By Tad Friend, The New YorkerHow much rest do the dead require? Late this spring, two experts were discussing burial theory over lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Mill Valley, California. The elder man, Ron Hast, had just visited Fernwood, a new “green” cemetery on the edge of town owned by the younger man, his friend and protege Tyler Cassity. Hast is an avuncular fixture in the funeral industry. In his earlier days in Los Angeles, in the sixties and seventies, he invented the Casket Airtray, which enables corpses to fly home in style, and he ran a service that provided mortuaries with embalmers and pallbearers, men known for their navy-blue suits and perfect manners and prepossessing youth. When Marilyn Monroe and Gary Cooper and Clark Gable died, Hast’s men helped compose them for their final closeups. Now in semiretirement, at sixty-six, Hast edits and publishes the magazines Mortuary Management and Funeral Monitor.
In 2003, Hast had urged Cassity to buy Fernwood, a run-down thirty-two-acre cemetery and mortuary in the heart of Marin County. Cassity, who shows promise of having an even bigger effect on the American way of death than his mentor, did just that, and then spent one and a half million dollars transforming the property. At Fernwood, the dead would go into the ground unembalmed and in shrouds or wooden coffins rather than in the standard metal caskets packed inside concrete burial vaults. A simple rock, at most, would serve as a headstone, and grave sites would be planted with native grasses or oak trees that would be fertilized by the bodies below. In theory, the land would be indistinguishable from the forest that adjoins it, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
Fernwood was not the first green burial facility in America–three others have opened in recent years–but it was intended to be the most ambitious, at once the prototype for a simple and virtuous method of burial that would force the fifteen-billion-dollar-a-year funeral industry to change its ways and a test of the revolutionary notion that cemeteries could conserve land. If Fernwood succeeded, Cassity hoped that environmental groups would buy large tracts of “buffer” land in conjunction with cemeterians like him, whose revenues from green burials on a portion of the property could be used to protect the rest.
Fernwood’s grand reopening isn’t until November, but dozens of people–from as far away as Oregon–have reserved “pre-need” plots, and the bodies or ashes of fifty-seven people are already in the ground. However, Hast had his doubts. When he dropped by the Fernwood office this spring, he was alarmed to see a mixed-breed dog named Owen slopping water out of a bowl, funeral directors kidding around, and one employee wearing what he termed “a hippie skirt.”
At the Japanese restaurant, Hast told Cassity that Fernwood was so laid back that he couldn’t, in good conscience, recommend it to his friends. As Cassity began to bridle, Hast made a placatory gesture and hurried on. (He and Cassity once had a heated argument about hearses–Hast insisted on traditional black Cadillacs; Cassity leased a black Volvo S.U.V. and silver and blue Priuses–and didn’t speak for months.) “Now you just listen, for once,” Hast said to Cassity. “In Australia last week, they started burying people in pastureland. They’re buried vertically, in a crouch.”
“We’d talked about that–” Cassity began.
“Yes, yes,” Hast interrupted. “The funeral directors I’ve mentioned it to all feel that the end of life is peaceful, which requires this”–he laid his chopsticks flat–”not that.” He popped them upright. “But crouching is something else entirely.”
Cassity agreed. “Crouching in the fetal position would be nice–you go out the way you came in,” he said. His voice is a velvety vibrato, like a leopard’s purr. “Actually,” he continued, “that could be a beautiful ceremony, like planting a seed. And because it would be less land use it gives us a two-thousand-dollar option.” Within weeks, Cassity had commissioned papier-mache shrouds in the shape of seedpods for crouching burial.
At thirty-five, Tyler Cassity is already renowned in the world of “death care,” as the industry styles itself, for having transformed Hollywood Memorial Park, a bankrupt, tumbledown, sixty-two-acre cemetery where the graves of Cecil B. De Mille, Mel Blanc, and Douglas Fairbanks were covered with weeds, into the gleaming showpiece known as Hollywood Forever. Cassity and his family, which has built a death-based empire comprising five cemeteries and two pre-need insurance companies, bought the property in 1998 for three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. He spent two million dollars making it presentable. Then, he threw parties and screened films on the mausoleum wall and turned the cemetery into a kind of city commons. In 1997, the cemetery’s revenues were sixteen thousand dollars; this year, they will exceed nine million.
Yet Cassity is acclaimed as more than just a restoration artist. If there is a radical memorialization idea out there, Cassity conceived it, has adopted it, or has already discarded it. (His notion of offering DNA samples of the dead, illuminated in a globe “like a drop of semen,” as he put it to me, found only three takers.) Cassity’s most influential innovation so far has been LifeStories, A&E-style video biographies of the deceased that are shown at the memorial service and are available in perpetuity on the Forever Web site.
Cassity, who resembles Robert Downey, Jr., stands out among his colleagues both for his delicacy and for his recklessness. He’s a little like the stranger in a Western who rides into town just before the trouble starts. When he began renovating Fernwood last year, he had two partners: Dr. Billy Campbell, who opened the country’s first green burial facility, in South Carolina, in 1998, and Joe Sehee, Cassity’s longtime media consultant. But, by the time of the lunch with Ron Hast, neither one was speaking to him. There had been an ugly rupture, accusations of bad faith, lawyers. And yet his former collaborators missed him. “Tyler is handsome and wealthy and intelligent and compassionate–he’s like being around a young J.F.K.,” Sehee told me. “I wouldn’t want anyone to go through what I did, but I don’t know if I’d have done anything differently.”
The challenge for cemeterians is to attract live patrons; after the so-called “season of death”–the three months following a burial–the average grave receives only two visits. Without visitors, a cemetery’s cold geometry can suggest that death really is the end. This depresses sales. That is why Ron Hast told Cassity that he envisioned the crouching-burial site as a “romantic” spot: “There would be a rail fence you’d lean against with a name burned into the rails–John Jones–nothing about death, all about life.” And, Hast added, “There’d be cows grazing.”
“What do you think about the manure?” Cassity asked.
Hast squinted as he considered it. “No problem,” he said at last. “A big heap of manure, it’s natural.”
“Good,” Cassity said. “Because we’re going to have sheep.”
After lunch, Cassity and Hast returned to Fernwood and sat in the sun-flooded chapel, which Cassity calls the Gathering Room. They were awaiting Richard Jongordon, who wanted to talk about green burial. Jongordon was another pioneer: in 1973, he started the Northern California chapter of the Neptune Society, the low-cost direct-cremation outfit that helped drive up the cremation rate in California from about five per cent at the time to fifty-one per cent today (the national average is thirty per cent). The motivations of those who choose direct cremation are complex–thrift, guilt about taking up any further space on earth, and a wish to be erased in a purifying fire–and although funeral directors sought to dismiss it as a squalid “bake and shake,” it was the first serious challenge to the routines of modern death care.
Jongordon, a burly, affable man, arrived and settled into a chair. “I felt I was changing society,” he said. “Because everyone was moving around so much, there was no longer a place where families wanted to be buried, generation after generation, and so we helped them out, a real benefit to people at two hundred and fifty-five dollars and no fuss.” Then he explained about the lawsuits–the heaps of ashes piling up in the California hills; the families and their excitability about where, exactly, their relatives’ remains were–that drove him from the business. He sighed. “But, anyway, here we are today with all this pre-selling, and I think it’s wrong. It shouldn’t just be all set so someone carts the body away in a van and that’s it.”
“Is that why you’re here?” Cassity asked. “Guilt?” Jongordon shrugged, and Cassity nodded. He listens with the absorption of a therapist, and he is particularly curious about what motivates people to prefer one method of disposal over another. It appears that his deeper project, his emerging life’s work, is to codify a new religion of departure–one that encompasses the struggle between the wish to become a meadow and the belief that nothing, not even a meadow, matters to the dead. Cassity has approved Wiccan and Goth funerals and a pre-need request for a monument in the shape of a giant prehistoric rat, and he acceded to the wishes of a man who asked, when his time came, to be rolled up in a shroud as if he were a joint.
Jongordon said that he’d just invested in a funeral home and burial ground in Colton, east of Los Angeles. “What I’d like to do,” he said, “is take five acres, plant fruit trees, do direct burial, and put a wall around it with the names on it.” The cost of the average American funeral and burial can exceed ten thousand dollars, but Jongordon said that he planned to charge only about fifteen hundred dollars for a “simple burial and wooden box.”
“Or a shroud? The way the Jews do it?” Cassity suggested.
“No shroud; a box,” Jongordon said. “It’s an emotional factor. The box looks better going in.”
“And what about pets?” Ron Hast interjected.
“Nothing wrong with that,” Jongordon said. “When the pet dies, you lower it down in a little box on top of the master’s box.”
“You don’t euthanize the pet at the master’s death?” Hast asked, frowning.
“Personally, my wife would be unhappy,” Jongordon said. “She loves our dog.”
“And you, Richard?” Cassity said. “What do you want done with you?”
“I don’t even care,” Jongordon said. “Take me to the dump.”
In death, our bodies, never entirely reliable to begin with, disobey us completely. Or, perhaps more accurately, they disobey those whom we leave behind. As Mary Roach terms the stages of repulsiveness in “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers,” first comes “fresh” (the skin sloughs off the body in sheets); then “bloat” (the body cavity swells with gas generated by bacteria); and, finally, “putrefaction and decay” (the organs liquefy; the brain bubbles out of the mouth and the ears). The collapse of our physical housing in death has long impelled us to construct substitutes, out of sturdier material. Many of the ancient world’s wonders–the Ming Tombs, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal–were attempts to grandly preserve the body or, at least, the memory of its former inhabitant. The most expensive quarters in a modern American cemetery are private mausoleums that offer exclusivity, proximity to water, and a view–attractions that encourage the belief that the dead can still, in some manner, appreciate their surroundings. The Corinthian metal burial vault, for instance, is advertised as being “built to withstand whatever time and nature can deliver. . . . You’ll have the comfort of knowing your loved one will truly rest in peace.”
Embalming, which is now primarily an American habit, forestalls putrefaction for about a week. It came into use during the Civil War, as a way to preserve dead soldiers for shipment home (at thirty dollars for an enlisted man and eighty for an officer); it gained wider acceptance when at least a million people viewed Abraham Lincoln’s embalmed body as his funeral train proceeded from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Illinois.
A turning point for funeral directors occurred in 1926, when the silent-film star Rudolph Valentino died unexpectedly at thirty-one, while in New York on a publicity tour. Frank E. Campbell, a local mortician, hired mourners, and a crowd stormed his funeral home, crying out to see the actor’s preserved body. By then, funeral directors were recognized as adepts who could compose a corpse for the “final look,” also known as the “memory picture.” The trocar, the sharpened rod that morticians use to pierce the body cavity and begin the embalming process, had become a kind of wizard’s staff.
Green-burial proponents hold that our bodies don’t disobey us in death so much as they obey the dictates of time and nature. In this view, in which embalming is seen as ridiculous, you don’t really need funeral directors. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that most of the funeral directors and cemeterians I spoke with dismissed green burial as a niche product that’s fine for California but not for anyplace normal. “There is something very sacred and tranquil about fields of stone, about Arlington or Normandy,” Bob Biggins, the president-elect of the National Funeral Directors Association, told me.
Tyler Cassity is an impresario of the drama of daily life. At a staff meeting one May morning in Hollywood Forever’s office, a former Masonic Lodge, he explained to his employees that his vice-president and close friend, Andy Martinez, had resigned. “We had a personal falling out about jazz which caused me to lose my temper,” Cassity said cryptically, “and when I lose my temper it’s very destructive.” He bowed his head in contrition. His assistant, Samantha Tibbs, has quit six times, and he likes hiring former sex workers and down-on-their-luck porn stars. “The way it works,” Cassity told me, “is I have a place, I put people in it, and then I tweak and modify, seeing how people respond. It’s very much like a zoo or a terrarium.”
On another morning that week, Cassity strolled through Hollywood Forever’s Russian section, glossing the graves: “Cancer”; “Kidnapping”; “Private plane.” He drained a Diet Rockstar energy drink; the previous evening, at a Russian bath, he had drunk half a bottle of Absolut vodka and been beaten with eucalyptus branches and, at some point, forgotten where he left his car. Cassity often misplaces his car or his keys or his cell phone. Though he is worth about fifteen million dollars, his wallet, too, often slips away.
Cassity sees himself as the dead’s envoy. (He has twice, in a parking lot and on a tennis court, felt peculiarly agitated, made inquiries, and learned that Indian burial grounds lay beneath.) And he carries a torch for his own doom. He drives erratically, with his knees, while on his cell phone; smokes a pack of Camel Lights a day; forgets to take his Zoloft; passes out in the Jacuzzi. The little finger on his right hand is curled up from a misadventure chopping ice for margaritas with a hatchet. “It’s wonderful–a drink holder, a lighter holder, and I don’t spill as much,” he told me, holding his pinkie aloft as if it were a gizmo from Sharper Image. He often broods over Valentino’s crypt, one of Hollywood Forever’s leading attractions (Valentino’s body went by train to Hollywood, attracting Lincolnesque throngs en route). “People who die young, like Valentino, have overflow crowds,” Cassity said. “If you win longevity, no one attends your funeral.”
In front of Cassity, abutting the southern edge of the property, was Paramount Pictures Studio. Behind him, high on the hill, framed by the cemetery’s front gates, was the “Hollywood” sign. Occasionally, the funerals at Hollywood Forever are studio productions, staged for the HBO funeral-home drama, “Six Feet Under.” Cassity is a consultant for the show, and has provided it with story lines from his own experience, from Buddhist funerals to blood spewing from the embalming-room drains. When Cassity told the show’s writers about his new cemetery in Marin, they decided that when the main character, Nate, died, at the end of this, the final season, he would receive a green burial. “Tyler has affected the tone of the show, more than anything else,” Alan Ball, the creator of “Six Feet Under,” said. “There’s this amalgamation of sadness and loss and regret, the hopefulness on top of that, his soulfulness, his soft voice. Everybody in the writers’ room has a huge crush on him: men, women, gay, straight–after he comes in we all go, ‘Mmm!’ ”
Hollywood Forever is an idyllic panorama of mowed grass and white roses, cypress and olive and palm trees, and four types of jasmine, whose perfume evoked all the mournful promise of the City of Angels. Peacocks, a symbol of immortality, strutted about the grounds. A black Rolls-Royce hearse hulked in the shade. None of those plant or animal or automotive species are indigenous in the way that the lube shops and homeless people just outside the walls are, and Cassity said, “It’s a reproduction that becomes an original. It’s a reproduction of a movie version of L.A., but people come here to see what the city is like.”
Cassity borrowed the tenor of his simulated originality from Hubert Eaton, the founder of Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, in nearby Glendale. Beginning in 1917, Eaton created the modern memorial park, with grave markers that lay flush with the grass–permitting unhindered vistas and easy maintenance–and filled it with copies of famous art works that he had modified and improved. He had Leonardo’s “Last Supper” done up in fade-proof stained glass, and he added to his replica of a sombre Buckinghamshire church an optimistic fillip: singing canaries. In the nineteen-fifties, Forest Lawn was one of California’s top five tourist attractions.
“Eaton’s vision is very ‘Ten Commandments,’ ” Cassity observed on a recent visit to Forest Lawn. “The creators of the film industry were doing exactly this at the same time.” Cassity admired how Eaton had placed statues of two moppets and a dog near a nude sculpture of the Three Graces. “If you want to attract people, get kids and a dog,” he said. “And the pornographic threesome is another crowd-pleaser. Like Cecil B. De Mille, Eaton understood that you could show nudity if you’re doing something pious.”
Hollywood Forever’s reliance on the lure of stardom exceeds even Forest Lawn’s. Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone recently chose it as their final resting place (though Johnny’s wife is still holding on to his ashes), and the sight of Johnny’s blackened-bronze statue banging out a power chord helped persuade others to buy fifty-thousand-dollar plots in the nearby Garden of the Legends. (It also persuaded a conservative Filipino-American family to move their plot across the lake.) Ramone’s memorial is off the newly christened Nelson Eddy Drive; Eddy’s fan club paid thirty thousand dollars for the naming rights. “Selling streets was my brother’s idea,” Cassity said, referring to his older brother, Brent, the C.E.O. of the family business. “And I thought it was stupid. Now I just wish we had charged more–turns out everyone wants a street.” Celebrities are a cemetery’s anchor tenants; they bolster, by their continuing fame, the hope of an eternal life. Early on, Cassity sought to take Jim Morrison off the hands of the Pere-Lachaise cemetery, in Paris. That effort failed, but he did acquire the ashes of Ann Sheridan, who starred opposite Ronald Reagan in “Kings Row.”
It was never Cassity’s intent simply to refurbish cemeteries. In a talk at a 1997 International Cemetery and Funeral Association conference, he and his technology chief, Jay Boileau, startled the audience by announcing that they were going to turn an outmoded industry upside down. “We want to be the Microsoft of cemeteries, not the hardware of stone but the software of memory,” Cassity said. Boileau free-associated about the value of creating an archive of memories in outer space, because “I’d like to have alien races be able to come along and see what we did.”
Cassity seems to relish gazing out into a sea of bewildered faces. At one point, after I had asked to see some of his speeches, he gathered a stack of file cards and then accidentally left them on the roof of his assistant’s car as they drove off. Later, I saw a few cards by the curb, and we gathered the rain-soaked talking points that remained: “Television + Film–Modern Cathedrals”; “Cemetery–a library of bodies catalogued by name and date.” Cassity declined to arrange the cards more than wind and rain and chance already had: “Much better this way, I think. Don’t you?”
As a boy in Springfield, Missouri, James Tyler Cassity grew up in a family from central casting–charismatic, with gleaming teeth, ideally American. Tyler’s parents, Doug and Rhonda, were born-again Baptists, but one of his forebears had been a young Chinese girl and another a Cherokee. “I’m assuming they were both raped,” he said.
At the age of three, Cassity was given a duckling for Easter. “It wasn’t behaving,” he said, “so at one point I was trying to catch it and I closed its neck in the door.” After the accidental beheading, he said, “I began petting it, seeming not at all upset, as it was now behaving.” When Brent began taking violin lessons, Tyler listened to the screeching for three days, and then grabbed the violin and smashed it over Brent’s head. The family tells these stories indulgently.
Tyler’s mother made a career of buying ever-larger houses, refurbishing them, and flipping them. Her husband made his money in real estate, and was a millionaire before he was thirty. Later, he would expand into pre-need funeral insurance. Bill Obrock, a childhood friend of Cassity’s, told me, “Tyler lives in the shadow of his father’s ability to turn everything he touches into gold.” Cassity said, “I believe in the Oedipus complex, and my sense of the family was three men competing for the love of the beautiful woman on the pedestal, my mother.”
As a child, Tyler often hid a running tape recorder in a room to learn what the adults were saying. When he was thirteen, he found a tape he’d made two years earlier of his grandmother Jeannie, who had since died, laughing and smoking and chatting with his mother. He ran down to the breakfast table with his big idea. As Doug Cassity recalls, “Tyler played the tape and said, ‘You guys sell stuff that’s worthless–insurance policies for six to ten thousand dollars that cover a piece of ground and a stone. This three-minute cassette is worth more than that.’ I was just trying to make money, and he was already trying to revolutionize death.”
In high school, Tyler was an All Division defensive end with no great interest in football or the girls who came with it. At sixteen, tormented by a forbidden crush on his best friend, he tried to kill himself by swallowing all sixty pills in the family medicine cabinet. When he was a freshman at Columbia University, he came out. His mother was devastated; his father was bewildered. “I’m a farm boy from southwest Missouri, and I had looked at gayness as a choice, because that’s what my religion said,” Doug Cassity told me. He immersed himself in medical and psychological studies, “and it became obvious that it wasn’t a religious or moral issue.”
“It had a big effect on my family,” Tyler said quietly. “My parents changed from being Baptist to being spiritual.”
After majoring in English at Columbia, and briefly pursuing a dream of becoming a famous novelist–he wrote a number of short stories about mortuaries–Cassity decided to go into the family business. He developed LifeStories at the family’s cemeteries, which Brent was running, and then he and Brent travelled around the country, trying to market the idea. The brothers had spectacular fights. (After a dispute about President Bush, they didn’t speak for six months.) “The best and worst thing about working with your brother,” Brent Cassity said, “is you can’t fire him.” It was after one of these fraught sibling trips, in 1997, that Tyler, on his way to the Los Angeles airport, stopped to look at Hollywood Memo-rial Park, which was for sale, and realized, suddenly, that he wasn’t a funeral-products salesman: he was a cemeterian.
Tyler Cassity’s tutor in green burial was Billy Campbell, the only physician in Westminster, South Carolina. Campbell, who is forty-nine, is a skinny pinwheel of world-changing ideas–he was a river guide before he became a doctor and an environmentalist. He wears rimless glasses and a gold hoop earring and has the self-reliant air of someone who lived alone in a solar-powered shack until he met his future wife, Kimberley, and she hinted that the wasteful, self-indulgent technology known as air-conditioning might not be all bad.
Campbell didn’t originate green burial; credit usually goes to Nicholas Albery, a psychotherapist who began orchestrating “woodland burials” in England in 1994. But, six years before that, Campbell had written an article in a regional magazine which espoused a broader vision. It recounted an epiphany he’d had when he read the book “Kuru Sorcery,” which described how the Fore people of New Guinea set aside sacred groves for the dead. Campbell suddenly realized that burying people in a simple way in the wilderness–America’s sacred groves–would be a means to preserve open space and to give families a stake in the land. Such burials would leave the environment relatively undisturbed; you wouldn’t be interring each body with three gallons of toxic formaldehyde and mercuric chloride, as well as concrete, steel, and tropical hardwoods, or using energy-intensive crematories that fill the air with particles.
In 1996, Campbell established Memorial Ecosystems, with a thirty-year goal of using green burial to save a million acres. Two years later–the year that Tyler Cassity took over Hollywood Memorial Park–the Campbells began conducting green burials at Ramsey Creek Preserve, a wooded thirty-three-acre plot they own just outside Westminster. They charge twenty-one hundred and fifty dollars for a burial–fifty dollars more if they hit a rock. In seven years, Campbell has buried just fifty people, only four of them his patients–a group who seem leery of the one-stop-shopping implications of his second career.
One Sunday in April, Campbell invited me to visit: “We’ve got a couple people who are hot right now”–close to death–”so you might get to see a burial.” The following afternoon, there was a service at Ramsey Creek for Anna Palmer, a seventy-eight-year-old former nurse. Palmer, who was dressed in a white sun hat and white gloves and tucked up with a patchwork quilt, lay in a cardboard box beside her freshly dug grave at the edge of a clearing.
A Baptist minister, David Blizzard, addressed the three dozen mourners. He looked around uncertainly, clasping a small Bible, and widened his stance. “This is kind of a unique funeral,” he began, “the first one I’ve had this way, out here in beautiful creation. It reminds us that where there is a creation, there is a creator. Thank God I didn’t descend from no monkey.” There were murmurs of “Amen,” and Campbell’s expression became studiously neutral.
Palmer’s family lowered her into the ground. Susan Grant, Palmer’s daughter, looked on calmly as Campbell eased a spadeful of reddish earth onto her mother’s head. (”It’s only an empty body,” he said later. “But still . . .”) After the Campbells had mounded the grave and planted it with wildflowers, they took me into the forest. “See all those ferns?” Billy said. “That’s Jah from California.”
Having observed that England’s early woodland burials had come to resemble tree farms–the trees were too ordered and close together–Campbell had spaced his graves, and saplings, according to what he called “an informed stochastacy,” a randomness intended to mimic nature’s clumpings. So his graveyard was almost indistinguishable from any other oak-and-pine forest. “In the woods, after a while,” he said, “all that’s left of a body is a dark spot and a few teeth.”
A Swedish biologist, Susanne Wiigh-Masak, told me that the process of decay was more complicated. “In the old days, we were torn apart by animals and spread around and became soil, but without using animals a whole body is too big to mulch–it starts to rot because of a lack of oxygen in the body,” she said. Wiigh-Masak’s solution, which the Swedish town of Jonkoping is going to try this fall, is to freeze-dry bodies in liquid nitrogen and then shatter them into what she calls a “pinkish, hygienic, dried organic powder” that will serve as compost to nurture a freshly planted shrub or tree. “By reducing the body to millimetre-size pieces, you make it not recognizably human, and you take away the fear of what happens to it,” Wiigh-Masak told me. “It makes death appealing. And so I feel very calm in knowing that I will be a rhododendron when I grow up.”
In January, 2003, Tyler Cassity and his media consultant, Joe Sehee, flew to South Carolina from Los Angeles to discuss green burial with Billy Campbell. Cassity says that he learned about Ramsey Creek on the Internet after having a flash of insight while swinging in his hammock and staring at an elm: cemeteries can save land.
Sehee says that pursuing Campbell was his idea. Sehee, a restless forty-four-year-old with a monkish scruff of hair, has had an eclectic career, with stints as a Jesuit lay minister, a Peabody Award-winning journalist (for “Dateline NBC”), an advocate for affordable housing, a creative consultant at I.B.M., and a rollerblading lounge singer. He began working with Cassity in 1999, and helped to generate numerous articles about Cassity and Hollywood Forever–”the most successful death-care media campaign in the last decade,” Sehee told me. In June, 2002, he and his wife bought a home in Joshua Tree, California, and the sere landscape there gave him the idea of holding desert retreats where people would learn to “befriend” death. He also began to look into ways to conserve the land. These projects, he said, led him to discover on the Internet what Billy Campbell had done and to suggest to Cassity that they should all meet.
When Cassity and Sehee arrived in South Carolina on that January weekend, they walked the frozen ground at Ramsey Creek and talked with the Campbells late into the night. Campbell and Sehee found that they were equally passionate about saving land, and that Sehee could recast Campbell’s knottier ideas into punchy slogans. “Joe can just about be me at this point,” Campbell said. He added, “I was immediately taken with Tyler, and Kimberley adored him.”
The three men decided to work together to create “memorial landscapes.” Campbell recalls, “I’d be chief environmental officer, Joe was going to do the marketing and putting people together, and Tyler was going to be finance and creativity and devil’s advocate.” They were confident that green-burial customers, who leave no mark in stone, would want to buy a LifeStory. (Though LifeStories had made Cassity famous in the industry, they had never actually made him or his family any money, because the Cassitys had had to repeatedly invest in the latest editing technology to distinguish their product from the sort of slideshow teen-agers could put together on their PCs.) The partners fanned out, talking to environmentalists and financiers, intending to do nothing less than revolutionize environmentalism and the funeral industry.
In March of 2003, when Ron Hast called Cassity and told him that Fernwood was for sale, it seemed to Cassity and the others to be the perfect place to test the green-burial idea. For one thing, Fernwood was already zoned as a cemetery. (Because of neighborhood resistance, only about three municipal cemeteries are approved each year, nationwide.) Not only is seventy per cent of Marin County already protected land; the county’s cremation rate is an astounding eighty per cent, and people who cremate are presumed to be open to other nontraditional forms of disposition. Marin is also a stronghold of hospice care and of home funerals, in which the deceased’s family or a “death midwife” washes and clothes the body. Furthermore, Jessica Mitford, who wrote “The American Way of Death,” the 1963 book that convinced many Americans that funeral directors are smooth-talking swindlers, had lived in nearby Oakland. “This is Mitford land around here,” Cassity told me. “We benefit from that suspicion.”
And so Cassity found another cemetery bargain–five years after buying Hollywood Forever, he paid four hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars for Fernwood. He eventually offered Campbell and Sehee ten per cent of the new cemetery’s revenues, explaining that he was putting up the money and taking the risk, and that Fernwood might not show a profit for several years; they both agreed that the proposal was basically fair, but they couldn’t get Cassity to finalize the details or focus on how their management company would be structured to handle future projects. (Cassity said that Sehee and Campbell were responsible for the delay.) Cassity also slept through or skipped meetings with potential investors, and at times spoke blithely about abandoning the partnership and returning to writing fiction, his first love.
As time passed, Campbell and Sehee–who moved from Joshua Tree to Marin to work on Fernwood–began to worry that, despite Cassity’s assurances, they would find themselves working for the Cassity family empire. And Cassity increasingly fretted that the others were trading on his wealth and renown. He was also annoyed by Campbell’s name for the partnership, Memeco, a truncation of Memorial Ecosystems. Memeco, Cassity wrote Sehee, sounded like a “little Japanese schoolgirl tart.” He later joked that it should be called Mememeco. As early as his first visit to Ramsey Creek, Cassity told Sehee, “I’m here to learn from Billy, but he’s not really necessary to do this with.” He later told Sehee that Campbell “would be the perfect face for us–a physician with a stethoscope standing in the forest. He’s our Colonel Sanders.”
Cassity repeated this remark to Campbell. “I found it a little offensive that I was just being included as Colonel Sanders to send a better message than Tyler’s message of ‘innovative cemetery guy,’ ” Campbell said.
In early 2004, a few months before Cassity was to take possession of Fernwood, the partners had discussions with the Trust for Public Land. They were hoping that T.P.L. would agree to hold a conservation easement on the land, thereby giving the project both credibility and transparency. (An easement’s holder has no rights to use the property, but can restrict development or mandate ecological restoration according to rules established in the easement contract.) Ernest Cook, a senior vice-president at T.P.L., says, “It was a conceptually marvellous idea, but we didn’t move forward, because the team at Fernwood was not together on what the easement would allow–fifty people buried per acre? Five hundred? Would it require the eucalyptus trees to all come out?” The trees are not indigenous to California. “There was a lot to be worked out between the three partners.”
The differences were as much philosophical as personal. Campbell and Sehee viewed their prospective properties as nature preserves that would host burials; Cassity was a cemeterian who saw the land as an inspiring and potentially lucrative twist on the memorial park. “Tyler once asked me if I’d rather make a million dollars and save a million acres, or make twenty million dollars and save twenty thousand acres,” Campbell said. (Cassity does not recall this.)”I said I’d rather save the million acres, of course. I’m not sure it was the right answer.”
One Saturday afternoon this spring, Cassity and Aurora Mahassine, an ecologist at an environmental-design firm in Carmel Valley, set out to walk the Fernwood property. They were considering its ecological needs, including how best to remove invasive Australian eucalyptus and restore the hillside to the way it was before the gold rush. Mahassine, a free-spirited woman with cascades of auburn hair who lives in the woods, has often explained to Cassity that green burial won’t be green the way a heavily watered cemetery lawn is, that nature has its seasons of decadence and death.
As they walked, Cassity began to discuss Roy Armanini, a sixty-six-year-old gravedigger with a pronounced limp whom he had acquired with the cemetery. Mahassine said that Armanini had recently sneaked up behind her when she was standing on a culvert and whispered, “I could push you right now and you’d be dead.”
“I’m worried that Roy has gone from being cool creepy to creepy creepy,” Cassity said. “When you told me your story, I said to him, ‘What’s this about killing people, Roy?’ and he said, ‘Who have you been talking to? It was an accident!’ But I might take him with me to Hollywood–he’d be a perfect star for a cemetery.”
“Yes, Roy needs to be seen carrying around a shovel, but in the distance,” Mahassine said.
One night last August, Mahassine accompanied Cassity to his hotel, the Acqua, to throw his Tarot cards. The cards foretold that he was about to face his judgment. Disturbed by this augury, Cassity took an Ambien to knock himself out. When he awoke, smoke was everywhere, and Mahassine was screaming. After they’d gone to sleep, the candle she’d left in the ice bucket had set a nearby silk-covered chair on fire. Cassity recalled, “I found myself outside in a cashmere sweater and my underwear, filled with tremendous humiliation.” He paid nineteen thousand dollars for the damage, and, having been banned from the Acqua, he tried to expiate his sin by staying at twelve other hotels in the same chain. He also began calling Mahassine Sparky, a name she didn’t much like.
The two of them stood now in a cordon of massive eucalyptus trees. Workers had cut huge swaths of eucalyptus saplings and cotoneaster, revealing century-old graves of Portuguese immigrants. “I like the big eucs here,” Mahassine said. “They’re like angels.”
“You sell the trees, maybe call them Guardians,” Cassity said. “Guardians of the Portuguese Colonnade has an expensive ring to it.” The Fernwood brochure suggests, “Each tree, flower, songbird, boulder, and butterfly will become a memorial to a loved one and hope for the future.” Campbell intended to commodify conservation; Cassity intends to commodify nature. Graves near the big eucalyptus now sell for thirty thousand dollars, while a top-of-the-line grave by an “Inner Grove” oak tree is thirty-eight thousand five hundred dollars–oaks being costlier not because they are indigenous but because they are adjudged twenty-eight per cent more charismatic.
In early 2004, at Billy Campbell’s suggestion, Cassity hired Sim Van der Ryn, who had served as Governor Jerry Brown’s state architect, to head a team of architects and ecologists who would reconceive Fernwood as a green prototype. At two workshops, the team and the partners tossed around dozens of earth-friendly proposals, such as using only quarried stone, rather than “surface-harvested” stone that would have served as a home for insects and small animals. Cassity was initially nourished by the ideas, but once their costs became clear he took to calling his team, skeptically, “the gurus.” This January, Cassity convened the team again and, after renegotiating their fees, fired them. “He stood there with this pleasant, smug little smile,” David Schwartz, one of the landscape architects, recalls. “This is just a game for him.” Van der Ryn wrote Cassity a letter afterward, saying, as he recalls, “that on the one hand there’s this Tyler of great transparency and vision, but on the other hand there’s this amazingly mean, distrustful individual.”
After Billy Campbell made a tour of the cemetery in December, he wrote Cassity an alarmed e-mail about the burial practices he had observed, including, he recalled, graves being dug with a backhoe. Cassity replied, weeks later, that “this prototype has to sing ‘I am profitable–just add money and multiply.’ I apologize for some of my mismanagement, especially of the gurus, but I had to learn that Green still means green.” Campbell had intended that at Fernwood no more than a hundred people would be buried per acre; Cassity was now planning to fill each acre with as many as five hundred bodies and an additional two thousand “inurnments,” or urn burials. And Cassity’s site plan allowed embalmed bodies to be buried outside the boundaries of the old cemetery, in the so-called Transition Zone. “People want embalming but they also want a natural setting–natural but preserved, like a green bean,” he said.
As Campbell and Sehee began to realize that Fernwood was turning into a complex hybrid, they shared their dismay with local environmentalists and home-funeral midwives. Michael Fischer, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, had toured Fernwood with Sehee. “It seemed pretty exciting at first,” Fischer told me, “and I’d buy a plot there if they do partner with an environmental group, but then Joe said they’re not. If it’s just a businessman focussing on the business of death, then perhaps I’ll go somewhere else.”
This February, the Los Angeles Times Magazine ran a story about home funerals and green burial in which Cassity and Sehee were both quoted extensively. The following day, Cassity, who had always enjoyed Sehee’s company–”I loved P.R. Joe; he fit in perfectly with my menagerie”–sent him an e-mail suspending his five-thousand-dollar-a-month retainer. Cassity’s motivation seemed to be sheer pique. He wrote, “I believe you are receiving sufficient compensation through your publicized yet nebulous role as a ‘managing partner’ of this project”–the story actually referred to Sehee as Cassity’s “partner”–”as well as the man responsible for conceiving the idea (my recollection is startlingly different).” Cassity told me, “Joe had been publicizing me for so long that not only did he come to feel that he’d made me; I think he was trying to be me.”
“After two years of being regarded as a partner, suddenly I was called on the carpet like an out-of-line employee,” Sehee said. “I was really, really angry.” He and Campbell discussed their options, including the inventive but legally dubious one of seeking an injunction against Fernwood, on the premise that Cassity had misused Campbell’s intellectual property. They held off on suing, even though Campbell had never been paid for any of his work, but Sehee decided, on his lawyer’s advice, not to reply to Cassity’s e-mail. Sehee and Campbell eventually decided to go into business as Memorial Ecosystems Services, which would do what Memeco had tried to do but as a concessionaire of burial services–that is, it would oversee the work but not own the land–and without Cassity’s money.
The split left Cassity feeling troubled and regretful. “I think about P.R. Joe and Dr. Campbell all the time,” he said in early May. “It would be good to talk with them, to transform hate-hate to love-hate. Through ego-driven madness we’ll create something good for the world. And if we can’t talk nicely I’ll sue them and use my hostility to fuel my ability to outcompete them.”
The rest of the Cassity family was pleased by the demise of what they had always seen as a misbegotten partnership. “Tyler was bringing these guys to the party,” Brent said. “Joe, in particular, was an add-on.” Cassity acknowledges that Campbell and Sehee probably believed that Fernwood would not be owned by his family. But, from the start, Fernwood has been owned by Hollywood Forever, which is part of the Forever Network of cemeteries, which is owned by Forever Enterprises, which is held in a trust, RBT, whose beneficiaries are Rhonda, Brent, and Tyler Cassity.
“Our biggest fear all along was that some big cemetery company would ap-propriate the idea to make money, rather than to establish lasting conservation,” Sehee said. “And that’s what happened–only we did it. We created what we feared.” He and Campbell began to wonder if, in Cassity’s mind, they had ever been his partners.
Cassity has broken with partners before. He accepts such difficulties wryly, and even stoically, as if he were being punished for being so quick to grasp that each of us goes alone to the grave. Cassity told me that when he dies–he closed his eyes, picturing the scene–his memorial at Hollywood Forever will be “a circular island of Carrara marble in the lake, beneath which is a submerged sarcophagus, atop which is a statue of a naked Narcissus on all fours, staring at his reflection.”
On a sunny Saturday afternoon in May, the cremated remains of Carolyn Sloss, eighty-four, were interred on a steep hillside at Fernwood. A dozen mourners had gathered in a loose circle around the grave, and, after a reading of the Twenty-third Psalm and a Wendell Berry poem, five of them offered brief remembrances: “She always cooked me hamburgers and spaghetti”; “Ornery sometimes, but that was part of her spirit”; “I’m wearing her shirt now, with the Velcro wrist flaps.” The family took turns spading dirt into the hole around the papier-mache “earth urn,” and then laid flowers on the grave.
Back in the office, the Slosses asked to see the LifeStory again (it had already played at a larger memorial service). Everyone watched as photographs of Carolyn flashed by on a computer screen to the tune of “The Girl from Ipanema.” She was young and then, five minutes later, she was old. The family arose, smiling, and stood outside chatting for half an hour before they drove away.
That upbeat mood was what had first got Martha Sloss, Carolyn’s daughter, interested in the cemetery. “Something was different about the place, and they had candles that smelled good,” Sloss, a psychotherapist, told me. (Cassity insists on keeping Diptyque candles burning–narcissus, jasmine, and oak–a trick he learned from his mother, who slips a cake in the oven when she’s showing a house.) “I never felt depressed–I felt good there,” Sloss said. “We could be ourselves, not guarded or pretend sombre.” Her family had budgeted a thousand dollars for direct cremation, but by the time they were done they had spent $4,778, and she and her husband had put down an additional two thousand dollars to hold spots near her mother for themselves.
During Carolyn Sloss’s service, Cassity crouched in the grass a few feet away, studying everything from the casual attire–flip-flops, jeans–to the companionably late start of the service. In recent weeks, he’d taken to keeping a few changes of clothes in a pine coffin in the showroom of the mortuary, where he was to be found at all hours.
There was still much to get right. A number of California newspapers had run stories about Fernwood, although some of the facts that they contained might more accurately be termed plans, or hopes. This March, Cassity and one of his funeral directors, a sardonic former Scotland Yard detective named Gary McRae, told the Sacramento Bee that more than a hundred people had been buried at Fernwood since Cassity had taken title; that formaldehyde was now banned; that visitors were guided to graves via G.P.S.-equipped laptops that automatically began playing the deceased’s LifeStory at the right spot; and that the cemetery had a conservation easement in place. (McRae also called Fernwood a “soul spa,” which earned him Cassity’s admiration.) Cassity admitted that he hadn’t actually counted the burials–the number was closer to fifty. And, in truth, the G.P.S. system remains in the prototype stage–Cassity judged the original proposal, at six hundred thousand dollars, much too expensive. He also acknowledged that he had neglected to clarify that he was not planning to seek an easement until after five years or so, by which time he would have learned how his customers wanted to use the land. In the meantime, Fernwood’s brochure refers to burial plots as “easements.”
On Mother’s Day, Cassity, McRae, and I were standing outside the Fernwood office when two women drove past; the older one rolled her window down and asked, “Is Mom the one furthest up the hill–the mound?”
“No,” McRae said. “It’s the other one.”
The woman nodded, absorbing this. “Well, we’ve been getting it wrong until today. But thanks!”
As they drove off, Cassity blushed. “The need for grave markers on handhelds–we’ve got to get on that. People feel very foolish paying respects to the wrong grave.”
After the Sloss service, Cassity said, “It’s clear what the elements of a Fernwood service are, if you leave people alone to do it. They walk up the hill carrying the coffin or urn, they gather in a circle, they speak, they toss the flowers. We can now standardize it, maybe suggest that people lay their flowers after each one speaks, and print out a handbook for a do-it-yourself service.”
Cassity’s developing ritual of departure draws equally from Scripture and self-help. “We encourage a Circle of Remembrance at memorial services, like an A.A. meeting–we did the first one last year at Hollywood, for Fay Wray,” he said. Speakers hold a lit candle and share a recollection of the deceased, then place the candle in sand, in a memorial bowl. Cassity plans to gather the melted wax after each service and reconstitute it as a Memory Candle, which he’ll present to the family with a fern and an oak leaf–a sales mnemonic for “Fernwood”–and instructions to light the candle on the anniversary of the loved one’s death. He is so enamored of his new rite that when the Fernwood gravedigger Roy Armanini was eased into retirement, in late June, Cassity threw himself into planning a Circle of Remembrance for the goodbye party and seemed crestfallen when one of his staff pointed out, hesitantly, that Armanini was not yet actually dead.
Other businessmen have also begun to exploit the perceived hunger for green burial. Forest Lawn’s Hollywood Hills branch recently opened a cremation garden called the Woodlands. “It’s for people who like the nature option,” Forest Lawn’s C.E.O., John Llewellyn, who is Hubert Eaton’s great-nephew, said. “But it’s not really green–it’s plastic urns and cremation vaults and traditional, rather than indigenous, plants.”
Cassity’s new dream is to establish green burial facilities in every county along the California coast. He’s looking closely at Carmel Valley, two hours south of San Francisco, where there’s a several-thousand-acre ranch filled with oak trees draped in Spanish moss–not far from properties owned by Rupert Murdoch and Clint Eastwood–which he and a prominent environmental organization would like to buy. It’s a pristine tract, where the environmental organization (its officials asked that it not be named) would preserve a condor habitat. As we drove into Carmel, Cassity explained that he hoped to underwrite that goal by establishing a five-hundred-acre memorial landscape for the wealthy. “This is destination cremation and interment,” he said.
There are two significant obstacles to Cassity’s plan. An official at the environmental organization told me, “We don’t hold a conservation easement frivolously, as it’s not an asset–it’s a liability to manage. If the property is going to cost us twenty million dollars, and we have ten, Tyler would have to commit up front for that ten million.” And though green-burial theory holds that nature is not man’s enemy, conservation theory holds that man is often nature’s. “We’ve got a real problem in California with sudden oak death, which comes from a fungus that can be spread by the soles of people’s shoes,” the official continued. “If you open the property to hikers who are visiting their dead relatives, are you going to kill the very oaks you’re trying to conserve?”
Cassity’s ability to bring investors into such a venture would depend, in great part, on the vitality of his model at Fernwood. But he is confident that he could sell graves in Carmel. Standing at the base of an enormous three-hundred-year-old oak tree, Cassity said, “It’s all perceived value. Should an oak be fifty thousand dollars? Why not five hundred thousand dollars? A private family mausoleum anywhere is one million dollars. So what is the value of an oak tree? If we set it too low, then it doesn’t feel exclusive.” He circled the tree, examining its gnarled branches, the doughty, living wood that predates the birth of George Washington. “Since we’re nomads now in America, this would be a family’s place of return, a one-acre oak plot where the bodies would be laid in a spiral out from the trunk, a spiral that would trace the passage of the generations. Seen that way, a million dollars for an oak doesn’t seem unreasonable. If I were a hundred-millionaire, I’d buy one. Wouldn’t you?”
After months of angry silence, and with the status of their separate green-burial projects uncertain, the three former partners agreed to try to reconcile. Cassity and Sehee planned to meet on Memorial Day Weekend at the National aids Memorial Grove, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Campbell, who was on call that weekend, was going to conference in by cell phone. Earlier that week, he told me, hopefully, “It would be nice to get to a place where I can wish Tyler well in his success.”
Shortly before the 4 p.m. meeting, Cassity sat in his San Francisco apartment with a Monster energy drink. He mentioned that he had finally given up his lingering ambition to be a novelist. “I think I’m living my novel, choosing my characters. I’m defining my destiny so I can fulfill it,” he said, adding wistfully, “while half expecting or hopeful that someone else is designing it.” For weeks, he had been looking forward to the rapprochement, but now he suddenly remarked, “I’m bored by the Billy and Joe story, the B story. I think you need to focus on the A story.” Which is? “Death. Death is always the A story.”
When Cassity arrived at the aids Grove, twenty minutes late, he and Sehee smiled at each other ruefully and shook hands. After a brief, largely silent tour of the grove, they found their way back to a stone bench at the entrance and sat side by side, looking off into the trees. “Should we open with a prayer, Joe?” Cassity said.
Sehee hesitated, and then bowed his head and offered a prayer: “That we both are able to find understanding and the wisdom to listen.”
“And good shoes,” Cassity added.
Sehee nodded. Then he took a deep breath, and explained that he’d been so mad that “I had to take a timeout. But I don’t want to revisit it all. I want to see if there’s a way we can all work together. I’m not into managing cemeteries–”
“You don’t like bodies, Joe.”
“I do have to go out of my way to see a body.”
“You don’t like touching them.”
“I like touching live people more,” Sehee acknowledged, and they both laughed. “The other thing is your domain, but what I’m interested in is the advocacy, in setting standards for green burial. We have a blank-slate opportunity here to avoid confusing the marketplace, the way they have in England–”
“Oh, that’s always the American exceptionalism that leads to doom,” Cassity said. “And I’m taking exception to your jump ahead. You were a consultant, Joe, working for me–”
Sehee jumped up and stood in front of Cassity. “No, the whole idea was that we were partners, building something together.” He took off his sunglasses, and Cassity took his off, too, and smiled up at him. “Screw you. I never wanted to be your consultant at Fernwood. I wanted to be your partner–”
“Being a partner involves investment–an investment of time and energy.” Cassity was sounding increasingly reasonable. (Later, he said, “Joe fought a lot like my brother. When someone gets emotional, I get calmer and cooler. Joe was angry, I was resentful.”)
“Oh, please,” Sehee said. “I collapsed a business and moved my family up here–” His cell phone rang and he glanced at it. “Billy,” he said, and let it ring. After a moment, mastering himself, he continued, “We started a nonprofit to move this thing forward, and you can choose to participate or not.” Sehee opened a folder that contained his and Campbell’s protocols for green cemeteries, which they hoped to establish, complete with a Good Housekeeping-style seal of approval, under the umbrella of their new Center for Ethical Burial.
Cassity put his hand up and looked away, saying, “I don’t want to see it yet. I’d love to see it, but with a disclaimer on it, so that you won’t sue me when I come out with something similar.”
“You can’t do everything in this field, Tyler,” Sehee said.
“No,” Cassity agreed, in a melancholy tone.
“You need an independent entity like ours to approve of what you’re doing, because there have been so many misrepresentations with Fernwood that could blow the whole idea up.”
“I’m looking forward to your model. It’s something for me to watch.” Cassity’s cell phone rang. He opened it up to talk–it was Campbell–and then absent-mindedly put it back in his pocket.
Losing patience, Sehee said, “Tyler, if you advertise yourself as a memorial landscape, you don’t then go do other things–”
“Of course you do, Joe,” Cassity said. “That’s business. We do whatever we wish with the requirements we set forward on that site. There are seventeen acres dedicated as pure memorial landscape, and there are other zones where we do traditional burial and embalming because that is the standard of care and maintenance in that section.”
“Do you think the Bay Area, after reading what they have about Fernwood, believes that embalming is going on, and that you’re doing conventional burial on land that could potentially be preserved? You used people like me to make misrepresentations–”
“Which ones, specifically?” Cassity asked, silkily.
“You don’t have to have language in the price list that tells people embalming is necessary for a viewing. Is embalming necessary for a viewing, Tyler?”
“If one has a communicable airborne disease, yes.” (Though funeral directors often make this claim, there are no laws in California requiring embalming in the case of such a disease.)
“Oh, come on–that’s bullshit.”
Cassity stood. “Let’s walk, Joe.”
They wandered down the sidewalk. Sehee’s phone rang, and he opened it and said, “We’ll call you back, Billy. Someone will call you back.” After a moment, he said to Cassity, “What matters to me most is not arguing about the past but saving this idea that we both love–”
“If we don’t fix the past, we’ll repeat it, Joe. The ghosts of the past always have to be laid to rest.”
“I think that’s just such a fallacy. I learned in a twelve-step program–”
“What was your addiction?”
Sehee quivered, then burst out, “I was addicted to crazy people!” They both laughed.
“Life is short, Joe,” Cassity said. After a moment, he went on, “We were dating, and we broke up, and now you suddenly want to get married?”
“I don’t want to marry you, Tyler. I want to have an arm’s-length relationship, where we can certify what you do, a tidy, elegant way to avoid a legal mess, and steer business your way.”
Cassity bent and picked a pink rhododendron blossom and gave it to Sehee. Holding it, a little unwillingly, Sehee tried again: “Tyler, you, more than any person, can make this idea come out right–”
“So why are you my enemy, Joe?”
“What? Why am I your enemy?”
“I don’t know!”
“No! What?” Sehee said, bewildered. “Listen, this industry is rotten, and I’m offering you my help to change it! If I thought I was coming here as an enemy–”
“If you’re not, you’d better hug me as we say goodbye,” Cassity said, stepping forward. After a pause, Sehee shuffled into a gingerly hug. Cassity turned and opened the door of his blue Prius hearse. “So we’ll talk again, if you like,” he said, smiling ambiguously. “Maybe you can call Billy, as I’ve had enough reconciliation for today.”
Watching Cassity drive away, Sehee shook his head. “Wow,” he said. “You know, wow. He orchestrates the crazy-making–I mean, he’s done some wonderful things, but he just . . . It’s just so hard for him to deal with living people.” He stared at Cassity’s rhododendron as if it had suddenly sprouted from his palm, and then tossed it aside with a shudder. “Oh, it’s very easy to love a corpse.
Tyler Cassity and the new way of death.