Prologue

Every time I look up at these beeping, flashing, NO SMOKING signs while flying commercial, it reminds me of how all the madness started. I had just awakened from a little cat nap and the first thing I saw was the NO SMOKING light blinking, though why these newer planes still have a NO SMOKING indicator is beyond me. Smoking was outlawed on planes decades ago.

        It was just a little thing, really, to take smoking out of commercial airliners. To be fair, it seemed like a good idea to everyone but smokers, of course. At first, smoking was banned on all domestic flights, but you could still light up on an international flight if you sat in the back of the plane. As if the forward momentum of the plane would keep all the smoke near the tail section. But then smoking was taken away completely on all flights arriving or leaving the United States. It made sense to me for the obvious health reasons. Even smokers don’t like breathing other people’s sidestream smoke.

        Then came the restaurants and bars. Special sections were cordoned off for people that couldn’t wait an hour to puff on a cancer stick, and this seemed to work for a little while --like a week. Then the rules changed again and smokers had to either smoke in the bathrooms illegally or step outside. In today’s world, you can’t even think about lighting a cigarette outside a federal building or hospital. It seemed only a matter of time before they outlawed soda on planes too, because someone was bothered by another’s obesity.

        In principle, I never disagreed with most of the anti-smoking laws, but it was the shape of things to come. It seems that greed is not only about money, because of those who want things the way they want them, and be damned anyone who doesn’t like it.

        Anyway, when the bars started throwing away the ashtrays, the patrons screamed that things had gone too far. I mean, 90% of the people who go to bars are smokers, and it wasn’t as though excessive drinking was exactly good for your health, either. Besides, it wasn’t the sidestream smoke that was the leading cause of cancer deaths; according to the World Health Organization, outdoor pollution was.

        To continue, the anti-smoking crusaders have tried everything to make the lives of smokers miserable. Today, it feels like you can’t smoke anywhere in public, unless it is outside city limits and away from public buildings. There is talk of one state making it illegal to smoke inside your own car. And cruise ships are beginning to ban smoking from guest’s private balconies, which doesn’t make much sense. The last I heard, you can only smoke in your house with the lights off while hiding under the covers under an air scrubber. Just kidding.

        But as I said, I believe that is where the madness began. People taking things way to far and deciding what is best for others. The smoking issue may have been right on target, but many of the things that happened later were way outside the grid.

        A pretty brunette in a tight flight attendant uniform touched my shoulder. “Sir? Could you please buckle up? We’re about to begin the descent.”

        “Sure thing. Should I get my flotation device ready?” I whispered.

        She giggled. “I don’t think you’ll need it,” she said as she walked, swaying toward the front of the plane.

        I didn’t think I’d need it even if we were about to crash into the ocean. The chances of survival are next to nil. In fact, if we were going down, I’ll bet you my life savings the pilot would turn off the NO SMOKING sign and announce, “Ladies and gentlemen: Go ahead and light ‘em up, ‘cause we’re going down.” No, a flotation device wouldn’t be much help over land, unless it’s designed to bounce out of a wheat field.

         The smoking thing was just the tip of the iceberg. People pushing for more and more civil liberties successfully took religion out of schools and government buildings. Gone was swearing on a Bible in court testimony, and God help you if you said, “So help me God,” after you speak the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. No more Pledge of Allegiance, no prayer in public, and no public profession of faith. To be more precise, no criticism or endorsement of religion.

        Abortion was a little glitch in the system compared to what came next.

        Assisted suicide garnered some huge controversy a few decades ago when Dr. Jacob “Jack” Kevorkian helped some people opt out of their suffering. Suicide is such an ugly word for what he helped those people do, and carried with it none of the horrible aftermath that is usually present when someone “opts out”.

        Kevorkian was jailed repeatedly for his assistance, but to his credit, he hated seeing people suffer toward the end, and he never gave up his position that choosing your own end was an inherent right, and not something anyone else could decide for you. As a result of all the media attention, some people started looking at assisted endings as a viable legal right. They argued, “It’s my life. I should have the choice to decide how and when I die just as much as how I live. And while I’m at it, so should you.”

        Anyway, I suppose I should introduce myself at this point. My name is Kaser Haynes, and I am licensed in the state of Ohio as a death and funeral director. We are known by some of the hardliners as “death doctors”, and while this is not an inaccurate moniker, it is a bit unfair, in my opinion. After all, I’m no ghoul, and that nickname suggests someone hovering over a person’s deathbed like the Grim Reaper.

        I inherited Haynes Funeral Home from my parents years ago, and by 2015, new laws were passed that made it necessary to conform to them, or watch your business – and everything you’d worked for—go down the drain. The Death Act was passed which gave people the right to end their own lives, and if you were a funeral director, this was one of the services you could now provide. Trouble was, if all you wanted to do was provide burial services, you couldn’t just get a license for that; you had to take on all the other crap, too. The extra degree, the government mandated classes, and all the paperwork that went with it were a pain in the ass.

        At first, I couldn’t stomach it. Providing a life retirement party, which is basically a wake before someone dies, was beyond awkward, and when you added the fact that making funeral arrangements for someone who was planning to end their own life went against everything I believed in. But, I adjusted. I got over it.

        One of the reasons it was so easy to overcome my convictions is that most of the people who came to make death arrangements were selfish pricks who didn’t give two shits about the wreckage they were leaving behind, or the people who cared about them, for whatever reason.

        Another thing that made myself and other funeral directors begin to warm to the idea of assisted endings is that it gave us the ability to take much of the ugliness out of suicide. Sure, there will always be the impulse suicides by the desperate, drunk, or destitute, but when the Death Act became law, most of the really ugly premature, self-inflicted deaths disappeared. And people were forced to face the music of telling loved ones what they were about to do.

        One of the most horrible things that can happen is for a loved one, friend, or family member to come home and find the body of Mom or Dad, smoking shotgun clutched in a death grip and minus a head. Gone were the kids finding Grampa swinging slowly from the ceiling fan, or Pappy lying in a bathtub of gore, or Sis, foaming at the mouth after a pill overdose. Once I began to see the numbers declining, I realized that the new aspect of my business was bringing some order to one of life’s dirtier little secrets. I began to believe I was providing a viable service for the most part, and I still do.

        I also found I had a penchant for it. Why? Well, I’m not a morbid or dark person by nature, but due to the grim nature of my ghoulish profession, I’ve developed a bit of an interest in what I do that I never thought would happen. I won’t tell you that my previous years as a funeral director were depressing, but let’s face it: what I do is not the most exciting job one could ever have, and it got boring. I used to go to work each day stoically, silently, and even close to tears on rare occasions. In this business, if you don’t have a good cry once in a while, you’ll go stark raving mad looking at dead people all the time.

        Back to me having a knack for the assisted passing angle, I should point out that the people who are looking to opt out of life are free to choose the way they go out. You want to get fed to a tree chipper over a river? No problem. Firing squad from twenty paces? Piece of cake. I even had one idiot want to get fed to a swamp full of alligators down in the Florida Everglades. He was a total douchebag, a deadbeat dad with no hope in sight of ever amounting to anything. He was such a piece of shit that the gators just killed him and left the body. I hated the fact that I had to approach the family about a burial after the fact, but there wasn’t supposed to be any of Mr. Doucheface left to bury. But you get the idea. You could pick your exit strategy, and as long as everything goes by the numbers, you get a big sendoff however you see fit.

        This interesting twist means that at times, I become a movie producer, director, choreographer, and funeral director all rolled into one neat, efficient little package.

Some of these planned deaths wind up looking like the ending of a blockbuster action film. Then there are those who just want to go quietly into the great unknown without fanfare. This is the preferred method, and the one I am most often involved with. In a bizarre sort of way, going out on their own terms, at a time and place of their choosing seems to provide them with some very important peace of mind. I fancied myself as a father, tucking his “child” into their final sleep.

        I won’t lie; sometimes assisting someone’s death feels awful. There are times when it doesn’t seem like the person asking would benefit from dying, but it isn’t my job to choose for them. But there are times when I help someone into the afterlife and I feel like I’ve done something worthy. I mean, I’ve seen people suffer terribly with chronic pain, so when they come to Haynes Funeral Home and Death Services, I am their friend, their deliverer. And when I can relieve that person of the awful burden they carry, I feel like it’s worth it.

        There are those who argue that death doctors are actually doing some good in one area, and that niche includes those people who are tormented by demons. I’m talking about rapists, murderers, child molesters, and wife-beaters. Most of the time, the person is facing some serious trouble, but sometimes they come to me voluntarily and unaided.

        Because of the new laws, some of the more heinous crimes were declining in part due to legalized death assistance. People with, shall we say, disgusting or immoral proclivities, sometimes chose to end their lives in order to spare an innocent victim of the future, or perhaps to give closure to a past one. I have to say that I am only too happy to assist those people.

        Anyway, prison populations over the last few years have dropped, and death doctors like myself are doing their part. If someone who is a monster wants to opt out honorably, who am I to argue? It’s not like none of us have ever wondered why we spend billions every year to try and incarcerate a scumbag rather than just spend two bucks on a bullet to the brain. Right?

        And then, of course, there’s the money. Lots and lots of it. My annual income shot up to fifty times what I was making previously, and I have to say I don’t mind that a bit. It’s an ugly job sometimes, but the money is a good consolation. When the new laws and regulations came into effect, guys like me suddenly found themselves in a higher tax bracket. We were making the same kind of money that high-profile lawyers were making; only brain surgeons and heart doctors were making more.

        I do get some really rich clients, and they pay for elaborate going away parties, known colloquially as “deathvents”. These people will pay millions for a big send-off, and I take a nice chunk of it. There’s a lot of planning involved sometimes, including locales, catering, hiring of subcontractors, and getting the important guests comfortably to the deathvent.

        It’s not uncommon for me to pull in more on one deathvent than I do with twenty ordinary funeral services. Every time I get to feeling like I hate my job, I think about the money, and then the people that I am truly helping, and it balances toward the good.

        Death doctors have taken some of the heat off the abortion clinics along the way, too. Religious extremists got tired of chasing abortion doctors around and smelled the new blood in the water, death doctors like myself. Until recently, you could go to the worst ghettos in the country and find that the only building that wasn’t infected with a crust of graffiti was the sacred funeral home. Not so anymore. Now you see the evidence of prejudiced hatred everywhere. “Murderers, Death Doctors, and Reapers” can be seen spray-painted in blood red on funeral and death homes across the nation by those that oppose it.

        As the backlash over the most controversial court ruling in the history of the human race grew, so did the violent acts of hatred towards us so-called death doctors. More and more, I was forced to watch my back as the religious extremists and the righteous extremists were quietly going to war putting us smack dab in the crosshairs.

        Other than my safety, the most difficult part of the job is getting to know the client and trying not to get sucked into getting emotionally involved. I have to somehow get to know the person, determine they are of sound mind, and meet the families in most cases. This makes it hard to compartmentalize, but I do a pretty good job of keeping my own head.

        Surprisingly, even when our race was reaching an all-time low in the greedy quest for inventing more civil liberties, I was at the top of my game with my life going rather well. In the same manner that weapons makers make money in wartime, I was making a killing in my business, if you’ll pardon the pun. I mean business was booming, except our suicide bombers at least had the decency not to take others with them.

        While I was always wary and vigilant, I knew that sooner or later, something would come along and steal my joy. But for the time being, I was content and happy. What I didn’t know was that my life was about to upset itself in a way that I never could have prepared for…or seen coming.