Today I was as usual thinking about death and a funny story a friend once told me flew into my head.
I used to play softball for a team sponsored by a funeral home. Consequently, I got to know several funeral directors--the ones who liked to play ball. I had never thought about it before, but sometimes people die in their houses, and they don't just beam themselves over to the embalming room. Someone from the funeral home goes and gets them. The story concerns one time when the family member placing the call had warned that the decedent was "a big fellow." So they sent out not one but two funeral directors, a couple of strong, able-bodied guys from the softball team. Arriving at the residence, they discovered some complicating factors. For one thing, it was an old house, and the "big fellow" was in an upstairs bedroom. For another, he weighed over 400 pounds. To get to the bedroom, you climbed about ten stairs to a landing, then turned 180 degrees and went up about five more steps. I'm not going to resist making the obvious joke about how the descent was toilsome due to 400 pounds of "dead" weight. The turn: very awkward, especially considering that making it brought them into sight of the family members seated in the living room at the bottom of the steps. My friends tried to disguise the fact that they were using the bannister to slide the corpse along. Nothing helped, however. They bumped and thumped their way down, adjusting their grips a few times and not even pretending to be gentle.
If you take up mortuary science in school, do you know what the first course you take is called--a prerequisite for all the more advanced ones? Freshman Decomposition.
For some reason, this "discussion" puts me in mind of a poem by Robert Frost. Ants are a curious race.
