- Sat Sep 05, 2020 9:44 pm
#700153
Thank you all for the letters, cards, notes, texts, emails, and pm’s.
They were most appreciated, and brought me great comfort.
Updates and observations.
Over the past twenty years, the Old Man told everyone and anyone, close or acquaintance, that after he died he wanted to have his ashes spread across his ranch in Mendocino. He’d even tell them the name of the pilot who’d agreed to perform the task.
When I mentioned this to my mother she said, “He changed his mind, and wants to be in a mausoleum next to me.”
Fine.
The Old Man was born and raised a Catholic, but never accepted any of their teachings.
“It’s nothing but a fucking cult,” is one of the kinder things he ever had to say about the Catholic church.
And so it surprised me when my mother said she’d bribed a priest to come and give the Old Man last rites.
Just to clarify, the bribing part, and the acceptance of the bribe, was not a surprise.
It also surprised me when she purchased a 2 ft by 2 ft urn condo in the Catholic mausoleum.
The Old Man was a carpenter by trade, so my mother ordered an outrageously expensive wooden urn through the funeral home and had it engraved. The reason it was outrageously expensive is because that’s the only price range the funeral home offered.
Take it or leave it.
It wasn’t until the urn was in hand that the Catholic cemetery informed my mother that wooden urns were verboten.
“Bugs.”
“Mold.”
“Rot.”
Perhaps.
And yet I can’t help but wonder what their carpenter would have made of this petty nonsense and greed.
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