My mom is obsessed with her own death.

My mom is obsessed with her own death.

Wait, it’s not really her death she’s obsessed with. It’s more the funeral. And it’s not in a morbid, dramatic way. More in a very… precisely organized kind of way. She regularly shares with my brother and me what her wishes are, and she adds, “I’m just trying to make things easier on you guys!”

I do believe that she has this kind of good heart, for sure, wanting her kids to experience less overwhelm whenever she makes her way off the planet. But I don’t think it’s entirely altruistic. I don’t know if she knows this herself, or if she’d admit to it, but I’m pretty sure she’s just worried about not having any control over her own shebang once she’s gone.

She’s not a controlling person, at all. She merely, like Sally Albright in “When Harry Met Sally,” just likes things how she likes them. Is it so much to ask to implement these wishes? Is it?

This started back when I was in college. I was 21 or 22, making her 47 or 48 years old, and she called me up one day to ask, “What do you think of teal?”

“The color?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“For what, like, the new armchairs?” She was in the process of redecorating their living room.

“No, no,” she said calmly. “For my coffin. I was at the funeral home this week and they have these really pretty teal coffins now. I had no idea!”

I didn’t either.

The thing is, my mom looks so normal. Here we are in Austin a few weeks ago. Is this not the most wholesome-looking mom you could imagine for me? Trust me, she does not know from whence I, her tattooed, glittery, multi-color-haired, tomboy daughter came. I remind her that she did give birth to me, so I’m pretty sure she had something to do with it.

And yet, despite this normal and sane look she has, this is a woman who has far outpaced any drama-infused goth teenager’s biggest dreams for their funeral.

Mom worked for a life insurance company for a long time, and through her experience in the marketing department, she learned that you could arrange and pay for your funeral services ahead of time. She learned all of the ins and outs by taking a class with about 6 or 7 other people, all of whom were funeral directors. “Don’t fall asleep in class,” I said.

“Oh, I won’t,” she said. “They’re hilarious!”

Once the topic had been broached, we’ve chatted regularly about the outfits she wants to be buried in. My brother and I are forbidden by threat of haunting from having an open casket, but she still wants to make sure she’s in her favorite clothes for the burial. Bonus: her hairdresser is the hairdresser for the funeral home, too, so we’re covered on that front.

But the underwear request she made at one point was more unexpected than many of the other pieces she was lining up, like seeing if we can get a subtle (“classy”) version of “Pop Goes the Weasel” to play during her calling hours, and if we have any say in it all, making sure she dies in the spring or summertime, so that people attending the burial won’t see the abandoned shantytown across the creek from the cemetery.

Back to the underwear. She has a very specific pair of underwear that she wants to be buried in.

When we were little, she ordered all of her and my dad’s underwear from a company called Dutchmaid. No other brand of underwear would do for my parents, no. Dutchmaid was everlasting, indestructible underwear, and it was the underwear of the Zandts.

Perhaps because they were so indestructible, the company wasn’t able to sell enough of them, and folded in the late 1980s. Wails of mourning could be heard from people throughout the working class nooks and crannies of the country who craved underwear as tough as their own stubborn disposition.

So, when Mom realized she had probably the last new pair of Dutchmaid underwear in her drawer, she put it, still sealed, into a brown paper bag and tucked it into the very back and bottom corner. She brought them out and showed them to me around 2010 or so. “These,” she said. “I want to be buried in these.”

“Wow,” I said.

“There’s more. You have to tell the funeral director to put them on me inside out.”

“Do what?”

“The seams itch me, so I wear them inside out. I don’t want the seams itching me for eternity, Deanna.”

When I sent her the draft of this post for her permission, because I’m not a monster, she sent me a photo of the latest version of the funeral underwear package.