Are We There Yet?

March 18-24, 2019

By Jay Edwards
jedwards@dailydata.com

We were having one of those talks, KM and I, where I’m not supposed to crack wise, because, as I’ve been told more than once, “a little of you goes a long way.”

But I was cooperating as we discussed the past, present and future. But mostly the future. 

The talk diverged sharply from careers when I asked her what she wanted me to do with her if she, God forbid, was to die first. 

“What do you mean?” She asked, with the familiar inflection in her voice I knew so well, after almost 44 years as a couple, the inflection that said, “I’m not interested in your shenanigans right now, Mr. funny man.”

After a thoughtful pause I carefully trudged ahead. “I mean, if you die before me do you want to be buried or cremated?” I winced a bit after ending the question.

“Cremation is fine,” she calmly said. “Just make sure I’m not still breathing.” 

I laughed at that, maybe a little too energetically because she rolled her eyes and went back to her magazine. 

“You can cremate me too,” I said, thinking I should make it official by saying it out loud. “I mean, no need me buying a plot for just me, if your ashes are blowing in the wind somewhere.”

Then I thought about that old bootleg cassette tape my buddies and I used to pass around, with the guy making prank phone calls. It came out later on a CD called, “Mad as Hell” by Lucius Tate.

 One of his pranks was to a funeral home, which he began by saying to the old undertaker, “Ummm, yesss, I need to know the price of a fine funeral.”

The conversation goes on and the caller says that his wife just died and he’s keeping her in the freezer until he can get her in the ground. After he hears the price the undertaker charges, he tells him that he will probably just bury her in his back yard. The undertaker is getting more and more upset and tells the prankster that it’s against the law to bury her in the yard, it has to be a cemetery. 

“Well,” the caller says, “when my hog died I buried him in the yard. Why can’t I just bury her next to him?”

“Oh no, no, no, no, no,” the undertaker replies. “That will not do at all.”

“Well, why not?” 

“Well, you must understand,” the distraught undertaker continues, “a hog is not an individual.”

A few days after the conversation with KM, I went down to get our mail, and was surprised to see a large glossy postcard advertising cremation services. “That’s pretty weird,” I thought.

But I did like their price, which was $795.

I walked back and found KM at her desk and asked her if she remembered telling me a few days ago that I should have her cremated if she died before me.

“Uh-huh,” she said. I dropped the card down on her desk in front of her. 

She carefully studied the card before finally replying, “See, I told you our cell phones were listening to us.”

She had indeed told me that, more than once, and I had always scoffed at the image in my mind of paste-skinned nerds sitting in a dingy rom, eavesdropping on people like me. 

But I had to admit this was some coincidence. We had never talked about our funerals before, much less cremation. And I’d never received an ad in the mail for a discounted cremation, or one at any price for that matter. And then these things happen a few days apart.

“I guess I shouldn’t have said I want my ashes left on Blue Mountain Beach,” I told her. “There’s probably some law against that, huh?”