Category: death

Clearing out the museum of Mom

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Florence was a gas. I got back a few days ago and I’m still huffing the trip’s fragrant fumes and, I admit, getting a little high. It was an idyllic sojourn: the friendliest, prettiest people; piquant pizzas and pleasing piazzas; huge marble slabs of history; staggering art; so much gelato you could vomit. And dogs — a festival of dogs.

I’m leaving on a jet plane yet again in a week, but this one isn’t for vacation; it’s for vacating. My brother and I are going to the San Francisco Bay Area to clear out my late ole Mom’s condo and put it on the market. We are vacating the abode of its current renter and as much furniture and stuff as we can in a short stretch of time, about six days. It could be a herculean errand, or it might snap into place like Legos.

Mom passed in late 2019, so this isn’t really a mournful visit, though it is naturally tinged with blue-hued rue. Ghosts, memories, love and misses. We have to riffle through reams of photos — that’ll be fun and painful and snoringly tedious — and decide what things we want and what can hit the curb. My brother can’t wait to get his grubby hands on this damn metallic rabbit Mom placed next to the toilet. It’s probably spattered in urine.

Save for that weird rabbit, there’s nothing original about any of this. It’s just another life stage, a serial speed bump that most of us have to go through. My turn. Yawn. 

Yet we’re going to make the most of it, dammit, back in the Bay Area bosom we grew up in. From the San Francisco airport, we’re beelining it to our favorite restaurant in Chinatown, House of Nanking, a bustling joint we used to line-up for before they expanded a bit. I like their zesty food so much — especially the Nanking Sesame Chicken — and the surly, snappish owner, that I still wear one of their neon-bright t-shirts. 

Then it’s down to business. For a while. 

We’ve planned other sidelights to sustain our spirits and energy. Like a special dinner at chef /author Alice Waters’ legendary Chez Panisse in Berkeley. This is quintessential farm-to-table California cuisine, which Waters practically invented. I’ve eaten there before. It’s spectacular, an institution. My brother, the foodie who’s been to them all, says it’s his favorite restaurant. We’re spoiling ourselves. We’ve also slated a day and dinner in Napa. Boo-hoo for us. 

Still, getting real, the trip won’t be fun; a few good meals can’t blot out the grim reality of the situation. Fortunately, Mom left a fastidiously tidy home, decorated with utmost taste and artistic flair. (We will be plundering her artwork and art books for sure.) She had class, and we want to honor that by doing this dirty work with a soupçon of respect.

We’re dismantling a life, in a way, dislodging and dispersing things that defined a real person. And we’re a part of it. My travel photographs adorn a wall. A painting my brother made of David Bowie adorns another wall. And so on. 

I think of the place as a museum of Mom — meticulous, magnificent —  carefully curated, painstakingly, and with inexpressible love. We have our work cut out for us. 

Quote of the day: Exactly how I feel about it

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.” — Teen philosopher Holden Caulfield

Dying for our sins, and for Italian food

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Like many Catholic countries, Italy is crawling with crucifixes, and Florence, where I’ve been for four days so far, is inescapably swept up in the cross craze. The objects, often beautiful pieces of art, are bloody, baroque, humdrum and horrific — a whole cross-section. 

Jesus died on the cross and we know that wasn’t pleasant. Naked, nailed, speared, bleeding, suffocating … you get the picture.

I do too. But what I don’t get is the exuberant, even perverse glorification of Christ’s grisly death. I sort of understand the symbolic power of it all — God willed it — yet wonder why people wear one of history’s worst torture devices around their necks. (And I wonder why so many heavy metal bands are morbidly obsessed with them. Dude!)

Speaking of bodily torment, today I stumbled on the rabidly popular sandwich stand All’Antico Vinaio — the kind of place with lines out the door — where I had been hoping to go but had no idea where it was. Pure kismet. This was after I took in a sprawling and mind-altering M.C. Escher (he sounds like a Dutch rapper) exhibit at the Museum of the Innocents, whose name has guilt written all over it. I didn’t know Pink Floyd was so into Escher, but it makes almost comical sense.

I couldn’t read the big menu board at the sandwich place — Italian and all — but I finally settled on the Firenze for seven euros, or just over seven bucks. The baseball mitt-sized meal consists of six heart attacks worth of salami, creamed parmesan and sun-dried tomatoes, stuffed between thinly sliced focaccia. It was fantastic, popping with flavor, and totally unfinishable. The pigeons had a frenzied feast.

The night’s meal is typically the highlight of the day and must be meticulously researched. For dinner I went to an old-school trattoria — defined as an “Italian restaurant serving simple food” — that ratings aggregates go gaga for. Even Michelin backs this joint. It was fine, but mostly wound up being overrated by dint of its noble, been-there-forever history. The giant glass of house wine was a plus at a meager four euros. I maybe eat one or two steaks a year and I ordered a sirloin (Florence is famous for superior steaks) and a seven-euro salad that was actually a few floppy, naked leaves worth about 15 cents. 

The steak was solid, but it dawned on me: As yummy as they are, steaks are like pancakes — they get boring about half-way through. I was glad I didn’t get a true “Florentine” steak that so many diners got and chewed on for like an hour. Those meats are the size of the cut from the opening credits of “The Flintstones,” a slab so big it tips over Fred Flintstone’s car.

As far as Florentine greatest hits, the other day I visited the awesome 17-foot-tall marble nudist David, by Michelangelo. I didn’t mention it before, but here’s a peek (it’s almost obligatory, isn’t it?):

One of the hottest books of the year is cool to the touch

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

Funny how you can admire a book without fully liking it. That’s the case with the lavishly overpraised memoir “Stay True” by New Yorker writer Hua Hsu, which was named one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times and made book reviewers get all moist.  

It’s a baffling response to a book whose prose contains no electricity, no buzz. A book that rather lies there, dry, ho-hum and humorless. 

And yet Hsu reveals authorial gifts by showing what even a mildly engaging story can do: carry you along with raw pathos, stripped of punch and pyros. Though the book sputters at the half-way point — Hsu’s early years at UC Berkeley in the ‘90s aren’t as novel or riveting as he thinks they are — it occasionally grazes the profound with ranging reflection that delivers a spurt of substance. 

Still, missteps abound. Women, for instance, are almost totally absent for most of the book, noted in passing by first names only, granted the vaporous texture of ciphers. I don’t recall one speaking, even when Hsu at last finds a dimly sketched girlfriend.

Not even his Asian identity issues (he’s Taiwanese American), his mania for alt-music, or especially the zines he publishes pop off the page. These are exciting topics, but we’re left thirsting. While a huge fan, I find most New Yorker writing to be self-consciously restrained and prim. Staff writer Hsu suffers from a chronic case of New Yorker-itis.

But at least it feels real, which memoirs like Mary Karr’s aptly titled “The Liars’ Club” definitely do not. Which makes “Stay True” also aptly titled. (I find pretty much all memoirs to be 15-20% made up — there’s simply no way such decades-spanning reportage can be true — but that’s pulp for another blog.)

This book is about friendship and the violent loss of it and the hole it leaves. Hsu meets his friend Ken —  who’s mostly depicted as a one-dimensional cut-out — at college and they become best bros (Ken is in a frat, something initially anathema to the “outsider” Hsu). Ken is soon ripped from the narrative and we’re supposed to be crushed. 

But the loss of a character we barely knew is treated with a remove that makes it hard to share an emotional wallop. Believing otherwise, Hsu writes: “I was a storyteller with a plot twist guaranteed to astound and destroy.”

Not quite. “Stay True” misses its mark, but by feet, not yards. A few sentences jiggle with magic — “Their beats sounded like death rearranging furniture in the underworld,” Hsu notes about a rap group — and the closing passages of this slim volume emanate a cathartic warmth that’s AWOL in the gangly prose of the first 100-plus pages.

In the end, Hsu wants the truth to pierce. Here, it merely pinches. 

***

Ten books I really liked this year:

“Asymmetry” (Lisa Halliday); “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness” (Richard Yates); “The Copenhagen Trilogy” (Tove Ditlevsen); “Heat 2” (Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner); “Either/Or” (Elif Batuman); “How Should a Person Be?” (Sheila Heti); “Weather” (Jenny Offill); “Wildlife” (Richard Ford); “A Manual for Cleaning Women” (Lucia Berlin); “The Idiot” (Elif Batuman).  

Going out in a blaze

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

There’s the scratch and sizzle of a striking match. Then the blue-orange blaze that ignites the shrouded body, which is wreathed in marigolds. Then … foof! … all is rising flame and billowing smoke. The corpse begins to burn. It will do so for hours, until all that remains is a heap of ash and bone.  

I witnessed such sacred funeral pyres on the Ganges in India and on the Bagmati River in Nepal some years ago. I didn’t stumble upon them; I sought them out as quasi-spiritual pilgrimages. My slightly morbid, slightly practical fascination with death led me there. Beholding the ritualized smoke and fire, I felt privileged and humbled.

What I didn’t feel was awed. Death is deeply quotidian to this non-believer. There is nothing mystical, magical or celestial about it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, with no heaven, hell or afterlife to follow. Pardon the party-poopery.

Seeing these holy spectacles, my thoughts toggled between where the spirit goes (er, nowhere) and the fact that I was simply watching large bonfires almost beautiful in their pageantry. Any psychic weight was emotional — these were real, beloved humans — and philosophical — what does it mean? — and not, at last, spiritual. 

I’m brought to these memories by a spread in today’s Times about the only public open-air funeral pyre in the U.S., located in the small, dusty town of Crestone, Colorado. The story follows an 81-year-old resident from the last stages of his illness to his outdoor cremation:

“He knew his body would be wrapped into a simple shroud, carried on a wooden stretcher into an enclosure, and placed on a platform a few feet from the ground,” the story goes. “His sons and his wife would light the fire and watch his body burn for several hours. The next day, they would collect the ashes.”

While pyres are rare, cremation in the States is hot stuff. In a statistical shift, more than half of Americans are cremated after death, and you can be sure that’s how I’m getting out of here. Embalming is for chumps, religious beliefs be damned, and casket funerals are so much ceremonial claptrap — wasteful, ghoulish, quixotic. (You can read about far more creative and eco-friendly ways to be put to rest here and here.)

The Hindus have it down. Across Asia they practice communal, public pyres that almost anyone can chance upon and witness. They are solemn. Tears are shed. But for some reason they are not private family affairs, but rather regal roasts for all to see. Crestone, Colorado, is on to something.

Yet as much as I respect it, that’s not for me. Let me say — family, listen — I do not want to be burned on a communal funeral pyre for public consumption. A high-tech, high-temperature crematorium is just fine, and afterward, as I’ve said, do what you will with my ashes. I suggest salt and pepper shakers. 

What I saw in India and Nepal was real and powerful, despite my spiritual doubts that border on irreverent. I’m of two minds, the sacred and the profane, but a bit closer to one than the other. Guess.

Funeral pyre, Nepal

‘Tis the season to chillax

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

2020 bit, hard. Somehow 2021 was just as rotten. 2022 looms — turn the page and all that. Don’t hold your breath. It’s going to be another shit show.

What’s been on the menu of wonderfulness? In short: family deaths, illness, Covid and its spawn-of-Satan variants, political/racial/social outrages, chronic insomnia, that gnarly pimple on my forehead last summer — the usual maelstrom. 

Complaining about, even inventorying, these things is by now beyond trite. So we saunter ahead and seek purpose and palliatives, things that distract and dull the pain. 

Like … hell, I don’t know. A stiff drink? (Yep.) Christmas carols? (Bah!) How about just a mindset adjustment, a way of looking at the world in a soft-focus haze rather than the cold, klieg-light glare we’re currently deploying? 

Things are pretty bad, but for most of us, most of the time, they’re not catastrophically bad, are they? Maybe they are. I’ve had my share of catastrophes in these gloomy times — some bad, some badder — and yet I’ve still found resilience, wisps of hope.

It’s a matter of focus and self-possession. If at all possible, we need to mellow. Take a deep breath wrapped in a sigh. We’re starting to hit the I’m-over-this-shit button, yet we’re in for more bone-cracking cold. Hang tight. But not too tight.

Maybe this is a call for self-improvement. For our quirks and foibles — our hideous flaws — to get tweaked and kneaded into something softer and more accepting. And more helpful.   

Me, for instance. I own a roiling anger that springs from fighting life, resisting and pushing, sparking off it, flint-like. I strain and recoil, writhe and seethe. It isn’t helping. I need to cork it. Clonazepam does only so much. 

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions — hardly a novel stance — but if I did one it would be to ride the next wave with the mettle and determination of that young surfer who got her arm bit off by a shark but keeps on shredding half-pipes like nothing ever happened. Limbs are missing. Still, we carry on.

I plan for Paris. Covid laughs.

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

Last fall, Paris went kaput. That is, my planned trip to my favorite city was scrapped with a muscular assist from the pandemic. Covid, that magnificent killjoy, effectively squelched the October vacation, along with so many of your precious plans to get out and live life freely and safely. 

Woe is me. I know this is a first-world, big-baby complaint, but actually I’m not complaining. The trip was doomed from the start, founded on chutzpah and delusion. The pandemic would pass by October. Right. What a dope.

But I couldn’t resist the $430 round-trip flight bought last spring and the airline’s policy of crediting the ticket if trips were cancelled by Covid. Considering how grim everything was, it was sort of win-win.

I used that credit yesterday when I decided, rather rashly as usual, to take another shot at Paris in the fall. It cost a little more money, but the price was still right. Eight days in mid-October, starting where I left off during my last visit in fall 2015. 

Paris is slowly stirring from its Covid coma, when life was hamstrung by onerous rules and restrictions that made visiting pointless, if you could even get into Europe. I’m banking on more normalcy in the next few months as cafes, museums and bistros cautiously unlock their doors. (Alas, Notre Dame remains closed to worshippers and tourists after the blaze of 2019.)

Notre Dame, fall 2015

Must-dos: Musée d’Orsay; Musée Picasso (essential); Musée de l’Orangerie; citywide cinemas (I always see three or four classic movies in Paris); Centre Pompidou; and the skull-crammed Catacombs.

This time, my sixth in Paris, I will skip my beloved cemeteries: the lushly rococo Père Lachaise and the more classical Montmartre and Montparnasse cemeteries, which together house the graves of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, François Truffaut, Susan Sontag, Edith Piaf, Chopin, Balzac, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. (Why visit cemeteries? Because they’re haunting and beautiful and, in Paris, they’re like strolling walks of fame for artists and intellectuals.)

Centre Pompidou, 2015

The Parisian foodie experience is paramount, and I have several places in my crosshairs: the peerless Frenchie; Michelin-star Le Chateaubriand; Buvette; and famed falafel joint L’As Du Fallafel in the Marais. For cocktails, it’s the vaunted Little Red Door — named one of the world’s 50 best bars for seven consecutive years — also in the Marais.

This all sounds super on paper, like most vacations do. The planning, the reservations, the advanced tickets, the accommodations (Hôtel Jeanne d’Arc Le Marais), the raw, giddy anticipation. But it’s a crap shoot.

I’m all in. I’m ready to split this burgh for a few days, sip wine on the Seine, see an old Eric Rohmer film, walk the Luxembourg and Tuileries gardens, skip the Mona Lisa, and be blown away by the city’s exuberant beauty. Again.  

I don’t know if I’ll actually get there. But I’m making a bid for it. For Paris, and for life. 

Philip Roth, ranked

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Good, bad, worshipful, scandalous — writer Philip Roth is making boldfaced headlines again, four years after his death. His largely acclaimed new biography and its author Blake Bailey are under fire, while publications like The New York Times are issuing fresh appraisals of his almost 30 novels and memoirs, like this and this.

This longtime Roth fan joins the chorus. I haven’t tackled all of his books but I have read his most celebrated titles, from “Goodbye, Columbus” (1959) to “Nemesis” (2010) and many in between. What follows are my five favorite Roth novels, with an obligatory postscript about a glaring omission.

 1. “American Pastoral” (1997) — Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winner may be the best novel I’ve ever read. It’s deep, thorny, complex, timely and so rich with perception and wisdom — communicated in ferocious, passionate prose — that you’re stuffed after each sitting. But it’s not difficult. Tracing the life of one Swede Levov and his daughter’s radical political terrorism in 1968, “Pastoral” gradually becomes an epic tragedy about recent American history and our hero’s inevitable descent. A biting, indelible masterpiece.  

2. “Sabbath’s Theater” (1995) — Raunchy, stylized, rip-snortingly funny and  aggressively profane, this cathartic gush of undiluted id is Roth at his sweatiest and most swinging, a big bite of eros that “shows off his linguistic verve and his unparalleled ability to stare unblinkingly into the psyche of a depraved scoundrel,” raves one critic. Winner of the National Book Award, this feverish, in-your-face opus isn’t easy, and it shouldn’t be. What it is: crudely sublime. 

 3. “The Human Stain” (2000) — A dean of a college faculty is ousted after he makes a loaded, if ultimately benign, remark interpreted as racist. He holds a shocking life-long secret close to his vest in this, “one of Roth’s most complex moral conundrums,” which came out during similar dramas unfolding in academia and beyond. The book bristles with Roth’s fanged moralism; the writing is poignant, alive, uncompromising. 

4. “Operation Shylock” (1993) — What could have flopped as an elaborate literary stunt winds up one of Roth’s richest masterworks. “His best use of autobiography and his most incisive use of meta-techniques,” a critic writes, “the novel pits Philip Roth against an imposter, a man going around using Roth’s name and identity to proselytize about the necessity for Jews to return to Europe.” Crazy, but that’s its brilliance. Roth’s facility with form proves, again, formidable, his wit and playful intelligence on dazzling display.

 5. “Everyman” (2006)— A meditation on “one man’s lifelong skirmish with mortality,” this slim book, part of a quartet of late shortish novels, marks Roth’s return to the profoundly personal following the speculative politics of “The Plot Against America.” Haunted by death, the protagonist looks back on his life, from childhood, marriage and divorce, to old age and sickness, all the while reflecting on the inevitable — his own impending demise. Bracingly elegiac.

P.S. About that other famous book everyone so adores, the one in which the hero masturbates with a piece of liver: Don’t overestimate the frenzied gimmickry of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” a worthy early volume (1969) whose onanistic perversities, both smug and farcical, fuel the novel’s shrill pitch. I like this ribald coming-of-age comedy well enough, but it’s more exhausting than exhilarating, minor Roth at its most breathlessly attention-hailing. It made him a literary star. 

Cryonics — a miracle, or just another coffin?

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

You’re alive. You die. Your body is then submerged in an icy bath of liquid nitrogen, clouds of frosty fog billowing down the sides of the tank in which you now float in suspended animation. 

The lid is sealed. And there it is: instead of being buried or cremated, you are being cryonically preserved, your body — or, in some cases, just your severed head — enshrined for eternity.  

If you’re lucky — say, the procedure actually works, or the planet doesn’t blow itself up while you’re in deep freeze — you will stir to life again, a muddle-headed Rip Van Winkle, yawning and stretching, wiping decades of goo from your eyes, and, oh, do hurry, brushing intractable halitosis from your maw with cases of Colgate. 

You can hear a delirious Dr. Victor Frankenstein baying, “It’s alive! It’s alive!” The excitement is electric. You’ve been dead — no, you’ve been a “patient,” say the scientists, who spurn the term “dead” — for 25 years. But now, in a miracle out of the most outlandish science fiction, you are, yes, alive. Indeed, re-animated. Forget the cancer. Forget the car wreck. You’re back in business.

Never happen. This is science fiction of the most cynical kind, a laughable, despicable scam convincing the gullible that there is life after death, as long as you freeze your body first. And as long as you cough up (cough, hack) $250,000 for your whole body or $80,000 for just your head. Costs only mount.

These sums come from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a major cryonics company in Arizona “built on the spectacular wager that it can rescue its patients from natural post-mortem deterioration until a distant time when cellular regeneration, nanotechnology, cloning or some other science can restart their lives,” writes the Times. 

Alcor insists it can stop the dying process with cryonics, which it calls — and I kind of love this — “an ambulance to the future.” The company promises “future restoration of good health and reintegration into society for all patients.” 

Alcor has 182 frozen patients and 1,353 members, or living people who give Alcor cash as a sort of pre-freeze down payment. I hear a cuckoo clock in the distance.

This — death — is right up my morbid alley. I think about dying with unhealthy frequency, and, as I get older, the bleak thoughts strike with increasing ferocity. But I am not a life freak. I don’t pine to extend this predicament. I understand it’s all miserably finite. Plainly: I do not want to live forever. Freeze me if you like, but only if I’m placed in the TV dinner aisle. 

And so cryonics seems like so much quackery — misguided, wasteful and patently impossible. It reminds me of “Re-Animator,” Stuart Gordon’s 1985 horror classic in which a crackpot scientist is obsessed with resurrecting dead bodies, with splattery results. The movie was smart, playing the premise for gory laughs. 

I don’t think anyone is laughing — except to the bank — at Alcor and other cryonics outfits. They seem to really believe this twaddle. They believe a disembodied head can bob in freezing fluid and later be reattached to a torso and come to life. This happens in dazzling fashion in “Re-Animator,” but I’ll bet my life (ha) this will not happen to any real person. Ever.  

What if it did? What then? “I don’t want to do it because it might work and I don’t want to come back as a carnival act,” cracked actor Walter Matthau. I’m with the guy who coached the Bad News Bears. What kind of zombie-ish life can a thawed corpse lead after decades levitating in faux amniotic fluids? Are they immortal, or can they die again? Now I’m thinking of another horror movie: “Dawn of the Dead.” 

Yet freezing a corpse and jumper-cabling it back to life will never occur, and never has. Cryonics boasts no success stories. There is no Lazarus in its impoverished narrative. Peddling unabashed pseudoscience, cryonics advocates, and especially those who sell it, are no better than psychics, mediums and tarot card hucksters, ethical, religious and legal issues be damned.   

And who knows what nefarious schemes cryonic patients have cooked up before they died. As with anything, there are surely some bad people swimming in those tanks. Like disgraced, sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein, who wanted to have his head and penis frozen after death so that he could “seed the human race with his DNA.” 

Ick. 

When I think what I would do if my life was extended cryonically, I first see a long, leisurely trip to France, one of the most gorgeously alive places I know. If friends, family and doggies were still living — remember, I could be floating in a tank for decades before scientists figure this thing out — I would reunite with them with big, stiff-limbed hugs (I also see extensive and excruciating physical therapy after years of immobility).

Everything would have changed. My nephews might be old men — older than me when I died — making for some acute interpersonal awkwardness. The whole thing sounds messy, difficult and expensive. And, fortunately, utterly hopeless.

And yet proponents have faith. Says Alcor company honcho Tanya Jones, “If we can prove this works, everybody will know about us.”

Sorry, Ms. Jones: brace for obscurity. 

Baseball legend Ted Williams’ head cryonically preserved … ew, no.

Dead heads

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

When I die, give me head.

Scratch that. What I mean is: put me in a head. Specifically as ashes, poured into a ceramic simulacrum of my noggin, mug and all, including hair and rockin’ Don Johnson stubble.

This active seeker of novel burial techniques has found a new one, the ultimate head trip. It’s an urn by the company Cremation Solutions and it’s as ambitious as it is ghoulish: 

“Customers send in a photo of their face, and the company scans it, creates a 3-D model and then 3-D-prints an 11-inch polymer head (with an optional wig) and mounts it on a hollowed-out marble base. Cost: from $600 to $2,600.”

In a grody Hannibal-esque touch, you pop off the crown of the fake head, rather like a cookie jar, and deposit the ashes inside the plaster brain pan, which is naturally empty, much like the brain pans of some people I know.  

“Death masks are so eighteenth century,” quips one reviewer of the disembodied domes, adding that they can “stand looking less lobotomized.”

Yes, that glassy, dead-eyed gaze begs improvement — sunglasses perhaps? — as does the wax-museum luster of the fake flesh. While these 3-D computer models may console mourners, they ick me out more than comfort me.  

I wonder how many times someone yelps and clutches his heart when he catches a glimpse of one of those mannequin-meets-Marie Antoinette heads in his home office. I could see myself, in a frightened start, backhanding a loved one’s waxy head, sending it flying in shards and puffs of ash, because it’s so unrelentingly eerie. (The facial expressions are all about serene neutrality. I see a glazed embalming job instead.) 

In vintage corporate-speak, Cremation Solutions pitches this bizarre selling point: “You will never again have to worry that you might forget what your loved one looked like when you invest in one of these custom made, very lifelike cremation urns.” 

Curious, considering that forgetting what your loved one looked like hasn’t been an issue since the invention of the photograph 200 years ago.

Who really wants to see a macabre doll head staring at the wall every time they enter the room — a startling bust that could be mistaken for a fancy penny bank, or a decapitated midget? According to Cremation Solutions owner Jeff Staab, demand is low. 

“They look so real that they actually creep people out,” Staab tells Newsweek, with impressive candor. “Most people write what a stupid idea they are. But we do sell ’em. There are some weird people out there who want Grandma’s head on the mantel, looking at them all the time.”  

Or Obama’s head. Puzzlingly (suspiciously?), the company uses a fake head of the 44th President as a sample urn, pissing off some and pleasing others.

Staab says the Obama noggin was a “practical joke … I get shit all the time, people saying how dare you have an urn made out of the president’s head,” he says. “But it wasn’t even my idea. I’d rather have a George Clooney head.” 

The Obama head a “practical joke”? Couldn’t you say the whole enterprise is exactly that?