SERVICES by Allyson Hoffman
Mary Applebaum and her husband were my first services. They planned their arrangements several years ahead of time, so I gave them a fifteen percent discount. They picked out matching caskets, cherry wood and ivory interior liners. When she died I had her folder ready in my filing cabinet. Her husband and I reviewed the notes, and we held her funeral just as she’d planned it, down to the high school choir kids singing “Nearer My God to Thee.”
Grief is a disease that manifests in each body individually. Some fall physically ill, vomiting for days. Others throw folding chairs against the walls of the visitation rooms, leaving tears in the wallpaper. I plan funerals, what I think my father would have wanted. I plan what I want for myself.
Brennan Morgan had a stroke in Meijer. A coworker found him slumped over the shopping carts. His plants came from the floral department, lots of bonsai trees that had gone on clearance. I peeled the orange stickers off the bottoms so his fiancée wouldn’t see when she took them home.
When my daughter asked me, many years ago, about my parents for her family tree project, I told her the easy things. My parents had a farm three miles outside of Felton. I was an only child. My father died when I was a teenager. I couldn’t tell her about how much my parents hated the farm they’d inherited; or how I was supposed to be an older brother many times over but my mother kept losing the babies, and sometimes I dreamed my father took them out of her body and tossed them over the fence, like he did with the runt pigs; or that my father talked so little I can’t remember the sound of his voice.
My daughter drew a tree branch with three smiling heads, like ghostly leaves.
Children were always the worst for me. Buddy Mason got hit by a car. He was chasing after a Frisbee and forgot to look both ways. We cleaned him up good, painted over the bruises on his face, stitched his ear back on. He got buried with his favorite stuffed animal – a rainbow-colored fish – and a Bible.
Carol Sharp had Alzheimer’s, and when her daughter walked her up to her husband’s casket, Carol said, “He looks like a nice man. A handsome man.”
Jack Jackson was the director of the civic theatre in town. He’d saved the old building from being torn down by Felton Hospital, had it preserved by the state as an historic landmark. His funeral was more of a four-day party, flocks of makeupped men and women singing and kissing in the Home. They brought out the old “Save the Civic Center” banner and strung it along the bumpers of their cars and trucks in the parking lot. They drank rum and Coke out there long after visitation hours had passed. I drank with them after I vacuumed up their glitter from the carpets.
Not too many murders in town. The last was Mollie Landis. She disappeared one night when she was walking her dog. They found the dead dog, but the police didn’t find her body for over twenty years. By then her parents had died and most people at her service only knew her secondhand. She’s still alive in a lot of ways. Mostly warning for daughters to not walk alone at night.
At most visitations I think of my father. Tall, long face, with hands scarred from years of farm work. I found him in the barn when I was fifteen, hanging from the rafters with cattle rope. My mother was so angry she never spoke of him after that. I buried him myself under a pine in the tree line at the back of the cornfield. I called a priest to come bless him and carved his name and his years into the tree with the pocketknife he’d gotten me for my birthday that year.
Margot Seterdahl was hit by a driver racing through a red light. She was on her way to school, spring of her senior year. Her father, a paramedic, was a first responder to the crash scene. He watched doctors in the ER crush her ribs with their palms as they did compressions. He listened to them pronounce her dead. When I saw her body I knew they’d have to choose between a closed casket or cremation. Her father picked the casket, and her mother chose a picture for an 18x24 frame. Margot, floor-length navy blue dress, strawberry blonde ringlets, standing on the muddy football field. Homecoming Princess.
With suicides the visitors don’t mourn the losses, they writhe in their guilt. Annie O’Malley’s room was full of people – cousins and teachers and friends – crying over what they should have done. If only they’d called her more often, if only they’d seen the scars on the inside of her thighs, if only they’d known. I whispered over her body. I’m sorry you have to hear all of this.
Matthew Donnelly died while on a run in the cemetery. Heart attack. The visitation room was flooded with cross-country runners, current and former. They formed a line that wound around the lobby and into the atrium. Girls with their ponytails yanked high, boys with skinny arms and glasses. The next spring some of them started a 5K race in Donnelly’s honor that went from the high school to the park across from the cemetery. Donations raised went to support the county animal shelter where he’d volunteered with his wife.
Denise Robinson (Parkinson’s Disease) had a fussy family.
That’s the wrong shade of lipstick.
Mama wouldn’t want that prayer.
We want a piano. Can’t you bring in a piano? She’d like to look at it.
Some didn’t have instructions or requests, as if they’d never planned to die.
I always asked the family members questions, attempting to make the services something the deceased would have wanted. Were they religious or spiritual? Did they listen to music? What would they consider their greatest accomplishment? The family members went mute in my office, as if hoping I would make decisions for them. As if I could understand the desires of someone I had never known.
I keep the list of my own instructions in a black folder with the Rogers & Rogers logo embossed on the front. Whenever I leave the house I set the folder on top of my desk with a note to my wife.
The Home keeps a binder full of readings. The titles of the poems sound like they were written by melancholic middle schoolers – “If Tears Could Build a Stairway” and “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep.” The psalms I’ve memorized after all these years: “The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want.” I’ve put Ecclesiastes 3 into my folder. “To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under Heaven.” I say it a lot to myself, and on the days I still believe in Heaven it sounds nice.
Zachary Howe was the youngest one I knew personally. He was friends with my son. They played baseball together, pitcher and catcher. When I folded Zach’s hand across his stomach I thought of him belly-laughing in my living room with my son. A fart joke. A booger.
I have a rotating collection of suits. Mostly black and navy. Sometimes thin, barely-there pinstripes for special services. Veterans. The mayor’s. Mine.
Friends ask if my work is depressing. I tell them the truth: funerals are a celebration of life. It sounds like a Hallmark card or a billboard ad on US 131. I don’t remind them death is inevitable.
Anna Ngyuen wasn’t a suicide but she might as well have been. She was a volleyball player, tall, her body so thin the casket was as light as a child’s. The stylist added thick layers of makeup so the skin over her cheekbones wouldn’t split. Her father chose an open casket. He also had a picture of her before she starved herself – curvy, hourglass waist. Bright brown eyes, looking toward anything but an ending.
When I was a boy I helped my father gather the chickens in burlap bags, let them squawk inside until they’d practically suffocated. In the evenings we tied the twiggy chicken feet to the clothesline drawn between two crabapple trees in the yard. My father sliced them at the necks, and their wings flapped until the blood ran out. The next mornings I boiled water, poured it over the line and the trees and the red-brown grass. I once admired my father for killing the chickens because he was doing what he had to do to feed us. He wasn’t a master of fate, just speeding life up a bit. They were going to die anyway.
Sometimes families, like the Oerbeeks, have shit luck. Deena Oerbeek died from breast cancer, and four months later her husband, Don, died from undiagnosed pancreatic cancer. Then the Home had to hold off his service while we prepped his son’s body. Don Junior died driving home to plan his father’s service. I did Junior’s service pro bono. Seemed like the least I could do. When the Home donates the paper lantern bags to Relay for Life I write their names on three bags with a permanent marker.
There are some nights when I drive home I wonder who will come see me. My wife, my son, my daughter, son-in‑law, and granddaughter. Some distant cousins. When they stand over my body will they hold my hand? Will the lilies I’ve requested be there on the plant stands, and will anyone remember they were my favorite? What will they say about me?
Dr. Jacob Clark’s visitation was so quiet I could hear the few mourners – receptionists and nurses – breathing. Dr. Clark had been my orthopedic surgeon when I was a kid and busted my knee sliding into home at the regional game. I was surprised when I learned he’d shot himself. I’d always imagined him as a happy man. He made a lot of jokes at my appointments and gave me stickers to decorate the sides of my wooden crutches. Stars and rocket ships. The Beatles.
The closer I get to the end the more I don’t know. I don’t know if the dead can see or hear or understand a funeral, and I’ve spent my whole life planning as if they can.
The Home keeps a folder of designs for prayer cards. Mourners take these and tuck them in their pockets, their purses. I wonder what it must feel like to reach into your wallet for a Biggby coupon and instead pull out a blue card with a pastel angel on the front, holding a banner that says In Memory of Margaret Adams. What does it feel like to be reminded your mother, or aunt, or cousin is dead when all you wanted this morning was a half-off coffee?
Joyce Murphy’s granddaughter climbed into her casket. She was five and apparently had liked to take naps next to Joyce in the hospice bed. They looked so similar lying there, puckered lips, heavy curly hair. Except for the brown, the gray. The girl’s parents let her stay there until she fell asleep.
On my father’s dresser was a used tissue, a broken pair of glasses, pine-scented deodorant, and a phone number written on a torn index card. The closest thing to a note that he left. When I called I reached the voicemail of Allen & Sons Life Insurance agency in town.
I’ve gotten to know the priests. Father Charlie has cloudy eyes behind thick glasses, and he listens to the mourners telling him stories about their dead. Father Brendon is stern, and I’ve overheard many times his words that are supposed to be kindnesses: “There is no need to cry. Andrew is with God now.”
My wife always has dinner ready when I come home. Sometimes potatoes and broccoli, other times spaghetti with tomato sauce. She is an excellent cook and has always catered to my vegetarian preferences. After the worst services, the ones where I looked into the casket and saw my father’s face for just a moment, I ate and ate until I was past full, and while I ate I asked her questions. About her gardening, the books she was reading. She updated me on sports scores, college football, basketball, major league baseball. I filled my body with the ordinary. Each bite, every flower and sports statistic, taking up the space in my body that held the day’s deaths. My stomach swelled, my mind clouded, and I ended the day with heavy sleep.
Babies don’t get big funerals, if they get one at all. Baby Girl Thompson did because her daddy was state representative of the district. She died so quick after she was born they didn’t name her. Her mother sat through the services in a wheelchair, pushed around by security detail. What I remember most is the flowers sent for Baby Girl Thompson. Lots of red-white-blue geraniums. Plastic eagles poking out of ferns.
After the pileup on Route 31 the Home was busy for weeks. The St. Maries. The Browns. Many of the Dingmans. Wholes and halves of families, separated. Some scattered across the road, into the median and in ditches, bits of flesh missing until the snow melted.
I started at the Rogers & Rogers Funeral Home in my late twenties, after I moved my mother to an assisted living facility and sold my parents’ farm. In the beginning Eugene Rogers had me doing floor work: replacing tissue boxes and washing down the bathroom floors and cleaning vomit stains out of the carpet. One day Eugene found me comforting a boy, maybe six, whose father was lying in the casket in the next room. The boy was crying, and I gave him paper and pen to draw. I understood his grief, the place in the chest that feels irreparably hollowed. I escorted the boy back to the visitation room, drawing in hand, where his aunt and mother were waiting, anxious. Eugene promoted me to assistant director, helped me earn my license through the community college. He treated me like a son, and when he died he left me as director and owner of the Home. His own son had no interest in it, and neither does mine. And I understand. They do not want to deal with daily losses. But for me, it’s the grief that’s kept me working. Treating each service as if it were for someone I loved.
When I think of my father, I imagine what he’d have wanted if he’d had a real ceremony. He liked the rosebushes my mother planted in front of the house. I’d have picked a vase of them if she’d let me. I’d have had the choir lady from church – dark red hair, purple tent dress – come sing something about angels, because my father always believed in them. Maybe his casket would have wings carved into the head. Harps for handles on the sides.
The Home has a folder of songs to play at the services. I like the hymns “Amazing Grace” and “How Great Thou Art.” My favorite is “On Eagle’s Wings.” My father would have liked it, too. I’ve got instructions to play it twice, once for each of us.
Allyson Hoffman’s stories have appeared in The Rumpus and Third Point Press.