A Tomb with a View - part one

My first job was delivering flowers for a now defunct flower shop that was located adjacent to a Polly's Pies in Long Beach. I made $5.50 an hour, all the soda I could drink, and the employee discount on food and pies at Polly's. It was a pretty cool first job to have but there were two places I hated to deliver flowers to - gay bars (not that there's anything wrong with that) and funeral homes.

I always got a little freaked out when it came to delivering a casket piece because most funeral homes made the delivery guy place it on the casket. If I was lucky, it would be a closed casket and I could get out of there really quickly.

If I was unlucky, that casket was open and I'd have to see the body. It never happened to me but I was always afraid that I would be in there all by myself and the body would make some sort of death rattle or worse, sit up in the casket.

Funeral homes just freak me out.

Saturday morning arrived and Number 2 and I had a 10:00 a.m. appointment at the funeral home. My dad had wanted to be buried with his parents at Riverside Memorial but the tricky thing about that was my grandfather had to be dead first before my father could be buried there. Funeral and burial arrangements were about the only thing that my dad didn't take care of before he passed so Number 2 and I decided to have him buried just up the street from where he worked when we were kids.

It is the Disneyworld of funeral homes.

I knew the place was big. I had been there for other funerals. But I never really understood the amount of land that this business really had.

Number 2 pulls up to the "arrangements office" just after I do and we head into the lobby.

It is apparent that everything in the lobby is set up to be soothing. There's a babbling brook with a waterfall. Classical music is playing softly in the background. Three receptionists are sitting at a bank of phones like volunteers for a PBS pledge drive.

Number 2 gets excited about something in the lobby and wants me to check it out. "VW, look over there!!!"

It's the urn display.

"How cool would it be if Paul Bearer came out right now holding one of those urns?" says Number 2.

I smile at the notion of the WWF manager leading the Undertaker through this lobby with the over-the-top screech of the Phenom's name - "UNNNNNDERRRRRTAAAAAAAKERRRRRRR!!!"

Number 2 is right. It would be funny if Paul Bearer was here.

We sit for a while and I pick up an LA Times to read. An employee begins to head toward us but as I make eye contact with her, she apologizes without saying a word - she wasn't coming to pick us up.

After about 15 minutes, a large black man greets us. He explains that he is going to help us pick the plot and then once we have that another employee will help us with all of the other details. He escorts us to a nondescript office so we can begin the paperwork.

The walls in his office are adorned with fake grave markers of all different sizes on one side and memory books on the other. He turns to his PC and begins to fill in the blanks on some sort of template to help us with all of the funeral and burial arrangements. It looks like Death Madlibs.

He starts asking us what type of plot we would be interested in and I cut him off before he can get too far into his sales pitch.

"I don't mean to be crass," I said. "But my father was very clear to both of us that he didn't want us spending anymore on him than we absolutely had to."

"I understand that but don't you want have the appropriate memorial for your father?"

I could see Number 2 tense up. Getting mad about a pretty horrible sales technique wasn't going to help but both of us were instantly annoyed. We didn't want to be cheap here. We HAD to be cheap here. My father would have haunted us forever if we spent too much money here.

"Let's just take a look at what you have that is in the price range that we'd like to be in."

With that, he escorted us out of the office and to one of the white mini-vans parked out front.

We were off to find the final resting place for our father.

VW