the casket showroom on the day of a delivery. It was the coolest room in the house, a respite on muggy summer days when it was too hot to play outside. The casket room was set in the back of the property where the limbs of shade trees grew close to the building. My father rolled tremendous, long boxes into the room via an outdoor ramp that led directly inside to the casket room. But on this day two noticeably smaller boxes appeared. I stood at my father’s side when he opened the first one. In it was by far the smallest coffin I’d ever seen. The pink satin box looked like a toy. I glanced at him, but said nothing as he opened the second one – a blue satin covered baby coffin. I ran my fingers along the outside of the pink one on which puffy tufts and pleats attempted some kind of design detail. He took the lid off. Inside was a tiny pillow. I asked if it was meant for a baby girl and he said yes, it was.

“Did a baby girl die, Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“What’d she die of?”

“She was born dead.”

“Oh.”

He continued to unwrap the clear plastic wrapping from the blue one.

“What’s that? What’s born dead?”

“Well, it means that the baby died before it had a chance to be born, it’s called stillborn.”

“Will her parents leave the casket open?”

“No, they won’t.”

“They don’t want to see her?”

“No.”

“Why? Why don’t they want to see her?”

“It’s just too hard on them. And she’s too small.”

“Did a baby boy die?”

“No.”

“So why do you have that blue one then?”

“Well, sometimes baby boys die, too.”

“Did the baby girl’s parents know when the baby was going to die? You know, a lot of times you know when people are going to die, I hear you say so and then they do.”

“That’s not the same. I don’t know if they knew. It’s not something you ask a parent.”

“Do you know when I’m going to die?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you know when you’re going to die?”

“No.”

“Where’s the baby girl, Daddy?”

He glanced over at the door.

“In the embalming room? Is she in there right now?”

He knew where my question was headed.

“We don’t embalm babies.”

I didn’t know that babies died. Until that moment I thought that only old people died.

I moved away from him and the baby coffins so that he couldn’t see me. I felt a cocktail of sickness, fear and sadness, but I wanted him to think that I could handle it. I felt his hand on my shoulder directing me out of the room, away from the boxes for dead people.

“Come on, let’s go get a Coke and some peanuts,” he said as he turned out the light.

He closed the door and left the blue baby casket in wait of its yet unidentified occupant.

2011-04-06T03:08:00.000-07:00

THE GHOST OF SEXTON HOUSE

Southerners learn from the time they’re able to scoot across the floor in diapers that most stories they hear with a drawl and a twang are exaggerated, and none more so than a ghost story.

The Maple Grove cemetery sits on what was once the edge of town. Still small and rural, the town nevertheless grew up around the cemetery. Opposite two gas stations, and at one time, an efficient little milk bottling plant, our cemetery was always on display to those traveling in and out of town and life buzzed along just outside its black rod iron gates. On one corner of the graveyard sits Sexton House where most of the caretakers have lived since 1870.

At the turn of the century the caretaker who owned Sexton house lived there with his wife and daughter. One Saturday his daughter was looking forward to attending a dance. She planned to meet her boyfriend who had given her signals that tonight was the night he would propose. Excited beyond containment she rushed to the second floor to dress. She was in the bath, or maybe not. She was naked, or maybe not. One thing everyone agrees upon is the lightening storm. In the South when the air is pregnant with humidity, before the clouds break water, the sky suddenly grows black and lightening flashes, followed by a long pause and then a shrieking crack of thunder. On this Saturday the lightening storm was so vicious the girl’s parents felt it was too dangerous for her to leave the house and refused to let her go.

The girl was bitterly disappointed, angry to the point of madness. She stood at the window, raised her fist and cursed God. Lightening struck her and before she fell dead to the floor, a lightening portrait of her was etched into the window’s glass. Her parents, who’d heard a terrifying clap of thunder, ran upstairs to check on their daughter, only to find her lifeless body sprawled on the floor.

Soon, people reported that the girl’s etching appeared on nights of lightening storms. Others swore that what they saw was the girl herself, railing at the window.

By the 1920’s the house had become a tourist attraction. The owners at that time painted over the window, but still the number of sightings and tourists grew. In a desperate attempt to stop the congestion in front of one of the town’s few traffic lights, the window was boarded up. This did absolutely nothing to dispel the traffic or squelch the dares of young boys to walk through the cemetery at night.

Years later, another caretaker who’d lived in the house for over ten years decided to remove the boarding and began work on stripping the paint. He never finished stripping the window. One day, while standing in his kitchen, he too fell to the floor when he suffered a fatal heart attack.

I grew up playing in the cemetery and sorely wanted to ask the caretaker about the house, but my father wouldn’t let me. “Leave the poor guy alone,” he used to say. When I was older I drove past the house everyday on my way to high school. My car was full of girls, Cokes, cigarettes and Cheese Nabs, all part of a healthy breakfast. Most of the time our minds were far from ghosts, but once and a while, especially on Halloween nights, we looked up at the window and fully expected to see the etching of the girl, almost dared her to show herself. Someone always screamed, “There she is!”

2011-03-20T06:04:00.000-07:00

PRESIDENT JOHNSON’S PROBLEM

For many years after we moved out of the funeral home, I couldn’t bear to see a gladiola. My gladiola aversion developed because it was the least expensive funerary flower and there was never a funeral in our home without their spiky blooms. Carnations may have cost a little less, but bucket loads were needed to create an impressive arrangement. A spray of tall gladiolas demanded attention and it didn’t take an imaginative florist to throw a few together. I’m not accusing the town’s citizens of being cheap, but good lord, fill several airplane hangars full of gladiolas and you get the picture. Maybe you’ve noticed that many things left in a sale, whether it’s a kitchen utensil or a cashmere wrap, are often orange. The same applies to gladiolas. If you ever want to ruin my day just send me orange gladiolas.

The Shandihar cave in Iraq was excavated in 1957. Neanderthal remains were thought to have been buried with flowers, suggesting that the idea of funerary flowers originated there 60,000 years ago. Alas, it was later argued that animals that stored seeds and pollen was the most likely explanation for the remains. The exact origin of funereal flowers is still debatable.

The man who took over for President Lincoln after his assassination was President Andrew Johnson. After two failed impeachment attempts and a lacklustre post presidency, at his request he was buried wrapped in an American flag with a copy of the constitution placed under his head. But there was the problem of his swiftly decomposing corpse. His undertaker, Lazarus Shepard, now there’s a name for an undertaker, who ironically was Knoxville, Tennessee’s first embalmer, did not embalm the president. By the day of the funeral the air surrounding the president was so unbearable that Lazarus Shepard literally buried the president’s coffin under a massive blanket of highly fragrant flowers to mask the odour.

On the American mid-West prairie in the early 19^th Century, families chose Flower Ladies as honorary assistants. With the same clout as a pallbearer, usually six women bore the responsibility of carrying the flowers from the funeral to the cemetery and then carefully arranged them at the burial site. This custom died out, so to speak, when family and friends began to spread out and live farther apart, which begs the question, why didn’t the pallbearer custom die out. Hmm.

In the early 20th century, the practice of hosting funerals in flower gardens became common. Some funeral home directors brought the garden inside, conducting services in solariums, with waterfalls, live plants, flowers and even birds. I can’t tell you how happy I am that this particular practice was not in vogue while my father was in the business.

There was a frenetic atmosphere in our funeral home before the doors opened to allow the first mourners in, especially if it was a big funeral. A large funeral meant more of everything, more people, more chairs, more food, and of course more flowers. Florists scurried quickly through the hallway laden with their flower deliveries, stealing looks at each other’s arrangements, checking out the competition. My father set the stage, placing them in just the right spot, not too many roses here, a few lilies there, spreading out the gladiola factory, creating the best configuration to enhance the tableau. A buzz in the air, a heavy scent wafted through, men scurried around like a production team preparing for the silence before curtain up.

An elderly lady slowly made her way up the steps to the funeral home on a quiet afternoon in a year I’ve forgotten. A small round hat sat atop her grey haired head, a simple handbag dangled from her wrinkled wrist and she more or less attempted a pale colored lipstick. She’d made an effort. Her husband had died that day. She had no other family and not much money; in fact, she was worried about paying her husband’s funeral bill. My father noticed she twisted a thin, worn out flowered handkerchief in her spotted hands. He remembered such things. Please, could her husband have the least expensive casket and a no frills service, she asked. She couldn’t afford flowers, not even the casket piece. It pained her to ask for long-term credit.

My father waited for a flower delivery for the husband’s funeral, flowers that never appeared. He thought maybe a friend, or the widow’s church would provide at least a simple wreath, but no. On the morning of the funeral he called the florist and ordered a wreath of carnations, which he placed on the man’s casket. Every week after her husband was buried the widow returned to the funeral home. She sat down in the chair opposite my father, opened her small black purse and handed him one dollar. She was a regular visitor to our funeral home for over two years, until at long last she’d paid her husband’s funeral bill in full.

2011-03-05T06:32:00.000-08:00

MEET ME AT THE FAIR….said the undertaker

Our county fairground was a cow pasture on the outskirts of town. With a splash of a few machines, colourful tents, carousel music and shady carneys, it was amazingly transformed in a few hours.

My father never missed a chance to advertise his funeral home, even at the county fair. Before our family moved into town the rival funeral director had pressed palms from his fair booth for years. The duelling undertakers kept a close eye on each other and my father had no choice but to stake a claim. When he spotted his chance to set up his own booth he flew to the task.

It wasn’t really a booth, but his own fine, open tent erected by his gravediggers. Somehow my father wangled a prized position at the entrance from where he greeted folks from all corners of the county as they arrived. I’ll admit it sounds a bit strange to be met by an undertaker at such a merry event, a bit SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES, but in a small town an undertaker was considered part of the community in the same way as a fireman, preacher, or doctor – a service provider.

Under the tent was everything one needed to recover from the scorching evening sun. Women with pink faces and large bottoms fanned themselves while resting their swollen feet and ankles. They sipped cold drinks and gossiped as people passed on their way to the belly of the fair. I dug down into the boxes of calendars, pens, pencils, potholders, and handed them to passers by. The funeral home’s name and phone number throbbed on every item in bold black type as if flammable.

In the corner of the tent sat two large tanks of helium. My father and his employees spent hours blowing up balloons with the stuff. They twirled a string around them and then strung them up along the tent poles. They floated through the air in the hands of children who kicked up dust on the fairground. Not a year passed that my sister and I didn’t eat the helium in huge gulps. We filled the balloons, inhaled, held our breath and then spoke like munchkins. Hilarious. My mother warned us of brain damage.

After sunset, carnival lights lent their glow to an otherwise blackened sky and the children were led home, high on sugar. The haunted house ride picked up a long line of customers. Ours was a church-going, god-fearing town. Men passed the hoochie coochie girls with one eye to the ground, the other to the swaying hips inside a tight dress. They lingered as long as they could without being obvious. Many strolled around to the back entrance.

Throughout the week tractor pulls, (still don’t know what that is) a beauty pageant, judged in rather close proximity to the heifers, hogs and tobacco, were awash in a sea of blue ribbons and tiaras. A peculiar odour of cow patties and popcorn wafted through the evening air.

At the time, I thought how terrific it was that my father was lucky enough to spend every night at the fair from opening until closing, four or five hours of shaking hands, handing out balloons and listening to people talk incessantly about the heat. It was summer, school was out and the days were long and lazy. True for me, but not for the undertaker, who was still on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

2011-02-13T02:53:00.000-08:00

We buried him with ham…

`It's likely to be a very cheap funeral,' said the same speaker;' for upon my life I don't know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer.'

`I don't mind going if a lunch is provided,' observed the gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. `But I must be fed, if I make one.' A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

Whenever our doors opened to welcome the family and friends of one of their deceased, my father was adamant that things should be just right. He never wavered from precise rules and instructions to which our family eventually grew accustomed.

One of those rules involved our dining habits. From the moment the bereaved family arrived to make arrangements, until the last mourner left the funeral home a couple of days later, we weren’t allowed to eat any food that had a strong or lingering odor. This rule was always completely at odds with the goings on downstairs. All day long friends of the deceased brought food by the truckloads, wrapped in foil or stacked in boxes, they were placed upon a groaning table in a back room downstairs. Pots of coffee continuously brewed throughout the day and a ginormous red Coke machine hummed and clattered and clinked with each glass bottle removed.

The custom of feeding the mourning has been a ritual longer than one might imagine. Last year the remains of a huge burial feast was found in a cave in Northern Israel that dates back 12,000 years. The bones of giant extinct cattle were excavated and over 70 tortoise skeletons.

This kind of evidence had only been found in archaeological sites that dated much later. The research states this is the earliest evidence for feasting on this scale.

All over the world feasting rituals take place for one reason or the other and in one way or another. Quoted from a record in England in 1309, the provisions for consumption at a funeral feast were as follows:

"One and a half butts of cider--five pigs--one hare--five sheep--thirteen hens--nineteen geese--one and a half gallons of oysters--two hogs--nine capons--one and a half carcases of beef--four 'bacons' besides wine, ale, eggs, bread given to the poor and friends, and a fee of sixty-six shillings and eightpence to the Chaplain. Fifty pounds of wax was also used--presumably for candles."

In 1702 the most costly item of George Brown’s funeral feast, above the cost of cheese, bacon, veal and mutton, was the 16 shillings for ’16 dozen at 14 to the dozen whole loaves’ of Arval bread, or “averil”. Often called Arval Cake because of its sweet, fruity dough. The funeral repast was once known as the averil. An averil, which means "heir ale" or succession ale, was a banquet to welcome the new heir to the title, or property, more so than a feast in honor of the departed. In a ritual found most often in the north of England, mourners were each presented with a piece of rich cake or biscuit (Americans, think large cookie) wrapped in white paper and sealed with black wax, a ceremony which takes place before the 'lifting of the corpse,' when each visitor selects his packet and carries it home with him unopened.

By 1800 there was usually a cold meal at the house of the family of the deceased that most often included ham, from which the phrase “we buried him with ham” originates. In describing the Yorkshire villages of the period, Elizabeth Gaskell’s "Life of Charlotte Bronte," states "the custom of averils was as prevalent as ever, and that after the burial had taken place, the sexton standing at the foot of the open grave, announced that the averil would be held at the 'Black Bull' or some other local hostelry where the mourners and friends repaired."

The first time I attended a funeral in Britain the widow invited thirty or forty of us to a wonderful country pub for lunch after the funeral. It was an entirely foreign occasion for me, one I found touching, calming and generous. I’d never been to a funeral feast in a pub, or really, anywhere other than the deceased’s family’s home. When I lived in New York, I remember crowding into a woman’s one bedroom apartment for drinks and a buffet where we spilled out onto the fire escape, as one does.

In the States, it is a well-known fact that nobody eats better than a bereaved Southerner. Usually, a close family friend moves into organizational mode and the last thing the family of the deceased has to think about is food.

Every Southern woman knows that she must have a “funeral food” for which she’s known, like Aunt Lilly’s fried chicken or Granny Ester’s lime congealed salad. My mother always makes deviled eggs. I keel over whenever she says, “I’m going to dress some eggs.” This always conjures an image of eggs running away from her, bouncing along the counter top as she chases them with tiny sweaters and skirts.

Many women own serving dishes with their names printed on them so the bereaved won’t have to worry about whose serving dish belongs to whom, although there’s also a rule that if your dish is not returned you should forget about it. Never bother a grieving widow with your Pyrex problems.

Here then are a few examples of a bit of South in your mouth, the top Southern funeral comfort foods we all know and love.

Grits Casserole

Hash Brown Casserole

Any kind of casserole, really

Pimento Cheese Finger Sandwiches

Country Ham and Biscuits

Crockpot Barbecue Pulled Pork

Truck Stop Potatoes (don’t ask)

Ambrosia

Mississippi Mud Bars

Moon Pie Banana Pudding

Jimmy Carter Cake

Pecan Pie

All washed down with Party Fruit Punch, or something a little stronger.

I leave you with the great Southern word stylist, Lyle Lovett.

I went to a funeral 

Lord it made me happy 

Seeing all those people 

I ain’t seen 

Since the last time 

Somebody died

Everybody talking 

They were telling funny stories 

Saying all those things 

They ain’t said 

Since the last time 

Somebody died

2011-01-23T02:39:00.000-08:00

PAID TO MOURN

"There's an expression of melancholy in his face, my dear ... which is very interesting. He would make a delightful mute, my love." Oliver Twist

By the age of seven, possibly earlier, I had learned what to do when someone came by the funeral home unexpectedly. I quickly slipped off my father’s lap, wiped the smile off of my face and excused myself with the most somber expression imaginable. Death was not funny or playful, and those who suffered were to be paid the utmost respect. Nor was death to be a curiosity. That was asking too much – nothing could hamper my curiosity.

From the top of the stairs, my unseen perch, my classroom, I observed a steady stream of people as they came to mourn and pay their respects. They spoke in low voices, sometimes weeping or wailing. They smelled of lavender water, Evening in Paris, hairspray, cigars and cigarettes.

By the time I was twelve, just about everyone who lived in our town had darkened our front door several times. It would have been the shock of my young life to learn that in ancient cultures it was deemed a worthy profession to be paid to mourn. There was even a fancy name for such a person: moirologist.

Years later I visited the Tomb of Ramose, Tomb number 55 in the Valley of the Kings, Luxor where I beheld the exquisite painting of the young king’s death scene. It depicts the ancient ritual of hiring professional mourners to follow the dead to their graves. It was predominately women who were charged with mourning and these were painted in the pale cluster you see below.

They would be expected to wail and pat dirt on their heads, a gesture of distress, as also shown in these terracotta statues.

Perhaps the most interesting contributions to proxy mourners are those of the Chinese and Taiwanese, called ‘professional wailers’.

Studies have shown that wailers most often are laid-off workers or those in low paying jobs wishing to supplement their incomes. They weep, sing mournful songs, and crawl during the funeral.

Wailing is considered a performing profession. One wailer was frightened that she would not be able to cry in her first performance, but when the day arrived she thought about how frightened she was of dead people and wept hysterically during the funeral.

For his book, The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up, author Liao Yiwu interviewed twenty seven people from the margins of Chinese society. One of these was a professional mourner paid to wail at funerals.

“I entered the mourning profession at the age of twelve. My teacher forced me to practice the basic suona (reed instrument) tunes, as well as to learn how to wail and chant. Having a solid foundation in the basics enables a performer to improvise with ease, and to produce an earth-shattering effect. Our wailing sounds more authentic than that of the children or relatives of the deceased.

Most people who have lost their family members burst into tears and begin wailing upon seeing the body of the deceased. But their wailing doesn't last. Soon they are overcome with grief. When grief reaches into their hearts, they either suffer from shock or pass out. But for us, once we get into the mood, we control our emotions and improvise with great ease. We can wail as long as is requested. If it's a grand funeral and the money is good, we do lots of improvisation to please the host.”

"How long can you wail? What was your record?" Asks Liao Yiwu.

“Two days and two nights...Voices are our capital and we know how to protect them...Frankly speaking, the hired mourners are the ones who can stick to the very end.”

Sometimes wailers receive gratuities. After the ceremony the bereaved may physically lift up the wailer and give them a bouquet that contains money, or, in a different area of China, the custom is to place red envelopes at the side of the wailer while the funeral is in progress. The amount varies. In China the profession is becoming so competitive that wailers are reluctant to take on apprentices these days.

I think my father would have been fascinated to learn how differently people mourn and pay respects to the deceased and their families… Perhaps I should have presented him with a monthly invoice.

2011-01-09T02:22:00.000-08:00

SKY BURIAL AT MOUNT KAILASH

There was only one after-death experience offered in our small patch of Southern earth and that was to be buried in it. The first time I heard the word ‘cremation’ and asked my father what in the world it was, I could not believe that this disposal by fire actually existed. There was no crematorium in our town and with the custom of burial firmly in place, no one would ever dream of choosing this route. Of course that’s all changed now, and although I’m told the nearest crematorium is miles away, it has fast become a choice of many.

I’ve learned of another burial practice that I don’t think has a hope of catching on in the Western world, not that it should or could. For thousands of years the Tibetans have practiced sky burial. It is simply a means of disposing the deceased by leaving the remains exposed to the elements and the birds of prey, which are considered sacred to Tibetans. The practice is called jhator, which means “giving alms to the birds”. Sky burial evolved as a practical solution to the problem caused by grounds in Tibet being too hard and rocky to dig a grave and in which the scarcity of timber made it difficult to perform cremations.

To a Westerner the ritual is quite grotesque, and the risk of offending is great, so I’ll not relay the procedure in detail here. When a Tibetan person dies, monks come to the home and pray for three days. The body is left untouched and at this initial stage, the family consider it inappropriate to display grief or sadness. After this period, the body is wrapped in a white cloth and moved to the site.

The ritual is performed on a specified sky burial site, a large flat rock located on higher ground than its surrounds. Monks trained specifically for this use tools designated for the ritual. Family members are near, but usually do not witness. Should you find yourself in Tibet and happen upon a sky burial in progress you should never photograph the procedures or even stop and watch unless you’re invited. It’s considered extremely disrespectful and rude.

The government of China, which has occupied Tibet since the 1960’s, prohibited sky burials until the 1980’s. They consider the practice barbaric, but probably realized it is the most efficient, fuel saving funerary practice for the region and thus allowed the burials once again.

Four of the most remote and revered sky burial sites lie at the foot of what is known by four religions, Hinduism, Bön, Buddhism and Jainism, as the axis of the world – the majestic Mount Kailash.

Part of the Tibetan Himalayas, located in western Tibet, Mount Kailash is considered so sacred that there are no recorded attempts to climb it and even setting foot on its slopes is considered a sin. It’s claimed that any attempts to do so have resulted in death. In other words, it is off limits to climbers.

Pilgrims have made their way to Kailash for thousands of years, and in the early days they walked for months to reach the foot where they then walked the kora, the 32-mile circuit around the foot of the mountain.

The location is so remote and inhospitable that even today the journey to the foot of Kailash is only slightly easier. Every Tibetan aspires to one day walk the kora to wash away a lifetime of sins. There are pilgrims who perform prostrations around the entire mountain. It takes four weeks when they follow this demanding regime.

Along the way, in a painful climb into ever thinning air, Grachon Ngagye Dorsa is one of four sky burial places around Kailash.

Sky burial site at Mount Kailash

Here pilgrims will pause to simulate their own death. They may spill a drop of their blood, leave a tooth or strand of their hair, or tear a piece of clothing to leave on the site. They lie as if dead on the rock to be reborn to a higher life in their next rebirth.

Tibetans believe that life has completely left the body immediately after death. They consider jhator an act of generosity on the part of the deceased and treat it as important instruction on the impermanence of life.

2010-12-17T14:58:00.000-08:00

SANTA’S FUNERAL PARLOUR

“Will Santa Claus still come if someone dies tonight?” This was the kind of thing I worried about when I was a child and lived in the funeral home. We had chimneys, we had fireplaces, but would Santa bother to pop down if he knew that he might land near a dead body? Was Santa frightened of the dead? I was assured that being the kind of man who could travel the world in one night, a corpse would hardly impede him.

Winters in our small Southern town were bitterly cold and icy. This always seemed to surprise people. Nestled in a corner of the upper South, we suffered from winds and frigid temperatures from the North, and in the summer, the swampy heat from the lower South. ‘Twas the worst of both worlds.

One December night an unexpected, furious snowstorm descended upon our town and in a matter of a few hours we were knee deep in the stuff.

Our friends Flo and Billy were having dinner with us that night and no one noticed how serious the blizzard-like conditions had become until it was too late. Even if the roads had been safe, they couldn’t possibly climb the steep driveway that led to their house. They were snowbound at the funeral home. Can you imagine being sequestered in a funeral home if you weren’t used to that sort of thing? Flo woke in the middle of the night disoriented and sleepless; she climbed out of bed to sit by the window to watch the storm. Brave woman stumbled in the dark and broke her toe.

December was a busy month at the funeral home. It wasn’t necessarily that people died more quickly or in larger numbers than any other month, although the elderly and infirm did tend to fade away at the end of the year. Rather, it was that my father made certain that the funeral home performed and offered services beyond the call of duty. This required more than the burial of the dead. December brimmed with giving.

Anyone could stop by the funeral home for Christmas cookies or that god-awful fruitcake and enough steaming hot coffee to float a boat.

He bought and delivered gift baskets full of fruit that didn’t look quite real for the time of year. Christmas cards were sent to almost everyone in town. Small tokens of potholders, calendars, pencils and pens emblazoned with Mayfield & Son Funeral Home and our phone number were given to anyone he might have overlooked. There was a great deal of toing and froing. For someone who spent so much time with the dead, he was ultimately a people person.

I wasn’t allowed to complain when people died. Tragedies occurred, shock and sadness was accepted, but to complain about a death would be akin to an orthodontist wishing that every child be born with perfect teeth. It was inevitable that over a period of thirteen years the phone would occasionally ring on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, a call that might upset our plans and was sure to take my father away from the tree. On those occasions I retreated to my room and sulked.

There’s no easy way to dig a hole in frozen ground and if the ground is frozen hard enough, it’s impossible without dynamite. We had no dynamite, or sophisticated digging equipment, no morgue and no storage space, so frozen ground was often a worry.

But I had it all figured out. I thought it would be a good idea to appeal to Santa’s kindness and request that he land on empty, frozen plots in the cemetery. If he touched down hard, the sharpness of the sleigh’s blades, the weight of all the toys and the hooves of the reindeer would surely break enough ground for our gravediggers to get a spade going.

I quickly set out to write a letter to Santa Clause requesting a slight detour in his landing plans for our town. My mother mailed it as she did every year, without knowing its contents. For years I was certain that on that year Santa kept everyone alive through the holiday season.

Wishing you a happy, healthy and successful 2011.

2010-11-29T02:56:00.000-08:00

THE UNDERTAKER’S ART

I am aware that I walk a fine line. There’s a certain risk of exploitation when writing about death, the funeral business and the funeral home in which I grew up. I could be accused of being too glib, too morbid or disrespectful. So I hope and trust that the needle of my morbid-o-meter stays firmly pointed in the middle.

I didn’t follow in my father’s footsteps, although the thought crossed my mind when I was about eight years old. It was then that I first discovered that my father was an artist, though he probably never thought of himself as such.

A funeral director is not necessarily a mortician and a mortician is not necessarily a funeral director. My father was both. On my birth certificate, the answer to the request for the father’s occupation reads ‘undertaker’ and it’s how I’ve always answered the what-does-your-father-do question. The room clears quickly.

One funereal custom prevalent in the South that generates controversy is that of viewing the body. People are divided on whether or not this age old custom is valuable. My father told me that it helps the bereaved to place the idea of death firmly in the mind. Many people understand intellectually that death has occurred, but emotionally they are unable to comprehend. Most people these days have not had much experience with death. The mortality rate is higher, people die outside the home, and many people live far away from their families and haven’t been present for the death itself. Seeing, and even sometimes touching the deceased presents a tactile, visual confirmation that a person is not just gone away, but actually dead and they see exactly how death is different from life.

“Well, he looks real natural, Frank.”

This, probably the highest compliment my father received, was the aim. The bereaved sees their loved one at peace and if the undertaker has done a good job they won’t even notice the makeup or how much work went into making them look natural.

The fear of bad makeup is one of the largest reasons a family would choose not to hold a viewing. A heavy-handed undertaker who creates, on both men and women, a waxy orange glow, garishly rouged cheeks, and enough greasy lipstick to dim a Vegas showgirl are the results of a very bad artist indeed.

Many people think that undertakers search high and low for a cosmetician, but that’s not true in most cases. The undertaker/mortician is well trained and if he performs his or her other duties well, not much makeup is needed.

The Undertaker's Best Friend

The first time I watched my father put the finishing touches on an elderly woman I was mesmerized. He always did this in the chapel where he could check the makeup against the lighting, which was softer and rosier than the prep room. His suit jacket hung on one of the chairs, his sleeves were neatly rolled up and he tucked his tie into his trousers. In one hand he held a palette of lip colours and in the other, a long, thin wooden brush. Slowly, with a steady hand he added a little more coral lipstick to her lips.

“That’s not a very nice colour.” I said.

“It’s okay.” He said while he worked.

“It’s not what the ladies are wearing today. Mother always wears red.”

He stopped and turned to me.

“It’s what the family wanted. It’s the colour she wore everyday of her life. That’s what’s important - that they see her as she was.”

Lesson learned.

2010-11-12T09:57:00.000-08:00

HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW

It was an ancient ritual in the South for a woman of a certain age and a certain social standing to clock in at the beauty parlor, which my mother did twice a week without fail. The men about town may have owned seats at the coffee counters, but god help any one of them who came between his wife and her beauty parlor appointment.

Mildred Bond washed and rolled my mother’s hair, then sat her under the dryer until her face turned pink and her ears heated up to bright prickly red.

Out came the rollers, at which point Mildred went to work teasing my mother’s hair and arranging it into, ahem, a style. Think Country & Western without the glamour. The beauty parlor was always thick with hairspray, half of which seemed to land on my mother’s do. She didn’t rise from the chair until her hair was absolutely immovable.

No, not really.

Although there may have been a few steel magnolia customers at Mildred’s place, she was no Dolly Parton. A farmer’s wife who spoke in a soft country twang, Mildred moved calmly from head to head in her plain white uniform and white shoes. Her own hair, the color of a young doe, seemed less important in height and not quite as stiff as her customers'. Constantly she pushed her glasses up her powdered nose and was the kind of woman who looked as if she’d been sixty all her life. Strange then to see her with her husband, who was the spitting image of Superman in overalls.

I learned quite by accident that Mildred was guilty of moonlighting. One evening my mother told me to find my father and tell him dinner was ready. He wasn’t in the office, nor in the casket room, so I knew I was going to have to check the embalming room. I was as skittish about the embalming room as anyone might be, but I had developed a grin and bear it attitude over the years. I knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked again. Nothing.

I heard strange sounds, stranger than usual, through the heavy wooden door, so I slowly cracked it open a bit. My father said, “Come on in!" as if inviting me to a party. There stood my father with a horrible thick hose in his hand. There stood his employee by a shiny white machine. And good god, there stood Mildred Bond with a strange contraption in her hand. She waved the noisy thing around the head of a woman who lay on the table draped in a sheet. It was a blow dryer, the first I’d ever seen. I felt I was on the set of a science fiction movie.

Very early blow dryer

Mildred looked up at me and smiled her easy smile. “Hi,” she drawled, “how are you this evening?”

Oh just great.

Some doors are best left closed.

2010-10-27T04:54:00.001-07:00

HALLOWEEN AT THE FUNERAL HOME

My father’s funeral home sat in the middle of the residential section of Main Street. Ours was an odd little stretch of the street. On one side of us there lived a chiropractor who practised out of an old Victorian house. At that time, our town’s citizens looked upon the field of chiropractic as suspect and related to sorcery. People occasionally knocked on his door and from my seat on the veranda I did my best to be certain they got out alive by monitoring their exit.

On the other side lived two widowed sisters who I never saw in the flesh in the thirteen years we lived there. I heard dishes clattering from their kitchen window, the smell of their burnt toast and coffee wafted past and I could just make out their shadows as they walked to and fro in front of the dark mesh screen that protected their window.

Across the street was another Victorian house brimming with a family of Holy Rollers. You just never knew what might be going on in there.

Every day was Halloween in our neighborhood.

On October 31, my father spent a small fortune on CANDY – the panacea for all life’s scary, icky moments and childhood hurts.

Children will do almost anything to get their hands on it, including knocking on the door of a funeral home on Halloween night.

One might think that the funeral home’s would be the last doorstep trick-or-treaters would darken on a Halloween night. Might be just a bit too real - a dead body, a casket or funereal accoutrement. God knows we had enough odd-looking stuff stashed away in old cupboards.

The children were not at all frightened by my father - he was the friendly sort. An undertaker who realized the best advertising and marketing campaign was based on one in which you are remembered as a giver, not a taker. So there he stood in his perfectly tailored and fashionable suit, (I always thought he must have made some Faustian pact with Pierre Cardin) threw open the door to the goblins and filled their bags with candy. We had hundreds of little visitors, all dressed in crazy costumes, excited to be at the funeral home. The undertaker gave good candy.

I wanted to decorate.

I preferred to hang cobwebs, make the kids walk through the funeral home with the lights off to find their candy secreted behind coffins, or piled up on a gurney, put my stamp on a haunted house installation, bob for apples, sell tickets.

But nooooo, the most my father would allow was a couple of freshly carved jack-o-lanterns on the front stoop.

One year, my father loaned one of his less expensive caskets to the school for a special Halloween event. Oh for a photo of THAT.

If we happened to be “busy” on Halloween night we hoped that the string of cars outside the funeral home and the number of plainly dressed adults entering would be a sign for the children to pass us by. You’d be surprised how many couldn’t take a hint. To ward off pint sized witches and devils and to prevent them from screaming “trick or treat” to a grieving widow, one of the funeral home’s employees was stationed outside where he cheerfully steered them away.

“Ya’ll come back next year, ya hear.”

2010-10-18T04:12:00.000-07:00

RUMBELOW’S RIPPER WALK

Internationally recognized as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow is said to run the best Ripper walking tour in London.

I emailed London Walks, London’s premiere walking tour firm, three times to make sure the Donald would actually be present on the early autumn evening my friend and I chose to take the tour. “Arrive early. It gets crowded,” she said. No kidding. Over one hundred people converge outside Tower Hill tube station on a balmy, soon to turn nippy night. Fortunately, half of the unknowing throng trail after another guide.

With the energy of a much younger man, he carries a canvas trolley full of brochures, books, water bottles and a little plastic stool upon which he stands surrounded by the crowd. His voice, something like a lion’s, penetrates the faithful. He’s also a crowd control expert; we relax at his assurance that he will always be seen and heard as he employs a step right up, no-one-left-behind attitude.

Here’s a man who is passionate about his subject. He’s an author, has been interviewed countless times whenever a Ripper expert is needed and he tells us he spent two glorious hours alone with Johnny Depp walking this same route when Mr. Depp was conducting research for his role in FROM HELL. Okay, so now we know with whom we’re dealing.

Donald is a talented storyteller. He paints the scenes of 1888 London by reminding us of our romanticized images donated by film and television, of which he tells us are only a paltry two percent accurate, and then smacks us with the reality of what life was really like for an East End London prostitute. His description of a toothless, men’s boot-wearing woman who has piled all of her clothes on her person because she has no home in which to hang a skirt, is gruesome and dire indeed. Though miserable her existence is, she still would rather live in the stench of the rookeries, filthy city slums, than to meet such a sudden and certain death.

The Ripper walking tours are quite famous, and indeed, our small army of Rumbelow converts fly past four other groups like a swarm of bees in the night. The cringe factor is high when we pass a young man wearing a headset who is vigorously, and badly, acting out a scene for his group. My friend and I lock eyes. Ha! We think. We are with the best and you, my friends, are clearly not.

Donald tells us “things may happen” during our winding walk through the cobblestones streets and abandoned squares.

For example, a man who particularly dislikes walking tour groups routinely rides down the street on his bicycle while shouting a string of curses. He is nicknamed ‘Old Bollocks’ by consensus of the guides. Donald warns of drunks who might want to replace his guiding expertise, and an unaware naked man or two who might appear in a window of one of the flats. Anything, it seems, may happen.

To cross a single street is to cross an invisible line that separates the heady richness of the original Square Mile in the City of London where one can easily feel swallowed by the concrete, from Petticoat Lane and Middlesex Street where the odour of a long simmering curry hits the nostrils and the abandoned market stalls leave a ghostly impression.

After hundreds of years the difference is still blatantly apparent.

The Rumbelow Effect is in full force as he describes the scenes of the murders and the state of the victims in detective-like detail.

And here lies the difference in Donald and the other guides. He is an investigator, and in fact, an ex-City policeman. Once, as he swept up his little stool and trolley and scurried to the next stopping point, I ran along beside him and asked about his research. “Police records, police records,” he told me. “ And I’m still investigating.” As if I needed telling.

At the last stop on our Ripper ramble we gather around him once again. My friend and I, caught on the edge of the group, are probably the first to see Rumbelow’s eyes look past us to a fellow lurking about. Not just any fellow demands his attention; he is this group’s “things may happen” moment. Dressed in a black frock coat, a bowler hat and smoking a meerschaum, a young man stalks our group. Under the bowler sprouts insane black tufts of hair, and a touch of smeared black hollowing makeup surrounds his eyes. He keeps his distance as if he knows that Rumbelow won’t tolerate any infringement upon his show.

Our visitor circles us for a few minutes and then points his finger at his chest and mouths silently. “I’m Jack the Ripper.”

If only he’d resisted making that claim before he slowly disappeared. It would have been the perfect end to a perfect evening.

The Suspects

2010-10-06T06:47:00.000-07:00

MOURNING BECOMES ECLECTIC

I’ve been thinking about all the strangers who used to spend the night with our family. When we were busy my father usually closed the funeral home around ten o’clock, except for the nights when, through a sense of tradition, superstition or an emotional inability to leave, the family of the deceased requested to stay the night. The ancient custom of sitting with the dead, ‘night-watching’, annoyed me royally. It was difficult enough to sit still for hours while underneath our floorboards the choral hum of people flowed through the funeral home. It was creepier having living strangers downstairs all night than it was hosting the dead ones.

I hurl the blame at those who interrupted the sleep of my childhood and aim it at the Middle Ages. Before the Middle Ages death was not contemplated, the body was tossed back to the earth with nary an attempt to memorialize even the burial site.

First off, in the Middle Ages you’ve got your memento mori all over the place; the artists’ shocking reminder that we will indeed, all die. Why, in the face of famine, plagues and disease, a reminder of death was needed, is a question for the church.

Death and the Devil Surprising Two Women

Most works of memento mori were products of Christian art. The concept of the immortal soul became universally accepted because it appealed to the idea that one’s identity did not dissolve at death. However, death was a rude and unwelcome guest and the gruesome images were a reminder to live well and good.

Carved from a single piece of ivory, c. 1650 artist and origin unknown

Examples of memento mori can also be found in Asian and Buddhist art.

The ritual of watching the dead varied according to culture and religion. Christians believed there was a need for special prayers for the soul; a soul that might benefit from a shove in the right direction. The Jewish custom of visiting the sepulchre for three days following death was in part out of hope that the departed might gain consciousness.

Once watching became a ritual in all its varied forms, it wasn’t long before people were paid to do it. Watchers were hired to protect the body from animals, body snatchers and thieves. In the 14^th century professional watchers who were bored with the endless hours of tedium played games and tried to “rouse the ghost” and raise the dead with black magic or witchcraft as one was wont to do in the Middle Ages. Food and some form of alcoholic beverage were provided: mead, wine, beer, or whisky, a crust of bread and cheese. Party central, if you will. See where I’m headed here?

German Watcher 1754

The transition from moving the deceased out of the home parlor and into ours had long been made.

There were those who came from deep country ways who were superstitious and pleaded that they didn’t want to leave their relative alone all night. My father was a tad insulted that they wouldn’t entrust them into his complete care. There were no gas lamps or candles to spark a flame, the doors were securely locked, there was no danger of night animals, and after all, safety was included in the price. He would never mention that their dearly departed was soon to be much more alone than they were now, instead, he caved in and said of course anything they wished was fine.

It’s easy to take advantage of an undertaker. A good one will refuse you nothing. Tennessee habitually coughed up people on our Kentucky doorstep who claimed it was too far to travel back and forth for the duration of the visitation and funeral. When they asked if they could spend the night, my father could hardly refuse.

Selfishly, I wanted to listen to records, watch TV and stomp around at night, especially after an entire day of tiptoeing around upstairs. I now realize that I have the watchers to thank for forcing me to pick up a book to retreat from their stories to those of my own choosing. We gave them a few more hours with their loved ones; they gave me years of entertainment and a certain addition to my education.

2010-09-16T09:10:00.000-07:00

THE TOMBSTONE THAT GOT AWAY

As a young girl the most natural thing in the world to me was to play in the town cemetery. I often hopped in the car with my father when his business took him to our town’s burial ground. He checked on graves, stopped by to place a marker in the rich soil, or had a word with his gravediggers.

A tent often protected a fresh, open grave until the graveside service was over, or in case the skies poured before it was time to backfill. If a storm blew through we drove by to make sure the tent hadn’t collapsed. There was always something to do at the cemetery.

We spent a lot of time across the street from the cemetery sitting at a Formica counter where he drank coffee with the men.

A waitress with a beehive and large orange lips always gave me a wink before setting a plate of pie topped with a tall meringue in front of me. I twirled around on the stool, fork in hand and admired the view of the cemetery from that perspective.

Old Cemetery by paprika-jancsi

One day my father reached into his pocket and pulled out a large iron key. It was the key of mystery, the key that opened the door to an anomaly; there were only two mausoleums in our county.

My father fiddled with the key in the rusty lock and struggled with the heavy chain on the door. When my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I was surprised to see how small the space was. He explained the drawers and answered my questions about the strange, deceptively empty storage room. Stone vases jutting out from the wall awaited fresh flowers. I was relieved to spot a small vent at the top of the wall. At least we wouldn’t suffocate if we were accidentally locked in. The mausoleum really wasn’t as much fun as I expected.

Tombstone, gravestone, monument, headstone - all names for the thing that marks a plot of land and the person who was. My favorite cluster:

The Hardy Tree St. Pancras Churchyard

I was partial to a particular tombstone erected in the early nineteenth century decorated with images of the deceased husband and wife, each sepia toned photo was displayed on porcelain plaques and framed in brass ovals. I visited their tombstone regularly, as if I knew them.

Many years later, although too soon, much too soon, my father died an early death and was buried in the cemetery in which we’d spent so much time together. Years later still, I came back to the cemetery to visit his grave. I felt I had a complete intimacy with our little necropolis. I thought I knew every turning, every tree, every tombstone that marked the path to my father’s own tombstone. I drove through confidently with my British husband, who was visiting Kentucky for the first time and already in a deep state of culture shock, when the unthinkable happened. I couldn’t find my father’s grave.

I drove round and round in circles. The paved pathways in the small cemetery, hardly roads, had no names, but I was certain of my surroundings. “I’m sure it’s here.” I said one too many times. I drove down different paths; perhaps the cemetery had grown a great deal more than I thought. I stopped the car, laughing at how ridiculous it was. I got out and walked around, then got back in and drove around again. After an hour of this, my husband, perplexed and attempting to be helpful, gently suggested that we’d been on this route before, perhaps we should ask someone. “You must be joking. I absolutely will not ask anyone where my own father is buried!” But the fact was that I couldn’t find his grave and now it was not funny at all.

I tried to remain calm, but in all truth, I verged on the hysterical. How was I to tell my mother that someone had stolen my father’s tombstone? I didn’t know how and I didn’t know why, but stolen it was. It was the only possible answer. I called my sister.

“Are you sitting down, because I have something terrible to tell you.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know how we’re going to tell Mother.”

“For god’s sake, what?”

“Daddy’s tombstone is gone. Someone’s stolen it!

She burst into laughter.

I was shocked into a stupor of silence by her reaction.

“We had it removed for further engraving. We’ve just now gotten around to it. It’ll be ready in a couple of weeks.”

“Oh.” Long pause. “I thought it was something like that.”

“Right. Sure you did.”

2010-09-03T14:55:00.000-07:00

A-TISKET A-CASKET

In old Persian scriptures a taboo expressed that anyone who touched a dead person was “powerless in mind, tongue and hand”. Evil spirits associated with the deceased struck them with paralysis. Well thank goodness that’s not true or my entire family would have been paralytic a hundred times over.

Ancient people also believed that high mountains and cliffs were the nearest places to paradise, so they buried their dead on cliffs in coffins carved out of a single piece of wood.

The Hanging Coffins of Sagada

Perhaps the most famous of the suspended coffins are those of the Bo people, a 3000 year-old minority group on the border of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces who believed that the higher the coffin, the more prominent or honourable the deceased.

The Hanging Coffins of the Bo

How simple their coffins seem compared to the fussiness of Victorian designer coffins. My undertaker father always insisted that his children were well mannered, polite and sympathetic. That was tough enough, so I’m really glad he didn’t push us out the door onto the street corner and make us do this!

Ah, the subtlety of salesmanship. This woman models coffin accessories. The rings dangling from her hat are from coffin robes and could also be used as less expensive handles. Hanging on her dress are coffin chains and a full, proper sized frame to indicate that this coffin maker also made frames.

She wears two coffin plates, one around her neck and the other on her chest flanked between two coffin handles. Coffin plates were often inscribed with genealogical information and then removed and passed on to the family.

Although I can’t see them, I’m sure she has a few coffin nails on her person as well.

Coffin nails weren’t merely functional. A talented man, or woman, hammered nails to decoratively spell out the name of the deceased on the lid.

Today, online witches and herbal magicians collect and sell old coffin nails. Their use in rituals and as a tool to inscribe candles apparently makes their spells more powerful. Who knew?

We may have handed out free potholders with the funeral home’s telephone number indiscreetly printed on one side, and there may have been stacks of Jesus fans sporting the funeral home’s “motto” on the back, but we never did this:

And we didn’t have one of these in our town either.

Instead, one room in our funeral home was designated as “the showroom” – a room full of caskets, each propped up on casket trucks. How many times did I crawl underneath a casket and take a nap? Can’t count them. It was the coolest room, as in temperature, in the whole rambling house. Maybe it was the congregation of those rectangles of steel in cool colors that chilled me to the bone.

We stocked only one coffin. An option for the modest budget, it was made of pressed wood and covered in grey-as-a-rainy-day felt. It sold for $395.00. Caskets were the preferred piece of funereal furniture in the South. North American undertakers hijacked the use of the word casket, originally a jewellery box, or a box in which to place precious things. Fair enough.

While coffins are lidded, caskets have a split top, the better to see you, my dear. I think most Southerners thought that embalming was invented solely for the purpose of keeping Great Aunt Flossie looking good, even after death. Caskets were most often left open during viewings and funerals. Psychologists say that it can be an important step in the mourning process to view the deceased. I don’t agree. I think it’s an incredibly personal decision. Viewing the deceased doesn’t make opening a closet full of untenanted clothes less traumatic. It doesn’t ease the effect of dozens of reminders. People mourn differently, heal differently, some not at all.

At the Mass of Our Lady of Prompt Succor there was applause when they finally closed the casket at the end of the service. That doesn’t happen often, not even for very bad people, and never in my memory. This was the scene of one of the symbolic funeral services that marked the fifth anniversary of Katrina. Hundreds of people dropped notes, cards and letters into the casket. One young girl’s note read, “Go away from us.” Many were hopeful that the symbolism of burying their grief would bring closure. Perhaps it did, or will. But one resident remarked, “You will never bury Katrina.”

2010-08-22T01:12:00.000-07:00

SHROUD SPOTTING

An elderly woman entered my father’s funeral home in a tizzy. She expressed her desire to be buried in her own clothes. Crack! The cemented surface of tradition lay crumbling. The long era of burial shrouds in our Southern way of death was over.

Before she lost her job, I scrambled down the stairs whenever the Shroud Lady came to visit. Most women in town spent a couple of hours in the beauty parlour and emerged with twelve-foot high lacquered statues on their heads. The Shroud Lady wound her dark hair in a simple bun, ran a tube of red lipstick across her lips and piled her arms high with green cardboard dress boxes. She was a farmer, a mother and a shroud maker and had no time for parlour parley.

She opened the boxes carefully; even so the chiffon dresses billowed out. Hand covered buttons, lace trimmed high necks, pleated fronts, all details that made her the best shroud maker around. Not that there were many women sewing away, fighting to make their mark on the funeral business.

With a wink at the Shroud Lady, my father let me choose which ones he would buy. Sherbet colors stared back at me: pale pink, powder blue, lavender, mint green. Soothing colors heightened the strong impression that the corpse slept peacefully. I wanted one. I thought it would make a nice nightgown. I imagined wearing it, the chiffon floating behind me as I wandered the funeral home barefoot.

Then the Shroud Lady removed one from the box, gave it a little shake and turned its back toward me.

Tricked! The shroud had no back. Two strands of fabric tied at the back of the neck, the rest of the gown, also shorter than I had imagined, was open to the air.

Technically, a shroud is a winding cloth, or sheet made of natural fibre. But we Southerners do tend to exaggerate and “shroud” rippled off the tongue easier than burial dress. There was nothing natural about the nylon chiffon our seamstress bought by the bolt. But really, a shroud can be born of any type of fabric. And I learned that a shroud often materializes quite accidentally...

Recently I met a young textile artist at the New Designer’s Show in Islington. In constructing her project she followed detectives to crime scenes in which the victim had been left to the elements for many months. She studied victims’ clothes - clothes that had sadly become their shrouds.

Then she began to bury her own clothes, or rather, stole t-shirts from her father and placed them in the compost. She was astonished at how quickly the fabric deteriorated. She told me this rather cheerily.

Her business card is made of fabric with a hint of stain. Cheeky.

Thanks to Keely Butler for the use of her photos.

2010-08-09T05:43:00.000-07:00

Séances And Other Pastimes

The first time I conducted a séance I was about twelve years old. This foray into the spirit world was purely for entertainment’s sake. Fright was the goal, and a séance was a way to fuel the fun of being terrified, as if growing up in a small town in the South wasn’t scary enough.

The perfect place for a séance would have been my father’s funeral home, in which he worked and we lived. But that was too real for most of our troops; anywhere but there was the cry. No one really wanted a spirit to actually appear. We put the setting together like an impromptu picnic. Anyone have a candle? What about a tablecloth? And we weren’t fancy about it, no cloaks, turbans or costume jewelry.

We clasped hands and I asked the spirit world to join us, as you do. Sometimes nature cooperated by sending a breeze through an open window. On nights when it was so warm and humid that our hands joined in a moisture bath, heat lightening flashed, the electricity crashed, the dark became darker and we were left dumbfounded by the silence. Then we screamed. Tantalizing as they were, these natural occurrences weren’t reliable. Time to employ – The Foot.

“Can you tell us Oh Great Spirit, does Jimmy love Deborah? One tap for yes and two taps for no, please.”

I became very good at tapping underneath the table with my foot. I stretched my leg and made it seem as if the tapping originated from the far end of the table.

And then we got one of these!

But then we saw this

and never used it again.

We added levitation to the repertoire. We called it “lifting”. It kind of works.

The person to be lifted lay supine on the floor. We sat on the floor around her, one person at her feet, another at her head and two people on each side. We made a lever with our hands by holding our forefinger and thumbs together - this looked like a gun - and placed them under her body. The leader hypnotized the subject into feeling very relaxed and heavy, soothing her, instructing her to allow her body’s weight to fall into our fingers. This went on for a while until our fingers, hands and arms began to ache. Finally, the leader said, “Lift!” With that the body rises in the air. Yes, it’s supported, but it really did feel like the body lifted much higher than it should and it felt outrageously light, as if floating. Then we gasped and dropped her from the shock of it. Worked every time.

Moving on to derelict house hunting, otherwise known as haunted houses, it was a pleasure to risk falling timbers, floors on the verge of collapse and an untold number of vermin to rummage through the remains of a lonely house.

One night we hit the wrong house. It was occupied! A woman who looked the living embodiment of a witch stuck her head out the second story window and angrily yelled down to us as we tried to enter her house. I clearly saw her long black scraggly hair, her one front tooth protruded terribly and her eyes were ever so slightly crossed. We ran away as our hearts leaped up our throats.

Ghost House
by Robert Frost

I dwell in a lonely house I know

That vanished many a summer ago,

And left no trace but the cellar walls,

And a cellar in which the daylight falls,

And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

O'er ruined fences the grape-vines shield

The woods come back to the mowing field;

The orchard tree has grown one copse

Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;

The footpath down to the well is healed.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart

In that vanished abode there far apart

On that disused and forgotten road

That has no dust-bath now for the toad.

Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;

The whippoorwill is coming to shout

And hush and cluck and flutter about:

I hear him begin far enough away

Full many a time to say his say

Before he arrives to say it out.

It is under the small, dim, summer star.

I know not who these mute folk are

Who share the unlit place with me--

Those stones out under the low-limbed tree

Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.

They are tireless folk, but slow and sad,

Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,--

With none among them that ever sings,

And yet, in view of how many things,

As sweet companions as might be had.

HERE AND HEREAFTER

Ghost Houseby Robert Frost

Ghost House
by Robert Frost