While it is purely conspiratorial and I have zero proof, my strong suspicion is that they simply conducted the funeral, took the body back to the funeral home and put him in the cooker. Or maybe he wasn't even at the funeral. Maybe they cooked him beforehand.
We can't know. It was a closed casket.
But it was the way we were hurried away that made me quite suspicious of the whole thing. Is that normal? Do mourners usually get rushed away from the burial site like that? Did they even put the coffin in the vault or is that just as empty as I think the coffin might have been?
You see, we never even saw the casket lowered. The entire funeral was done on site at the Veteran's cemetery in Milwaukee.
I mean, are there sometimes back room deals made between funeral homes and certain coordinators of the VA? "Just make it look good, and we'll slip you a few bucks so we can resell the coffin a few times." Here we had a 93-year-old man who died of natural causes, who was in a closed casket. Who's ever going to try to dig him up?
I remember my grandfather always joked about what we did with him after he passed on. "Bury me in a burlap sack for all I care," he would say and laugh heartily.
We at least got him in a slight step up. It wasn't a bad coffin, but it also wasn't a particularly pretty one. I think it cost somewhere around $1500, but I may be off on that. But it was essentially a "universal" casket that could be used to buried in or cremated in.
I tried to direct my aunts to go for something nicer. "It's grandpa after all," I told them. But they picked the one that could be used for both. At first everything looked beautiful. The casket was there before the services started with the American flag draped over it.
The color guard came to fold it and that's when the reality hit. My uncle leaned over to his sisters and quipped, "I think we screwed up on the coffin."
Granted. Our family isn't all that serious a bunch. We had a good laugh about it, probably thinking back to grandpa's old joke. "You wished. We delivered, old man." At least it was a respectable and honorable sendoff with the gun salute and the pastor's words.
Grandpa was a World War II veteran.
But it was when it was done when the alarm bells were initiated for me. I didn't think of it right away. But over time it has become something I have thought often about. What did they actually do with grandpa?
There were groups paying their final respects before heading off. Again, there was no casket lowering. Finally, one of the directors or whoever he was began waving people off. "Not to be rude and rush anyone off, but we have another funeral right behind this one and we need to clear this space for the next one rather soon."
The Hearse grandpa came to the site in sat waiting. Presumably to transport the casket to the burial vault.
Or back to the funeral home.
It's not like something like this is unheard of. Sometimes there are bad players in this world who simply see the money and don't care about the loved one. Sometimes business is just that. Business. "Who's going to know?" they might say. "Does it really matter where the body goes?"
At the end of the day, it probably doesn't matter. Unless you happen to be very religious. And even though I'm not that guy, even I think it does matter a little bit. It's my grandpa, after all. I loved him and respected him, and he was a powerful and influential force on my life and who I became.
At the same time, knowing the man that grandpa was, even if they did toss him into the cooker and run off to take the casket back and sell it to another mourning family, I think my grandpa would have appreciated the comedy of that—if any comedy can exist for something like that.
He viewed death as just a part of life. He saw the body as just a shell of the person. The person is what's alive, not dead.
I have no idea if grandpa's in that grave. Maybe they at least put his ashes in there? But what I do know is that wherever grandpa is in the great beyond, he still lives on in my heart. And no one can take that away from me.
Now, where my heart winds up when I leave this world may be another question. And I guess whatever anyone decides to do with it when I'm gone won't really matter in the end either.
© 2024 Jim Bauer
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