Grave Mismanagement

No, my stepfather and my mother had not suddenly discovered a taste for zombiehood and climbed out of their graves, nor had we all somehow missed the rapture while we were napping. What actually happened was far less dramatic, but infinitely more absurd: a broken water pipe decided to audition for the part of Niagara Falls in the cemetery.

One day, it washed through their vault, and the flood politely nudged their urns out onto the grass, where they lingered like lost tourists at a train station. Oddly enough, this had been happening for over a month, which gives you some idea of the cemetery staff’s talent for noticing things.

When I finally found out, I found myself greeted by an association whose ability to locate urns was roughly equivalent to a blindfolded raccoon’s sense of direction.

“Where are my parents’ urns?” I asked.

“Well, somewhere in the cemetery,” said the clerk.

“Somewhere?” I repeated. “You’re telling me my parents have been missing for a month, and you’re not sure where?”

“Uh, they might be in the back office,” she said hesitantly.

I went down to the cemetery to identify my folks, who, I’m happy to report, remained firmly ensconced in their containers. Several of the missing containers were sitting on a desk in a back office, as if they had taken a day off from being dead.

I was angry at first, but then I calmed myself with the soothing thought that the cemetery people were doing their best. But their best, it turned out, involved plans to relocate all the urns to a “better” area, which I interpreted as “anywhere else.”

“We were going to relocate them to a better section,” said one attendant.

Now, my folks had bought their plot years ago, with an ambitious little idea that they might someday have visitors gape at the Bay. I explained politely that this idea was still very important to them, despite their being dead.

“Better for whom?” I demanded. “They bought their plot to overlook the Bay. I assure you, it’s not just scenic preference, it’s a matter of principle.”

The staff looked at me like I’d suggested teaching algebra to squirrels. Still, they promised to cooperate.

Then the urns vanished entirely. Panic surged through me like a freight train, until a thorough search revealed them resting in a back room not often used, sitting right there on a table like a pair of grumpy old cats.

Relief is a curious thing, especially when it comes in tandem with a muttered, “I swear if you move them again…”

I spent the next four days observing crews work on the broken water main. The pipe was fractured, cracked, and shattered in several places along fifty or sixty feet, which is roughly saying the thing was beyond hope. They dug, cajoled, and cursed the pipe back into submission, replacing it with fresh plastic that seemed almost too polite to be believed.

“Do you think this pipe will hold?” one worker asked.

“It should,” came another’s reply.

As the preacher overseeing the careful reburial of both vault and urns spoke, I had a moment of clarity from that meager conversation: should this happen again, I may not be around when their restless spirits decide to make the living dance around their misadventures one more time.