March 14, 2006 – First Visit to The Funeral Home

March 14, 2006 – First Visit to The Funeral Home

It’s the afternoon of Monday January 30th, 2006 just after our youngest sister, DD has arrived from Boston in preparation for the funeral and burial of our mother at Ft Bliss National Cemetery in El Paso, Texas. DD is the bubbly one of the family, seemingly full of energy—the sort of person, who never seems to have a bad day, though I know she has. An eternal optimist she left home to find herself, spending time in Michigan, California and finally settling in Boston. Like the next older in the family, LC, DD’s a nurse. LC is in cardiac rehab, while DD was in OB-GYN, but has since become heavily involved in alternative medicine, practicing with a Russian immigrant in the Boston Area, a fully accredited MD, who offers alternative holistic remedies.

Once she’s settled and we’ve gone over the details of Mom’s last day at William Beaumont General Hospital, we pile into Dad’s Chevy Uplander and head for Martin Funeral Home to schedule the rosary, funeral mass, and burial. The Uplander is just large enough to accommodate all six of us, my oldest sister EV driving and my Dad riding shotgun, my niece and I in the two middle bucket seats and my younger sisters LC and DD in the bench seat at the back. The six of us would be spending a lot of time driving around in Dad’s Uplander in these same seats throughout the week. Outside, it’s a typical winter’s day in El Paso: temperature in the low 70s, a light breeze blowing, not a cloud in the sky, and the sun lighting the surroundings with a brilliant luminescence—the light always seemed more intense in El Paso than other places I’ve lived, made even brighter by the absents of vegetation to absorb the rays reflected from rock and bleached soil of the desert landscape.

Martin Funeral Home is at 3839 Montana Avenue three miles away. From our place, we take Dyer Street until it turns into Pershing Drive. This stretch of Dyer is as familiar to me now at age 60 as it was when I was in my early teens—most of the same buildings are still standing—the businesses that occupied them have changed over time though a handful have remained until now: convenience stores, garages, gas stations, furniture stores, pawn shops (hardly noticeably in other cities plentiful in El Paso), and bars. The houses on the street look their age—years of hard living and a minimum of investment in maintaining their outward appearance. They resemble the people that inhabit them. From Pershing we make a left onto Trowbridge Drive for a long block then turn right onto Lamar Street for five blocks to Montana. A right turn brings us to the funeral home, a sand colored single story brick building, nearly a third of a block along. We park on the western side of the building and enter en masse.

Funeral homes are not pleasant places, because of what they represent: portals to the underworld. Martin was no different: workers dressed in conservative attire all speaking in somber sympathetic tones. But, it’s a business and we’re ushered into a meeting room with dark wood executive table and six matching chairs. The funeral home representative, RM, is a pleasant Hispanic male, about five-ten in height with a muscular frame carrying a few pounds extra around the middle, while shirt and tie, dark blue dress pants. He brings in a couple of extra chairs one for himself and another representative an attractive Hispanic female in a dark beige suit. RM begins by reciting the components in the package that my Mother has purchased a few years back with her best friend HM:

1. Preparation for internment. Did we bring the clothes that she requested to be buried in? “No” my oldest sister EV said we would bring it by tomorrow. Did we have any jewelry that we wanted them to dress mom in? “Yes, some earrings my mother favored along with a rosary we wanted to have placed in her hands,” all to be dropped off on Tuesday. This was the most personal exchange of the meeting because it involved the most intimate details of the funeral. A round of tears from my dad attends this exchange—tissues in good supply about the room are offered to him. My oldest sister is the next one to accept an offered tissue.
2. Use of one of the chapels at Martin to hold a rosary. Martin has two chapels, one slightly larger than the other but each able to handle 200 people. We anticipated no more than 50. It was a workday and friends would choose to attend the church service rather than the afternoon rosary. The earliest either chapel could accommodate us was Thursday afternoon with the funeral service itself the following Friday morning. We agree and RM then asked if we would like Martin to supply a chaplain or if we would like to have one of our choosing. In retrospect, we should have opted for one of the many priests, who knew my parents for the service, someone who knew Mom to preside rather than someone who had no knowledge of her. But we selected their alternative. His services would be an additional expense.
3. Hearse to carry mom in her casket to church for funeral service—where did we plan to hold the services? “Our Lady of Assumption at Byron Street and Truman Avenue,” we reply. Have you arranged with the church to hold services there and have you gotten a priest to say mass? We had done neither and suddenly collectively agreed Father Ben should say mass. Father Ben is a family friend who Baptized my daughter RD and married her. He is also the brother of LG, another family friend whose husband passed away some years back. The two were quite a couple in the Filipino community. At every event they would take the dance floor and treat the crowd to some classic dance moves. LG, now in the care of her daughter MG walks with the help of a walker.
4. Casket, a copper colored model—it had a model name but I took no note of it. RM had a picture of the model but it wasn’t in the color Mom had chosen and EV wanted to see the actual color, RM excused himself to locate the brochure with the casket in the appropriate color. He asked if we might want to upgrade to the next model up, an additional cost but with some features we might find worthwhile. RM recites them and EV turns him down with no disagreement from the rest of us.
5. Plastic encasement to surround the casket—Ft. Bliss Cemetery supplies this with every plot and we’ll be getting a credit since we won’t be requiring it.
6. Also included in the package were two limousines one to carry pallbearers and a second to carry members of the immediate family. However, there would be a need for a police escort to allow the funeral procession to travel from funeral home to church without having to stop at traffic lights and from the church to the cemetery—fascinating that when you’re dead, you’re given the right to speed along your way from place to place. We would have to pay the two off duty motorcycle policemen for their time at an hourly rate and he gave us the amount though I don’t recall what it was.
7. The funeral home would also place a notice in the “El Paso Times”, the Gannett-owned local morning paper—the only daily in the city. (As a kid I was a paper carrier for the Times delivering papers up and down Truman, Lincoln, Johnson, and Hayes Avenues between Dyer Street and Byron Street.) We could also write a larger obituary for a fee and Martin Funeral Home would place it for you in the “Times.” We opted for the larger piece that had to be written by Wednesday to make the paper on Thursday.
8. Also included in the package was the production of a slideshow on DVD that Martin would produce from photographs and text copy we would provide. The slideshow would play on monitors inside the chapel during the rosary service. The slideshow would transition from one photo to another accompanied by music supplied by the funeral home—we could supply music of our choosing as well. We opt for theirs.

It cost just under $3000 back then and it would be over $5000 now. He suggest that my father might want to consider the package for himself as a hedge against the inflation that will surely drive the cost up even more over time. Getting no response, he summarized the items that we have to get to the funeral home and the times we need to have them by and we’re done. It was just over an hour and a half. I realized that grief comes at a financial price, just as does the happiness that accompanies a wedding or baptism. We were planning an event—a somber one no doubt, but an event nonetheless. There was a ceremony to be performed. We were its host and we had just worked out the details to make it come off. We had work to do and left RM and his associate to get it done.