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can’t imagine what tears flowed when, as a young navy wartime aviator, he watched comrades
     killed or, as a young father, endured the death of his six-year-old daughter from leukemia.
    “No me digas nada triste,”
Pup said as we sat around the conference table at Leo P. Gallagher & Son Funeral Home. (Don’t say anything sad to me.) He
     was afraid of breaking down in front of the young funeral director—named, as it happened, Chris. Chris was gentle-mannered,
     considerate, and punctilious. But then I suppose rudeness and brusqueness are not considered prize qualities in the funeral-directing
     business. In the presence of death, one craves the soft touch, the lowered voice, even if it verges on the baroque. I remember
     reading in the memoirs of one of my favorite actors, Richard E. Grant (
Withnail and I
), the gruesome moment when a hospital worker holding a box containing his newborn son’s corpse shoved it at him with all
     the tenderness of a grouchy janitor handling a bag of garbage. (A vignette like that sticks in the mind.) I remember, too,
     a friend telling me of going to fetch the body of a mutual friend of ours after he was killed in a car wreck in Mexico. He
     arrived at the police station to be told the body was in a room out back. As indeed it was: lying in a pool of congealed blood
     on a concrete floor swarming with flies. So one is grateful for the antiseptic plainness of Leo P. Gallagher and for soft-spoken
     Chris.
    We sat around the conference table, surrounded by wall displays of headstones, coffins, urns, and reliquary keepsakes—you
     can put some of the loved one’s ashes in a pendant and wear it around your neck, making for one heck of a conversation starter
     on a first date. As Chris gently slid a piece of paper toward us, I thought of Jessica Mitford’s book
The American Way of Death
, published in 1963, coincidentally the year of America’s most indelible death. The paper was the price list. Chris said,
     somewhere between earnest and apologetic, “
Because
our industry is so heavily regulated, that’s why all these charges are explained in such detail.” So… “Basic professional
     service fee: $2,795.” What does that buy you? Don’t ask. “Care and prep of remains: refrigeration: $600.” Hm. Okay… “Transferring
     remains to funeral home: $695.” “Transfer to or from crematory: $395.” Wouldn’t it just be cheaper to hire a limo? “Brown
     standard cremation container: $295.” Such detail indeed. Well, the industry is so “heavily regulated” in no small part because
     of Ms. Mitford’s exposé. She was, of course, one of the famous five, highly variegated Mitford daughters: Nancy wrote
Love in a Cold Climate
; Diana married British Fascist leader Oswald Mosley, gloriously satirized by P. G. Wodehouse as Sir Roderick Spode, “the
     amateur dictator” and leader of Britain’s Fascist “Black Shorts”; Jessica married an American Communist lawyer with the Dickensian
     name of Treuhaft and herself made a brilliant success of muckraking journalism, causing vampiric shrieks in U.S. funeral homes
     coast to coast and, into the bargain, exposing as a money-minting fraud Bennett Cerf’s Famous Writers School. I took a course
     from her in my senior year at Yale; we cordially loathed each other. But here I found myself her beneficiary, staring at Chris’s
     weirdly detailed price list while scratching my head.
    We had come, Pup and I, to arrange for a simple cremation, no frills, the plainest urn—by the end, I was about to suggest
     that a large Chock full o’Nuts coffee tin would do—but the American Way of Death is, as is the American Way of Life, complicated.
     I wouldn’t have been surprised if, fifteen minutes in, Chris had cleared his throat and said, “Now, would you prefer propane,
     mesquite, or charcoal briquettes?” I began daydreaming about just bringing dear old Mum home in the back of the car, building
     a nice roaring bonfire on the beach;