Three Stories About Death
I.
I came home from school and my parents told me that the cat was dead. There was a lot of crying; weirdly, more from them than me. It wasn't because they were particularly fond of the cat — he was overweight and aggressive and as my dad liked to point out, "an asshole" — they were just worried about me. They assumed I'd be devastated. I was the one who brought the asshole cat home in the first place, and the only one in our family who spent any time with him. I was sad that he was gone, but not nearly to the extent that my parents had braced themselves for. It wasn't the kind of sad that permeates your bones, or makes you want to sob until you're dry-heaving. It was more like the "Oh my god, I can't believe they canceled The Six Million Dollar Man" sad.
My dad calmly repeated what the veterinarian had told them. My cat had Feline Urinary Syndrome, which caused blockage in his urinary tract. It was a difficult decision, he said, but they finally decided to put him to sleep, if only because he was in such excruciating pain. He explained where the body would be buried, and how he'd actually lived a very long and happy life, at least compared with the average feline life span.
After he covered all the medical details, we just sat in the living room and said nothing. We weren't about to discuss the considerably more ambiguous topics of souls or an afterlife. As a family, we were already pretty skeptical about the idea of a heaven for human beings. So it was agreed, without anybody needing to say it out loud, that a kitty heaven was kinda retarded.
When my parents were satisfied that they'd done their best, I wandered upstairs to my room for a nap. I sat on my bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to convince myself that I was fine, just fine. I didn't need any "he's with the Baby Jesus now" platitudes. But this was the first time that anybody close to me had died, and I wasn't sure how to make sense of it. During my ten years on the planet, my only exposure to death of any kind was when Obi-Wan Kenobi took a light-saber to the gut in Star Wars.
"Is that how it happens?" I wondered during my first of many, many screenings. "When somebody dies, do they just disappear completely? And does everybody get to come back as a spirit and visit your friends on the ice planet Hoth, or just if you were really, really good?"
I eventually figured out that Star Wars isn't the most reliable source of information. But there wasn't anyplace else for a guy to get a concise overview of spirituality, or at least enough spirituality to get by. I didn't need all the answers, just enough to take the edge off.
With few other options, I lay on my tiny bed and tried to work it through on my own. It seemed easy enough. I just had to conjure up a mental image of the earth and pull back like a camera, until I had an unobstructed vantage of... everything. It'd all become clear if I just got a good look at the nuts and bolts of the universe. So I watched as the earth got smaller and smaller in my mind, becoming one of many planets, until it was just another speck in the vast canvass of the galaxy. And then even our galaxy began to diminish, swallowed up by bigger solar systems and black holes that seemed to stretch on forever. Soon anything even remotely recognizable was gone and it was all just black and emptiness that went on and on and on and...
I gasped for air, like I'd been swimming at the bottom of a pool for a little too long. My heart was racing and I was suddenly very, very cold. I didn't realize it at the time, but I'd just experienced an existential panic attack. I took a good, hard look at the void, and sure enough, it was a whole lot of nothing. And let me tell you, it was fucking scary. Weak-in-the-knees, pit-in-your-stomach, face-to-face-with-the-meaninglessness-of-existence scary. Given that the most stressful part of my day usually involved wondering if I was going to be picked last for dodgeball, it was a lot of information to digest in just a few minutes.
I waited until I was able to catch my breath again and my heart didn't sound so much like bongo drums. And then I went downstairs and watched Young Frankenstein with my dad, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
II.
The knocking started around 7am. When we didn't answer, my mother cracked open the door of the guest bedroom. "Rise and shine, you two," she whispered in her most soothing morning voice. "I made some coffee and there are hot scones in the kitchen. Oh, and grandma is dead."
My mom has a talent for delivering bad news as an afterthought. In my line of work, we call it burying the lede. "I made your favorite brownies. Oh, and I may have ovarian cancer." "Your cousin just got into a great prep school. Which reminds me, your father and I have decided that we're not paying your college loans."
The Dame and I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs. My dad was standing in the living room, frozen in mid-stride, as if he forgot where he was going and what exactly he was supposed to do next. He saw us and pointed towards grandma's room just a few yards away. The doors were open and her body was laid out on the bed, exactly as they found her, her tiny head still peeking out from under her favorite quilt, the one that always smelled (at least to my nose) like a pungent combination of mildew and vanilla.
She died in her sleep, my dad told us. They hadn't noticed at first because, as we all knew, she tended to look like a corpse when she slept. (As kids, my brother and I were fascinated by her eerie ability to seemingly stop breathing during a nap, and we often debated whether she was hiding from predators.) But after repeatedly trying to wake her, they realized that it might be actual rigor mortis and not just her usual morning stiffness.
My dad and I held onto each other and cried. With tears still streaming down his face, he looked at me and said, "She was a bitch, wasn't she?"
"She was," I nodded. "A colossal bitch."
We both burst into laughter. Not because it was such an inappropriate thing to say, but because it was a relief to finally say the word out loud. She was a bitch. The kind of bitch who scowls at babies and undertips waiters. The kind of bitch who accuses her son of turning up the thermostat in an attempt to kill her and steal his inheritance. The kind of bitch who assumes that her grandson recommended Harold & Maude because the septuagenarian leading lady commits suicide on her 80th birthday, which is clearly a subliminal message that she should off herself at 80. The kind of bitch who, on the last night of her life, reminded her daughter-in-law that she was a disappointment to her.
We were sad that she was gone. But... well... when a 94-year old woman dies in her sleep, in her own bed, without any suffering or illness, leaving a family who has had quite enough of her bitchy attitude, thank you very much, the last thing you'd call it is a tragedy.
It took only minutes for the paramedics to arrive, followed closely by the coroner and funeral director. While the medical professionals examined her body, the director tried to console us. "I'm so sorry about your grandmother," he told me, and it sent a shiver down my spine. Not because of the sentiment, but because there was something about him that reminded me of Jonathan Frid from Dark Shadows. His words had a whispered menace, and he held on to certain vowels just a little too long. "So sooooorry about your graaaaandmother." Also, as far as I could tell, he didn't have a neck. When he turned to look at you, he had to bring his entire body with him.
The cause of death was determined to be "natural causes" and the body shuffled away. The whole process happened so quickly that I wondered if they thought they were being timed. Were funeral homes now working on commission? Was it like Glengarry Glen Ross? "First prize for bringing in the most bodies is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is you're fired." But when I wandered outside, I began to understand the need for haste.
The street was filled with teenage girls brandishing pom-pons and practicing their high-kicks. A farmer was roughly pulling a pygmy donkey into position on top of a float that vaguely resembled a pink birthday cake. A man dressed as a large brownish blob, either meant to be Mr. Potato Head or a cancerous testicle, tumbled to the ground as he tried to find his equilibrium.
I stood on the front porch and stared out at the chaos. The Dame came out and handed me a cup of coffee.
"Is there a parade today?" She asked.
"God I hope so," I said.
We watched as my grandmother was carried into the waiting hearse. As if supplying a soundtrack to her departure, the birthday donkey brayed in protest and Gloria Estefan's "Conga" blared from speakers mounted in a convertible Hot Rod.
"Feel the fire of desire
As you dance the night away
Cause tonight we're gonna party
Till we see the break of day"
When we ventured back inside, my mom told us that what we'd just seen was a parade — or at least the staging area for a parade — and not the Fellini hallucination I feared. With little else to do with our day, we decided that a parade might be just the thing to lift our spirits. So we walked downtown and sat in the grass with our neighbors, none of whom had any idea that we just lost a family member.
When the parade began, we laughed and passed around a milk jug filled with wine and voted for our favorite floats — a tie between the retirement home, which we agreed should be renamed "Praying for the Sweet Release of Death", and the local Jiffy Mix factory, in which truck drivers threw mini-boxes of pancake mix at the crowd like projectile weapons. After awhile, we got so caught up in the excitement that we completely forgot why were sad in the first place.
And then my mom saw her.
"Look," she said, pointing into the distance. "There's grandma."
Sure enough, there she was. The hearse, which I personally witnessed my grandmother's body being loaded into just five minutes earlier, was slowly driving down Main Street, somewhere between the marching band and the cowboy cavalcade. The neckless funeral director was behind the wheel, waving at the crowd and throwing miniature Butterfingers at the children.
He spotted us and smiled broadly, exchanging a meaningful gaze that seemed to say, "Yes, I know and you know that there's a dead body in this hearse, but let's not ruin everybody's fun by drawing attention to it, okay?"
So we just waved back and quietly said another goodbye to my grandmother, and tried to ignore the absurdity that a woman who had gone out of her way to make everybody around her miserable was being given a bon voyage parade, with dozens of strangers she never met cheering for her and applauding her as she made her way towards her final resting place.
Children were sprinting towards the hearse, grabbing for the falling candy and narrowly avoiding being crushed by the front tires. "Y'know," my dad said, "she would've hated all this attention."
"Probably so," I said. "You think this is what hell is like?"
He just snorted, trying not to seem too amused. We watched as the hearse was surrounded by snot-faced prepubescents, pounding on the windows and howling for more treats. Fueled by sugar, it didn't seem unreasonable that they might roll over the hearse and pull grandma into the street, thrashing at her body like a piñata.
We could've said something. But who wants to be the one to spoil a parade?
III.
Like every summer, my brother and I drove up to visit our dad's grave. And like every summer, we waited to see if the dog would show up again.
It's not the kind of thing we talk about with a lot of people. What could we tell them? "Well, sometimes my dad comes back as a dog." No, they don't want to hear that. It makes them uncomfortable. And they never know what to say. "Oh... how nice... well, when you see him again, tell him I said hi."
My dad died of a massive heart attack in 1999. We buried him in a small cemetery in northern Michigan, near our summer home, and invited only a few close friends and family members to join us. Nobody knew quite what to say. We just stood there and stared quietly at the grave. There seemed to be no point in comforting each other. We were angry and numb and nothing would make any of this okay.
And then a beagle showed up.
At first, we thought it must be somebody's pet. But he had no tags of any sort, nothing to indicate whom he might belong to. For a stray, he seemed unusually friendly. He moved from person to person, pressing his wet nose against their legs. He took a particular interest in our mother, trying at one point to climb her and lick her chin. He sat and watched intently as my brother and I lowered our dad's urn into the ground. And at the end, he accompanied each person to their car and waited for them to drive away.
We left the cemetery feeling strangely uplifted. And for a family of mostly agnostics, a little confused. Nobody wanted to admit what we were all clearly thinking; that the dog was our reincarnated father. That didn't make any sense, we told ourselves. It was silly, really. Did this mean we were Buddhists and never realized it? But even as the logical sides of our brains dismissed it as poppycock, there was a small part of us that wanted to believe, that needed to believe, our dad had come back for one final goodbye.
The next morning, the dog was still the hot topic of conversation. Even the smallest detail took on special significance. We noted how the dog and our dad shared the same color eyes, and how at the funeral he had completely ignored our aunt, who, even in life, he considered to be something of a bitch.
"Did you notice how he smiled at me?" I said. "Dad always used to smile at me like that."
We wondered if the dog might still be up there, lazily napping near his grave. We couldn't help ourselves. We piled into the car and drove up to the cemetery. And sure enough, the beagle was waiting for us. But something was different about him this time. He wasn't the same lovable mutt from yesterday.
He was, well, kind of a jerk.
He snapped at our hands when we tried to pet him. He tore at our pant legs and pushed us to the ground. As we looked on in horror, he began digging at the grave, threatening to unearth our father's remains. We jumped on him and tried to pull him away, but he easily slipped from our grasps.
"Oh sweet Jesus," my brother whimpered. "Is he doing what I think he's doing?"
He was. The beagle was licking his balls. Right in front of us. Right next to the tombstone! We tried to shield our mother's eyes, but it only made the absurdity of the situation all the more apparent.
"C'mon, Dad," I screamed at him, regretting my words even as they left my mouth. "I know you're single now and everything, but show some respect for your widow."
We could think of two possible explanations:
1) The dog was not, and never had been, our dad.
2) Our dad, at least in the afterlife, was an asshole.
We never talked about it again, but we knew we had only ourselves to blame. One spiritual moment should have been enough for anybody, but no, we had to press our luck. If we'd just left well enough alone, we'd still have a pleasant fantasy to shelter us from the grief. But we were greedy, and got exactly what we deserved.
We still return to the cemetery every year. Sometimes we'll wait around for hours, jumping every time we hear a twig snap, gasping when any forest creature happens to catch our eye. Seven years have passed without a sign of our beagle. Some days, we convince ourselves that there was nothing magical about that dog after all. His owner probably moved out of town years ago. But that hasn't stopped us from looking, and waiting, and hoping against hope that he isn't gone forever.
And then, this summer, he finally returned.
We saw him in the distance, running through an open field a good ten yards away. My brother and I both spotted him at once, and started jumping and waving our arms, trying to get his attention. The beagle stopped and looked at us, tilting his head uncertainly. We waited for him to gallop towards us and into our open arms. But instead, he turned and began running in the opposite direction, ignoring our cries.
"Let's get him," my brother said.
We jumped into the car and chased after him, following him through dusty back roads at frightening speeds. It never occurred to us to wonder what we might do if we actually caught up with him. What were we expecting? Did we intend to kidnap him? Throw him into the back seat and bring him home with us? And what then? Did we seriously think we could adopt our dead dad? And wouldn't more exposure to this beagle just prove what neither of us wanted to find out, that he was an ordinary dog, and we'd just been fooling ourselves all these years?
What we really wanted, I suppose, was a proper goodbye. If he'd done it once, he could do it again. And we'd get it right this time. We'd let him lick our faces and comfort our mom, and we'd tell him all the things we never got a chance to. We wanted our lasting memory of him to be something special, something that we could tell his grandkids about someday. Not some stupid farce with an obnoxious beagle gnawing at our calves and cleaning its junk. We deserved more than that, dammit!
My brother and I said nothing, just stared at the dog as it disappeared from view. "Dad, don't do this," I whispered. "Just give us one more chance. That's all we want. One more chance. Just one more. One more. One more."
– Eric Spitznagel is a frequent contributor to The Believer, Playboy, and Vanity Fair, among others. He's written several books, including one that was translated into German and features a cat on the cover for no apparent reason. He's currently working on a new memoir, tentatively called What We Talk About When We're Trying Not To Talk About Death. He’s also the editor of the upcoming anthology You’re a Horrible Person, But I Like You: The Believer Book of Advice, which features terrible life lessons from the likes of Sarah Silverman, Judd Apatow, and Zach Galifianakis. He has one more testicle than Hitler, which he considers a moral victory.
