Who mourns the grim mortician?
Here’s my late contribution of a Halloween poem. Boo!
Who mourns the grim mortician,
That dour, sour presence?
So humorless, refusing any
Mirth at things unpleasant.
So trained to keep a somber
Look at death's unpleasantries.
Who cries in his crematorium
While donned in widow's weeds?
Who grieves for the embalmer
On that feared and fateful day
When he himself is in the
Hearse that's hauling him away?
We don’t miss the undertaker
When undertaking grief.
His leaving brings no loss of joy,
Just unrestrained relief.
Liz McFadzean
What inspired this poem? Two and a half years ago, my husband and I were in southern Indiana where he was a writer-in-residence for a playwriting conference. The town was very small, perfect for lots of walking, and I took full advantage of that opportunity. One day as I passed the local mortuary a line popped into my head: “Who mourns for the mortician?” I really liked it, the combination of sounds, consonant alliteration and long o’s. When I got back to my room, I put it into my computer. But nothing else came. And a line does not a poem make.
I think I liked it because my husband and I have a very darkly humorous approach to the subject of our own deaths. While many get itchy talking about the particulars of their wills, some even going so far to avoid signing for months or years, Dave and I often would answer questions about particulars of our estate with the quip, “I won’t care. I’ll be dead.” Of course, we realized the benefit of sound planning for our children’s and grandchildren’s future, but the idea of trying to control the future from beyond the grave didn’t sound like a wise expenditure of our emotional energy.
On the other hand, if we really wanted to control our children after our death, we could buy a crypt and install an ATM machine that our children had to visit once a year. When they would put in the card, the door would open and they would have to come in for a half an hour and listen to a tape of our voices saying things like, “Have you brushed your teeth? Have you cleaned your room?” After said time, the money would pop out and they could be on their way. (Did I mention that Dave and I can have a dark sense of humor?)
When we were in Michigan one summer, we decided to pick out our cemetery plots. As we drove around with a salesman, we trotted out our humorous suggestion for the above-ground mausoleum, and with a perfectly straight face he replied, “We don’t sell those anymore.” People in the funerary biz are so well-trained in the somberness of death, that he never even got the joke.
So after a couple of years, I pulled out that opening line. A second line came to me: “that dour, sour presence”. And I was off and running. The poem practically wrote itself. But I still lacked an image to accompany the lines. I drove to a local mortuary and took a photo of a hearse, but it didn’t feel quite right. Then on Halloween day, my husband went to get fitted for a tuxedo. In the shop he donned a top hat, and when he turned his back, I had a perfect photo of a Dicksensian-looking undertaker. That is why my Halloween poem is a week late.
There was one more stanza that I wrote for the end of this poem, something about the mother who gave him birth and loved him…but I hacked it off at the last minute. It tied things up too prettily. I prefer the slightly plaintive and lonely ending. Besides, the words “unrestrained relief” feel like they should be followed by a big sigh, not more words.
Love, Liz
