Death isn't funny, but people are. And when people die, funny things happen.
A few years back, I was volunteering at a hospice in New York City. Two afternoons a week, I spent time with dying people I didn't know, rubbed their feet, fetched them liquids, listened to their eleventh hour stories. On one such day, I was in a patient's room reading a magazine while she slept, minding my own business. Suddenly, the door flies open and a frazzled-looking, preppie dude demands to know what the hell I'm doing there.
"I'm waiting for her to wake up," I said.
"She's dead!" he told me.
I felt like a ghoul. I had no idea. Watching this scene, you'd have been apoplectic, but it was nothing compared to what happened next. Beatrice and Sarah, the bulky Jamaican nurses who did most of the scrubbing, dragging, slopping, and shlepping, came lumbering down the hall toward the dead woman's room. "Get a chuck!" Sarah ordered.
"A what?" I asked.
"Get me a friggin' chuck!"
Chucks, it turns out, are those blue absorpent pads that pass for underwear in hospice units. I grabbed a pile and tore back to the room. Beatrice and Sarah were standing on either side of the bed, where the dead woman lay buck naked, her blue lips forming a sybiline smile.
"Gimme those!" Sarah grabbed the chucks from my arms. Then, without a word of planning, Beatrice pulled the dead lady up by her ankles like she was trussing a chicken and Sarah wiped between her legs, tsk, tsk, tsk-ing while she worked. When the cleaning was done, the dead woman was laid on the bed and slipped into a six-foot Hefty bag. Working together, the nurses tied a rope around the ankles and the waist of the body in the black plastic cover. Then one of them handed me the third bit of rope and requested that I tighten it around the neck.
"We superstitcha," Beatrice said. Superstitious island gals. I tied the rope around the corpse's neck then helped them heave the dead lady onto a gurney. An attendant wheeled her to the elevator. It felt like a David Cronenberg flick, but without the aliens clawing out of her thorax.
Nightmares can sometimes make you laugh. They are tasteless and irresistable. We're confused by our lack of sanctimony and struggle to maintain a skein of good taste. But sooner or later, something side splitting happens in the midst of pomp and circumstance.
It happened against two weeks ago. I was at a mortuary where my sister and I were arranging for the cremation of our half-sister. A group of us were in the mortuary basement surrounded by funeral urns and wallpaper that reminded me of Oscar Wilde's deathbed response to the decor in his hotel room: "One of us has got to go." With our family seated around him, the pompous mortician was being painfully tasteful, so-so-sorry-for-your loss curling his upper limp into a permanent simper. At the same time, he was trying to con us into buying an overpriced cremation box for her to be lit in. I did not see the point in this. Why couldn't she be cremated au naturelle?
He said absolutely not. That would be illegal as well as unsightly. Having traveled in Varanasi and watched public body-burnings on the Ganges, where Brahmin priests chant from the Vedas and bash the frying corpses with sticks to make them burn faster, I found his squeamishness bizarre and annoying. Not to mention expensive.
Luckily, before I get too pissed off, my sister caught my eye, snorted, and burst out laughing. Then my niece and nephew got caught with the giggles and I lost it, too. The mortician sat there with his mouth hanging open. The pent-up stress of that terrible week, our communal shock, the funereal urns, sleep deprivation, and family tension caused a gas fire of hilarity that sent my sister running to the bathroom, trying not to pee in her pants. By the time we left that ridiculous place (a couple of thousand dollars poorer), we felt so much better for having laughed that instead of going home to be miserable, we put together a barbecue. Our half-sister loved to eat and this seemed to be the most enjoyable way to pay our respects to a woman who died weighing 300 pounds.
Rather than spend this sad day moaning and growning, belly aching over the dead party's wretched life (a life that had nearly buried us all), we had Doritos and dip and London broil. My sister and her girlfriends did shots of Jack Daniels in the garage while I played air hockey with my nephews. Babies crawled up and down the stairs; there were dogs and chaos and too much noise; we dug up old family photos and teased each other. We reminisced about our dead mother who lived for a tasteless laugh especially at someone else's expense. Mom liked to laugh as much as anyone I have ever known. "You'll be dead soon enough," she'd say when people forgot that life is funny. "Menschen tracht und Gott lacht," she would remind them in Yiddish.
Man thinks. God laughs.
