Arranging Arrangements

Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined being in this predicament. In fact, the storyline’s so much better than anything my vivid writer’s imagination could have cooked up. But this isn’t fiction. Well, at least not in the literal (or literary) sense, anyway.
27 days after coming into contact with someone from Arnold’s family — a first cousin — for the very first time in my life, she wrote me a short note informing me that Arnold had died.
He had apparently been deceased for more than a week when the Des Plaines Police Department, responding to a call for a wellness check, entered his condo and found him already in the early stages of decomposition.
From all indications, Arnold was a loner. Lived alone, died alone.
According to my newfound first cousin (her mother is Arnold’s sister) — and to information I was able to gather prior to my first and only telephone conversation with him in 2002 — Arnold had been estranged from his family, his two siblings, at least three known children he fathered with three different women (one of them being my own mother) and other family members for at least the past three or four decades.
All I really knew about him was from occasional snippets my mother would mention and from first-hand accounts I was given by relatives and family acquaintances in the days prior to my speaking to Arnold all those years ago.
I was told by one woman, who had worked for years for the family scrap metal business, that Arnold ate breakfast at the same diner (on Cicero or Pulaski, if memory serves) every day, walked with a cane and traded in his car for a new one every year.
Another relative said he had been in and out of mental institutions as a result of his time in the army during the Viet Nam War (though my mother claims, despite my hearing stories to the contrary, he never saw active duty).
But now — today — Arnold is no more. At least not in any earthly presence.
His body was found at his condo (which according to information I found was purchased on June 20th 2017 — my birthday, incidentally) on August 10th and taken to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office on West Harrison Street in Chicago and placed in the care of Rebeca Perrone, the Indigent Coordinator who looks after the deceased who are either unclaimed or unidentified. Articles that have appeared in the local Chicago press refer to Ms. Perrone as the “Social Worker for the Dead.”
Typically, remains are kept at the county morgue for 30 days and, if they go unclaimed, are buried in a common “pauper’s” grave.
From my initial correspondence with my cousin, she made it clear that no one from Arnold’s family would be willing to make funeral arrangements or assume any costs involved with his burial.
While I never knew this man (though there was never a day in my life when he didn’t momentarily pop into my thoughts), I felt almost immediately compelled to take action to insure he would get a proper burial.
On the very Saturday evening my cousin informed me of Arnold’s passing, I reached out to an old friend who worked as a funeral director for the Cremation Society of Illinois. In fact, I had contacted her on Facebook hours before we were informed of Arnold’s whereabouts while she was visiting her mother at Evanston Hospital. She was both kind enough to offer her advice and assistance and to walk down to the hospital morgue to see if by some chance Arnold may have been there.
Hours later, my friend informed me of his being at the county medical examiner’s office in addition to providing some information about the circumstances of his body being found at his place of residence in Des Plaines.
The next day, I received an email from Lloyd Mandel, a well-known Jewish funeral director, who offered his services and condolences.
It turns out that Arnold’s uncle, Izzy Dick (Arnold’s mother’s youngest brother), the longest serving funeral director in the state of Illinois, worked with Mandel for years and he felt honor-bound to extend a “generous discount” due to the fact that Arnold was Izzy’s nephew.
While ideally, a proper Jewish burial would have desired, I wasn’t prepared to pay the nearly 3,000-dollar fee he was asking; and those were just the basic costs that included, amongst other services, transportation of the casket to the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Cemetery in Elwood, Illinois, some 50 miles southwest of Chicago, where Arnold was entitled to a free burial as a veteran of the United States Army.
My friend also extended a generous offer should it be decided that cremation would be an option (not a traditional one for those of the Jewish faith but becoming increasingly more common). My friend’s fees would come in less than 2,000 dollars, and despite my launching a new business and my two older children both starting university this autumn, I felt that this was best and most prudent option.
My cousin and her mother were willing to fill in and sign the required paperwork to have my friend transfer Arnold’s remains to her care for cremation and had the documents notarized and returned in a matter of days.
A few days later, my cousin sent me information she found online about another company who advertised a “no-frills” cremation that was a third of the price I was going to pay my friend. So, I gave them a call and set things in motion one more time.
My cousin informed me in a message I received late last night that she and her mother would complete the new forms and have them notarized in short order and returned to the cremation service.
Meanwhile, I have been in touch with Rebeca Perrone at the medical examiner’s office who kindly extended the claim date for Arnold’s remains until September 20th — a welcomed retrieve that will allow me time to tie up my other pending matters such as launching my new barbershop on the 15th, getting my kids’ university matriculation paid and putting the finishing touches on my 2019 bow tie collection that I will be going to England on the 27th to finalize.
My decision to take on the responsibility of arranging Arnold’s final arrangements hasn’t been a popular one with family and friends, whose unwavering assertions that “I don’t owe Arnold anything” and “he wouldn’t do it for you” were taken at face value but ineffective in changing my mind.
“Owing him nothing” is relative if in fact that I feel I don’t owe him my life. Which, in a peculiar but justifiable way, I feel I do. And whether or not he would do it for me is purely beside the point.
In the end, my decision to see that Arnold’s earthly remains are transitioned with dignity is purely a human one. One that I feel right about. One that, as a Jew, as the biological son of a Jew, and as a man brought up with the identity, traditions and values of a contemporary Jew, I feel morally obligated to carry out.
