thoughts – cranky and droll – from a feisty geezer determined to ride his quick cancer into the ground

It is now the 27th of September.  I’m still alive!  It has been at least five months since I began predicting “my demise within six weeks”.  Yes, my credibility is shot – Jan loves to remind me.  I’m a flop, as far as prognosing my own termination.

There are complicating factors.  For one thing, my talent for procrastination ought to be allowed for.  I should have taken that into consideration, myself.  Not only have I been procrastinating my own suicide, but have also been procrastinating with regard to completing my two-and-a-half-years-dead-mother’s estate probate.  Jan has been working on it in my absense.  I have also been procrastinating about selling my truck, chipper, saws and pruning and climbing tackle.  Procrastinating getting some very tardy bills delivered to clients (some for work done years ago).  Procrastinating over the ordeal of tax filing for the past two years.  Procrastinating the relinquishment of my social security disability check.  They think that if you have a terminal cancer you’re disabled.  Fair enough.  I find myself wanting to keep collecting my (presumptively-few) SS checks.  We keep winnowing down the expenses that bleed my monthly allotment, and I keep thinking that one of these months I’ll actually finish with a net gain in my checking account balance.  I don’t think I’ve done it yet, but I keep expecting that “this will be the month” that I break out of deficit spending and manage to book some savings from my check.  I do think this might be the month.  These are all things which have caused me to have to put off my rendezvous with destiny.  Darned good excuses, I think.

I suppose I owe you (who?) some telling of toilet-house tales.

My cancer, besides impeding my ability to talk and chew and swallow, has driven me into the arms of narcotic painkillers.  As we all know, one’s tongue tells one whether or not whatever has been put into his mouth should stay and be swallowed, or be spat out.  Much (nearly all) of what comes into my mouth, lately, tastes either: 1) not-so-good, 2) bad, or, 3) poisonous.  Increasingly, bad and poisonous are vying for dominance.  Among the bad and poisonous substances I keep trying to choke down, water is one of the more disagreeable tasting.  Often, our water tastes like poison, lately.  Not sure why, although there’s no doubt that my cancerous tongue has gone off the rails.  Letting water sit out in a mug or jar overnight seems like it ought to dissipate the most likely-nasty-tasting toxin – chlorine.  Unfortunately, the overnight “airing out” of a mug of water seems to render it even more vile tasting.  Really vile, sometimes.  Combine that with the unpleasant discomfort of the mere act of swallowing anything, and you have a nice set-up for becoming dehydrated.  I sometimes forget to take my pain pills on schedule – or at all.  This leads, usually, to even greater discomfort in swallowing.  That tends to lead to drinking less water, which leads to a general diminution of my basic vigor and sense of wellness.  I feel droopy… bad.  Which contributes to forgetfulness, re taking my pain pills.  You see…?

Both, the consumption of narcotic pain pills, and the reduction of fluid intake, contribute to the reduction of hydration everywhere in your body, including the contents of your gut, most pertinently, in the lower intestine.  Peristalsis does or may slow down or weaken, and the content of your colon suffers the shared fate of all now-dehydrated tissue of your body.  To put it quite succinctly, good-old garden-variety shit turns to brick.  Have we talked about this before (if so, you may be excused) ?

Don’t know if any/all reading this are familiar with the term “shit a brick”.  (sorry)  I’m here to tell you, this is not something that the intestinal tract (at least, mine) was designed to do.  My theory is that anything the consistency of a brick (hard, inflexible) does not flow around the corners of one’s lower 12 feet of pipework.  No matter how much grease, no matter how muscular one’s peristalsis, brick shit will just not make the turns.  I believe, to my own satisfaction, that this I have demonstrated, repeatedly, and well.  Everyone seems to have advice about how to get this stuff to come out more easily.  ”You need a lubricant.”  ”Just take some laxative!”  ”You need to take some “stool softeners’” (getting close)!  None of these will do any good if you’re fundamentally dehydrated.  My main problem, re constipation, is & has been the drastic lack of adequate hydration.  For most of us, that’s supposed to require something in the realm of two quarts of water a day.  I’ve been attempting to get by on less than one quart, many days during the past month.  The trick, from now on, will be getting enough water into myself every day.  The only acceptable route (besides a goddamned, blessed enema) is to get enough water past my tongue and down my craw.  I expect this will be where the last battle is fought, as far as my continuing existence in these parts is concerned.  Not enough water is my ultimate boogyman.

On to the etc.      Jan and I have been scouring the county for a cemetery that will accept my pine-boxed corpse, without the requirement of a vault or liner of some sort.  We have spoken with quite a few cemetery representatives over the past month or two.  Jan found one cemetery in the county who’s agent told her that they had no requirement for a vault.  It just happens that this one cemetery also informed us that we lived outside of their geographical boundary line, and were not eligible for admission  The coincidence of that one cemetery being the one-and-only one “requiring no vault”, leads me to believe that the person representing their burial grounds is misinformed – I’ll bet that they do require a vault, but, the person Jan spoke with was not aware of their requirement.  I think that because it just seems so unlikely that the one cemetery which would not allow us “entry” would also be the only one which permitted burials without a vault requirement.  Too extreme a coincidence, I think.

But, after two months of searching, it seems we have discovered the holy land, at last.  We had to go out of state to find a cemetery which would allow us entry, regardless of our geographical address, and which does not require us to purchase and bury a concrete (or other material) vault or liner.  These vaults and liners are “required” by the respective cemetery boards, for reasons apparently unknown to many of their agents and members.  Many sextons and agents told us that the vault/liner requirement was dictated by Washington State law.  Our research discovered otherwise.  We found no state statute that requires a cemetery to have all burials include a vault or liner.

I should stop, here, and explain these terms.  A vault is a box (usually concrete) that surrounds a casket on at least five planes (four side panels and one top panel).  Some vaults have 6 sides (including a bottom).  Some are rather elaborately sealed.  Some are not.  The basic concrete models seem to cost between $400 and $600, delivered and placed.  They can run upward of a couple thousand dollars.  Well upward.  There are some vaults now being marketed, made of polyethylene, and some, I believe, made of polypropylene.  I think they can be had for $200 to $3oo and up – wholesale.  Some are sealed, some are not.  My internet searches indicated that purchasing one of these boxes directly was, perhaps, prohibitively expensive due to shipping-rate economics.  Orders of multiple units may cost no more for shipping than ordering a single unit.  There seems to be some tradition of telling funeral customers that the more elaborately sealed vaults will protect their contents from corruption or infiltration.  I think most states now prohibit the purveyors of ‘burial goods” to make such claims.  In our area, an outfit by the name of “Wilbert Vault” appears to have the vault market pretty-well sewed up.  Wilbert manufactures concrete vaults, and delivers them to burial sites, on a custom-job basis.  They also seem to have many cemeteries contracted exclusively to use Wilbert-hired grave-excavating services – “opening and closing” as they call it.  In some cases, I believe Wilbert handles the placement of heavy and elaborate vaults into the open grave.  Some of these things must weigh a half-ton or more.  Again, they can be very expensive – sometimes exceeding the cost of the casket… a piece of furniture that can run up to many thousands of dollars!  There’s money, real money in this industry.  It’s a serious underground economy.

As I was saying earlier, the cemeteries’ representatives don’t always know why there is a vault requirement.  ”State law”, they say.  I talked with a local Washington State Cemetery Board member.  He said, emphatically, that there is no state requirement for vaults or liners.  He also said he knew of no local cemetery that didn’t require a vault or liner.  A few cemetery sextons or reps told me they required vaults because of subsidence issues.  You dig a hole, drop in a large wooden box containing a large-ish piece of meat, and wait for a few years.  Eventually, after sufficient time, the box and its contents decay and collapse.  Subsequent to that, the soil above the cavitated space begins to fall into the cavity and, eventually, the cavity “moves” upward as soil from above keeps falling into the space below, until at last, the soil in the top layer falls into the upward-moving cavity and leaves a depression at the surface about the same volume as the casket originally occupied at the floor of the grave some years before.  In the “old days” they simply piled the soil into a prominent mound above the grave, and then “waited” until the natural collapse and subsidence process played out, at which point, the ground would be approximately level again.  No problem.  Then, about a century ago, someone invented mowing equipment, followed by the invention of mowing equipment salesmen.  This, of course begat “lawns”.  Lawns need lawn-mowers.  Away we go.  Can’t run a lawn-mower across a two-foot-high mound of dirt.  It’s hard to even grow grass on one.  So, they hauled the “extra” dirt away and raked the grave-top level.  In a few years, more-or-less, the ground subsided as the coffin collapsed.  The cemetery’s visitors tripped and fell into the depressions, and this begat insurance salesmen.  The sextons and maintenance crews had to fill in the holes and/or deal with mowing divoted ground.  They griped to the board folks.  The poor board was desperate to find a way to keep visitors from suing, and lawn crews from striking.  This, thanks to American can-do-ingenuity, begat steel-wire reinforced concrete vaults, which of course, begat concrete vault salesmen, and thus Wilbert Vault.  ”The State makes us do it!”, say the local cemetery board’s representatives.  Their cluelessness is typical of the misinformation and fog that cloaks all things funereal, it seems.

I did some investigating, and then some calculating.  A human body has about the same relative density as water (we’re mostly water).  If you’re fat, you’re fluffier.  If you’re lean, you’re denser.  Mas o menos.  A pound of human takes up about as much space (volume) as a pound of water.  Same for a hundred-pound person.  Same for a two-hundred-pound person. Finding dimensions for a concrete vault on the net, I multiplied out those dimensions, to find out how much volume it displaced. It came to about fifty (50) cubic feet.  Almost two cubic yards.  My pine box coffin which our friend Jeff has built for me, calculates out to about twenty-five (25) cubic feet.  Me –  I’m down to about 110 pounds (about 35 pounds off my fighting weight), and I’m seriously boney.  Using water’s weight-to-volume ratio, I calculated my own body’s displacement – 1.75 cubic feet.  That’s about the equivalent of two basketballs.  If you buried me wrapped in just a sheet, I’d displace a little more dirt than a kid’s play-toy wheelbarrow’s capacity.  If I was inside my custom pine coffin, we – together – would displace about five or six wheelbarrow loads of dirt.  Cover all that up with a vault, and the displacement of dirt comes to about ten or twelve wheelbarrows full of dirt.  Eventually, the man-made vault, whatever it’s material construction, is going to collapse.  They warrant these things for as little as fifty years.  I say the cemeteries ought to let folks be buried wrapped in a sheet, or simply charge a bit more for the privilege of being ensconced in a small, basic wood coffin, to support maintaining the cemetery’s appearance of operating on-the-level.  Nix the vaults!  Manufacturing a half-ton, steel-reinforced concrete box, and burying it along with some poor family’s deceased matriarch, etc, to the tune of $500 or more, makes no sense.  As we enter The Era of Rapidly Declining Resources, how much sense does it make to waste resources the way we have thus far?  A half ton of concrete box contributes to the ultimate pollution of the soil and groundwater below it.  It’s environmentally irresponsible, unnecessary – therefore unnecessarily expensive – and it’s a waste of finite resources which we are soon going to realize we can no longer afford.

How did I come to deciding on an old-fashioned “dirt burial” in the first place?  Well – I did some investigating and some calculating.  Most of us, over the past fifty years or so, have come to see cremation as the smart, sensible way to dispose of what we no longer want around, in the way of deceased relatives.  Neat, clean, quick, “modern”, inexpensive.  I don’t know the numbers, but I’m pretty sure the vast majority of friends and acquaintances I’ve talked with, about body disposal, over the past thirty years, have told me they intend to be cremated.  I actually don’t know what my mother’s preference was, but when she died two years ago, I just automatically ordered a cremation of her remains.  Neat, clean, quick, modern, inexpensive, automatic on my part.  Never gave anything else a thought.  It’s how I expected to be disposed of, one day.  But, some time after cremating my mother, I found some cause to think about just how “smart” cremation really was.  It occurred to me that it must take a pretty good dose of natural gas to convert a flesh and blood human body (mostly water) into a seven pound box of “ashes” (mostly burned bone-dust).  I looked it up.  A one hundred, fifty pound person (a pretty flimsy person in today’s America) requires about 356,000 BTUs worth of natural gas energy to fully cremate.  Regular (even occasional) National Public Radio listeners will perk up when I tell you that if you performed a cremation with the BTU-equivalent of diesel fuel, you could move a ton of rail freight nearly 3500 miles with that much energy.  And, same as moving a ton of rail freight 3500 miles, converting a (soggy) human body into a few pounds of bone ash… also converts a rather large amount of natural gas into a rather large amount of CO2 … released into the atmosphere.  That’s how I got into thinking about the “alternative” to cremation – an old fashioned “dirt burial”.  Doing the math persuaded me to seriously reconsider the old fashioned way.

The more I thought about an old fashioned burial, and began to look into it, the more attractive the idea became, for reasons that had little to do with environmental politics, and more to do with human politics.

First, I made a couple of sorties to local “funeral homes”.  After being momentarily under the spell of one of the less oily representatives of that industry, I realized I needed to get as far away from that pack of jackals as I possibly could.  I think the ancient Egyptians fed their less wealthy, less influential peasants to the jackals.  Their art depicted jackals in material that had to do with death, I believe.  In modern, efficient, jackal-loving American culture, we began turning funeral preparation and services over to “professionals” about a century ago.  Funerals, and their preparations – including the preparing of bodies for burial – were increasingly, handled by trained experts.  In the earlier half of the 19th Century, few people would have let non-family members (strangers) prepare kinfolk’s bodies for burial.  This was strictly a family affair.  The dead were routinely washed, dressed, and laid out in the home for relatives and friends to visit and pay their final respects.  Even out on the hard-scrabble prairie farms of that time, personal attention was paid to respectful attendance to details of preparation.  Out on the pioneer trails that led people from the East out to the “new land” in the West, people were often forced by drastic circumstances to give searingly-short-shrift to niceties, and dead bodies might not get more than a sheet wrapped quickly around them before being dropped into a shallow grave near the wagon track, before the caravan moved on again… but… I’m getting off my own track, now.

I gave up on the “pros” and decided that Jan and I could figure out some better, kinder, gentler, more humane, and more inclusive way to do a funeral for ourselves.  And so we have.  Trouble is – the industrialization of funerals and burials has made figuring out  how to do it yourself a damned difficult and murkey proposition.  There is plenty of disinformation – easily acquired – as well as a fair amount of useful information “out there”, if you’re persistent and resourceful enough to try it.  First thing, I asked my friend, Jeff, if he would build me a simple coffin – the “classic pine box”.  Without a whisper’s worth of hesitation, Jeff gave me an immediate “Yes!”  He spent a week or two researching the subject, and then another couple of weeks, after work, building my “last ride”.  I can’t remember how I found out whether you could build your own coffin (I guess one of the already-maligned “jackals” might have given me a straight answer, there).  Finding out about a “permit to transport” our own body to the cemetery was a little trickier.  You start with the local county health department.  I spent an hour or two down there.  I suspect Jan made more phone calls than I’ll ever know about.  The “funeral home” folks are not eager to tell you how much of this you can do yourself (here, in Washington, virtually all of it).  At first, I was under the impression – given to me by a “funeral director” – that they would have to come to our house, to write up a death certificate, and then, they would need to take me (my body) away from the house to keep it “on ice” at their facility, until we were ready to have me delivered to the cemetery for interment.   (I’m having a hard time getting myself and my pronouns and duties and tenses all coordinated, here.  I’m – seemingly – forgetting my place and condition in all this tableau.)   The tab for my two taxi rides by the jackal services people, along with the several days in their cooler, mid-stream, was to be just under $1200 – with my good citizen discount.  At first, I went along with the idea, because the good fellow pointed out that I was entitled to a free burial plot, with all the required basic swag, including the cursed vault, also free, because I was a US military veteran, honorably discharged.  That all added up to about $1200 worth of free goodies from the federal government.  Whoo-hoo!  There being a newly-christened military veterans’ cemetery about twenty miles from here, Jan and I decided that sounded like too good a deal to pass up.  Being grateful for the good jackal’s tip about my veteran’s entitlement, my mind was so sufficiently fogged, that the $1200 price tag for his own services seem irrelevant.  Thankfully, the G.I. cemetery struck Jan and me as dreadful when we saw it.  Brand new, sterile, over-paved, low-bid-industrial-looking, and having the whiff of military about it, we ran away, and began to consider whether we had any better options.  That’s when the do-it-ourselves notion really took off.  It was, come-to-think-of-it, only after our brush with the veterans’ cemetery that it occurred to me to ask Jeff to build my coffin.  I realized that $1200 was a lot to pay for two rides in the Jackal-mobile and a trip to their cooler.

As it stands, we expect Jeff to deliver my coffin at the appropriate time, and that Jan will have a couple of days to clean me up, give me a shave and a haircut, get me dressed up for visitors, and load me into the coffin, with neighborly help.  After two or three days lying in state, at home, Jeff, or someone else with a truck, will load up the coffin and me, to lead a caravan trip to Worley, where the city grave-digger should have a nice neat hole, 4.5 feet deep, prepared.   Assuming good enough weather for it, some of our hard-bitten friends will be there, to help unload the coffin and me, say some kind things about how I tried to be a good person some of the time, sing a sentimental song or two, then lower the coffin into the ground, and pass out shovels to the willing and able, who will back-fill as much of the hole as their patience will allow.  The Worley city clerk told me our crew could re-fill the entire hole if they wanted to – no extra charge by the City of Worley, Idaho.  I’ll only be one state away from home – for about 15 billion years, if my sense of the universe and its schedule is reliable.  In any case, I’ll be back home, where I originated, a reunited Earthling, at last.

That’s the plan.  DeLuxe !

And – get this – our old fashioned, pine-coffined, genuine dirt burial, with, perhaps, a home-brewed graveside homily – will actually be less expensive than the recently-conventional, generic, gas-fired version of disposal that we’ve most-all been conditioned to settle for during the past several decades. Think on this, and spread the word… ?