If you are of the male variety of the species and you are receiving a floral delivery, it means — nine times out of ten — you are lying in either a hospital bed or a casket.
Funeral arrangements are huge arrays of flowers resembling a stereotypical Native American headdress, mounted on wiry, wobbly legs. The delivery boy’s job is to set them by the casket and lay the coffin crown arrangement on top. No one briefed me on the protocol. For that matter, I’d never attended a funeral.
The first body I saw was a younger guy, French, mid-thirties, killed in a motorcycle accident. The funeral director pointed me to the viewing room and left me to it. I arranged the flowers, pretty much common sense, propped on a tripod right up front. I didn’t look at the open casket.
But why was it open two hours before the ceremony? Wouldn’t you keep it covered, like hors d’oeuvres, until the grieving family arrived? With no one there to answer, I figured the policy was: air the sucker out.
With my work done, I looked.
I’ve heard people describe the contemplation that comes with looking at a dead body — how it’s hard to fathom that the soul no longer pulses inside the worldly vehicle. Not this guy. Despite the cosmetician’s best efforts, he looked dead. Really dead. Almost fake. There was trauma to the head — not disfiguring, but I detected a wig, and the makeup on his face was thick. He looked more like an aging mannequin in a wax museum than a body that just days before woke up, brushed his teeth, put on his shoes, had breakfast, laughed at the reels, coughed when a little juice went down the wrong pipe, put on his jacket, checked his pocket for house keys, locked up, noted the lovely mid-winter central coast weather that perhaps reminded him of home, and drove off down a cypress-lined road to an untimely death.
I couldn’t connect the two. I tried for the rest of the afternoon, driving around on autopilot, not mindful at all of the routine of delivering the rest of my flowers.
At one of the funeral homes I delivered to regularly, I met an interesting young man. Rather than the typical director, I was greeted by a kid who looked like me — early twenties, jeans, Cal Poly sweatshirt, baseball cap on backwards.
I asked where the director was. He said the director was out and he could sign for the delivery. It was as if I’d popped into the hardware store and found old man Miller’s son manning the register. Normal for a hardware store. Strange in a funeral home.
Here’s what was up: he and three other Cal Poly students lived in an apartment above the funeral home — an old Victorian house — rent-free. In exchange, each guy spent one week a month on night call. When on night call, if a pickup came in, you climbed out of bed, got dressed, and hopped in the hearse.
Only crime scenes went to the morgue. Everything else — straightforward car accidents, electrocutions by domestic mishap — came straight to the cold boxes downstairs. He’d lived there four months and had four weeks on shift. Some weeks you’d get a couple calls. One week he got zero. The following week his housemate got eleven.
When it rains it pours.
