Grandma-Eats-Puppies

Dear reader, I’d like to share with you one of my latest encounters with Grandma-Eats-Puppies.

This weekend, I ventured to Staten Island to visit Grandma-Eats-Puppies. Over baked ziti and coffee (That is how we roll), Grandma and I somehow got to discussing one of my Grandmother’s favorite topics; her own imminent demise.

My Grandmother is not sick or anything. ‘Imminent’ is a relative term here; my Grandmother’s death, at least by her own estimation, has been “around the corner” for 15 years now.

Grandma took on the spirited, self-satisfied, will-to-power-is-a-will-to-plan voice of a 17-year-old coordinating the perfect “Spring Break” as she shared with me the price, size and location (“Right next to Grandpa!”) of her burial plot suggesting,  perhaps, that she might procure a plot for me next to for her.  

“Uh, no thanks,” I said.

“Why?” She asked seeming disappointed-on-the-verge-of-hurt which is, for her, only steps away from enraged-and-passive-aggressive. I rushed to make sure Grandma couldn’t take my answer personally and said: “I’m not getting buried.”

“Whattayou nuts?!?” My grandmother erupted. Apparently, my Grandma found my plans for my own post-mortem existence worrisome and anti-social.

“Why would I need to take up space when I’m dead?” I asked. “I don’t need a monument to myself, Grandma… I’m not a cave man or a megalomaniac or something.”

“Whattyamean, “Caveman?!?” A headstone is SO NICE! A tomb is NICE!”

I almost spit coffee onto my zitti. “A tomb?!?! Who are you? Fucking Lenin?”

“Whattyamean? What do The Beatles have to do with this? It’s just NICE that we all be TOGETHER!”

After explaining to Grandma that the ‘Lenin’ I made reference to was ‘Vladimir Lenin,’ the Russian Revolutionary infamous for the not-unimpressive-but-certainly-ironic opulence of his burial site and not ‘John Lennon’ the musician/songwriter famous for making The Beatles famous, I decide that the argument of “headstones and tombs are ‘NICE’ and therefore ‘unarguably preferable’” is air-tight as far as “Grandma-Logic” is concerned and that I have no choice but to relent.

“Grandma,” I said, “if you pay for it, I’ll lay in it.”

“Good,” She said with a triumphant smile. “Now where do we put your mother?”