Nothing Serious
Everyone knows they’re going to die. Someday, we all will. That part of life is inevitable. Some
people are comfortable in this fact; many are not. What they usually don’t think about—unless
they’ve got a lot of time on their hands or know that it’s coming soon—is what they want done
after the fact.
Most girls fantasize about their wedding day: what gown they want to wear, what kind of flowers
they would like to lob like a grenade at their bridesmaids, what song they would dance to at the
reception, what kind of cake. Meanwhile, I was imagining what I wanted my funeral to be like.
Pinstripe dress suit. Lilies and ivy. Louis Armstrong’s “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Red
velvet, cream cheese icing. Maybe I saw Harold & Maude one too many times in high school. It
may have left an indelible impression on me.
Elizabeth Taylor left specific instructions that the hearse had to circle the cemetery for fifteen
minutes, in order for her to arrive fashionably late to her own funeral. Brilliant.
Evita ran all of the flower shops in Buenos Aires dry. Elvis had a procession of seventeen white
limousines. Princess Di had more than half of the world viewing her memorial. Alexander
the Great had a road built from Babylon to Alexandria just for his funeral, the most expensive
service in history. There is no forgetting those who went out in style.
They used to ask me if I had read The Tibetan Book of the Dead. My friends inquired, “Is it like
that one show on HBO with all the sexy undertakers?” It was hard meeting new people, going
out for a drink, or trying to have nice date without, upon finding out what I do, they’d immediately
offer up what they would want done if (not “when”) they were to die.
But that was before the Machine.
It changed everything. We used to expect the same old tradition: a three-day wake, a painfully
slow church procession, a burial at the city cemetery. Now, funerals are a bigger industry than
weddings. Marriage is the leading cause of divorce in this country. The only thing you can
count on is having a fantastic funeral.
It’s not like I was some creepy little kid sitting in a picture window, staring at the sky,
singing, “When I grow up—I want to be a funeral director!” What I wanted to be was a school
teacher. Or maybe take portraits of babies at the mall. After college, I interviewed for a job as a
receptionist at what sounded to me like a dentist’s office or law firm. I got there and found out a
bit late that Forchione & Borenstein was a funeral home.
That was before the Death Prediction Machines were widespread. Once they announced that
DPMs had outnumbered ATMs, my boss told me I had to get licensed—or get out. Well, color
me licensed! Professional widow-hugging was my calling. Four months into it, I was booking
six events a day and had a team of arrangement planners to manage. In short, I had a gift.
My mother thought it was in very poor taste that I started marketing our Expiration services with
the tagline “YOU put the ‘Fun’ in Funeral! We’re just here to help.” None of the other funeral
homes were doing edgy event planning campaigns. They were so slow to change, having been
steeped in tradition too long. “Die In Style: Don’t let your eventual demise go unnoticed.” Once
we saw the opportunity, it was clear that there was a demand in a changing cultural landscape.
“Fun Funerals and Deathday Bashes – We’ll make it happen!” I don’t even know if there had
been a funeral home that had used an exclamation point before the Death Prediction Machines
reshaped the world. Now it’s flat again, and you can fall of the edge. “Deal With It: Lock in
today’s deals by prepaying for your funeral plan!” I have to admit, that one was somewhat
tacky.
Most of the traditional funeral home outfits held great disdain for us and went with the opposite
approach. They pushed family plots and somber cathedral settings. If anything, they should
have taken a page out of the New Testament. The most well-known celebrity funeral? Last
supper. Public crucifixion. Special effects show. Mausoleum entombment. Grand finale
exhumation. Totally big budget stuff. Not too many people get BETRAYED BY APOSTLE.
In Morocco, they’ve never had DPMs. Banned them before the sales reps even made it to the
border. They’ve got the highest population of Pendings in the world, as well. They immigrate
there to feel comfortable with all those Moroccans who have to die the old-fashioned way. In
the dark, without a prediction. The capitol of Morocco: Rabat. Population: Fifty-eight million.
Cause of death: PENDING. We rarely get Pendings anymore and, boy, are they expensive. If
we get a Pending, usually a foreigner or minor, a medical examiner needs to be flown in. It’s
weird, because that is one of the few things that the Machine did not change—those with a
cause of death that was unknown or under investigation were called Pendings before death
predictions came into play. Even after the long, arduous examination, cranial autopsies, a time
consuming toxicology report, some people never get to know.
They used to ask. Before the Machine. There was nothing worse than having to tell a family
member why a person died. If the doctor or the police didn’t tell them, I used to have to break
the news. Even with all of those fancy words, “PNEUMONIA, due to (or as a consequence of)
CHRONIC OBSTRUCTIVE PULMONARY DISEASE, contributing factors include PROBABLE
TOBACCO USE,” it didn’t help anything. If you were not a medical professional, you didn’t
understand the words, but you still knew there was something that killed, something you could
hate. That murderous cause, as a consequence of this, with these contributing factors, took
my husband, my mom, or my child. People used to pay for private autopsies, sometimes
they’d suspect dad of pulling the plug on mom. Wrongful accusations, investigations, all
sorts of wacky shit. All the metastatic organ failures, all the septic shocks, strokes, and
cardiopulmonary arrests won’t bring them back. Not even any luck with NECROTIZING
FASCIITIS going mutant and turning people into zombies. No undead here.
Since the Machine, we have opened a Self-serve Cremation Station in every state, province,
and peninsula, and the Conference is working on developing certification for Creative End-Of-
Life Directors. It didn’t hurt that we gave a lot of celebrities some fantastic deals on their event
services, in the beginning. People love a good Expiration.
Major League Baseball players do it right. I don’t mind throwing in some extras here and
there, especially if it means season passes, and a plug for our company when the player is
interviewed. Perks beget perks. Remember when Wally “the Wix” won the World Series for
the Cubs? I was there, in Club Box seating. He wants a full on fleet of chartered airplanes
scattering him over rival teams’ stadiums when he goes. During finals, preferably.
We threw in some freebies (read: retro laser light show) for a really high profile technology
developer (name withheld, because it’s copyrighted) who, in turn, outfitted us with touchscreen
arrangement kiosks. People love being able to plan ahead; cause of death in one hand,
MasterCard in the other. And whenever you sport for a free memorial service for some great
leader or humanitarian, the company’s logo appearing in subtle manner throughout their
videobituary, it appears as altruistic as public broadcasting or a children’s charity.
I’m completely booked with final arrangements for the next eighteen months. Some of them
are pre-mortem events—you know, just in case that AIRBORNE FIRE HYDRANT hits sooner
rather than later. Sometimes that cause of death sneaks up on you. Better enjoy yourself while
you can. Sky-diving trips with the family, wine tastings at a mansion in the woods, geocaching
hunts, re-enactments of a future passing with the predeceased portraying themselves. Video
is a huge component; I have a full media team at every event. These days, you couldn’t sell a
headstone without a microchip or encoding link to a DeathPage. Sometimes, if the Predecedent
is savvy enough, they’ll make their own videobituary, but it’s worth it to get one professionally
produced.
Mostly, I do at time of Expiration arrangements. There’s so much more gravity to an event
when someone actually dies. People find comfort in taking part in the production. After all,
acceptance is the first step of the healing process, so it makes sense that participation should
be the last. These are not your old “in the event of my eventual passing” kind of funeral
services. People are picky. A few years back, this affluent woman got SCUBA DIVING. We
held her event last week. With a cause of death like that, she figured that she’d go young
(she was right). She was quite confident about her looks (dare I say, vain?), she had written
in her will of disposition that she wanted her loved ones to eat sushi off of her body… naked.
Embalmed, of course! All of it was fugu sashimi, you know, that puffer fish which is lethal to
consume if incorrectly prepared? Well, the real conundrum was that she had a clause with her
attorney that, if her loved ones (who all appeared to be ex-husbands or future ex-husbands in
the making, had she had more time) declined her deadly nude sushi buffet, they were excluded
from her will! We had to collaborate with (i.e. bribe) a restaurant downtown, acquire a handful of
permits from the health department, and notarize a stack of legal forms the size of Capitol Hill.
Legally, it was a nightmare of paperwork, but we pulled it off.
All of her designated dinner guests arrived for the Naked Sushi Lunch. Of course, had any of
them had FUGU or NAKED LUNCH as their cause of death, someone would have gotten sued.
But luckily for us, the living, the deceased did not commit any acts of fifth degree murder. She
looked good, our embalmer mixed her a stiff cocktail Frigid Rigid, Rock-M42, and HardeHyde,
so there was no risk of deterioration for at least a decade. She looked really statuesque,
classic, old money. It was an elaborate buffet: Little scallops of pickled ginger that looked
like a synchronized swimmer’s bathing suit, an assortment of tastefully placed wasabi dollops,
peacock fans of seaweed and vegetables. The expensive Ray Bans? Class act. The fellows
really ate it up.
She got the last laugh, of course, and they got diddly, squat, and some loose change. Oh sure,
there were lots of “personal effects” willed to each of the deceased’s dinner guests. All of the
items involved seemed to expose the sordid affairs that she had with the others. In the end, the
bulk of her estate had been donated to some marine biology charity. Jokes are a lot crueler in
death: there’s no way to get back at someone after the fact.
I remember before the Machine, when we would run out of tissue paper and women wailed and
keened and threw themselves onto caskets being lowered into graves. Now, we get people
who want that one last laugh, some kind of post mortem victory. As if in doing so, they get a
pinch of revenge at death in their afterlife shenanigans. I’d like to see a cause of death for one
of these control freaks that reads STRANGLED BY FUNERAL PLANNER.
My favorite singer from when I was growing up, Vic Ruggiero, got OVATION. The last man
standing in the folk, rhythm and blues generation. When he started touring constantly and
refused to play anything but an Ovation guitar, publicizing that it would be his demise—that’s
when he started getting some recognition. I would not say he ever got truly “famous,” but I
do remember being absolutely crushed at one of his concerts I attended. It had sold out and
scalpers were selling tickets at the door for two hundred dollars. Two hundred dollars? I saw
him before the Machine for ten! It did not surprise me when he got hit by that Mooney Ovation
aircraft. Folk singers always go out that way. Unusual that the plane would crash right into the
stage at an outdoor festival, but isn’t death always unusual?
The best Expiration I’ve directed recently was in Las Vegas, for Bruno Brunetti, the Original
Chicago Gangster. This fellow was clearly over hundred years old but lied and said he was
only ninety-nine. “Just like da bottles a’beer on the wall!” he would drawl and slur. His was
SELF-INFLICTED GUNSHOT WOUND TO THE HEAD. Never pretty, but pretty easy to control.
The ones with the right to control their own end, that have a say in when they go. I envy them;
everyone does. Those who come to terms with their termination, they have a special kind of
peace of mind.
Anyway, Bruno wanted to do a whole Broadway spectacle, like the Ziegfeld Follies, or the
Ringling Bros. Circus used to do. It took a lot of time out of my research team, but we got
the venue booked, the casino reserved, the hottest jazz band from out of town hired, and the
theatre troupe costumed and readied with their parts. The whole affair lasted about four and a
half hours.
Needless to say, he went out with a bang.
After I’ve met with a Predecedent and am walking them to the door, or I’m finishing
arrangements with one of my Expiration families, they often stop me and say, “May I ask…
what’s yours?”
I’m never shy, “NOTHING SERIOUS.” I smile.
They always get the same look on their face. Like a pinball machine of reactions. Like they’re
in line to ride a carousel, and they’re trying to pinpoint which horse they want, so they remember
to pick that one when they get on. Their eyes kind of flick back and forth really fast, their lips
twitch, they try and read my face and tell if I’m making another joke, or lying, or both.
“NOTHING SERIOUS?” they repeat. And typically, after a minute, they smile. Maybe they even
laugh. I don’t really mind.
[Submitted to the Machine of Death II Book in July. Here’s their ever-so-polite rejection letter….]
Hi there,First off, and with all sincerity: thank you for sending us “Nothing Serious”! As you may have heard, five years ago when we did the original call for stories for Machine of Death 1, we received about 675 stories. This time around, we received almost THREE TIMES that amount, with 1,958 stories submitted. Not only were we blown away by how MANY stories we received, but we were also blown away by their raw quality. The bad news is that the reality we live in insists there’s only room for 30 or so stories in the book, and that means there’s going to be 1,920 stories that we can’t fit into Machine of Death this time around, regardless of how awesome they are. Unfortunately, yours is one of them. We regret that “Nothing Serious” will not be appearing in Machine of Death 2. Normally this is where an email like this would end, perhaps with a brief thank you for your submission. But we’re serious when we say the sheer quality of the stories we received staggered us. There’s enough excellence, there in our inbox, to put out FIVE really amazing volumes. And it would be a crime to leave these stories unpublished like that. Many of the stories that aren’t right for the Volume 2 anthology (for a bunch of different reasons: anthology pacing, variety, length, and so on) would fit wonderfully in any hypothetical future collection, or some other kind of MOD project down the line. Of course, right now the focus will be on Machine of Death 2: on assembling the book, on getting the stories illustrated, on getting the finished book out into the world, and in making the whole thing as awesome as we can. But after that, if all goes well, we’d like to continue doing some really exciting things with these really great stories you’ve sent us. And we’ll be keeping your story in consideration for whatever those plans might be. Obviously we can’t promise anything, and nobody can predict the future. But if all goes well, a while down the road, we may be able to send out some more acceptance letters. There’s a chance you could hear from us then. Even if we’re never able to purchase your story and this is the last you hear from us about it, let us say this: thank you. You created something out of nothing, brought a new narrative into the universe, and shared it with us. Reading these stories has been a humbling and inspiring experience. Thank you, once more, for being a part of it. If you submitted more than one story, we’ll be sending you an email with our decision for each of them over the next few days! All the best,- Ryan, Matt & David !ps: we’re doing a Machine of Death event in LA on November 17th. If you’re in the area, come on out! We’d like to give you, as a Machine of Death story submitter, a MOD badge as a token of our appreciation. There’s more details about the event here: http://machineofdeath.net/nov-17 pps: If you’re interested, updates on the progress of both Volume 2 and future MOD projects can be found on our blog at http://machineofdeath.net
