Step 4: Home Funeral

Not long after, I mentioned an article I saw about how expensive caskets are. What a racket it is; oftentimes guilting survivors into buying a Bentley when they wanted a Beetle.

Dad said he wanted to see the article. Once he read it, I asked dad what kind of casket he was interested in. He told me. “Cheaper the better” was his position. “I wish we could just skip the whole casket rip off”

Later, I found a lady in California that would UPS ship a cardboard casket to me at a total cost of less than 100 bucks. This thrilled dad. I began to get it. Dad was enjoying thumbing his nose at the fat cat establishment.

We went through a checklist of similar concerns in a handy funeral checklist, and he repeatedly blasted "No" and "Hell no" to most of the items, now that this was all in his hands.

He was also enjoying how often opportunity presented situations for him to interject his trademark witty sarcasm. For example, I put the casket in storage in the loft of the shed dad had. One day dad asked if he could see it. I pointed and from where he was standing in the shed he could see part of it overhead. “So that’s it, huh? Insert flap A into slot B and slide the old man in. Well I’ll be damned.”

He smiled a long while and then silently retreated to his oxygen generating machine back at the house.