Yesterday my Mom got a call from a Funeral Home/Cemetary telemarketer. There's just something wrong about that--the whole selling death thing. And so this telemarketer continues on with my Mom saying, in an ultra serious, brooding, yet sensitive tone that dealing with the death of a loved one is a traumatic experience, and can be all the more complicated if the appropriate planning steps are not properly taken. She then asks, if "Her family would know what to do if she suddenly died." At this point, this is where my Mom cracks up. She starts just cackling at this telemarketer, and then eventually says, "well I hope they would figure it out!" I hope so, too. I'd say we would most likely, ya know, not let her just decompose wherever she keeled over. I was a little offended, first because they would telemarket such a thing, and then second because this guy could think that I, as part of my Mom's family, couldn't figure out how to get somebody to stick her body in the ground, or burn it or whatever--not exactly brain surgery. But then I thought about it for a second...

I recall a story I was told by some locals we stayed with in South Dakota. Really nice people--Meat eaters, owners of 7 tractors, and a couple fewer that the typical number of fingers. This neighbor of theirs had a wife and a kid, kinda kept to themselves. The father was a bit of a drinker. Anyway, the mother wasn't seen for quite some time, and so people would start asking the kid, "Where's you mother?" The kid would just say "she's sick." So anyway, after a while, somebody goes over and tries to, idunno, give this poor sick woman some soup or something, and they find out she isn't there, the police get involved, yada-yada. Anyway, they eventually find the charred bits of the woman's remains were in an oil drum out back.

The guys' story was that the wife had been sick, and eventually died, so he did the natural thing, and slung the body over his shoulder, heaved her into an oil trum, doused her with gas and torched her--and the kid was just having a hard time grasping that his Mom had died. Needless to say, no one in the town believed a word of it--everyone had their theory, but nobody could prove a thing. The police charged him with unlawful disposal of a body, but that's all they could pin on him--$200 fine.

So maybe there is a need for these telemarketers afterall.