My husband and I are only nine months apart. I smoke cigarettes and have a family history of early-onset dementia. Chris is a bad driver. Because of this, it’s a real toss-up as to which of us will die first. We speak about it sometimes. I want a proper Irish wake, corpse laid out. He wants to be cremated.
I tell him, “You better die second.”
For the past few weeks, I’ve been watching HBO’s horrifying and much-acclaimed new docuseries, The Mortician. It follows David Sconce, a sociopathic undertaker from Pasadena, California, who went to prison in 1989 after mutilating corpses and holding mass cremations in order to maximize his profits. (In the series, ex-employees allege that Sconce hired them to beat up people who were looking into his case, and heavily imply that he may have killed a guy, or possibly three. Those allegations weren’t proven.)
“All the ashes were mixed up, so people thought they were getting their dad or whatever, but now they’ve got an urn full of strangers sitting in their foyers or whatever,” I told my husband after the latest episode aired. “He hired all these crackheads and had them pulling the gold out of people’s teeth.”
My husband told me he was trying to sleep.
Once, Chris actually said he’d like to donate his corpse to scientific research—before it was cremated. I shut the conversation down, pointing to a case in Surprise, Arizona, where somebody’s grandmother—whose body had supposedly been donated for Alzheimer’s disease research—was strapped into a vehicle and blown up by the U.S. Army. Her family was none the wiser until reporters called to ask them about it.
“I’m putting you in the ground,” I said.