Undertaker Schemes

Part 23 of 30

There's Death In Them Thar Drawers

Maybe I should have been an undertaker, known these days as a funeral director. I’m certainly interested enough in it, actually to the point of fascination. I have indeed hung out with a lot of undertakers, breathing in the whole vibe they enjoy, their environment, and their faux sadness and sorrow, all so very superficial, I can definitely say from my in with them.

Which of course is easy enough to understand. They’re not mourners by nature but really technicians, and that includes the time they’ve put on their public display of stolid silence and grief. They’ll be patting someone on the shoulder in rarefied solidarity of grief one minute, then step behind the curtain and flip out the cards the next for a fun game of Pitch. Do they even care? I think they do, but like most technicians they’re personally detached except for doing what it takes to oil or grease the skids to make it through the rest of the proceedings and keep themselves beyond reproach.

I’m not quite as slick as they are, but I'm close to pretty much the same. Making me the perfect candidate to be an undertaker, except I wasn’t interested in it when I was casting about for an occupation that didn’t involve hamburgers. Now I look back and obviously say, Yes, I could’ve gotten in on the ground floor as an assistant to some creepy old man. I would've watched him, observed and emulated him. All the while spiking his beloved coffee with an occasional drop of formaldehyde. Until it was me who at long last was calling the shots, slicing, dicing, then becoming society’s last pillar between the average citizen and their imminent death.

But, alas, when push came to shove, I didn’t think of it. Instead I went the full burger route, till I graduated to delivering pizzas, and wound up my career loading dishwashers, a burying not of men, women, boys, and girls, but food waste, separating meat from the bone, disposing of half-chewed gristle, etc., the same kind of thing without the social perks. I could've made a lot of money. And done it looking so glum, so sad, like society's firm foundation when life gives way in every living creature. With the whole parlor overtaken with pallor and I’m the pal or best friend for the bereaved who may not believe, despite our common mortality, that it’s happened to them.

Then you have the economy of the whole thing. And the unpleasant fact that with modern medicine people can deprive the undertaker another day, week, year, or decade. Not good. We need to get out our Kama Sutras and realize there’s death in them thar drawers, and get people wantonly doing the deed with insistence, like they expect something from it, like it’s going to do some good this time, like it’s going to take hold and yield a blessed event. Which can be taken either way, the blessed event of a baby or the blessed event of someone saying bye-bye. For some folks, that’s also good news.

The Valentine's Flower Racket Morticians Run

I'm getting the word out there early on something I suspect, way before Valentine's Day, because I'm hoping to get widespread attention on this matter. I'd call it something of a scam. At least that's my suspicion, and I've always had a pretty good success rate in these things. At the very least it should be investigated, and when found to be true, be exposed, shut down, and left dead in its tracks. Prosecute!

My suspicion -- and I'm pretty sure it's more than that, it's something factual -- is that there's a huge racket being run by unscrupulous morticians. The racket goes something like this: Starting around October or November, they start "syphoning off" flowers from their funerals, then keep them in cold storage till just before Valentine's Day. Then they are sold everywhere, like to florists looking for something cheap to help their profit margin.

The big problem as I see it is that those flowers were purchased by well-meaning families and aggrieved loved ones, meant solely to honor the dead. They weren't meant to go from hand to hand, then on some black market, only to end up, maybe purchased by the same people as tokens of love on Valentine's Day! Of course the flowers are the property of the original purchasers, whose intent was that they would make festive a memorial service, then the grave-site.

You know what I should do? I ought to go nosing around a funeral home. I could show up during a funeral, then slip into the back room and watch through the curtains. While everyone else's eyes are bleary from tears, I'm wide-eyed and alert. I can see the flowers, what all there is. Then as the mourners file out, I watch for the morticians to start skimming. Plus, I'm listening. "This flower looks great, this one will fetch a pretty penny, I might keep this one for myself," etc. The wife, normally upstairs doing bookkeeping, is the go-between, helping stash away the flowers before anyone notices.

Or, my other plan might be to show up at a funeral home -- have some business cards printed, "Floral Wholesaler" -- and present myself to the mortician. Naturally, I'm looking to cut a deal. The guy's nervous, he hasn't seen me before. But obviously I know more about the scam than the average guy. And I'm flipping a coin. His denials won't hold up, because I'll keep pressing him, telling him, "You either play ball or they'll be buying flowers for your funeral, and I mean full price!" I honestly can play hardball, especially if my sense of justice is riled up, as it is on this issue.

I love the above graphic. I think it really drives the point home. Look at the expression of professional grief on the schmuck's face. It's Valentine's Day, and he's portrayed handing out flowers to sexy women in their underwear, you'd think he could manage a smile. But no, he's a professional frowner, looking a lot like an underpaid, unappreciated butler, so even naked ladies don't move him. Then we have the women themselves. They're not the least bit suspicious why a frowning mortician would be handing them a flower. They're just gung ho for flowers, they don't care where they come from!

But I care. This is the honest to God truth: In the last year I have personally sent two big floral arrangements to people's funerals. You ever do that? It costs a fortune. I bet they were $60 apiece. The last thing I want is to have these damned morticians -- very unethical -- reselling them on Valentine's Day. To me, that's simply wrong.