Good Mourning by Elizabeth Meyer Page B

casket seemed crazy to me, especially for cremations, when the whole casket (with the body inside, of course) was burned in the incinerator. I had once asked Bill if Tony ever swapped out the pricey casket, cleaned it up, and put it back in the showroom—the families would never have known—but he swore it never happened. Bill said that Haitians sometimes throw stones on top of the casket after a funeral to crack it a bit, so that the funeral home can’t try to resell it, trivia I never got the chance to bring up at a party. As I took down the note for a bronze casket for Dr. Feelgood, I wondered if Tony really just thought that people who could afford the best should have exactly that—or if it was all about the money to him.
    After the meeting, I called every prop shop in the city looking for extra ways to turn our chapel into a space suitable for the party boy of honor. Within hours, a crew oftwenty people was hanging ornate drapery along the walls, and huge ceramic planters were placed around the room for the palm trees. Then it was time to make the guest list—­European royalty would be there, as well as A-list designers, famous musicians, and a whole stream of socialites, some of whom I’d met before, and others flying in from across the globe.
    Two days later, the palm trees were in place and our chapel looked more like Bungalow 8, which was, at the time anyway, the chicest hangout in the city. Total bill? $150,000. I tried to keep a straight face as I watched Bill give a few last-minute touches to Dr. Feelgood’s body. The family had requested that their brother be buried in his favorite outfit: a Snoopy T-shirt and a pair of neon-green sneakers. They also wanted him to be clutching a bottle of his favorite drink, which is where absinthe came in. I watched Bill delicately place the dead hands around the bottle. The funeral lived up to the hype—hundreds of people came, arriving in their Bentleys and Rolls-Royces. One woman even brought her white Maltese, and even though pets aren’t allowed in Crawford, Tony let a few things slide for a six-figure funeral. (She didn’t bother to have it on a leash, just walked in and let her four-legged friend mingle with the guests.) But I couldn’t shake the feeling that for as many people as there were in ­attendance—and the place was packed—it all felt a little empty. My fears were confirmed when I saw guests coming out of the bathroom with red noses. Suddenly it made sensewhy the family had asked if the upstairs bathroom had ­marble countertops.
    I was glad that we could accommodate Dr. Feelgood, a lover of women and booze and who knows what else, with a send-off that felt like him . But I thought about my friends—the ones getting a little too old for the club scene, the ones snorting coke at work to keep up with the Wall Street crowd—and I felt relieved that my life didn’t revolve around partying anymore. It was one thing to live up your youth at a club, drink in hand. It was another to die that way with gray hair, people getting high before the eulogy starts.
    I hated to say it, but it also made me think of my lifelong friend Ben: he had a habit of going out and going out hard . Besides Gaby and me, his best friends were trust-fund babies, club owners, or trust-fund-baby club owners. There was always a lot of music, a lot of booze, and a lot of money being thrown around. It scared me a little to see someone who had so much potential to make a difference in the world just party it all away. I’d gone through a party phase of my own, but I’d grown out of it. In some ways, my dad’s illness helped me mature faster than many of my friends. I knew that life wasn’t just about crazy get-togethers and dancing until the sun came up, that it could end any moment, even when you least expected it.
    At the end of the service, after the last of the guests had gotten back into the same fancy cars