Death has Its Surprises by Peter Gregg Slater

Being dead, Lois quickly found out, was not what it had been cracked up to be. Whenever she had thought about death, Lois naively assumed that it would be the deepest, most restful sleep, the kind she had experienced under anesthesia for a hip replacement ten years ago at age sixty-two. The difference would be that no doctor was going to snap his fingers in front of her face and shout “Wake up, Lois.” But here she was in the chapel of the Crawford Funeral Home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, fully aware of all the doings. A fly-on-the-wall, except that she was a corpse in an open casket. Her eyes were closed, but she could somehow see in the blurry manner of someone with bad cataracts. The inability to turn her head limited her field of vision to those who leaned over the casket to peer in, but her hearing was exceptional.

“We’re going to the cemetery. You can ride with us.”

“She fought the good fight, a battler to the end.”

“My son went to high school with her daughter.”

That remark bothered Lois. Tell the full story. How the boy wouldn’t stop hitting on my daughter even when she made it totally clear that he was not her type at all.

“We had lunch together once a month for years.”

“I adored that little calico cat she had.”

Pandora.

“Lois was a good-looking woman, you know. . . . Until she put on those twenty-five pounds she didn’t need.”

Thanks, Helene. You’re a bitch.         

Her niece, with whom she had been close, had come. All the way from St. Louis! Lois was touched.

Two middle-aged men Lois didn’t know–probably colleagues of her daughter were viewing her body. “Don’t smoke is the lesson here,” the shorter one observed. 

Duly noted. And what’s your poison, smug guy?      

A little girl, a grandchild, was crying.  Lois liked the tribute. She wished more of the adults who went up to the casket were teary.

Bobby Jenkins, who was widowed young, up at the casket for a look-see. After her divorce, Lois had a thing for him, but it did not go beyond a few casual dates. He slowly shook his head over the body. 

Her daughter, a professor and a mother, had on what could be taken for a colorful prom dress. What was she thinking? The girl never did have any fashion sense. Took after her father that way, Lois reminded herself, who had doted on her, their only child. Lois had divorced the man and he was also deceased. She badly wanted to have a word with her daughter later, a big bone to pick.

The minister began the ceremony with “We are gathered here to mourn” boiler plate. Lois silently laughed when he came to the part about her having gone to a better place. Turned out, she had never left Milwaukee! If they only knew. To give the minister credit, the eulogy had its moments of eloquence. But he got some details wrong. Her college degree had been summa cum laude, not the lesser magna. And her first solo art exhibition was at the David Barnett Gallery.

The funeral home director, releasing his inner drill sergeant, barked instructions for forming the procession to the cemetery. Lois could hear the rustle of chairs and bodies moving, along with snippets of closure conversations.

“Such a shame.”

 “I have one of her early paintings in my den.”

“Her daughter will have to do something about the studio before she can put the house on the market.”

A female employee of the funeral home began to close the casket, stopped midway to pat down Lois’s dress where it crossed her hips—like it mattered—and continued.    

Soon after, the casket was being carried, not all that gently Lois griped, and placed in a vehicle with its motor running, which she assumed was the hearse. At the cemetery, another ceremony, much briefer, took place. Then she felt herself being lowered into the grave, the action taking longer than she thought it would.  She heard a worker commanding: “Slower than regular, slower. A light bump with the top, not a collision. . . . That’s it. . . .  Good.”  

A minute or two after the casket came to a stop, shovel loads of dirt tossed by mourners began pelting it, the reverberations unsettling. What a racket! Worse than the spring hailstorm she and a college boyfriend were caught in one night when they snuck onto the school’s golf course to make love and had to take refuge in a storage shack with a metal roof. She hadn’t thought about the episode in years.

The bombardment eventually ceased. Lois could hear car engines starting. And then it was blissfully quiet. At last, the deep sleep for which she longed.

“What the hell are you doing here, Lois?”  

The dead can communicate with each other? . . . Henry? . . . This can’t be happening. Prom queen daughter, to whom she had given power-of-attorney when she became terminally ill, must have secretly changed the burial plan in order to put the casket on top of the one her father was in. No! No! No!   

For years after the divorce, the girl, a teenager at the time, had done everything she could to try to get them back together. Prom queen had outdone herself with this final chance. Lois bitterly grasped that she would be bickering with her ex for eternity. Sucker punched by death!

There were now two big bones for Lois to pick when in thirty or forty years her daughter joined them. She would be looking forward to it. A welcome break from fighting with Henry. Instead of serene rest in the grave, variety in battle. She was a trouper, she'd make do with that.

Artist’s Statement

As someone well along in senior citizenship, I regrettably go to a fair share of funerals, a sobering experience that gets a person thinking. Being a writer, I tend to think a little differently from other people. In the aftermath of a funeral for a dear family member, an unoriginal hypothetical came to mind: what if cognition somehow continues? The drafting of “Death Has Its Surprises” took off from there. Except for the prom dress, the various details in the story are made up. The prom dress reference came from the family member’s funeral where a father was teasing his adult daughter about her outfit. The larger takeaway is that from all that is seen and heard on any occasion, a writer never knows which particulars may eventually wind up on the page. Nora Ephron put it well, “Everything is copy.”  

Peter Gregg Slater is a historian who has taught at several institutions, including Dartmouth College and the University of California, Berkeley. Even as a working professional historian, he had a side interest in creative writing, attending workshops and publishing his first short story while serving as the chair of a history department. In retirement, he has been able to fully devote himself to creative writing. His poetry, fiction, satire, and essays have appeared in DASH, Workers Write!, The Satirist, Masque & Spectacle, and Defenestration.