My best friend picked out my tombstone

Dealing with some family issues this week. So I thought I would reprint a piece I wrote for my Medium publication Words Mean Things. It’s not about job hunting. But it has some things to say about life, the universe, and everything. I hope you enjoy.

No one knows what happens when we die.

What I do know for certain is that my best friend has already chosen my tombstone.

Whether that is comforting or not — the jury is still out.

Paul and I have been friends since we were 5 years old. That’s half a century (!) now. We grew up together in a small southwestern Wisconsin town, and have remained close to this day, through everything. So I guess it makes sense that we would be considering, well, the end of things.

And Paul has always been interested in genealogy, including cemeteries. He made an exhaustively complex family tree on Ancestry.com for my mother’s family, and even presented my mother with a custom bound volume of the information he gathered. He’s thoughtful like that.

But this story starts many years ago. I went to Madison West High School, and kitty-corner from West High is the picturesque Forest Hills Cemetery. At one corner of the West High campus, across from the cemetery, was a small monument store. Outside the store, in the little hardscrabble side yard, several sample tombstones were displayed. One of those tombstones, low-slung in polished brown granite, had the name “JASMER” carved on it.

Many years ago — how many, I’m not sure; these things tend to get hazy with time — we were driving on Regent Street past the monument store. And Paul saw the “JASMER” tombstone. He had a brainstorm.

“When you go,” he said, “I’m going to buy that one for you. I will just get some stick-on letters that say ‘Adam’ above and ‘Blust’ below JASMER. That will keep the cost down. Plus it’s a sample, so I’m sure there will be a discount from that, too.”

“But my name isn’t Jasmer,” I protested weakly.

“Well you will be gone. And I will just tell everyone that ‘Jasmer’ is what you preferred to be called,” he said. “I can make them believe that.”

“I don’t even want a tombstone,” I said. “I don’t want to be buried at all. I want to be cremated!”

“Well, you won’t be around, will you,” he said, smiling. “At that point, what I want will be what matters, won’t it?”

I flashed briefly to the scene in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” where Joan Crawford says to Bette Davis, “You wouldn’t be able to do these awful things to me if I weren’t still in this chair.”

“But ya are, Blanche! Ya are in that chair!” says Bette.

Of course, in case it wasn’t clear, this isn’t a story about being held hostage by my best friend. It was all in fun. (Well, he has threatened to put those colored dot stickers on the bottom of furniture he wants to take from my place when the end comes, so maybe I still need to keep an eye on him.)

I countered that he would probably go to the monument store under cover of darkness before making an offer on the tombstone, hitting it with a chisel so there would be a crack on it. And he would tell the store management, “Well of course I’m not going to pay full price for this. It’s damaged!”

Paul and I would sometimes talk about how long we had been friends. Lifelong friends are a rare commodity. He always contended that if I didn’t go first — that being his main plan — we would probably end up in a sort of modern-day Jefferson/Adams situation, dying within hours of each other, and him exclaiming “Blust still survives!” as he went to his reward.

For me, I was always partial to Oscar Wilde’s reported last words: “Either these drapes go, or I do!”

So the JASMER tombstone became a running joke between us. A joke that continued to get funnier, because as the years went by, the monument store apparently thought the plain brown granite stone was too plain to really showcase their talents. They began little by little to add embellishments to the engraving — a bird here, a curlicue there — until eventually there was a full-blown woodland scene surrounding my new name, complete with deer scampering through the grass.

A bit too showy for my taste. And it didn’t look like any part of my actual name would even fit on the stone now, with all that extra nonsense on it. But again, I was going to be dead. So maybe I shouldn’t worry that much about it.

A few years ago, the tombstone came up again in conversation. And I had the idea to call the monument store and ask about JASMER. I spoke to a very nice woman on the phone. I didn’t tell her the whole story, I just said that I had noticed the stone outside their store, and I wondered how much it would cost, considering that it was a “floor model.”

I could tell that she was a bit flummoxed by this inquiry. This was not the usual phone call to her establishment. For a moment I wondered if she would angrily hang up, or dial 911 on another phone while keeping me on the line, like I was some kind of Batman villain planning a weird staged crime scene.

So she hesitated a bit, not sure how to respond. Eventually she said that she wasn’t sure how much JASMER would cost, but that it would not include a discount just because it was a sample. Full price.

I wanted to protest this, like I thought Paul would have. But I didn’t. I thanked her and got off the line before she could order the SWAT team to my location.

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Thing is, this isn’t the only death-related caper that Paul and I have been involved in. A few years before my mother died, her boyfriend George had himself died of cancer. His family gave her some of his ashes. She had scattered some of them on the hill in front of her house out in the country between Spring Green and Dodgeville, a place George had loved. But the rest was in a brown blown-glass bottle topped with a cork that my mother kept in the closet of the guest bedroom in her apartment in Madison, where she moved when she became too frail to manage on her own.

After my mother died, we found the bottle in the closet. My mother’s sweet wonderful friend Jean had helpfully affixed a yellow Post-it note to the bottle, reading: “George’s ashes — Careful!”

Jean said that she was worried that we would find the glass bottle on the closet’s high shelf at some point, and not knowing its contents, we might accidentally knock it off and spill George all over the bedroom carpet.

That didn’t happen. Thanks, Jean. We love you. ❤️

Paul and I discussed what to do with George’s ashes. I didn’t feel right keeping them myself, and some were already scattered on Mom’s property; the house had been sold.

Paul suggested that we scatter George’s ashes in the graveyard of the Unity Chapel, the small church designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his family near my mother’s house in Spring Green. This seemed perfect, since it was a beautiful place, it was a cemetery, and it had historical significance. A trifecta, as far as Paul was concerned.

I’m absolutely sure if we had tried to get permission to do this, we would have been denied. So we didn’t ask anyone. We just drove there, parked along the road, and then, scanning the area for anyone who might rat us out for this unauthorized ash scattering, we found a shady spot and left George to his rest.

That’s what friends are for, after all.

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CODA: Sadly, the monument store by West High is now closed — the company was sold in August 2020. The fate of JASMER, in all its strange glory, is unknown. I would like to think that some lucky family with the surname Jasmer and a patriarch who loved pastoral woods got an amazing deal on it, despite what the woman on the phone said.

I was planning to use a photo of the tombstone to illustrate this story, but I had to settle for a stock image altered with the name. I wonder what Paul is planning as a replacement.