Final Resting Places

That five other people, over the past seven years,

Had taken up residence in your grave

Hardly fazed you an iota.

What difference could it make to you?

After all, being dead is, if anything,

Unequivocal, unambiguously irrefragable, irrefutably final.

On the other hand,

Each of them, not to mention you,

Had suffered a rude and unexpected exhumation,

Due to an illegal loophole, an escape clause, so to speak, if you will,

By which the directors of Methuselah's Orthodox Mortuary

Took it, as their ethical and fiduciary responsibility,

To milk your plot (and the other 1149) to its maximum efficiency,

Every square and cubic inch of space

In their limited cemetery, behind their funeral parlor,

By digging you up, then the other five, subsequently,

So as to make the coveted space available to the next occupant,

A sacred, hallowed place for families of the deceased

To come pay tribute, lay plastic wreaths, Magen Davids, plant flags,

Little realizing that their whispers, tears, memories

Were being misappropriated, wasted on...

On whomever might be the most current resident,

Even as Methuselah's was already licking its chops,

Plotting to do another midnight grave robbery,

Showing the recently vacated and resodded piece of earth

To the next grieving next of kin and kith

Willing to fork over the steep fees for burial services and upkeep.

One Sunday, as an unwitting rabbi, reciting Kaddish, at "your" plot,

Over the casket of the fifth dead dupe in seven years,

Was distracted from his solemn duties

(Witnessed by two hundred sobbing mourners),

By the intrusion of the undertaker's three mangy part-Labradors,

Who dropped, at the black-robed rabbi's feet

(As if they were balls they hoped he'd pick up and throw,

So that they could race after and retrieve them),

A badly fractured skull, an intact pelvis, and a complete ribcage,

Causing the rabbi to choke, gasp, go silent, in mid-prayer,

Those gathered to heave a collective scream of horror,

The overalled workman to lose control of the ratchet mechanism,

Allowing the casket of the newest member of this revolving-door site

To plunge, with a deadening thud, six feet,

Land on its side, break open, spill its precious cargo.

The upshot was as perfunctory as perfunctory gets, these days.

Local, county, state, federal officials were notified.

Newspapers, radio, TV, the Internet got wind of the monstrous scam,

With its inherently ghoulish and grotesque implications,

Its tragic, greedy travesty against all things sacred,

Which humankind holds too dear to brook defilement and desecration.

The scurrilous perpetrators at Methuselah's Orthodox, the minyan of them,

Got their YHWH-ordained due comeuppance

And were processed into chopped liver, by late-night-talk-show comics.

When all was said and done and said again, into the ground,

The tallying up and reallocation of the decomposed corpses,

Stacked in mounds not unlike the Gizan pyramids, only taller,

Amounted to a gross and heinous 6514 indisposed souls,

Including you, who, unlike those sadly never-identified souls,

Ended up back in your intended resting hole.

Though you've not given it much thought — your exhumation, that is —

You do have to admit to yourself, these days,

That you do seem, finally, to be feeling a revitalizing peace of mind.

07/10/09