My credentials? Of course. They are in my pocket. Here: I’ve had friends who have died in California and I mourn them in my own way. I’ve been to Forest Lawn and romped over the place like an eager child. I’ve read The Loved One, The American Way of Death, Wallets in Shrouds and my favorite After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
I have watched men standing beside hearses in front of mortuaries directing funerals with walky-talkies as if they were officers in a metaphysical war.
Oh, yes: I was once walking with a friend past a skid row hotel in San Francisco and they were carrying a corpse out of the hotel. The corpse was done tastefully in a white sheet with four or five Chinese extras looking on, and there was a very slow-moving ambulance parked out front that was prohibited by law from having a siren or to go any faster than thirty-seven miles an hour and from showing any aggressive action in traffic.
My friend looked at the lady or gentleman corpse as it went by and said, “Being dead is one step up from living in that hotel.”
As you can see, I am an expert on death in California. My credentials stand up to the closest inspection. I am qualified to continue with another story told to-me by my friend who also works as a gardener for a very wealthy old woman in Marin County. She had a nineteen-year-old dog that she loved deeply and the dog responded to this love by dying very slowly from senility.
Every day my friend went to work the dog would be a little more dead. It was long past the proper time for the dog to die, but the dog had been dying for so long that it had lost the way to death.
This happens to a lot of old people in this country. They get so old and live with death so long that they lose the way when it comes time to actually die.
Sometimes they stay lost for years. It is horrible to watch them linger on. Finally the weight of their own blood crushes them.
Anyway, at last the woman could not stand to watch the senile suffering of her dog any longer and called up a veterinarian to come and put the dog to sleep.
She instructed my friend to build a coffin for the dog, which he did, figuring it was one of the fringe clauses of gardening in California.
The death doctor drove out to her estate and was soon in the house carrying a little black bag. That was a mistake. It should have been a large pastel bag. When the old woman saw the little black bag, she paled visibly. The unnecessary reality of it scared her, so she sent the veterinarian away with a generous check in his pocket.
Alas, having the veterinarian go away did not solve the dog’s basic problem: He was so senile that death had become a way of life and he was lost from the act of dying.
The next day the dog walked into the corner of a room and couldn’t get out of it. The dog stood there for hours until it collapsed from exhaustion, which conveniently happened to be just when the old woman came into the room, looking for the keys to her Rolls-Royce.
She started crying when she saw the dog lying there like a mutt puddle in the corner. Its face was still pressed against the wall and its eyes were watering in some human kind of way that dogs get when they live with people too long and pick up their worst characteristics.
She had her maid carry the dog to his rug. The dog had a Chinese rug that he had slept on since he was a puppy in China before the fall of Chiang Kai-shek. The rug had been worth a thousand American dollars, then, having survived a dynasty or two.
The rug was worth a lot more now, being in rather excellent shape with actually no more wear and tear than it would get being stored in a castle for a couple of centuries.
The old woman called the veterinarian again and he arrived with his little black bag of tricks and how to find the way back to death after having lost it for years, years that led oneself to being trapped in the corner of a room.
“Where is your pet?” he said.
The dog lay exhausted and sprawled across beautiful Chinese flowers and things from a different world. “Please do it on his rug,” she said. “I think he would like that.”
“Certainly,” he said. “Don’t worry. He won’t feel a thing. It’s painless. Just like falling asleep.”
“Good-bye, Charlie,” the old woman said. The dog of course didn’t hear her. He had been deaf since 1959.
After bidding the dog farewell, the old woman took to bed. She left the room just as the veterinarian was opening his little black bag. The veterinarian needed PR help desperately.
Afterward my friend took the coffin in the house to pick up the dog. A maid had wrapped the body in the rug. The old woman insisted that the dog be buried with the rug and its head facing West in a grave near the rose garden, pointing toward China. My friend buried the dog with its head pointing toward Los Angeles.
As he carried the coffin outside he peeked in at the thousand-dollar rug. Beautiful design, he said to himself. All you would have to do would be to vacuum it a little and it would be as good as new.
My friend is not generally known as a sentimentalist. Stupid dead dog! he said to himself as he neared the grave, Damn dead dog!
“But I did it,” he told me. “I buried that dog with the rug and I don’t know why. It’s a question that I’ll ask myself forever. Sometimes when it rains at night in the winter, I think of that rug down there in the grave, wrapped around a dog.”
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