Not My Ash-hole

You just truly never know what will come out of my mother's mouth. She's witty, plain and simple. She once told my two daughters, ages 3 and 5, that she was an Indian Princess. They didn't question it, just believed her. She braided their hair in true Indian Princess fashion and took them on a trip to Wal-Mart. It was there that those two little tow headed darlings decided to go to the toy department without telling her. While she frantically searched the store they found their way to the service desk and told the lady in charge they couldn't find their grandma.

"Well, can you tell me what she looks like," she asked my eldest daughter.

"Yes," she said matter-of fact. "She's an Indian Princess."

Of course, my mother found her little squaws and we have laughed about it for years.

So, you just never know what is going to come out of my mother's mouth, what she will say or do. Additionally, she has plenty to say about death. Specifically her own. She quite frankly informed my step-dad that he better see to her wishes or she would haunt him after death.

Furthermore, she wants him to heed her wishes on how she wants to be disposed of.

Now, my mother and my soft-hearted stepfather, are as opposite as day is from night or as sugar and salt. She is frank and outspoken (jovially) and he is more lenient and patient. It would be safe to say that they are the perfect balance for each other such as when you eat something really, really sweet and want to counteract it by eating a handful of salty peanuts. That's how they are and always have been for the past twenty some odd years of marriage.

One day while the two of them were conversing about death my mother made a simple plea. She wanted to be cremated and her ashes put in a hole up on top of the picturesque hillside they live on. She touted that it would be a beautiful resting place where even in death she would be out in nature and able to rest peacefully. My step-dad lovingly put his arms around her and said, "Baby, that is a wonderful idea. That way we can be together forever."

"What do you mean?" She pulled out of his embrace.

"I mean, that if you die first I will bury your ashes up there and then when I die they can dig up your hole and put me in with you."

"What???" She huffed.

In my daddy's thick Southern drawl he piped, "That way we can be together forever, it don't matter if our ashes get mixed up." He pulled her close and kissed her cheek.

My mother was not liking this one little bit. She pulled away again.

"No."

"No?"

And then she made a pronouncement that was classic "my mother." And in all my years of laughing at this woman with the quirky sense of humor, snickering at the funny off the wall outbursts she has voiced she looked straight in my daddy's face and proclaimed.

"You get your own ash-hole. I don't want you in my ash-hole."

Daddy burst into laughter.

"What? Stop laughing, it's not funny. I'm serious."

"Well, then baby, we can just live together in our mansions in the sky. Maybe the Lord will let us live together up in heaven."

Again no.

My dad visibily beginning to look hurt cocked his head sideways. "Why would you not want to share a mansion with me?"

"Well, because have you seen our backyard? It looks like a junkyard. There's so much junk laying around this place the neighbors must think a junkyard dog lives here and I don't want my mansion junked up by the likes of you. Now maybe you can live on the next block, but you cannot live with me or next door to me."

I am pretty sure my daddy stuck out his bottom lip like a pouting baby and tried to hug her to which she promptly stiffened up and proclaimed again.

"And you are not sharing my ash-hole."

Sittin' Up With the Dead

Anonymous Funeral Service, Somewhere Middle USA

My employment in the funeral business was totally unexpected. After experiencing a personal tragedy of my own, whereas I lost my young daughter to murder, I felt I had an insight to helping other families who had lost loved ones. This is how, in 2003, my sister and I became acquainted with Undertaker. We proposed to him an idea to make memorial tribute videos in the form of a music video and offer them to families who had lost a family member. Undertaker loved this idea and we began working with him and families directly to honor their loved one through a video montage. It was working out great. We were self employed and he contracted through us.

One day after I had met with a family I was visiting with Undertaker in his office about the ins and outs of the video montage when he asked me if I knew anyone who would be interested in a job.

"Here?" I piped.

" Yea, I need someone to help in the office and someone to work in the evenings when we have visitations. So, if you know someone who would be interested let me know."

"I'll do it," I said without hesitation not fully realizing what I was getting myself in to.

"You will?"

"Sure, how hard can it be?"

His eyes are this wicked deep sea color of blue and he cocked his head sideways and looked at me, his eyes seemed to stare through me. I should have known then that there was more to it than simply typing a few funeral folders and answering the phones but that look alone should have given it away, but we all live and learn, eh?

"I don't mean to be forward," he continued. "But I know your daughter died and well, frankly, can you handle this?" It had been 4 years at that point. I felt like I was somewhat among the living, yet seemed to be prepping to work with the dead. Seemed strange and I could see his point.

"I'm working with the families on the videos anyway so it isn't like I'm not exposed to the grief and pain they are suffereing. So, sure, let me give it a whirl and let's see what we can do here?"

"Can you start tomorrow night?"

Gulp.

"Sure."

"And there is a funeral on Friday in our chapel, you know how to run a sound board?"

"No."

"Oh well, you can learn. It can't be hard."

"You can teach me?" I say.

"I don't know how to even turn the thing on."

"How do you expect me to figure it out?"

"Easy, go over there and mess with it and put your time on the time sheet. You just be ready for Friday. Okay?" He was dead (no pun intended) serious.

Good grief.

I felt my throat start to close. The overwhelming feeling of panic started to set in because I would be responsible for the music, video, and sound at someones funeral? To make sure their last bit of business on this planet was tended to and done right. I was screwed. Everyone would hate me, grieving people would want my head on a platter for messing up their favorite rendition of Amazing Grace or not being able to press the CD player at the precise moment that Taps needs to be played. I will have the entire US Armed Services thinking I am a total idiot having messed up a veteran's funeral.

What had I gotten myself into? Yet, I didn't even know those concerns were the tip of the iceberg. There was so, so, so much more and then some. It was after all a business, a business of death. And those blue eyes of his. Yep, crazy eyes. I have learned that anyone who can embalm a dead body is somewhat of a lunatic. But, I will touch on all that later.

So, there it was in all it's glory. I was now employed by Anonymous Funeral Service, Somewhere in Middle USA. Not having a clue what I was getting myself into and truthfully scared shitless.

To top it off, I owned exactly one piece of black clothing, a jacket. So, I went shopping. I bought a black skirt and some snazzy shirts and one single pair of black pumps at Payless Shoes which later became known as my "funeral shoes." Old faithfuls. And I still love those shoes. We have seen a lot together, been through a lot together, moved a lot of flowers together, a lot of flower set up equipment...moved a lot of dead folks together. More dead folks than you can probably imagine.

So, now the true adventure was about to begin. My first day working in that creepy old funeral home... AND THEY LEFT ME ALONE WITH THE DEAD.

Said I should be able to lock the place up at 8:30 that night, there were only two corpses there. One in the viewing room and one in the dressing room.

"What's the dressing room?" I had asked.

Those lunatic eyes again. "Duh, where I get the dead folks dressed."

God, I had never even thought about that before now.

Help, someone, please help remove me from this Sick. Twisted. Nightmare.

What is Sittin' With the Dead You Ask???

1981

I will never forget her face, how her eyes would widen and her voice would lower to a whisper when she would tell me those stories of the dead.

"They always put them in the parlor. And they always let them lay there for days. You know why?" She clicked her false teeth.

I shook my head no, me, a girl of ten, could not possibly know of such things. Things of why anyone would leave a dead person laying in the parlor for days.

"It's because they would sit straight up." And her brown eyes would meet mine in a haunting yet fascinating manner. "Sit up right there in that coffin and their arms would go straight out and some of them would even let out a big moan. Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh-ooooooooooooooooo-uhhhhhhhhh!"

I shuddered. Pulling my legs underneath me. Barely breathing.

"We'd have to sit with the dead, make sure they were really dead and to make sure they didn't get up and run around the room like an old chicken with his head cut off. You ever see an old chicken with his head cut off?"

I nodded. In fact, I had seen her in the backyard just the day before chop the head clean off an old rooster and his body ran all over the yard while his head lay at her feet. She had plunged the ax back into the stump and waited for him to stop running before she went over and picked him up by the feet and swaggered over to a table by the back door blood slinging in every direction and put him in a bucket of water. She then plucked all the feathers off and I swear I saw him twitch now and again. Then she put his pink carcass into a boiling pot and within hours it smelled like scrumptious chicken soup. And when she made the dumplings I had all but forgotten about the chicken body running around the yard.

"Well, that's what we had to do. Sit with the dead, until they were cold and stiff and then not stiff anymore. Then we'd bury them usually on the third or fourth day."

"I will never sit with a dead person, Grandma. I swear it. I'm scared. I don't like dead people or dead chickens."

She laughed. "Oh, child, now they won't hurt you. If they sit up, you just put your hand on their chest and gently lay them back down. They'll go, you just gotta be gentle. But, sometimes when you lay them back down they will open their eyes and if that happens you put your hand over their eyes and close them. They won't bite."

"No, Grandma, I ain't sittin' with the dead. Ever. No way, no how, and nobody can make me."

"You ought not be afraid of the dead, they won't hurt you. It's the living you gotta worry about. It's the living..."

It's something how you remember words from your childhood, it's something how prophetic they can be. I have learned that it truly is the living you gotta worry about. For the dead are dead...and they ain't coming back.

May I Introduce Myself?

As you must surely realize, this blog could and probably will ruffle some feathers. Therefore, I have chosen to write it under the pen name Virginia Lee. And in my case the name belongs to someone very dear to me who has been deceased almost two years and meant the world to me (she would have been honored). For instance, Samuel Clemens, who was born way before his time in my opinion, liked to spout off whatever he chose going by the name of good ol' Mark Twain. Witty little man. And in the end it didn't matter because everyone knew who he was anyhow and he, Mark Twain, has a National Forest named after him that shouts of his exuberance and people still quote his words of wisdom to this day. What more could a writer want?

Additionally, how about Stephen King who used the pen name Richard Bachman just to see if he could actually write a novel people would read without the name Stephen King attached to it. He was successful because he's just that good, think, The Running Man, Thinner, and several others.

In this case, I will be telling stories that actually happened to me while working in the funeral service. In the case of my funeral home adventures, my rendition of these stories are heartrending, sad, funny, quirky, and sometimes downright gross. Death is not pretty, but sometimes equally, neither is life. And when a family loses a loved one it can bring out the best and worst in people. It also brings out the best and worst in preachers, in friends, in ex-wives and ex-husbands (lordy) and sometimes in an entire community pending on the community standing of the deceased. I had worked in the funeral business just shy of a decade when I decided enough was enough. I have seen my share of death, have experienced enough of it to last three life times. Being a writer, it's time to get all this stuff out of my head and share it with the world. If you hate this sort of thing just don't read it.