I finished a draft a few days ago for Listen to Your Mother, sent it off to a few people to pick apart. One of the topics I considered was trying to tackle how working in funeral service had changed how I parent.
It’s two in the morning, and I’m not sure this is that, but I couldn’t sleep so I wrote. I’ll throw it behind a cut because there is talk about dying, and kids, and talking to kids about death, and loss in all its iterations and there are a lot of people for whom that is all ridiculously uncomfortable and I respect that.
It’s the middle of the night or early morning, whichever. I can’t sleep. So there’s this.
If you’ve ever watched Six Feet Under, you’re familiar with their conceit - each episode opens with a death. I often think about how those writers must have scrambled, especially later into the series, to come up with something different for each one.
There is an episode, fairly early on, season one or two, I think, that opens in a nursery. The picture is blurry, the perspective is from the inside of a crib. You see a mother and a father, peeking in, then leaving. There is a mobile hanging above. The screen goes black, then opens to the mobile again. Black, mobile, a repeated sequence until there is just black, and then a name, and you realize what you’ve just watched.
The first time I saw it I was a single twenty-something. Wow, I thought to myself. They went there.
The second time I saw it I had a baby, several months old, and I put the meat of my palm between my teeth to stifle any noise I might make as I ugly cried my way through it.
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I was five months pregnant when I started working for funeral directors. Six weeks on the job and the highlight of our national convention, for me, was getting to work with some producers doing a project that would be included in the bonus material for the final season of SFU - a documentary on how the American view of death had changed over the course of the series.
They interviewed several funeral directors for the piece. One of them, a past president, is a tremendous man and funeral director based out of Connecticut, and I may be biased but he’s one of the best in the country. In one of the more moving segments, he talked about the funeral of a child. Young, very young, and he described putting the child in his mother’s arms, letting her rock him one last time, giving her that time to say goodbye and I thought, Jesus, what the hell have I gotten myself into?
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Back maybe two weeks from maternity leave, I travelled with some colleagues to tour a funeral home in a different part of the state. We walked into the casket showroom and there, in the corner, was an infant display (please to note: this is not something you ordinarily see in a showroom - fact of life or not it’s not something most funeral directors call attention to). I turned around and walked right out of the room, trying to catch my breath.
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You probably don’t know it, because they never talk about it but many funeral directors will donate their professional services for the funeral of a young child, asking only for payment that covers things like the casket, the vault, etc. Someone rolled their eyes at me once, said something along the lines of “of course they should, those funerals shouldn’t happen to begin with ” to which I responded, “so basically pediatric hospice should only bill for medicines delivered, then? Doctors should comp billing on cases where kids don’t make it?” I’m saying. These are good people.
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Another funeral director told me about a service he’d done, a family friend whose teenage son had killed himself, shot himself in the head at a range and with ammunition that did a pretty horrific amount of damage. He worked, nonstop, pulling out every trick he knew, everything he’d been taught to reconstruct the boy’s face so his parents wouldn’t have a closed casket as their only choice. So his mother could touch his cheek one last time and say goodbye.
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There is an organization of volunteer photographers called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep. They go in and provide remembrance photography for parents that have lost a baby. If there are angels on earth, these people have wings. Ours is a society that cannot process the notion of infant loss and so we don’t talk about it. At a time of unspeakable grief they help families and give them something tangible to hold onto, after.
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When Newtown happened, my first thought was of my kids, my second for those parents, those families. Then it was the funeral directors, because those are my people, even still. The Connecticut funeral director who was a friend and mentor. He has all boys, just like me, all grown up. All his grandbabies are all girls, and some of them, no doubt, the same age range as those kids. I have a pretty good idea what those kinds of rounds do to a body that size. I know all too well the lengths to which those men and women - whose calling is all too often dismissed as “creepy” - served those families, how they worked untold hours amidst that horror to make sure those families could say goodbye whatever way they needed to.
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If there are angels on earth, there are innumerable funeral directors walking around with wings of their own.
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They became part of my family, these men and women, and they taught me about how we care for our dead. They changed my vocabulary and they changed how I think about mortality. Whether you believe there is something more than what we know while our hearts are beating or not, we have this time, now, and this time is finite. There are no promises about how long we get, about who gets to go first. I have been to funerals for babies and for grade schoolers and for teenagers, for parents and grandparents and crazy old uncles.
I look at my boys and every day I am thankful for more time with them because I know there are no guarantees.
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It was always something of a running joke among some of us on the staff, about how much funeral directors love to hug. Six years working for funeral directors, gone from that work almost two years now and I’ll be damned if I’ve not become one, too. Hug while you can.
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I make no promises to my kids. Our pets don’t go to sleep, they die. Death is a part of life, and everything dies. I will die, they will die. The concept is mostly abstract to them now. They’ve been lucky enough that except for a pet they haven’t had to deal with the loss of anyone close to them. It is never a comfortable conversation to have but it’s an important one and I think I would have avoided the hell out of it were it not for my funeral directors, for funeral service.
Lately, the almost-4-year old has asked about it. I don’t want to die, he says and I tuck him up and tell him that I know. No one wants to, but it simply is part of our human experience. It’s okay to be afraid, but there is no need to linger on it. No matter what, no matter when, we will always love each other and that’s what gets you through.
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Love. It’s not true that funeral service taught me to love, but I don’t think I fully appreciated what a gift it is until I spent my time around people whose life work is to care for the dead. You can’t do that and not have love. You can’t do that and not understand that what we are will one day be stripped away, ‘til that’s really all that’s left.
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I learned that I can’t control when I go, when the people I love do. But I can love them, and I can tell them, and so the last thing they hear before they go to sleep, the first thing they hear in the morning is “I love you.” We can yell at each other and go to bed angry but no one leaves the house without those words to carry them on their way. Because you never know.
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Whether we go first, or we go last, at some point what we love here, in this life, is lost. Six years in the trenches with the caretakers of the dead, and I’m a hugger, and I say “I love you” more than I ever did before. There is nothing dark or creepy about that.
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