II
FUNERAL: THE END?
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That sense was breaking through …
Emily Dickinson (280)
“You’ve got to be kidding!” I told him. Please be kidding, I prayed. I don’t think he’s kidding.
Michael Leggett, managing editor for theHuntsville Item had just assigned me the odious task of researching and writing an article on the costs of funerals. Michael usually was kidding, but this time he seemed oblivious to my rampant necrophobia. He calmly folded his hands across his ample stomach, tugged on his mustache and said, “I’m dead serious. Would I joke about dying?”
Day after day I researched. For a week and a half, I gritted my teeth and traipsed in and out of morgues and funeral homes—those for the black folk and the mansion-like one on the hill for the white folk with its cavernous display room filled with caskets in muted mauves, empire blues, royal reds and every fabric, style and price imaginable. These long, colorful boxes ranged from a modest felt-covered pine model for $450 to the heavy ornate, cast-copper sarcophagus for $20,000.
Each day Michael asked, “Where’s the funeral story?”
I overlooked nothing in undertaking, from the training necessary for morticians to the cost of flowers
