I was struck with amazement, followed by a fired-up imagination, when I learned of a body in a funeral home for viewing had a pound of bacon planted on his chest and a bottle of rum in the crook of his arm. Maybe you can take it with you!
When a teenager, one of the guys had a teeth-clenching experience. Danny had a date with a funeral director’s daughter (not to be confused with a farmer’s daughter). Time passed when he realized he had missed his ride home. He didn’t have money for a cab either. A plan was hatched by his date to sneak him into the basement where the spare coffins were stored. The only suitable place to catch some shuteye it turned out, was in a coffin. He had cold feet at first, but did climb into one, with the lid kept open of course. He told us the next day, “The velvet inside was so comfortable and it blocked out the slightest noise.”
There have been bizarre cases where bodies have fallen out of coffins in transit or dropped by pallbearers smashing the coffin to bits — no injuries sustained though. There were those with added security that I prefer. Just in case I was mistakenly or intentionally buried alive, a mechanism inside the coffin would let me alert someone that I wasn’t dead yet. Hopefully, that someone still had good hearing!
The difference between a coffin and a casket is one of design. Coffins are tapered at the ends and caskets are rectangular in shape. I get off on the word coffin and will use that term only. There are so many wonderfully eerie tales of coffins and their new but so well-behaved inhabitants.
One time in Toronto, a friend took me to see a little business where they built the coffins. After our looksee, the owner noticed my keen perception and offered a 20 percent discount if I bought my coffin from him. I was as excited as a teenager securing his first date! When the euphoria died off, I thought, “If I’m dead, what good would the savings be anyway.”
The evangelist Billy Graham’s coffin was built inside a small prison wood-working shop, a secret of America’s largest maximum-security penitentiary. The three men who built it were inmates sentenced to life for murder. They hoped for a slimmest of chances to make it to heaven, I guess.
A devoted husband and wife married 60 years died within days of each other were buried together in a double coffin — holding hands. How frickin’ sweet! It is lawful, but to have two bodies in the same coffin could be trouble to assure a double space in the graveyard, which is at the cemetery manager’s discretion. If only one had to be exhumed in later years, then it implies an icky situation to complete the mission. If there ever was an instance of a man laid to rest with both a wife and a girlfriend, I haven’t heard if it!
During a burial at a cemetery in New Jersey, the family of a father and grandfather received a horrifying shock. As the eulogy got underway, grieving relatives said they saw a body part from another grave. “I didn’t think losing an 85-year-old father could be any more traumatizing than it was on the day that he died,” said the daughter, but it was, “I was there to bury my father and saw what appeared to be somebody’s left leg on top of his casket.”
There’s an old story about a coffin to be covered over with earth in a graveyard in the township. One of the two workers (whose names are protected) recalled how that elderly woman in the ground gave him such a rough time when he was younger, so he jumped down onto the casket and danced a jig, “Too even up the score,” he said.
In my forties living in Toronto, I had a couple of boarders. One was a Muslim youth who was quite curious about Canadian customs. One evening we got talking about burials. He remarked that Muslims as well as Jewish people were always buried facing the East, so what about Christians, he asked? I said we weren’t but he was inclined to not believe me and insisted I check with my father for a sound second opinion.
When it’s my turn to go, I’d like to take a few books by my favourite author and a Crispy Crunch chocolate bar in case I get hungry.
