My father died on a late Tuesday afternoon. I had to spend Wednesday directing a cartoon voice session. On Thursday, I picked up my mother and we went to the mortuary to make arrangements for a Friday funeral. We had an 11 AM appointment and my mother, who understandably was shaky and still somewhat numb, hoped we could be out of there by Noon. She wanted me to take her to a favorite restaurant for lunch, then to get her home, A.S.A.P. Her goal at the time was to go to bed and stay there as much as possible for the rest of her life.
We had selected a popular Jewish Memorial Park (nice euphemism there) on the west side. If it's possible to apply adjectives like "pleasant" and "beautiful" to a place where you go to bury family members, and I suppose it is, this one qualified. When my Aunt Dot had died a few years earlier, my father chose this one for her. It was famous for being full of famous Jewish entertainers. Al Jolson was buried on the premises so there was always the possibility that late at night, you might spot a ghost in blackface down on one knee and singing "Mammy."
"I'll try to get us in and out in an hour," I told my mother but it was a goal I could not achieve. We were there a very long time.
Our appointment was with a very nice woman who, like all who labor in this industry, was quite good at expressing sympathy and condolences and phrasing everything oh so tastefully. We weren't there to pick out a grave for someone who'd died. We were there to select a final resting place for the physical being of one who's left us. That kind of talk. She acted as if our loss was her loss, almost as if we were family members and not customers. She was almost apologetic as she gave me the first form to fill out and sign. It was followed closely by the second form and the third form and many, many others. I have a vague memory that at one point, I even had to sign a form that acknowledged I was signing all the other forms.
Then shortly after that, there was one form I refused to sign for some reason and I had to sign a form to indicate that I had declined to sign the previous form. I asked her, "What if I refuse to sign the form that says I refused to sign the other form?" and she said, "We have a form for that."
If a form had more than a few sentences on it, she'd say, "I'll give you a little privacy while you go over this one" and then she'd leave the room for around fifteen minutes. I am a rapid filler-outter of forms so I'd be done in one and my mother and I would just stare at each other for the next fourteen.
After I'd filled out every form that had ever existed anywhere on the planet, our Grief Consultant (her title was something like that) began to lead us from room to room…and I couldn't help notice that every room had at least one large box of Kleenex. When it came time to select a coffin, she led us into a showroom, announced she'd give us a moment alone to make our decision, and then left us there for an hour. I am also a fast decision maker and it was even easier when my mother said, "We both know what Bernie would want. He'd want the cheapest one. So let's find it and get out of here."
It took me about 90 seconds to find the cheapest one and another minute to ponder if there was any way we could ever possibly regret that choice. I couldn't think of one and neither could my mother…so we just sat in a creepy room full of coffins and stared at each other until our saleslady returned. Then we went to the room where we selected the grave marker and its typeface and I wrote out the wording.
Then we had to pick a place to put my father. There were many burial sites available and I'm sure she would have driven us all over that vast complex like a good realtor but I cut that short. I said, "Please…just show us a couple near where his sister is buried." I think the woman asked, "Did they get along well?" — like that would have mattered — and then we drove up to the hill, located the gravesite of Aunt Dot, then I selected the nearest vacancy. "Don't you want to see some of the other options?" she asked.
My mother interrupted. "Unless you have one with a view of drive-in movie, this will do fine." It wasn't that we were being callous. We just couldn't imagine why one farther away from Aunt Dot could be in any way preferable.
The last decision I recall was the chapel for the service, and I think our personal Grief Counselor was going to show us all the different ones they had but I made matters simpler. We were only expecting a turnout of about five people so I said, "Give us the smallest one you have." We took a look at it, I said fine, and then we went back to her office and I signed another dozen or so forms and wrote a large check. When we finally got out of there it was after 4 PM and my mother said, "Let's skip lunch. I just want to go home and go back to bed." I took her there, then went out and got us both some food. It was a pretty exhausting day.
Two days later, I put on my best suit, picked her up in the Mercury Sable I was then driving and drove her to the Memorial Park. The officiating rabbi was a man who'd never met my father and he took me aside, asked me questions and took notes. He then plugged my answers into the appropriate holes of one of his stock speeches and though I don't think he had it written down, it worked something like this…
[Name of Deceased] was so proud of his [son/daughter], [Name of Child] who had acheived so much as a(n) [Occupation of Child]…
Basically, it was Mad-Libs interspersed with occasional quotes from the Torah. There were five people in the chapel to hear it: Me, my mother, my Uncle Nathan and two neighbors. One was our next-door neighbor, Betty Lynn, who was more like an aunt to me than any actual relation. The rabbi's remarks were brief, totally appropriate and given that he never met my father, utterly unnecessary.
I was invited to follow him at the podium but I passed. The room was cold and foreboding and the four other mourners knew how I felt about my father. Besides, I was taking them all to lunch afterwards anyway — at that restaurant my mother hadn't gotten to on Wednesday. So anything I had to say, I could say more directly there. There was plenty to say, all of it good.
But back at the Memorial Park, we all just wanted the ritual to be over. I've been to funerals — including some there — that were in their own ways, joyous and fun. I've attended memorial services where people who knew the deceased got up and shared wonderful stories and there was laughter and sometimes music and singing, and new friendships were made or old ones rekindled. Pat McCormick's ended with jazz trumpeter Jack Sheldon playing "Taps" and then all the male comedians present — about half of those in the business and over the age of 60 — all dropping their pants.
I've spoken at quite a few great ceremonies and there can be something healthy about them, especially when they provide a sense of closure. I always feel like when they're over and you drive out of the parking lot, there should be a big sign that says, "You are now leaving the Mourning Zone. Please resume your life."
The last act of our Friday was the burial itself. We all got into our cars — my mother was with me in mine — and we caravaned up to the top of a hill. It was a clear but way-too-breezy day in Southern California. Trees were rattling and swaying and for a second there, I felt like I should gather up my little dog Toto and try to take shelter in the cellar. I parked as close to the site as possible, got out of the driver's side and began to walk around the car to open the passenger door to help my mother out. Suddenly, a violent burst of wind hit and my yarmulke blew off my head.
It was the cheap, disposable kind but it was still vital that I have it on for the duration of the ceremony. I watched it disappearing into the distance like a black frisbee and began to sprint after it. This was not easy because I was wearing not my usual New Balance athletic shoes but some leather dress footwear that I only wore to funerals and the Magic Castle. I ran and ran and every time I got near the errant skullcap, a new gust would blow it farther from me, making me run more. When I passed a grave marker I thought said "Jack Benny," I imagined the yarmulke was a five-dollar bill and Jack was yanking it away from me, again and again, on an invisible cord.
Finally, right in front of Vic Morrow's final resting place, I caught the yarmulke and then my breath. Then I looked back in the direction of my car and I was so far away, I couldn't see it. Wheezing, I hiked back as my mother sat in that car, wondering where the hell her son was. The rabbi and the three other mourners were all wondering that, too.
It felt to them like forever before I reappeared, breathing hard, with one hand holding my yarmulke firmly in place on my head. "What happened?" the rabbi asked me. I told him my yarmulke had blown off and I ran after it. He said, "You didn't have to do that." He reached into his coat pocket and showed me he had about eight of them in there. "I always carry spares." Then he added, "What you should do is what I do. Use a bobby pin." He pointed to his own yarmulke, which was a small disc, elegantly stitched with gold and silver threads. It was clipped onto his hair —
— and that didn't help. Because just then, the strongest breeze of the day so far hit us and his yarmulke (the expensive one) went spinning off in the general direction of Eddie Cantor — and since the rabbi was in his seventies, I had to go chase his down, too. By the time I got back to the burial site, I was so exhausted, I half-wanted to fall into the hole with the coffin and take the permanent dirt nap.
With one hand holding his yarmulke in place, the rabbi read the appropriate words. Then he explained, as we all already knew, that it was customary for the friends and family to demonstrate their acceptance of the burial by each putting a spadeful of dirt into the grave. The rabbi moved to demonstrate but since he was 70+ and he only had one hand free, I had to go up and help him while simultaneously preventing my own yarmulke from escaping again. I didn't find it so funny but I'll bet my father would have roared.
Then since everyone else present was of the rabbi's age, save for me, I had to do their burying by proxy for them. I think, by the way, this whole custom of the mourners helping to fill in the hole was something a cemetery owner came up with so he wouldn't have to hire as many men to do this.
We all paid our respects to Aunt Dot's grave — which pretty much consisted of locating it and saying, "There's Aunt Dot's grave!" — and then we were done. I took everyone out for that great lunch that involved all the warm remembrance of my father that didn't seem to fit into the formal funeral.
When I got my mother home, before she collapsed into bed, she told me, "When I go, I don't want you to have to go through any of that. I don't want you to have to deal with the paperwork of my estate, either. Can you get me a lawyer who specializes in estate and end-of-life planning?" I asked my Business Manager and he recommended just such a lawyer.
Three months later, my mother presented me with a manila envelope. She said, "Here…put this away and when I go, open this and you'll be able to handle everything in about fifteen minutes. Among other actions, she'd put everything she owned into a trust and named me as the sole inheritor of that trust. As for her burial, she'd prepaid for a cremation and burial-at-sea with the Neptune Society and specified that there was to be no service of any kind. When she finally did go in 2012, the non-funeral arrangements for her body didn't take fifteen minutes but they didn't take much more than that.
The trust worked well too, though that was a bit more complicated. Because she lived so much longer after the formation of the trust, many of her financial details had changed. You may recall how on two separate but consecutive instances, I caught caregivers stealing from her and had to close down her checking accounts and credit cards, and open new ones. Well, I didn't think to put those new ones under the trust so I had to sign a lot of forms and then I had to sign forms to verify that I'd signed the forms I'd signed…
But all in all, it was pretty efficient. In my mother's last years as I drove her around and ran over there at 4 AM to help her with this or that, she often said things like, "I don't know how I'll ever be able to thank you." Well, she thanked me plenty by how she arranged her affairs, including that "reservation" with the Neptune Society. It really made my life so much easier. That was one of the major ways we expressed love in my family: By not creating problems for each other.
This has run long, I know, but there's one more story that belongs in this piece. Three years after my father died, his brother Nathan joined him. Uncle Nathan was a life-long bachelor and it fell to me to handle his burial and his estate. I could turn most of the estate stuff over to my Business Manager but I felt I had to make the funeral arrangements myself…and that I had to go back to the same Memorial Park. That, of course, would mean going through the same day-long ritual once again.
I phoned the same Grief Counselor/Sales Person and said, "I've got another Evanier for you." She expressed all the same condolences as the last time, then asked me, "When would you like to come in? I have an appointment open at 10 AM tomorrow."
I said, "I can be there at 10 but I have a question. I don't want to seem insensitive but I really feel all these forms and taking an hour to pick out a coffin and a half hour to select a marker are…well, wastes of time. I'll miss my uncle but…is there any way to speed up the process?"
She replied, "Sure. Do you have any idea what you'd like for Nathan?"
I said, "Give me the least expensive coffin you have, the same headstone you had for my father — and I'll give you the new wording — the same chapel and the same kind of burial site, the closest one available to my father and aunt. Oh — and get me the same rabbi since he's already learned how to pronounce 'Evanier.' Anything else?"
"The time," she said. "How about Tuesday at 11:30?" I said that would be fine. She came back with, "And if you want, you can give me the check and sign all the paperwork when you're here then. I have one form that can take the place of all those others we have some people sign."
I was astounded. I asked her, "We just did all this in about the time it takes to boil an egg. Now, granted, a lot of that was because we were just duplicating decisions I made last time. But last time, it took five hours. Was there any way to make it go quicker?"
She said, "Oh, certainly. You might have had to come in but we could have done it all in, oh, about a half-hour if you'd preferred."
I asked, "Why wouldn't I have preferred that?" and I swear on the lives of all the dead relatives I've mentioned in this article, she replied, "Most people want to be distracted from their loss or to feel like they're really doing something for their loved one. Since they're spending so much on the service and burial plot, they get upset when the arrangements don't take all day. Heck, if you had a fax machine, you could probably have done it all from home in fifteen minutes."
