Ellen sniffed at the cold morning air that compared unfavorable to an abandoned fish packing plant. All along the lakefront, little silver fish---alewives---had made their lemming way across Lake Michigan to drop dead on Chicago’s shores. Her husband, Jeff, was stamping his feet by the van we rented, waiting for the signal to cut down the canoe stowed on top. My husband, Russell, was glancing nervously at his watch, waiting for the hearse driven by his friend Butch to show up. Everything depended on timing and Ellen’s doubt was not helping. “Are you sure we have his last one?”
By “his” she meant our father, Arnold, who, ideally would be in the back of the hearse along with hay bales and accelerant. According to his final request, we would transfer him to the canoe, light it on fire and pushed him into the lake ala a Viking. The last one referred to his last (as in final) will and testament.
Dad had been a successful lawyer, spending all of his career in the general counsel office of a local electric equipment company. Most of his work involved negotiating real estate transactions or union contracts. Dad was probably the most uncontentious person there was. In his mind, disagreement only meant he hadn’t worked hard enough to find consensus. It was a skill that came in handy as he was father to Ellen and me who argued as a hobby throughout our teenage years. Mom was more voluble and would yell she was fully capable of inventing a time machine so she could go back in time and prevent herself from becoming pregnant with either of us. Being alive, she reminded us, was a luxury and not a right.
Dad on the other hand would take a more passive role. According to Dad, we could kill each other, so long as we waited until we fulfilled the dictates of his numerous wills. While the substance of the wills was the same, our mother, who he erroneously believed would survive him, inherited it all. In the unlikely even that our mother predeceased him (which she did by almost nine very sad years), Ellen and I would split the estate equally.
The issue wasn’t what to do with the valuable parts of his estate, but rather what we were to do with his remains. Dad’s mother had died when he was three. He had no memory of her and his step-mother was a poor substitute. Their difficult relationship could be chalked up to mutual disappointment and he buried her without grief.
Something drew him to the idea of death. “One moment you’re here. The next you’re in a hole.” He wasn’t being lugubrious. He found it fascinating and as a result something he joked about constantly. He became a performance artist in which his will was his media.
The first codicil I remember was when I was fifteen. He came into the living room, standing in front of the television waving several sheets of paper. He had written his epitaph. He shuffled the pages until her found what I like. “I herby request that my grave shall bear the following epitaph, engraved in suitably large letters as to be legible from a distance of 10 feet: ‘I’d rather be breathing.’” He lowered the pages and obviously expecting acclaim. Ellen was mad about something and consequently mad at me. I just wanted to watch Miami Vice and mom just looked up from her knitting and smiled as if she was hearing a toddler prattle nonsense. “Don’t you get it? I’d rather be breathing? I will be dead. And” he said, he opened his arms, “I’d rather be breathing.”
We nodded so Ellen could get back to being mad at me, I could covet Don Johnson and mom could return to the scarf. Before Dad went back to his study, he made us each promise that we would adhere to his will’s provisions. It seemed innocuous if not inane so we nodded.
Within two weeks, Dad had changed his will to instruct us to engrave: “Told You I Was Sick.” He flashed the pages again as a sign of his sincerity. Again, nods as if he had just informed us that the sun rises in the East.
Later, he announced at dinner that he had changed his mind again. He was going to copy Mel Blanc’s epitaph and go with “That’s All Folks.” Later, he realized he had no association with that phrase as did Mr. Blanc. He could not be defined for eternity by a single phrase. He clearly needed to leave his options after he had technically run out of them. He hereby declared that there would be a small blackboard inserted into his gravestone and his heirs and assigns would be required periodically (but no less than once a month) write one of the epitaphs he had attached as an addendum to his will.
Eventually, he lost in interest in what was inscribed on his gravestone and more of what went happened to his body. The first few iterations were what we came to call the body as practical joke. The first will in this category stipulated, while most of his entire body was to be donated to science, at least 10% of it would be reserved for what he called “jokes of the practical nature, constructed to cause both shock and hilarity without doing actual harm either physical or psychological.” He was kind enough to provide examples, such as his head placed in the top of a locker, perched to fall out when the door was opened. Or his liver strategically placed under the covers of someone’s bed. The other 90% of his remnant would be Science’s whim.
He grew bored with practical jokes and soon was obsessed with his funeral. He wanted his coffin be perched on a trio of chairs at the front of the sanctuary with a sign: “Three Chairs for Arnold.” The three chairs were replaced with one. A single chair placed towards the back of the sanctuary on which he would be seated, waiting for an unsuspecting sympathy expresser to come to the realization they are seated next to a corpse. When Mom wrinkled her nose, expressing doubt that the synagogue would allow it, he went back to his study and came out with the rough schematic for a coffin that would throw its lid open at some point in the service. He got another mom-shake of the head on that one.
Mom had the last laugh as a pain in her stomach turned out to be ovarian cancer and she was gone in less than four months. Dad watched her being lowered into the cold dark earth without comment, just his tears drumming on her coffin lid.
He considered having his remains blasted into space. But as he grew older, he seemed less interested in making people laugh but rather his being present after death. At first, it was a simple urn on mantle piece, until he learned how cremation released toxins into the air and required nearly eight gallons of fuel. He discovered promession in which the body is freeze-dried, broken apart with ultrasound and then placed in the ground to nourish a tree. “Think about it,” you can just look out the kitchen window and there I will be.” This idea lasted until he noticed Buford, our basset hound watering every plant in the backyard. I assume that is when the idea of a Viking funeral began.
When Dad was 72, Ellen noticed his sclera were yellow. Within three days, the three of us sat in the oncologist’s office as he explained that the cancer was in the bile ducts and was inoperable. Dad had six months at most to make his final choice for the disposition of his remains. For a man given a terminal diagnosis, Dad was fairly sanguine. I assume years of preparation had softened the blow. Ellen went to the bathroom; I assume she didn’t want Dad to see her crying. Dad and I sat in silence while the doctor went to find the hospice brochure.
Eventually, I had to ask. “Why did you spend so much time on your funeral arrangements? Were you that afraid of dying?”
“No, not of dying,” His face was gaunt and the color of butter. He looked at bare trees through the window. His voice was distant as if from the bottom of a well. “I never knew my mother. My father never mentioned her. If she had any family, I never met any of them. I guess he wanted to protect me or himself. I don’t know if she was tall or short, fat or thin, a blonde or a brunette, sweet or mean. I don’t even know her name. He put his golden hand on mine and smiled like a saint. “I am not afraid of dying. I am afraid of being forgotten.”