I loved my first grade teacher, Mrs. Ebbey. She wore bright red lipstick and high heels with butterfly designs on them – I thought she was beautiful. And she decorated her classroom for each holiday, which I thought was so much fun. I couldn’t wait to see what she would put up.
One day she begins to talk to our class about the next holiday – Memorial Day. I was so excited – new decorations! So I raise my hand and ask “What are you putting up next, caskets?”
I asked her that because, at the age of six, I knew exactly what a memorial service was.
My whole life, my entire family has been involved in the funeral business. My great-grandfather and grandfather owned funeral homes. My Dad worked for a vault company and all my uncles either worked in a funeral home or for a vault company as some point. My Dad even got one of my boyfriends a job at a cemetery.
Some of my earliest (and best) memories of my Dad are from when I was really little and would get to go to a set-up with him. A set-up is when the vault company goes to the gravesite and prepares for the service by lowering the vault into the ground, covering the mound of dirt with fake grass, putting up a tent and setting out chairs for the family. Then we would drive over somewhere in the cemetery and park, inconspicuously, and wait for the service to end.
Unlike most movies, families typically don’t shovel the dirt themselves. Actually, in almost all movies, what you see is the family shoveling dirt directly onto a casket. This wouldn’t happen even if the family did do that – because caskets are lowered into the vaults and vaults have lids. So what you should actually see in movies is the dirt being shoveled onto a big cement box…
But typically, the casket is lowered in the vault (which is already in the ground) and the family leaves. So we would wait for the gravesite service to end and my Dad would put the lid on, put the dirt back, and clean up. And he would always let me take one flower from the arrangements that were left. It seems really tacky now but as a young girl that was my favorite part. That and playing King of the Hill with my sisters on the dirt mound while my Dad set up.
And it was never morbid to me. I know when you talk about playing in a cemetery people visualize Wednesday Addams but it wasn’t anything like that. We understood death and what it meant but we weren’t obsessed or fascinated with it – it wasn’t something dark.
In fact, my family was always able to find some humor within this very somber profession. Never in a disrespectful way – in a way that would lighten the burden of sorrow that they witnessed each day. They talked for years about a doing a show about the funeral business – and several years ago someone actually did. We should have taken the idea seriously…
I would like to write a book about it – another for my long list. But I’m fascinated with the history and evolution of the business - it’s amazing to me. Even if I never write a book I think it’s interesting enough that I want to formally write down some of the information that my grandmother has shared – for family historical value alone. Did you know that back during the time when my great-grandfather was in the business that one of the duties of the town funeral director was to also run the ambulance? That seems like such a contradiction! Can you image that today – how many lawsuits there would be?
And the deceased used to be kept in the home too. Funeral directors would go there to embalm and dress the bodies. My grandmother says that when the trend became to change – when they began to take the bodies from the home – that my great-grandfather was convinced that the idea would never catch on. He couldn’t imagine that people would begin to get comfortable with sending their loved ones off somewhere.
Which is funny because I can’t imagine keeping them!
