I Come from a Long Line of Morticians

By Oxford

"I come from a long line of morticians. By the time I came along, the funeral home had kicked the bucket itself, but my grandmother still remembers it vividly."

Oxford: I come from a long line of morticians. Not unlike the Fishers from Six Feet Under, but, instead in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere in Kansas, called Stockton. By the time I came along, the funeral home had kicked the bucket itself, but, my grandmother still remembers it vividly. Her father embalming and the funeral songs that were played in the chapel beneath her grandmother's house.

How does an eighty-year-old woman talk to her sixteen-year-old grandson about death? My grammy grew up in a funeral home, and this is her story.

Grammy: It was a very big part of the family. It was… my grandparents lived in the funeral home and it was three blocks at best from our house.

Oxford: What are your sense memories of the funeral home? Like what—

Grammy: The formaldehyde.

Oxford: Formaldehyde, is that it?

Grammy: That's a bad smell that permeated a lot. I remember that smell a lot. [laugher]. And there was a kind of smell down in the casket room because, the vaults and the caskets and—and it was down in the basement… but, it would have to be formaldehyde. Yes.

Oxford: Yeah. Um, how do you think—because obviously growing up in a, in a family where death is such a part of everything—affected your life, but, how do you, how do you think that it did?

Grammy: My grandmother was still alive when I went away to college. So I spent a lot of time in her place, which was a part of the funeral home. I think… that when something is just a part of your life, it's not like it's scary.

Oxford: Yeah.

Grammy: As a young child, it wasn't like, you know, I, “Oh, good! Let me go down to the funeral home and hang out with the dead people!” [Both laugh]. I mean, that wasn't me, but, uh, I didn't have a piano. I was taking piano lessons, and, I would be practicing piano with the dead body, even in the same room, sometimes. It was just a normal part of everyday life.

Oxford: Did you ever feel like there was one frightening experience that happened at the funeral home?

Grammy: I told you the most frightening thing to me was when I worked at the flower shop. And I would pick up all of the sprays from the funeral and load them into the station wagon, and I would drive to the cemetery, which was, at best a mile, probably.

And then the, there would be the hole where the casket was going to go and then they would mound that dirt in back of it. So, my job was to get all of those flowers arranged on that mound and be out of there before the funeral procession came with the people from the funeral.

Oxford: How quickly did you have to do that?

Grammy: Quickly! And I almost fell in the hole one day!

Oxford: Oh no! [laughter].

Grammy: It was like, "Oh! Oh! What am I going to do if I'm in there, when they all come?” That was the most frightening thing.

Oxford: How would you get out?!

Grammy: I wouldn’t, they, I’d have to wait until they came because it was six feet deep. That was, that was the most frightening thing.

Oxford: And that was your, like, high school job?

Grammy: Yes, yes. Yes.

Oxford: Did it affect your perception of death as, like, a young person?

Grammy: My dad was the perfect person to be a funeral director. His calmness about all of it, how it was an everyday kind of thing, we didn't perceive death as being something scary. I think, because it was part of my grandmother's house, because everybody just kind of accepted it, that it was an everyday kind of thing.

Uh, did it make it easier when I lost my parents? No. Because it's always an emotional experience, but… certainly it formed my ideas of what one should do when somebody dies.

Oxford: Do you think that John felt the same way?

Grammy: My dad was ready to go.

Oxford: Yeah.

Grammy: He, uh, we had to put him in the nursing home in Stockton.

Oxford: Yeah.

Grammy: And the day before he died, he said to the head of the nursing home, "How does a fella get out of here?" And I said, “He figured out.”

Oxford: He figured it out.

Grammy: And he died that night. So, my mother would say to me, “I just lived too long,” and I said, “You're right, mom, you did.” You know, I think you can live too long.

Oxford: And, do you think that your, your view on death now, at this point, was affected by that, like looking back?

Grammy: My own death?

Oxford: Yeah.

Grammy: Um, I don't think anybody really accepts what death is going to be like, how we're going to feel about it. I think… I don't know how you prepare to die. I really not quite sure about that. Um, but. I think even in the end, my mother was not really prepared for death, and she was so much more religious… I mean, I think there's a lot worse things than dying.

Oxford: As my grandmother and I talked for about half an hour, I found it easy to see her as a child playing with her dolls in the casket room, surrounded by coffins. And walking by doors she knew had bodies on the other side on her way to her grandmother's. I couldn't picture someone being ready for death, or wishing that they had gone at a better time.

As a teenager, it's always felt like I should fear death and all of its unknowns. But, death happens. And it happens every day. And who am I to say that it should be scary?

Grammy: You're a good interviewer.

Oxford: Thank you, you're a good interviewee.

[Grammy laughs]