Today! Casey Basch Funeral!
THE STRANGEST FUNERAL THAT I’VE EVER BEEN TO WAS MY UNCLE GEORGE’S. My dad’s brother, he’d been sick most of his life. Smaller and weaker than the other kids, he was a magnet for ailments. By the time he was eighteen, the notches in his hospital bedpost represented jaundice, growth hormone deficiency, mononucleosis, hemophilia, hemorrhoids, chicken pox, six mole removals (all benign) and pink eye no less than two dozen times. Throw in an annual case of mild-to-severe influenza and asthma, too. He was also one of the first recorded cases of peanut allergy. COVID would have loved Uncle George.
At twenty-one years old, one of his kidneys failed. My grandfather was the donor. A year later, Uncle George was diagnosed with leukemia. Miraculously, he never rejected the kidney and beat the leukemia. However, at thirty, they found a tumor in his brain the size of a ruby red grapefruit. Two weeks after starting chemo, he developed shingles.
He died at thirty-six in a car accident. An ambulance ran him over.
I was only seven years old. I remember my mom and dad walking me up to the dark wood casket. Uncle George’s wife, Aunt Bonnie, was greeting people. I remember that her tears left tracks along her cheeks the way a bucket of water cut through the sand near the sand castles I built on the beach in South Carolina where our family vacationed. And I remember wondering then if Aunt Bonnie was made of sand. The casket scared me. Aunt Bonnie’s crying face scared me. The collective sadness in the room scared me.
My mom nudged me toward Aunt Bonnie. She leaned down and hugged me. I winced, the sound of her snorting sobs slamming into my eardrum. She pulled away but held onto my shoulders and at eye level with me said, “Oh, Andy, your Uncle George would be so happy that you are here.”
That sentence confounded me. Why would Uncle George be happy I was at his funeral? Way I figured it, the disappointment he was dead would’ve trumped any joy he had from knowing the guest list.
I’ve been to a lot of funerals since then, and it was the oddest one. Until I attended Casey Basch’s funeral thirty years later.
The marquee outside of the funeral home looked like it belonged outside an old movie house.
CASEY BASCH – FUNERAL TODAY!
The exclamation mark had to be a mistake. Maybe it was a prank—the work of teenagers out the night before? There was probably a church sign somewhere in town that read JESUS LOVES DICK. But then again, maybe the funeral director was just that excited about this particular funeral. After all, death is big money in the funeral-home business. And when it’s the funeral of a guy like Casey Basch, you know you’re going to have a top-of-the-line mourning with hundreds, if not thousands of people stopping by to pay their respects. Casey’s funeral was the kind of funeral that the professionals talk about at the National Funeral Directors Association International Convention & Expo. It was the funeral of their dreams. A funeral like Casey’s is what they call the Big Dance. Or so I assume.
The casket was made of oak locally sourced from a nearby Michigan tree farm—its brass handles gleamed. The coffin was nicer than any apartment I’d ever lived in. But he deserved it. Casey Basch deserved to have the best of everything before we dropped him in the ground to rot away—not that his casket would ever allow moisture to get through. It was hermetically sealed.
His wife, Emily, had purchased the most complete and expensive package offered. There was a leather-bound guest book for everyone to sign—hand assembled by a local Chicago artisan bookmaker who made his own paper and sourced the leather from a free-range cattle farm in nearby Wisconsin. A string trio played familiar, but unnamable arrangements. Mourners scrolled through interactive scrapbooks on large touchscreen monitors where hundreds of photos and videos, and newspaper and magazine clippings were organized in digital albums. Many of those same photos were compiled into a slideshow with wipes and dissolves transitioning between each image displayed on an enormous monitor positioned on the wall behind and above the casket—Casey and Emily at their wedding; Casey playing little league; Casey and his two young daughters; Casey and Barack Obama; Casey on the aft deck of a deep sea fishing boat holding up his sizable catch… The casket was made of oak locally sourced from a nearby Michigan tree farm—its brass handles gleamed. The coffin was nicer than any apartment I’d ever lived in. But he deserved it. Casey Basch deserved to have the best of everything before we dropped him in the ground to rot away—not that his casket would ever allow moisture to get through. It was hermetically sealed.
What Casey didn’t deserve was to have his casket remain open. Like I said, I’d been to plenty of funerals, and not once had I been to one with an open casket when the deceased died from a gunshot wound to the head. Granted, this was my first suicide funeral, but it seemed to me caskets come with lids for a reason. You don’t drive a convertible with the top down when it’s raining. The same principle applies here.
I had to imagine most of the money and attention to detail for Casey’s funeral went toward cleaning him up. Or piecing him back together. I saw what he looked like before the makeup and glue was applied. The mortician had done an impressive job considering the source material. Still, he looked like he was made out of Play-Doh.
It was an exercise in denial, which is fine, since denial is one of the stages of grief that the rest of us have to go through. Giving Casey a brave face was everyone’s way of putting on their own brave faces and denying that a man so wonderful could do something so horrible. As if by showing him off like that, we’d forget that he put a .38 in his mouth and blew his skull across the primary bath. That’d we’d forget that his wife and daughters found his body moments after they heard the pop of the gun. That we’d forget that Emily slipped on his blood and brains as she ran to her husband’s corpse slumped between the wall and the toilet like a sack of rotten potatoes, leaving a little of her own blood on the bathroom tile when she cracked her head against the floor.
Maybe they could all forget that. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t forget the sound of Emily’s brokenhearted wails into the phone when she called me just minutes after it happened. I couldn’t forget seeing Emily and her daughters sitting on the bathroom floor, hugging Casey’s body, covered in his blood sobbing uncontrollably but silently. I couldn’t forget seeing Emily’s bloody hair and thinking how romantic it was that hers and Casey’s blood had pooled together. One last moment of unity between the two.
More than just strange, the funeral was a farce. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Where are you going?” my fiancé Lindsay asked me.
“Outside. I need air.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“No thanks. A minute alone, please.”
She kissed me on the cheek and I fought my way through the crowds of people—friends, family, co-workers, politicians, TV anchors, and journalists—a salmon swimming upstream against his contemporaries. It was a beautiful summer day in Chicago. Days like this were often spent aboard Casey’s boat on Lake Michigan. I sat down on the curb next to the marquee and loosened my tie.
“Lindsay said you wanted to be alone. Me, too,” said Ali as she plopped down on the curb next to me. “Hell of a way to kill a Saturday.”
“Kill a Saturday. Nicely done.”
“Glad you think so. I tried that line with Chris. She didn’t think it was funny.”
“It’s not exactly wife-friendly humor.”
Ali pulled a silver flask from her oversized suit coat breast pocket. It was adorned with several Avengers stickers. “Sip?”
“Devin know you’re using his flask?” I asked before pouring the bourbon into my mouth.
“This is what happens when you have a five-year-old. I’m telling you, Andy, don’t leave anything unattended when kids are around. They’ll smack stickers on it faster and with more stealth than Seal Team 6.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t leave your flask lying around.”
“The kid likes to get into the dishwasher. I don’t know what to tell you.”
I handed the flask back to Ali. She took a drink.
“Casey Basch,” I said with disbelief.
“Casey Basch,” Ali echoed.
“Where once there were three, now there are two.”
“Three little monkeys jumping on the bed. One went nuts and blew off his fucking head.” Ali sat back proud of herself.
“You love those children’s songs.”
“It’s all Chris will let me play in the car. My metal and punk CDs have become my dirty secret again like when I was in junior high. Jesus, my wife has become my mother.”
“Maybe I’m still in shock over the whole thing because I’m not feeling much of anything right now. I should be devastated, you know? But Jesus, I just never saw this coming. Casey was the last guy on earth I’d peg for suicidal.”
“Me, too. It could also be that the circus going on inside is hardly the place for two people like us to mourn the passing of their best friend. Did you even know he had a gun?”
“No! I’m not even sure that it was his. Can you rent those things?”
“In Chicago? Probably.”
Ali took another sip from the flask before passing it to me. I took a long pull. “Goddammit, my head hurts,” I said. Headaches were a problem for me. Migraines, really. I’d been having them for years, since I graduated college, and they started getting worse around the time I proposed to Lindsay, about a year earlier. One psychologist I was seeing believed they were due to the stress I felt as a result of the absurd pressure I was straddled with to live up to my idea of success and the ideas of Lindsay, my father and, well, everyone. The shrink called them unrealistic goals. I’d get stomachaches, too. Maybe the shrink was right but she had yet to supply me with a way to relieve those pressures. So I had a psychiatrist to supply me with the right drugs, which allowed me to get through the day.
Ali reached for the flask again but I didn’t give it up. I fished a bottle of pills prescribed by my psychiatrist from my suit coat pocket, popped one in my mouth and washed it down with another swig of bourbon.
“You know who doesn’t get headaches anymore?” Ali asked.
“Casey Basch.”
“Casey Basch.”
The pain in my head dispersed. “I just don’t understand it. He was perfectly fine the day before. And I know that’s how these things go. But that last good day is usually preceded by stretches of terrible days and the reason the day before a suicide is such a good day is because the person has made the decision to kill himself.”
“Or herself.”
“Or herself. So once they resign to be free of their mortal coils, they’re finally in a good mood. But Casey never had terrible days. It’s like he just—I don’t know—lost his mind.”
“No, man.” Ali put her arm around my shoulder. “He didn’t lose his mind. He blew it out of his skull and all over the bathroom walls.”
“True. Shit. What do we do now?” I asked.
“Right now? We just sit here. We’ll deal with this shit once the circus of idiocy has wrapped up.”
