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The Life and Death class listens patiently. When the meeting opens for questions, half a dozen hands shoot up. Has Mickey ever had a corpse come to life? Is there any demand for glass coffins? Eventually the questions get personal. Mickey is asked: "Are you going to be cremated?" He shakes his head no. Mickey is only 39, but the hint of a shadow crosses his face. He volunteers that the males in his family generally start dying from 62 on. Clearly it is time to tour the casket selection room.
Mickey's smile revives as he slaps a coffin and extols the virtues of 20-gauge steel. With undercoating. He points to one casket that boasts a watertight seal; he points to another that does not. "Caskets are Like cars," he philosophizes. "Some come with a few more of the niceties."
The Life and Death children swarm about the coffins—peer into them, peer under them. They improvise hide-and-seek games around the larger caskets. A small casket with a closed lid rests on the floor. They straddle it like a hobby horse.
One boy checks the price tag on his favorite model: "Wow, $5,700! Pure bronze.
I'm going to buy that for my dad." In a corridor outside, a fair young man with a mustache, soldierly erect in his three-piece gray suit, has been guarding a door.
On their way to view the caskets the Life and Death children, with infinite distaste for closed doors, ask the young man, "What's in there? Can we go in?"
It's currently occupied," he answers, I with a broad wink. Now the moment has come. Nobody has to go into the room, Mrs. Shaak reminds her excited pupils.
Nobody has to go anywhere or do anything he or she doesn't choose to.
At last the closed door is opened. By twos and threes the children march across the threshold as if entering the next life.
A widow who died in a nursing home two days earlier lies before them in an open casket, gowned in a dress provided by the funeral home, her gray curls coiffed. Some mouths arrange themselves in solemn expressions. Some quiver, then crack into nervous conspiratorial grins. But when their turn comes, all the visitors head to ward the corpse—an irresistible force confronting an immovable object.
Unwrinkled faces bend close to stare at folded, gnarled hands, at the sunken face. How much suffering takes place in 72 years! How much of that can a ten-year-old child understand? A question for Henry James or William Golding, with the answer buried deep between the lines of The Turn of the Screw or Lord of the Flies. Ten-year-olds have other questions.
"Why does she have a mustache?"
"Will she be buried with her glasses?"
"What did she die of?"
"Natural causes," Mickey answers.
"Some people just get old and wear out."
Afterward, in the driveway, the boys crawl into the back of the hearse where the old woman's body will ride. One of them asks Mickey a final question: "Can we have a ride in the Hertz?"
Everybody cracks up.
At the end of a long day, on the drive back to school, the girls sing duets from Annie while the boys try to pull their hair.
Death, where is thy sting? Not in Gainesville, Fla.
—Melvin Maddocks