Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt by Todd Harra & Ken McKenzie

Author:Todd Harra & Ken McKenzie
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780806531793
Publisher: Citadel
Published: 2010-06-15T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 25

The Comedian

Contributed by an open-mic night comedian

I have been a comedian my entire life. Funeral directing was my backup plan, still is, but until my comedy act can start paying the bills, I have to go out on night calls. It’s one thing to be up in the middle of the night hauling one of the dearly departed from bed, and an entirely different thing to be up at that same time of night in a smoky dive, clutching a whiskey-smelling microphone in front of a tough crowd. The latter gets my juices flowing a lot more than the former.

Death isn’t a laughing matter. But laughter does help the healing process. That’s my philosophy.

An older woman who showed up at my mortuary awhile back is still firmly planted in my memory—partly because she appeared in my life the same day I scored my first paying comedy gig (a hundred smackeroos) and mostly because she is not the type that one forgets. The woman had the innate toughness of someone who has lived a long time in a short number of years—you could see it in her face. Nary a tear was shed as she looked me straight in the eye and shook my hand firmly. She had come to see me because her only daughter was dead.

I ushered Mrs. Smith into my office. She walked with the slightest of limps, hardly using the cane she carried. Her gray hair was wound into a tight bun and perched upon the top of her head like a bird’s nest in danger of falling off. She hefted her plump rear end into one of the chairs facing my desk, folded her hands on the top of my faux-mahogany desk, and began to talk.

Mrs. Smith’s daughter was only 40 years old. She had died due to complications of diabetes. She was the only child, and Mrs. Smith’s husband had died a number of years ago. That much she told me. She didn’t fill me in on the when, where, or how. She had relatives in Florida, where she was going to be moving as soon as she buried her daughter.

It had been a long, hard, trying road and she was glad it was over. Apparently, toward the end things had gotten pretty bad. “I used to look like Jane Fonda before my daughter got sick,” Mrs. Smith said. “Now look at me!” She laughed sharply and sat back in her chair, pleased with her joke. I had yet to speak, but knew we were going to get along fine.

“Mrs. Smith, can I get you a refreshment? Coffee, tea, mineral water, soda…Manhattan?”

“Finally! A man after my own heart! Knob Creek, three cubes, no peel,” she rasped.

“Would you like that shaken or stirred, Mrs. Bond?”

She cackled. “I don’t care as long as it has lots of booze in it!”

“The only kind I know how to make.”

Her stony façade cracked and the floodgates opened. Mrs. Smith started regaling me with stories about her youth, when she and her husband had been an acrobatics team for the circus.

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