My Year with Eleanor (28 page)

“You're just in time, matter of fact. This guy's about done.”

I followed Fred around the corner to another oven. He opened the hatch and when the residual heat hit my face, I felt the millions of pores on my face expand simultaneously, like mouths opening to scream. Inside the oven sat a pile of ash and bones. The heap smelled of chemicals and gases I couldn't place. Using a long-handled wire bristle rake, Fred scraped the steaming pile into a tray and carried it over to a worktable. It was like watching a cooking show where the chef prepares a meal, sticks it in the oven, then immediately opens another oven and brings out the same dish, already cooked. The thought of this made me half gag, which I played off as a cough.

Fred explained that the bone fragments would eventually be fed into a machine that pulverized the bones into “cremains.” “But before we pulverize 'em, we gotta dig through the bones and pull out all the manmade stuff.” He picked a bucket off the floor. “Look here.”

It was full of jumbled hardware—screws, metal pipes, nails—only they were scorched and covered in what looked like dust. With sudden queasiness, I realized I was looking at reconstructed joints, surgical pins, and metal limbs. And that dust was people.
People dust
. Using his bare hand, Fred plucked an ash-covered ball-and-socket mechanism off the top. My gag reflex wobbled again.

“That there is a hip replacement.” He rummaged around like a kid going through his Halloween candy. “And this is my favorite!” Beaming, he pulled out a delicate lattice of thin metal tubes held together with screws. “This was in someone's spine, if you can believe that!”

I caught Lucas's eye. Noting my stricken expression, he cleared his throat and said, “We have to be getting back. Fred, I'll be back for Mr. Danbury's cremains tomorrow.”

Fred dropped the lattice back in the bucket and blew the powder off his fingers.
Poof!
It formed a cloud—a person cloud—suspended in the air, then vanished.

“Nice meeting you!” I said, hurrying back to the van before he could shake my hand good-bye.

Lucas was laughing so hard he could barely steer the car. “You shoulda seen the look on your face when he showed you that hip replacement!”

I was as grateful to Lucas for making light of the moment as I was that he had gotten me out of there as quickly as he had. Soon I was smiling, too, and my queasiness subsided. Once we'd settled down, I asked, “How much of your business is cremations?”

“It used to be fifty-fifty, but cremations are on the rise, what with the recession and graveyards runnin' out of space.”

“What does the recession have to do with it?”

“Cremation is only about $1,500 compared to a $7,000 casket funeral.”

“No way!” I'd always balked at the idea of being burned, but it was hard to argue with those prices.

He nodded, but his expression was grim.

“I take it you're not a fan of cremation?”

“Cremation is just picking up bodies, refrigerating them, dropping them off at the crematorium, and picking up their ashes later.” He sniffed. “You might as well be a chauffeur.”

“So you appreciate the theater of the open-casket funeral?”

“When someone tells me, ‘He hasn't looked this good in twenty years,' that makes me happy. I've done them all—kids, murder victims, suicides. I even embalmed my grandmother.”

“Ugh! Really?” I physically recoiled in my seat. I wasn't sure if it was the idea of draining your own grandmother's blood or seeing her naked that threw me more.

“She gave me permission, you know,
before
.” His tone was defensive. “She knew how much I enjoyed it.” His phone rang. “Oh, hi, Terry. . . . You want me to go right now? . . . Okay . . . Bye.”

Lucas hung up and reached for the clip-on tie on the dashboard. “We have a pickup.”

Outside the local hospice, visitors glanced up and immediately looked down as we made our way, ominously, through the parking lot, the funeral home logo on full display. Lucas pulled around back and reversed until the van was practically flush against the rear exit. Using the rearview mirror, he fastened the tie beneath his throat.

“You'll have to wait in the car,” he said apologetically. “Might be family in there who wouldn't take kindly to having someone standing around just watching.”

While I waited I pulled out the
Coping with Death
pamphlet I'd picked up at the funeral home. The introduction explained that at one time, death had been an integral part of family life. People died at home surrounded by loved ones. Adults and children experienced death together, mourned together, comforted one another. Today death is lonelier. Most people die in hospitals and nursing homes. Their loved ones have less opportunity to be with them and often miss sharing their last moments of life. The living have become isolated from the dying; consequently, death has turned into something mysterious, something to fear.

As I read this, I thought about my grandparents; all four of them died within a year and a half of one another when I was in college. Every phone call to my dorm meant a last-minute flight to Texas and a return flight, sometimes still wearing my black dress. At the funeral, I would stare at the casket, willing the knowledge of their death to sink in. There was something about the experience that just didn't feel real.

Lucas returned ten minutes later with the stretcher, covered in a green felt blanket embroidered with the name of the funeral home. On top of the blanket sat a pair of neatly folded eyeglasses.

When my paternal grandmother died, everyone gathered at her house for the funeral reception. At one point I passed by my grandfather's office and saw my grandmother's empty wheelchair parked in the middle of the room. Somehow the emptiness of that wheelchair was more moving than the utter fullness of her casket. I felt a dull ache in my throat thinking of that wheelchair now as I stared as these forlorn-looking glasses.

“Hospices are always easier,” Lucas said cheerfully as we pulled away from the building. “It's hard when they die at home and the family watches them leave their house for the last time.” When we got to the stop sign, he stepped on the brakes a little too aggressively and, once again, the stretcher crashed into the back of his seat.

He turned and gave the body an admonishing look. “Oh, lighten up.”

A
fter leaving work, I grabbed some fast food, which I wouldn't let myself eat until I'd washed my hands three times. Back at the motel, I took a shower to rinse off any ashes that might've settled on me at the crematorium and dried myself on the small stiff towels. I changed into a pair of Matt's boxers and a nightshirt and climbed into bed with a couple of Eleanor books. I wanted to learn how death affected her life. Franklin passed away suddenly at age sixty-three, but his doctors had been worried about his health for some time. His blood pressure registered 240/130 while he was campaigning for his fourth term in office. A cardiologist was called in and forced Franklin to cut his cigarette habit from twenty or thirty a day to five or six. But the damage was already done. On April 12, 1945, Eleanor was called away from a benefit and summoned back to the White House.

“I knew in my heart that something dreadful had happened,” she later said. They told her Franklin had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his winter home in Warm Springs, Georgia. The First Lady flew to Georgia immediately. When she arrived at the cottage, two of Franklin's cousins—Laura Delano and Margaret Suckley, who'd been vacationing with him—sat her on the couch in the den and told her the story. Franklin had been in a good mood, laughing it up with his visitors while posing for a portrait.

“I have a terrific pain,” he said suddenly, his hand flying to the back of his head. Then he collapsed and never regained consciousness.

When Eleanor asked about the portrait, they admitted it was commissioned by Lucy Mercer, the woman Franklin had had an affair with thirty years prior. Now a widow, Lucy had planned to give the painting to her daughter as a gift. Lucy had been Franklin's guest for the past few days and was in the room when he died. Eleanor calmly asked if Franklin and Lucy had seen each other before this final visit. Laura confessed that Lucy had been a guest at Warm Springs several times. When Eleanor was traveling, Lucy often joined Franklin for dinner parties at the White House. It was an open secret that Eleanor wasn't in on. Worse, she learned that her own daughter, Anna, had arranged many of their rendezvous.

“Wow,” I murmured. “That's some
Dynasty
shit.”

Yet Alexis Carrington would've been disappointed in Eleanor's reaction. She sat there silently for a few moments, processing the information. Then she rose from the couch, walked into the bedroom where her husband's body lay, and shut the door. When she came out a few minutes later, she was still dry eyed and perfectly composed. She was emotional, I suspect, but after a lifetime of practice, she'd learned to manage her feelings when she had to. She never commented publicly about her husband's dalliances, but she alluded to it in one of her autobiographies.

“Men and women who live together through long years get to know one another's failings,” she wrote. “He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical. That I was never able to be, and he had to find it in other people.”

W
hen I walked into the funeral home the next morning, the phone was ringing manically and Terry was holed up in his office taking calls.

Lucas yawned. “We had three deaths last night.” He was stretched out rather unsuccessfully on a love seat in the dining room.

“You did all the pickups yourself?”

“That's nothing.” Lucas took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and I saw that he was a pretty cute guy. “One time we had seventeen deaths in one weekend. We lined them up three deep in the garage.”

When Terry was overloaded, he occasionally had other funeral directors come in and freelance. Which is how I ended up in the preparation room with Sean, a funeral director from Columbus, about to witness my first embalming. Embalming made me more uneasy than I'd been before seeing the bones yesterday. Bones were anonymous. You never knew who they'd been attached to. But there was something primal, almost satanic, about draining the life force out of someone. So I was relieved that Sean was the human equivalent of Winnie-the-Pooh—blond, round, and gentle of tone (but, thankfully, wearing pants).

On the stainless steel embalming table lay the naked body of a woman in her seventies. Her skin had taken on a yellow cast. Her gnarled yellowish-green toenails extended far beyond the ends of her toes.

“The Mennonites are hardy folk,” Sean said, and I detected a faint Irish accent. “They don't care much about keeping up their pedicures. Around here we call them ‘the plain people' on account of their simple dress and because they work in the fields.”

Next he opened her eyelid and placed what looked like a spiky plastic contact lens on her eyeball.

“To keep her eyes closed,” he explained. “If the eyelids start to open, they'll catch on the barbs.”

As I watched him sew the insides of her mouth shut, I thought of that old Dennis Miller joke. “This has to be the easiest job in the world. Surgery on dead people. What's the worst thing that could happen? If everything went wrong, maybe you'd get a pulse.” It was surreal seeing an injury inflicted on someone who felt no pain.

He grabbed a few bottles of formaldehyde from the closet and set them down next to the embalming machine.

“Decomposition requires warmth and moisture, so preserving a body means drying it out as much as possible. That's where embalming comes in.”

The smell of formaldehyde slipped into the air. Not the invasive, eye-burning smell of chemistry class, but a whiff, like talking on my grandmother's Bakelite rotary phone from the 1950s. As he poured the mixture into the large clear cylinder of the embalming machine, he brought to mind a witch bending over a cauldron.

“It looks like blood,” I noted uneasily.

“It's dyed that color on purpose. To bring back that rosy hue to the skin.”

Using a small blade, he made a four-inch incision near her collarbone and inserted a metal tube into her carotid artery. Then he made another incision on the opposite side of her neck and inserted a metal tube into the jugular vein. With a series of clicks, the machine began pumping the embalming fluid into the body. From the carotid artery, it would travel through the circulatory system, pushing out the blood, which would flow out of the jugular vein and onto the table. Lining the perimeter of the table was a gutter which would catch the runoff and whisk it away into a funnel-shaped receptacle near the woman's feet and, eventually, the sewer system.

“Luckily, Mennonites don't believe in autopsies,” Sean said. “An autopsied body takes three to six hours to embalm because all of the organs have been removed. We have to go in and track down all the different arteries and embalm the arms and legs separately.”

As the embalming fluid snaked through the woman's circulatory system, her complexion pinked up, just as Sean anticipated.

“Is that a C-section scar?” I asked, pointing to her abdomen.

He frowned. “That's unusual. Amish and Mennonite women almost always have their babies at home.”

“I wonder what went wrong that caused her to go to the hospital,” I said, talking more to myself than to Sean. The scar reminded me that there was once life here.

“So do you feel like you're at peace with death?” I asked.

“I thought that I was. As a funeral director, you understand that it's a natural part of life. Yet when my mother died, I was completely devastated.” There was a faraway look in his eyes. “She always sat in the same seat at the dinner table, and there was a lightbulb over her chair. It was really uncanny because the lightbulb never had to be changed. It stayed lit for years. Then the day she died the lightbulb burnt out. When I saw that, I just fell apart.” He shook his head and smiled sadly. “So yes and no is the answer to your question.”