By Mary Anne White

“Anyone here – I mean besides the dead bodies?”

“Yes, I’m in the back,” Jerry replied. “Be right out.” 

Jerry squeezed his way between the upturned, soggy boxes, with his soaking shoes squeaking on the still-damp tiles as he made his way up the steps to the main workroom. “Oh, Dorothy, I sure didn’t expect to see you!” He reached out his hand in a greeting that morphed into a solid hug as Dorothy pulled him in. “And look at you – all decked out in pink.” 

Dorothy smoothed the skirt of her dress as she replied that she’d changed her wardrobe completely since she gave up the funeral business. No more blue pantsuits.

Jerry laughed, but then turned serious. “Dorothy, I have a real predicament, and if anyone can help me out it would be you. But first tell me – what are you doing back in town?” 

Dorothy said that she had been visiting her elderly uncle. “Won’t be long before you have him in here.” 

“So sorry,” Jerry replied. “Cremation or burial?”

Dorothy said that her uncle was old school all the way, and it would be a traditional burial. “With enough embalming fluid to puff him up to look 40 again.”

“I hope we’ll do him proud,” Jerry said. 

“And how are things here?” Dorothy asked. “I saw the new sign outside.”

“Yes, the bank recommended that I take the Campbell name off, since you and your family aren’t associated with the business anymore. Hope you don’t mind.” Jerry handed her his new card.

Dorothy read the name, ‘Valley Funerals and Cremation’, and commended him on the smart business move. 

“Buying you out was my best decision ever. The funeral home part is going great. I mean I don’t have to worry about getting customers – business is steady.” Jerry began to rattle the keys in his pocket and could feel his face reddening. “You know what I mean.”

Dorothy’s eyes crinkled at the corners as she spoke. “We’re about the only people who see the good in someone dying. I get it, you don’t want to rub your hands in glee, but business is business.” Dorothy laid her hand on Jerry’s arm, and gave it a motherly squeeze.

Jerry sighed. “Bless you, Dorothy. There’s not many people I can be so frank with about this job. Thank goodness for my wife. She’s a rock. We’re trying to have a baby, and are going through IVF – you know, in vitro fertilization. That’s pretty stressful, and expensive, which is another reason why I’m so glad the business is booming.” For a split second, the fear of more IVF bills unsettled Jerry, but he shut those thoughts away.

“Jerry, sometimes in this work we just need a good laugh as a release. You can call me any time.” He thought Dorothy’s voice was sincere and thanked her.

Jerry continued, “It’s great you trained the staff so well. They can handle most everything on their own, and have taught me a lot. Those three – Joe, Jeff, and Jess – are professional in all their dealings with the grieving public. They’ll be here in about an hour, and I’m sure they’d be happy to see you. But I especially want to tell you how they helped us out recently. They let my wife and me have a few days away last month, my first break since I bought you out. Being able to leave them to run the business gave us time to recharge after the first round of IVF didn’t take. That level of trust with the staff is something you can’t buy. Trust and honesty, the most important elements in a successful life.” Jerry’s shoulders relaxed as he described how well the business had been going.

“I guess you probably heard about Walter,” Jerry said.

“Yes, I did. What happened?”

Jerry placed the scene: a late winter storm, with that wet, heavy snow. “Heart-attack snow,” he said. 

Dorothy nodded. “Bodies can pile up after such a storm. Men – in particular men who had spent the long winter in front of the television – are especially at risk. I used to stock up on extra-large coffins when that type of winter weather was forecast.”

Jerry agreed that was a good idea, and pulled a piece of paper from his shirt pocket and wrote himself a note. Then he continued, “For me, the worst is that I let Walter run the crematorium pretty much on his own, since he could handle it well. I was still learning the business, so I focused on the funeral home part, and barely gave the crematorium a thought. In fact, I hadn’t done a cremation by myself since I got my license. That is until Walter was the next customer, so to speak.”

“So what did you do?” Dorothy asked.

“When I was looking around for the crematorium instructions, I discovered that Walter had kept copious notes, lab books really, with details about each and every cremation he had done since the installation of the ACS 200,” he said. Jerry took a book down from the shelf and showed her Walter’s notes of what worked well, and which ones had required a second go round to improve the result, with a chart of all the optimal settings and times for different types of bodies. “It’s a bit like a cookbook, if you like your meat burnt to a crisp.” Jerry paused and looked cautiously over at Dorothy to gauge her response.

“That’s a pretty over-done joke, Jerry. You should be ash-amed.” Dorothy winked. “But at least Walter achieved his wish of being smokin’ hot.” The ends of Jerry’s mouth turned up into a grin. Dorothy continued, “Anyhow, good for Walter for keeping great records. I also left him on his own with that side of the business, so it could have happened during my time.”

“Here’s the best thing, Dorothy.” Jerry opened the lab book to the back page. “I guess Walter realized he would be the first person cremated after his own death, so he had excruciatingly complete details personalized for his own cremation. And look at this. He even had his bone density analyzed to back up his cooking time. That way I didn’t have to experiment with him. And here are all his recommended grinding speeds and times for the cremulator. The final product was smooth as silk, and his detailed directions gave me more confidence when the next body came in. And it’s worked out perfectly.” Jerry realized he was gushing over Walter’s legacy.

Dorothy smiled. “Good old Walter. He always liked to do things correctly, and it’s great he was able to help you from the other side. I think he might have hoped for this conversation to take place, as we’re about the only people who would appreciate his work this much.” They agreed that Walter was the first person they knew to detail his own cremation, and that was very thoughtful of him, more thoughtful than self-serving.

Dorothy said, “As I’m sure you know by now, some people plan their funeral in complete detail –”

Jerry cut Dorothy off, saying, “Oh yes, we had Mrs. Groler last month, and she not only had the hymns picked out, but also what she would wear – it was an open casket – and she had directions for who was to sit where, and who would speak, plus a binder of notes for what they should say!”

Jerry and Dorothy shared a good, knowing chuckle, two business colleagues in a peculiar club. 

Jerry took a long, deep breath. “I mentioned I have a gigantic problem right now, and I sure could use advice, but I’m not so certain you’ll want to know about this.”

Dorothy said that she’d seen most everything in the funeral business, and would try to help if she could.

  Jerry led Dorothy down the steps to the room behind the main work area. It contained what used to be cardboard boxes, now soggy almost beyond recognition, and a pile of plastic bags filled with cremated remains.

“Whatever happened here, Jerry?”

“Well, as you may recall, this is the room where we stored remains that had not been picked up yet. And the shelves on this wall,” Jerry waved his hand, “were where we stored the remains that had been here for many years.” Jerry described the damage from the torrential rain two nights before. This room was below ground level, and the water built up outside, leading to severe flooding, compounded by a leaking roof. “Here, you can see the high-water mark,” Jerry said as he pointed to a dark line about four feet above the floor. “With everything else going on – especially the power outage and the water damage in the workrooms – I didn’t see what had happened in here until this morning. I am just piecing it together myself, but, from the mess, I would say all the boxes were destroyed by the water, and the bags of remains that used to be in the boxes were free to float around.”

“I agree this is a mess,” Dorothy said, “but I can help you sort this out. Let’s just look in the bags for the tags, and then match them up to separate them into piles by person.”

“That’s the thing,” Jerry replied. “There were cremation tags in the bags. I followed Walter’s standard operating procedure. You know how this works when we cremate a body. We put in four stainless steel tags with unique engraved numbers with each body as it goes in the furnace, and then those tags go, one tag per bag, in the four resulting remains bags for a person. That way we can keep track of whose remains are whose. Well, normally we can. You must have heard about the horrendous bus crash late last spring. We had twelve bodies to look after and I was waiting for a shipment of tags that was on backorder. At the time, I did the most expedient thing. I took tags out of the old unclaimed boxes, to reuse for the bus crash victims, for twelve sets of remains.” Jerry explained that he very carefully put all the old bags of unclaimed remains in boxes, one box for each person, and sealed the boxes, after writing the identification details on the outside of the box. “But those boxes were old and, after soaking in the water, they have disintegrated and spilled their bags out.” Jerry continued slowly, in conspiratorial tones, “And I don’t know which bags of remains go with who.”

Those words hung in the air, along with the smell of the fetid remnants of the storm. Jerry feared for his business. He was sure his wife would leave him if they couldn’t afford the next round of IVF.

“Okay, let’s think about this,” Dorothy said. “Does the bag type shed any light on this puzzle?” 

Jerry said that all the bags were identical: size large, heavy-duty Ziploc bags, with the slider seal, just as Walter had instituted as standard operating procedure years ago. No help there.

“I read that cremains differ slightly in mineral content, person by person,” Jerry said. “Do you think there’s a way to analyze the contents, and sort them based on that?” 

“Although that’s true in principle, the testing is expensive, probably hundreds of dollars per bag, and four bags per person. And – worst of all – it’s likely futile.” Dorothy described a court case in a nearby town a few years ago about possible mixed-up remains. They had tried mineral analysis, but the results were inconclusive, because the minerals reflect the water that the people had consumed, and both parties had lived in the same region for decades, drinking the same water. Thus, there were no discernible mineral distinctions in the remains. 

Jerry nodded and sighed, “And I just read in Canadian Funeral News that even with the latest lab techniques, DNA tests on remains are still useless, because DNA is destroyed in the high temperature of the cremation process.” 

Jerry pulled up two stools, offering one to Dorothy and plopping down on the other. He slumped over, with his right hand cradling his worried chin. He looked up at the clock, and then sat up straight when he realized that his staff would be here within the hour. It was one thing to share this situation with a past owner, but he really didn’t want his staff in on it. It was far too small a town for that.

Finally, he broke the silence. “Some of these remains have been here for ages. In fact all the remains in this section have been here for many years. So the cremations took place when you were the owner, Dorothy. I’m not blaming you at all, but maybe you know the answer to this question. What’s the story on remains no one claimed? Why has no one taken them? I’m still a relative newcomer to this place and this business, and I don’t get it.”

Dorothy asked if Jerry had the names corresponding to the unclaimed remains, and he produced a list from his files. She eagerly took the paper and ran her finger down the page.

Dorothy spoke slowly. “I lived here all my life until recently, so I knew most of these people. Many of them were older with no close relatives living in the region. Some have offspring who moved away a long time ago, and maybe they are waiting for an opportunity to come and bury or scatter the ashes. But some – and this is pretty astonishing – have relatives right here, even living spouses. In fact, I had lunch yesterday with my old neighbour Mildred McLean, and her husband George is on this list.”

Jerry gulped. 

Dorothy continued, “I know Mildred has had trouble coming to grips with her loss, and maybe she and others don’t want the remains around to remind them. Or maybe they just find them creepy. Or maybe they don’t have the funds to buy a plot as they had planned. One thing I have learned in this business is that there are many different types of people and different responses to death.”

Jerry nodded. Already in his two years as owner-operator he had seen a wide range of reactions to the loss of life. He remembered one widow in his early days who wailed through her husband’s funeral and has only been seen wearing black ever since. At the other end of the spectrum, some of the bereaved seemed to be relieved—the men he saw removing their wedding rings during their late wives service to hit on women at the reception. 

As they sat and pondered, the only sound was the clock ticking in the workroom. Time was marching on, taking them both closer to their final visits to this establishment, but no closer to a solution to the immediate problem.

“Jerry, I may have an idea. I don’t bring this up lightly, and the final decision as to how to proceed is yours.” She paused, looking over at him for permission to continue. He nodded as he leaned in. “First, let’s consider that the families have not picked up these remains.”

“That’s correct,” Jerry replied.

“So you don’t really need to hurry. Or even worry so much as you would if these remains were still warm.”

Jerry smiled. Dorothy was turning out to be quite distinct from the straight-laced business-suit Dorothy that he had last seen two years ago in her lawyer’s office to sign the papers to purchase her business. 

“Gotcha. Agreed. I’d like to get this sorted out, but I also don’t want to do anything to jeopardize the business. Our next IVF payment is due in three weeks.”

Dorothy nodded. Then she asked Jerry what he thought a person really wanted if they came to claim the remains.

He cleared his throat, hoping to say the right answer. “Some part of the person to remember them by.”

“Exactly. Some part.” Dorothy let Jerry consider the words before continuing. “Cremation remains are only a part of the person.”

Jerry was catching on. “So if they got a part of the person, that would be satisfactory.”

“To us, anyhow,” Dorothy replied. 

Jerry stared into space, in a bubble with his thoughts. “A part is what they expect,” Jerry said.

“That’s what I think,” Dorothy replied.

“Do you think Mildred would be happy with a part of George?” Jerry asked.

“George has been here for years,” Dorothy replied.

Jerry pondered some more and then announced, “I’d better get to work.”

“I’ll help,” Dorothy said.

Jerry went back up to the main workroom, locked the door, and dragged a heavy table against it for good measure. He opened the cupboard containing the new Ziplock bags. He hollered down to Dorothy, “Can you check how many boxes were destroyed?” Dorothy counted as she lifted each soggy one and announced there were twelve. Jerry counted the number on his list from his records, and it agreed. 

Then he took out four dozen plastic bags and placed them on the workbench, rolling down the top of each and standing the bags up for easy loading. Dorothy joined him until they had the empty bags all set up for assembly line work.

“The trick is going to be getting some in each new bag, to be certain to attain our goal,” Jerry announced. “I know that each bag has at least six cups of remains, probably more like eight. So putting a small scoopful in each new bag will ensure our main objective, getting some remains for each person from the old bags into all the new ones. We can distribute any extra later.”

“Got it. Let’s do this.” Dorothy took off her white cardigan.

Jerry handed Dorothy a lab coat, a mask, gloves, and a scoop. He put on his own equipment and went down to the storeroom, bringing up the first two bags for redistribution, one for each of them. 

As they circled the table, scooping from the old bags to the new, Jerry glanced again at the clock. After a panicky moment, he remembered that he had told his staff to come in an hour later today, to make up for all their help doing storm cleanup in the main workroom last evening. He relaxed a little as he went about his task. 

  “Hey, Jerry,” Dorothy said, “Three pieces of advice. One, promise you won’t re-use tags again.”

“I do solemnly swear.” 

He crossed his heart with his gloved index finger, leaving an ashy residue on his lab coat.

“Two, always store the bags in tubs with tight lids.”

“Will do.”

Dorothy continued, “And the third piece of advice: make good notes for your own cremation, like Walter did, because kid, one day you’ll be here too.”

They both laughed. After a few minutes of scooping and pouring, Jerry thought he could hear Dorothy humming softly. Her buzz developed into singing under her breath, and Jerry recognized the BTO song: Taking Care of Business. When he joined in on the chorus, they both belted it out, finishing in a flurry of gloved, ashy, jazz hands.

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Mary Anne White is a wife, mother, grandmother, writer and scientist. In her Third Act, she is embarking on creative writing to exercise the ‘other’ side of her brain. So far, her non-fiction creative writing has been published in The Globe and Mail, and in an anthology, “Gathering In: Covid-19 Silver Linings”. She finds creative writing to be more challenging, and more rewarding, than her previous scientific writing, which includes a textbook now in its third edition, and more than 200 research papers in the areas of chemistry, physics and materials engineering. This story is one of her first serious endeavors in fiction.