HW # 19 - Family Perspectives on Illness & Dying

In our family there has definitely been more dying on my father’s side than on my mother’s side. My father’s mother often leaves a message on our phone saying that someone has died and to call her. I hear my father saying, “Who is it this time, Fatty?” (He calls her Fatty although she has not been fat for twenty years, according to Fatty.) After she responds, I hear my father say “Fatty, I have no idea who that is and have no intention of going to their funeral.” Then he finds out that it was second cousin LeMelle’s adopted daughter who was the actual daughter of distant cousin LeRoy, who had to give her up because he couldn’t handle drugs. My father thinks that everyone should be cremated and that the funeral business is a racket.


Fatty used to like to go from Detroit where she lives to South Carolina for the funerals because they were like family reunions. She would tell my dad whether the relative looked good or terrible in the coffin and whether it seemed like the family had spent a lot on the funeral. My grandmother has a sense of humor so if the person looked good she would say something like, “If only Irma had looked like that when she was alive, she would have been strutting her stuff for another 20 years.” And if the person looked bad, she would blame the family for not spending enough on the funeral. Her family had owned a funeral parlor in the town of Whitmire, South Carolina. When she married my grandfather, they moved to Detroit so that he could work for Chrysler, and their first apartment didn’t even have hot water. No wonder she likes funeral parlors. They made it possible for her to grow up with hot water.


Now that Fatty is almost 90 years old she can’t go to South Carolina anymore. My grandfather is afraid of flying, and he had to have a leg amputated so he can’t drivea car. She has decided that she wants to be cremated now but thinks that she might still want to have “a viewing.” My dad thinks the cremation decision is great but told her that the “viewing” part is one of the dumbest ideas she has ever had. “Let people remember you when you were in your prime and not all gray and wrinkly.” She is still deciding.


My grandmother on my mother’s side definitely wants to be cremated. She says that her parents and the generations before them only thought about being buried because that was the only choice. If there were fewer people in the world, burial would still be okay. Now with billions of people there isn’t enough room to bury everybody. Granny thinks that if you live near a crematorium, you should be cremated. If anyone in the family happened to be going to England after she dies, she would not mind having her ashes sprinkled over the cemetery where her family is buried, but she doesn’t want anyone to go to any trouble. I asked her if she would want the ashes buried in one place with one of those stones that give your name and the years you lived. It would be a place where people could go to think about her. She said that memories are where people thinkof dead people, and hopefully they will be good ones.