Cedric Blackwell has buried three governors, two union bosses, and a vaudeville contortionist who insisted on being folded into his casket in the position he died in. "The contortionist was the most difficult," Blackwell says, spearing an olive with a precision that suggests he has done this before, perhaps in his sleep, perhaps in someone else's. "The governors were heavy with importance. The union bosses were heavy with grudges. The contortionist was simply heavy with ambition. He had been trying to fit himself into a hatbox for forty years. The hatbox finally won."
Blackwell is seventy-four, he has been an undertaker for fifty-one years, and he has never, he claims, been surprised by a corpse. "Surprise is a luxury of the living. The dead are consistent. They are always exactly as dead as you expect them to be. The living, on the other hand, are constantly exceeding my expectations in the wrong directions."
I asked him when he knew he wanted to be an undertaker. He paused with his martini halfway to his lips, a gesture I would later recognize as theatrical, practiced, part of a performance he gives to journalists because he understands that journalism is simply theater with worse lighting. "I didn't want to be an undertaker," he said. "I wanted to be a poet. But poetry, as you may have noticed, pays poorly. Death, by contrast, is recession-proof. People die in booms. People die in busts. People die, I am told, even in administrations they approve of. Death is the only bipartisan issue."
He took me to his funeral home after lunch, a Victorian brownstone on a street that had been fashionable in 1910 and had spent the subsequent decades in various stages of denial. The interior smelled of lilies and something else, something I would later identify as the absence of panic. "We use a special embalming fluid," Blackwell said, as if reading my thoughts, which I suspect he can do, or at least has learned to simulate through decades of listening to widows. "It contains a mild sedative. Not for the corpse. For the bereaved. The smell calms them. They don't know why they feel peaceful. They simply do."
I asked him if he believed in an afterlife. He looked at me with an expression that managed to be both pitying and amused, the way one looks at a child who has asked a sophisticated question with a naive verb. "I believe in the afterlife the way I believe in the before-life," he said. "Which is to say, I believe in the interval. The pause between notes. The silence between sentences. That is where I live, Mr. Norton. In the interval. The dead have moved on. The living have not yet arrived. I am the concierge."
His office contains a collection of funeral programs dating to 1897, which he catalogs with the devotion other men reserve for baseball cards or stamps. "Every program is a short story," he says, showing me a water-stained card from 1923. "This man was a baker. His program mentions his 'devotion to his craft.' What it does not mention is that he was devoted to his craft because his wife left him in 1919 and the dough was the only thing that responded to his touch. The program is not dishonest. It is simply edited. All biography is edited. All autobiography is fiction with a reliable narrator."
He has buried his own wife, his parents, and a daughter who died at nineteen from an illness he will not name, though his hand, when he mentions her, moves to his breast pocket as if checking for a letter he has not received. "The undertaker who buries his own child is no longer an undertaker," he says. "He is simply a father with better equipment. I performed the embalming myself. I chose the casket myself. I delivered the eulogy myself, which is against the rules, because an undertaker should not eulogize his own family. But I have never followed rules I did not write, and even those I follow only provisionally."
I asked him what he would want for his own funeral. For the first time, he smiled, a genuine expression that rearranged his face into something younger and more dangerous. "I want to be cremated," he said. "I want my ashes mixed into the ink of a very expensive pen. And I want that pen given to a novelist who will use it to write a terrible book, a book that is universally panned, a book that ends the novelist's career. Because the only immortality I believe in is the immortality of inconvenience. I want to haunt the literary world as a bad sentence in a worse novel. That is my idea of heaven."
As I left, he pressed a funeral program into my hand. It was blank. "For your own," he said. "Fill it in as you go. Most people wait until the end to write their program. I recommend starting now. The program, you will find, shapes the life. Not the other way around."
I have kept the blank program on my desk. I have not yet filled it in. But I have started to think about what I would want it to say, which is, I suspect, exactly what Cedric Blackwell intended. The undertaker is a poet after all. His meter is silence. His rhyme scheme is the interval. And his audience, though he will deny this, is not the dead. It is us, the temporarily alive, the soon-to-be-edited, the ones who still have time to write a better program.