From French Kisses and Other Tales of Whoa!
By Lisa Montagne, Ed.D.
September 2019, Los Angeles
By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.
Genesis 3:19
I thought my mother would live forever, but there I was throwing dirt on the lid of her coffin. As the now-classic children’s book declares, everyone poops. Of course, everyone also dies. In fact, 151,600 people die worldwide every day. That’s 6,300 people per hour; 151 people per minute. Far too young at just 64 years old, my mother Linda June Montagne-Anderson joined those ranks on December 10, 1998.
My mother was the most quick-witted person I have ever known. And, she was the most ridiculous person, too. Wrap your mind around a scenario in which a hyperbolic, cartoon version of Mozart had a love child with Hedy Lamar, the actress and inventor, at the height of her beauty and brains in the 1940s. Add in the doe-eyed loveliness of Elizabeth Taylor and a pinch of Lucy Ricardo’s unselfconscious zaniness, then you can begin to form a mental picture of my mother.
She was beautiful and intelligent, which many people in the era of my mother’s prime found confusing. To complicate matters, there was an air of witty absurdity about her, combined with warmth, that most people found endearing. Of course, as daughters do, I found it mostly infuriating. It has been over 20 years since my mother passed away, but if I post something online about her now, people come crawling out of the woodwork from the past to declare how they adored her. Even dead as a doornail, my mother racks up those likes and post replies like a Millennial social-media influencer. People at public readings who never met her declare “I love your mother!”
Mother was flown from California to be put in the Montagne family burial plot in Houston, Texas. She was confined—wits, talent, beauty and all—to a dusty-rose-pink metal box decorated with bronze roses. The design of her casket was so over-the-top that it could have made even Elvis blush. Like Elvis, effortlessly able to make an impression on people everywhere she went, my mother would have loved it, being the center of attention as she was celebrated up to heaven in a sparkly pink casket. If she could have, she would have whistled in a team of celestial horses and ridden her casket like a chariot up the chapel aisle, out through the double doors, and up through a part in a plume of fluffy clouds on her way through those pearly gates.
Back on earth, she lay there in the funeral home chapel gussied up in a light-pink, chiffon dress with a high, ruffled collar. She sported a surprisingly enigmatic Mona Lisa smirk on her face, as if she had actually ridden her pink chariot up to heaven and, like a lottery winner, finally got her much-anticipated mansion in the sky. As if she was saying, Take that waiting to a ripe, old age to kick the bucket. Her large pink, morganite gemstone lay around her neck on a gold chain. Over-sized pink cubic zirconia earrings adorned her delicate lobes. On her tiny hands, she wore one large ring with a clear, pink stone, and another featuring a pink-hued, dewdrop opal. Her brown hair, which she had colored for some years at that point, was set and coifed in its usual style, short and curled, the way she wore it most of her life. If her hair had been died pink, too, the effect would have been complete, but one can’t always have everything. My sister-in-law Sheila chose my mother’s viewing outfit with loving care and oversaw the aesthetic details with the funeral director. My mother would have heartily approved, feeling like a pink Snow White lying in wait for her prince to finally come wake her with a kiss.
My sister-in-law stood over the open casket. Always quick with her trademark dark humor, she commented with a dead-pan face that not only was it all a misunderstanding that my mother was struck down so young by a heart attack (written as “harder tack” by one of my mother’s elementary school students in a condolence note), but that it was also mostly a “waste of skin.” My mother had the audacity to die with flawless skin that bore nary a wrinkle. “If only we could just trade skin,” Sheila concluded, truly mournful.
Only in hindsight can I recall with any sort of objectivity this scene of my mother in all her pink glory as she lay in repose. At the time, I only felt bereft, robbed, cheated. My mother had been taken from me. I was a duckling left adrift. Even though I was already an adult, I still needed her. The unfairness of death gleefully mocked me, like a ruthless mercenary cashing in a paycheck.
Later, when the graveside ceremony was over, and the dirt had not yet been filled in, I could not pull myself away from her. I had an impulse to throw myself—possibly in a dramatic swan dive—into the hole with her. Let them pour the dirt over me too, I thought. That’ll teach ‘em. Although whom I would be teaching and what lesson, I did not know. At the time, this line of logic seemed perfectly reasonable: Throwing myself in with her seemed like the next step in the proceedings. Chapel, eulogy, prayers, swan dive.
If this hadn’t been my mother in that pink box, I might have been one of the first to scarper off to the repast supper to toast the deceased with a ready glass of Champagne. Then get on with my life, as people must do, or risk being perpetually lost in a Hamlet-like loop, forever pondering the mysteries of life and death, or constantly frightened that one would be next.
But this time, it was my mother who had the terrible, irreversible thing happen to her. On the day that we buried her, I was still in shock, struck numb like a lemming that landed with a THUMP! on a river rock. This wasn’t supposed to happen for decades. As I write this, her two sisters are still kicking. Just weeks before, the family had gathered in L.A. for Thanksgiving. At the end of that weekend, Mother drove me to LAX to fly back to Denver where I was living at the time. The last time that I saw her alive was curbside at the airport. Just 10 days later there she was in a pink, metal box dangling over a hole in the cemetery lawn.
As I stood there feeling like an anvil had just fallen on my head Wiley Coyote-style, Mark, my older brother and spouse of aforementioned sister-in-law, attempted to herd me away from the hole. Mother’s casket would be lowered by the crane lying in wait at the edges of the cemetery yard like a giant praying mantis poised to scoop up its prey. “Not yet,” I mumbled weakly as I narrowed my eyes at the spot where I had moments before tossed some obligatory turf onto the coffin lid. It had landed with a dull splat.
Everyone else in our group, including my young son, had already left to party it up at a Cajun seafood restaurant nearby. Just me, my brother Mark, and my sister-in-law Sheila were left standing there in the waning afternoon sun for what I can only assume was far longer than was usual in these situations. The pale, extra-tall, lanky funeral director, who looked like he had been sent over by a movie casting unit, also hovered patiently nearby. If I was making him feel uncomfortable with my refusal—inability—to move along, he was not showing it. He was probably used to desperate, crazy people milling about the cemetery yard.
I still wanted to be near her. I was giving a last-ditch effort to will it all not to be, as if I could somehow put a stop to the burial proceedings. I knew just enough about human burial not to want to abandon her to her fate. Several years earlier, in one of the textbooks I used for teaching college freshman English, I had read an excerpt of Jessica Mitford’s “American Way of Death,” a much-celebrated critique of the funeral industry that was written in 1963 but is still relevant today.
In order to cross state lines from California to Texas, my mother had been embalmed. State and federal laws dictated full embalming for transportation by plane. At least she didn’t have to eat the airline food, I thought wryly when my brother informed me of this arrangement, but I was not the least bit happy about it. Even though I knew that the Egyptians had perfected embalming thousands of years before and that millions of people had been embalmed before my mother’s turn, I found the practice distasteful on a gut level. It wasn’t like she would be dug up one day and put in a museum collection with a tag that said: Mummy of 20th-century American female—mother, wife, sister, daughter, speech therapist, musician, Scrabble player extraordinaire.
I had read that Mitford excerpt aloud to my writing students several times, usually around Halloween. I was intimately familiar with its prose. Mitford describes the process of embalming in micro-detail, including the equipment of the embalmer, which consists of “scalpels, scissors, augers, forceps, clamps, needles, pumps, tubes, bowls and basins,” that is used to drain the body of blood. Then through the arteries the body is filled with a mixture of formaldehyde and other formidable liquids. After this step, using “a bewildering array of fluids, sprays, pastes, oils, powders, and creams,” the embalmers somehow manage to decorate the corpses to look tolerable—sometimes even pleasing—to be viewed by those there to say goodbye. I could honestly say that the mortuary team in California, with its myriad of do-hickies and whatchamacallits, plied its trade admirably to make my mother look her deathly best, albeit a bit gray around the gills. She was deceased after all. All of the pink certainly helped.
Mitford also quotes funerary textbooks of the 1960s that declare that embalming is best done before “life is completely extinct—that is, before cellular death has occurred” because “one of the effects of embalming is to dispel fears of live burial.” Of this practice, Mitford keenly observes, “How true; once the blood is removed, chances of live burial are indeed remote.” Fear of live burial seems terrifically medieval, but it was still a major concern for the medical community half-way into the 20th century. Even though draining a person’s blood before “cellular death has occurred” was considered the ideal by Mitford’s funerary experts, there wasn’t always a rush to play fast and loose with that precious bodily fluid. In many cases, when there was some doubt about the deadness of a person, the body was left a few days in a “waiting parlor” until the stench of rot set in to confirm his or her condition. In fact, one of the original purposes of an Irish-style wake was waiting to see if the person woke up. What better way to wait it out than gaining comfort from a wee helping of venerable Irish whiskey? In the early 20th century, some even tried to determine whether or not a soul could be weighed, so that a person could in good conscious be declared dead if the soul had indeed departed.
The major take-away from Mitford’s not only insightful but also witty treatise is that embalming is totally unnecessary. Yet the funeral homes sell it to their consumers as a matter of course. Even today, there are no laws that demand embalming, but many people are woefully uninformed about their choices. In my mother’s case, the decision had been made a few years earlier that she would return to Houston to join her parents, even though she had not expected to arrive there in a box for many decades more. Someday, my aunts will join the rest of the gang, thereby reuniting the original family unit in all its embalmed glory. In that aforementioned mummy display, all five could be tagged as a 20th-century nuclear family: species Montagne-i-cus, a father, a mother, and three sisters, the Southern variety.
When my mother accepted a spot in my grandparents’ burial plot, I know she wanted to be buried with her body intact. If Jesus ever did wake the dead, she wanted in on it. But embalming? I don’t think she knew quite what she was in for. I don’t recall ever sharing the Mitford excerpt with her. At the time, it never occurred to me that it would be relevant to her for a very long time.
In Mary Roach’s 2003 book Stiff: The Curious Lives of the Human Cadaver, she writes about how to know someone is dead. Today, the general rule for medical professionals is to pronounce a person dead when there is no longer any brain activity. However, after some people die, they are “beating-heart cadavers.” They still have many signs of being alive, such as a pulse, but they are actually brain dead. These semi-alive cadavers are even called patients and not corpses. They are usually treated with the care of a live patient, especially if organs will be harvested from them. However, one may surmise, if they are to be buried, they may well have their blood drained and be embalmed before you can say Bob’s your uncle, as was the recommendation of Mitford’s texts.
In my mother’s case, she drove to her job as a speech therapist at a Los Angeles public elementary school, parked her vehicle in the staff lot, and never got out. The janitor found her several hours later slumped over her steering wheel. If no blood is reaching the brain, a person is usually brain dead after 4 to 6 minutes. This means that my mother was still medically alive for up to 6 minutes after her heart had stopped. She may not have even realized that those were her last moments. For all I know, she was thinking about buying milk (or, knowing her, more likely Milk Duds) at the grocery store on her way home from work.
Standing at my mother’s graveside, this jumble of facts and feelings tumbled through my head. I roused myself to muse aloud to what remained of our graveside group: “Huh. It’s very deep. Six feet under is no joke. That’s got to be more.” The hole looked quite deep from my view—at least 8 feet or more—surprisingly deep. Where was Hamlet when we needed him? Yorick had to be waiting for him at the bottom of that thing.
As we were standing there, the workers were steadily going about their business, like ants on a busy colony mound. They had whisked away the blanket of green artificial grass that covered the hole under the casket during the service, exposing the raw nakedness of my mother’s grave. It was a perfectly cut rectangle with sharp corners and dark, perfectly straight soil walls. The workmen seemed to take real pride in their work. Although why the neatness of the hole mattered once the dirt and grass were replaced, I could not guess. But it was impressive, nonetheless.
At that point, the crane, carrying a large object, started its crawl across the lawn, weaving in and out of the other tidy, upright gravestones. This Houston cemetery struck a middle ground in the grave marker arena. There were mostly simple headstones made of various materials from concrete to marble, but there were also some simple metal plates in the ground with engravings that listed only the person’s name and dates. My family’s burial plot was a combination of the two arrangements: a large, black, polished marble slab, bearing the family last name, Montagne, carved in calligraphy, stood like a sentry watching over my grandparents who were each marked by the simple metal plates.
The first time I remember seeing real grave headstones (the ones surrounding the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland do not count), I was 15 years old and in the U.K. where there are graveyards on practically every street corner from the tip of Penzance in the south to the Orkney Islands in the north. British gravestones range from giant, terrifying stone angels to simple hewn stone blocks that look like they were dragged in place by a Druid from Stonehenge.
In Europe, death is on display on practically every street corner and in every country lane. There is no mistaking that there are dead people every dang where, an everyday reminder of the natural cycle of life. In contrast, at Forest Lawn in Los Angeles the ground is headstone-less with only simple brass plates embedded in the ground where upright headstones would normally be. It is a very minimalist look, as if they don’t want people to notice that there are actually dead people there. The message is: Move right along, folks. Nothing to see here. No, siree. Like people don’t actually die in L.A. They just leave for a cocktail party and never come back. In fact, Forest Lawn is practically a golf course country club. Tiger Woods could smack one hard down the middle and wouldn’t disturb the peace of even one of the deceased.
As the crane continued its approach, I finally summoned the courage to ask the funeral director a question: “So, how long will she look like that? The way she looks in the casket. Ten years, perhaps?”
The funeral director didn’t skip a beat. “Much longer,” he replied.
“Much longer? Like how long? 20 years? 50?” I continued, incredulous.
The funeral director shook his head. “Probably more,” he conceded.
“More than 50 years? And my grandparents, too? So, you are telling me if I dug up my grandparents and my mother in 50 years, they would look as fresh as the day they were buried?” I could hear my voice pitching up, ending in a tiny, shaky squeak.
“Yes,” he replied, matter-of-factly, with a decisive nod. After all, it was his job to know these things.
Even though I knew some of the details of the embalming procedure, I really didn’t know for sure how long it would last. I was dumbfounded. After all, they weren’t actually wrapped like toilet paper spools the way ancient Egyptian mummies were. It was only then that I realized that this process truly does stop the decay of the body in its tracks. There would be no ashes to ashes nor dust to dust for my mother nor for her parents.
Next, as the workman carried on with their tasks of preparing the grave, the crane delivered an extremely large, gray concrete box with walls and a lid that were many inches thick.
“What is that?” I asked, feeling like I’d just swallowed a lightning bug.
The funeral director explained that mother’s pink casket would go inside the outer cement box, called a vault, to protect the casket from groundwater and keep it in place—kind of like a giant, concrete condom, or a set of Russian dolls. This business about the metal casket being put inside yet another container was also new to me. He went on to explain that, although for the graveside ceremony the pink casket was the star of the show, it would not actually be put directly into the ground.
At that moment, my stomach felt like it had been dropped from a great height. I expelled a very heavy breath. It was finally sinking into my addled noggin that my mother, looking like a flamboyant doll in its original packaging, would be filed under the letter M in that cement depository for who knows how long.
Books like Gary Laderman’s 2003 Rest In Peace list the ways that human societies, from the Paleolithic era to today, process their dead in ritual ways: they are burned, left exposed to the elements, floated down stream, buried in the ground, stacked like soup cans in catacombs. Then there are the less respectful or expedient ways the dead are disposed of, especially in desperate times of war, poverty, famine or plague, such as heaping them in piles like so much rusty junk in a land fill and leaving them to rot, tossing them like wastepaper into pits, or much worse—incineration after a lethal gas shower or being skewered on a pike and left to the crows. And what about more unconventional options, like being put into a deep freezer with hopes of being thawed out some day like a Sunday roast? Then there is burial at sea in the manner of sailors and pirates, which always seems a bit romantic to me. I have trouble deciding whether this is a good or bad choice for a last hurrah. In the past decade, a joke about the death of Osama Bin Laden has circulated among military types: How do you make a Scotch Bin Laden cocktail? Two shots and a splash of water. My mental image of burial at sea has since been complicated by this image.
By the afternoon of my mother’s funeral, I had already had some intense dreams about her—ones where my mother appears and starts talking to me. I am happy to see her. I respond casually, as people do to their very own mother, but then she starts acting strangely. Her image peels up off a rock, flattens out, and shimmers in the sun. Or maybe she can’t quite get any words out, or I can’t. Maybe I start feeling like sand is stopping up my mouth, or the old classic—I open my mouth to scream and nothing comes out. Then, with a sudden jolt I realize she is dead. I wake up clammy and gasping for air. Seeing her embalmed wax figure worthy of Madame Tussaud’s boxed up like a product on a grocery shelf may not have helped matters. But I don’t regret standing my ground that day—for sticking it out with her to the bitter end. I just couldn’t help myself. I had to see everything, even the cement box. Even the dirt scooped up and piled in. Even the sod laid over and tamped down by the proud workmen.
Years later, when I mentioned these dreams to my brother Mark, he said, “That’s why I don’t look.” It turned out that he hadn’t actually looked at Mother in all her pink regalia that day, nor had he seen his father nor or our grandparents nor any deceased person ever. He had chosen not to look. He prefers it that way. He can skip the dreams, thank you very much. To each his own, I suppose. But, for me, looking, and looking hard, helps me to know that the person is actually gone. It may look like them, but it isn’t them. However much I wanted a time machine to rewind to before my mother’s heart gave out, my mother…well, she was, I had to concede, not really there anymore.
In Barbara Tuchman’s historical analysis of the European Black Plague of the 14th century, she quotes monks of that time who wrote of the victims that “death is seen seated on the face.” Unlike my brother Mark, those monks had certainly seen beaucoup dead people, having lived through plagues, famine, war and whatnot, so they were more than capable of describing that look with a high level of accuracy. It is the person, and yet it isn’t. Death, that greedy ol’ bugger, takes up residence where the person once was. And, despite a slightly smug expression on what was once my mother’s face but wasn’t her face anymore, and despite being laid out like pink jewel in a jewelry box, death had, indeed, unseated my mother. It had rudely shoved her aside and moved in with all its stuff like an unwelcome relative. Yes, to paraphrase my dear Virginia Woolf, death is greater than we are. But I also realized one more thing: The American funeral industry is the one entity capable of getting the upper hand on death. Funeral parlors—and taxidermists, too, come to think of it—they have it all figured out, albeit with the help of capitalist commerce. My mother had been turned into an object; commodified, as it were—well, in actual fact, mummified. She was my mummy. But tell me, what good is paying good money for this object if it is hidden away where one cannot see it? I wonder what the social etiquette of displaying the family mummy in the living room might be?
The trouble is that in America people are desperately uninformed about the choices for how one is laid to rest after shuffling off the mortal coil. That was Mitford’s beef 55 years ago, and it is still a valid one. Thank the good lord, as my mother would have said, today in 2019, there does seem to be some hope. According to a non-profit organization called the Funeral Consumer’s Alliance, there are actually now a growing number of cemeteries in California that offer “green burial,” which is not only meant to be environmentally friendly, but it also allows the body to be processed by mother nature rather than by a funeral director’s crack team of embalmers. One can buck the system. One can give the finger to the funeral industrial machine, and just say no to embalming. One can choose a plain, colorless wooden or cardboard casket, or even a good, old-fashioned shroud. If a nice, open-weave linen shroud was good enough for the likes of Jesus, then who are we to poo-poo one?
However, most of these facilities still require at least a vault lid to hold the body in place to prevent drifting, and to allow for proper maintenance of the burial plot. A variation of this is to invert the vault without the lid, so that the body is still allowed to go through the natural course of decomposition while keeping it in place so that the gardener doesn’t plow under a stray hand or foot with his riding mower. In this case, the customer may take away the vault lid to be used for “something else.” I can see it now: a giant concrete monolith standing in my garden, perhaps surrounded by garden gnomes. When guests ask what it is, I say, “Oh, just the lid to my mother’s coffin. Isn’t it lovely?” Or, if I get bored with that and want to change things up, it might also make a serviceable backyard dining table.
The truth is that with almost 8 billion people on the planet, we are running out of ecologically viable space for everyone to be allowed lavish quantities of ground to be plopped in for decades or centuries at a time. In some places, like in Europe, people are buried in layers, or families cycle its members out of the plots every few generations, disposing of ancestors’ remains in favor of the fresh ones. In extremely crowded places like China, they are even running out of places to stash ash urns. Pretty soon, China will not only have to limit how many people can be born, but also how many of them can die because they have no space to store them. Elon Musk better get a move on with that transportation to Mars. We may need that compliant planet for more than just overflow housing. That advertisement might read along the lines of: Need a place to stash your ash? Let SpaceX eliminate all your worries–our journey begins when theirs ends.
In the end, I suppose that I am happy there is a place I can go visit my mummy, despite the fact that I’ve only been there twice in 20 years. That’s once a decade. Worth having her boxed up like a jewel in a safety deposit box? I honestly do not have an answer to that. Her situation was really one of expedience. She passed unexpectedly, had a place to go to in Houston, and my brother got her there. I got the call from him while I was giving a final exam. The dean’s secretary fished me out of the classroom and handed me a cordless phone. From the moment my brother Mark broke the news to me to the day I saw her pretty in pink at the funeral, I felt like I was being pulled through a cheese grater. I was barely able to drag myself there. Thanks is really due to my brother Mark for pulling it all off. He was always reliable like that.
I totally get cemeteries. I really do. But, let’s face it, they are there for the living, and not the dead. So maybe it is the living who should rethink this whole thing. For example, I have asked myself this question many times: What is it that I want to happen after I bite the big one? More than anything else, I want to be remembered. Nobody knows where Mozart was buried, and yet, clearly, we remember him. In the spirit of Mozart, I will leave behind a box of photographs, drawings and paintings, books, and manuscripts, and then I will let the living take it from there, based on what they need. Maybe pulling out my photographs and manuscripts once a year? Maybe making a small shrine in the tradition of the Día de Muertos ofrenda—nothing too crazy, though—only one or two candles will do. However, at this point, it is much too soon to speculate who will actually be left to remember me. But whomever they are, I would rather they do something other than traipse to a cemetery to look at the piece of grass I’m filed under. Ideally, as they remember me, Champagne will be involved.
Even though I am not physically near my mother’s gravesite, for the past 20 years, I have thought of my mother almost every single day. And, apparently, as I have found out, many other people also often think of her, although none of them have ever been to her gravesite that I know of. So, if the objective is to be remembered, maybe we don’t really need graveyards or headstones or mausoleums or urn depositories. We most definitely do not need embalming—at least not as a fait accompli. If my son outlives me, which is iffy at this point (that’s a whole other story), then maybe I’ll let him carry me around in an urn, preferably one shaped like a unicorn. He can take me with him to the market and park me in the shopping cart while he feels up the tomatoes.
Even more than being remembered after I go, I want to live my life to the fullest now, and for all of the days that I have left. I am only guaranteed the here and the now, and I’m okay with that. Recently, two close family friends, both male, passed without warning. They were both young, one 49 and one 58. The first one dropped dead on a tennis court, and the other in a helicopter crash. Another friend, female, aged 51, died a prolonged, excruciating death of cervical cancer. On August 31, 2018, my brother Mark went the same way as our mother. He dropped dead from a heart attack. Given his squeamishness about dead bodies, Sheila had him cremated. His ashes are in a wooden box that sits casually on her dresser. If you don’t look carefully, you might think it’s her jewelry box. However I end up going, the untimely deaths of friends and family alike serve to remind me that I could be next, especially since I brave the California freeways almost daily where 3,100 people are killed every year. That’s an average of 258 per month, and 8 per day. Come to think of it, I am never leaving my house again.
After the workmen set the cement vault into my mother’s grave, the crane, like a mother cat, took my mother’s casket up into its mouth. Snug in her pink box, my mother momentarily dangled like a fishing lure until the crane, like a giant, metal kid using the tweezers in a game of Operation, hit its mark. She was neatly cataloged in that hole, and I never saw her again. More than anything, I have learned from grief that you have to be tolerant of others saying the wrong thing or risk looking like a jerk. During the year following my mother’s death, then years later following my brother’s death, people tried to console me with platitudes like, they are “in a better place now.” You know, bull hockey like that. Maybe mother is enjoying that mansion with my brother; maybe they are just gone. Either way, it still sucks for me. So, more than anything else, I have learned to be kind to myself. It’s okay to be mourning her 20 years later, and for everyday that I have left. Just the other day, I wanted so badly to text my brother Mark some terrible joke. I cried for a while in the bathtub. It’s just the natural cycle of things, I think. This kind of fully realized grieving for our departed loved ones makes us all immortal.
END
