The Undertaking Read Online Free Page B

on the ground before the sexton and his backhoe do the opening. We buried Milo in the ground on Wednesday. The mercy is that what we buried there, in an oak casket, just under the frost line, had ceased to be Milo. Milo had become the idea of himself, a permanent fixture of the third person and past tense, his widow’sloss of appetite and trouble sleeping, the absence in places where we look for him, our habits of him breaking, our phantom limb, our one hand washing the other.

Gladstone

    T he undertakers are over on the other island. They are there for what is called their Midwinter Conference: the name they give to the week in February every year when funeral directors from Michigan find some warm place in the Lesser Antilles to discuss the pressing issues of their trade. The names for the workshops and seminars are borderline: “The Future of Funeral Service,” “What FolksWant in a Casket,” “Coping with the Cremation Crowd”—things like that. The resorts must have room service, hot tubs, good beaches, and shopping on site or nearby. No doubt it is the same for orthodontists and trial lawyers.
    And I’m here on the neighboring island—a smaller place with a harbor too shallow for cruise ships and no airport. I’m a ferryboat ride from the undertakers from my home state.But I’ve timed my relief from the Michigan winter with theirs in case I want to register for a meeting and write off my travel. It is legal and sensible and would reduce the ultimate cost of funerals in my town where I am the funeral director and have been for nearly twenty-five years now.
    But I just can’t work up any enthusiasm for spending any portion of the fortnight discussing business. It’snot that they aren’t a great bunch, chatty and amiable as stockbrokers or insurance types; and, out of their hometowns, incognito, hellbent on a good time, they can be downright fun, if a little bingy.It’s just that it seems I’ve been on a Midwinter Conference of my own for a long time. Enough is enough. I need to walk on the beach now and contemplate my next move.
    My father was a funeral directorand three of my five brothers are funeral directors; two of my three sisters work pre-need and bookkeeping in one of the four funeral homes around the metro area that bear our name, our father’s name. It is an odd arithmetic—a kind of family farm, working the back forty of the emotional register, our livelihood depending on the deaths of others in the way that medicos depend on sickness, lawyerson crime, the clergy on the fear of God.
    I can remember my mother and father going off on these Midwinter Conferences and coming back all sunburned and full of ideas and gossip about what my father insisted we call our “colleagues” rather than the “competition.” He said it made us sound like doctors and lawyers, you know, professionals—people you could call in the middle of the night if therewas trouble, people whose being had begun to meld with their doing, who were what they did.
    Our thing—who we are, what we do—has always been about death and dying and grief and bereavement: the vulnerable underbelly of the hardier nouns: life, liberty, the pursuit of … well, you know. We traffic in leavetakings, goodbyes, final respects. “The last ones to let you down,” my father would joke withthe friends he most trusted. “Dignified Service” is what he put on the giveaway matchbooks and plastic combs and rain bonnets. And he loved to quote Gladstone, the great Victorian Liberal who sounded like a New Age Republican when he wrote that he could measure with mathematical precision a people’s respect for the laws of the land by the way they cared for their dead. Of course, Gladstone inhabiteda century and an England in which funerals were public and sex was private and, though the British were robbing the graves of infidels all over the world for the British Museum, they did so, by all accounts, in a mannerly fashion. I think my father