Till Death Do Us

THE TERRIBLE MIX-UP (And encouragement from an unexpected source)

At this juncture, dear reader, you may be curious about the tragic event of just a few months earlier – every mortician's worst nightmare, now immortalized in Stiffs family history as The Terrible Mix Up — in which the body of Moses del Guardia, a much-loved prominent citizen and former mayor of Gravesend, was accidentally mixed up with the remains of Theodore "Trenchcoat" Tompkins, an equally well-known citizen, though singularly infamous for his penchant of going about town wearing nothing but a dirty old trench coat, which he would fling open wherever and whenever impulse, or the call of nature, prompted.

To the enormous dismay of the Stiffs family, the incident garnered a full week of front-page-headline attention in the Gravesend Inquisitor, the local newspaper owned by none of than Egon Von Titus Barr-Cadwell. Sadly, the family's protests that the disproportionate amount of negative publicity was entirely self-serving, given the newspaper publisher's own entry into the business of undertaking, went completely unheeded.

And now, let us return to our story.

Watching his father sort and resort the jumble of papers on his desk without making any apparent headway, Phineas felt the mixture of anxiety and sadness that any son would feel when witnessing a long-admired patriarch in a state of self-doubt and duress. For so much of Phineas's life, Seymour had been the Stiff family cornerstone, a pillar of stability – always thorough, measured, consistent, and thoughtful. Now seeming harried and scattered, his father pulled a piece of vellum from the pile and placed it in front of Phineas. The letterhead said Mortuary Licensing Board in large black type.

Phineas read through the letter, which demanded that his father appear before the board for a hearing about The Mix Up, and further stating that unless Seymour could explain how the unfortunate incident had occurred, and demonstrate that provisions had been made to prevent such a mistake from reoccurring, the Mortuary Licensing Board would have no choice but to consider a suspension or even revocation of Seymour's mortuary license.

Stunned both by the severity of the warning, and what it implied for the future of Stiffs & Sons, Phineas looked into his father's darkly ringed eyes. "Suspension or even revocation?"

"How can they expect me to explain something that I myself still can't comprehend?" Seymour asked, sounding agonized as he leaned forward and planted his elbows on the desktop. "The bodies were tagged, Finny. You know that. Tagged about the big toe precisely to prevent such mix ups. How am I supposed to demonstrate that I've taken action to correct a situation that makes no sense to me? No sense at all?"

When Seymour and lowered his face into his hands, Phineas felt both profound worry and ire rise from within himself. Worry because he had never before seen his father exhibit such uncertainty and befuddlement. And ire because here was a man who'd sacrificed, slaved, and suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune on a scale few others could comprehend, beginning with the betrayal brought forth by his very own son. For, while Seymour had voiced approval when his son first announced that he would not follow tradition and enter the family mortuary business, Phineas could not help but suspect that deep inside his father felt a near-mortal wound. Then while still trying to cope with that calamity, came one even worse, when Seymour's brother Fillmore — Cousin Rudy's father and Phineas's uncle — inadvertently blew himself up while trying to build a crematorium of his own to compete with Von Titus-Barr Cadwell's discount entry into the funerary field. And still, dear reader, the catastrophes did not end. The third and most recent tragedy had come just this past year when, while attending the Venenum Institute of Forensics, Phineas had received a missive from his mother, Sophronia, declaring that she was leaving Seymour for a used roadster salesman named Clearance.

Merited or not, Seymour Stiffs blamed himself for all these tragedies. To Phineas's father, his son's decision not to continue the family tradition clearly reflected a failure in his own ability to raise the boy correctly. Likewise, Uncle Fillmore's explosive end might have been averted had Seymour had been more assertive in his belief in the hallowed tradition of entombment versus quick and ashy disposal by cremation. Finally, Sophronia's decision to take up with another man was an obvious indication of Seymour's own failure as a husband.