Transition Counselor

by Mac McLeod

Virgie Warren’s white, embossed business card said she was a “Transition Counselor” for a funeral home serving a small Alabama town in the 1940s.

“Darlings, life is changed, not ended,” she said brightly, when she began a transition session with a sad sack family lumped in front of her oversized desk, laden with pamphlets and contract forms.

She often helped families of the deceased write the obituary. This gave her celebrity status because many thought they were the most wonderful obituaries ever:

After reading that obituary, Eunice Holifield, Bud’s widow, breathlessly upgraded to the high-priced “Most Beloved Package.” Virgie suggested that Bud’s fishing gear be laid alongside his body in the casket. Eunice’s plump tears plopped on the sales contract as she signed it.

In addition to her obituary skills, Virgie often staged dramatic funerals tailored to the deceased. None surpassed Hester McKay’s funeral.

Hester was the town’s only telephone operator. She was a fire hydrant of a woman. Her lips were perpetually pouty, which belied her pleasant personality. Hester lived alone in a small one-bedroom frame home. A telephone switchboard filled one wall of the bedroom. Since dial telephones had not yet come to town, callers turned a crank on their phone. Hester answered and placed their calls.

She did so expertly, as she manipulated metal plugs attached to black cables, inserting them in the proper hole to connect local calls or to join the caller to a long-distance operator. She wore a headset and spoke into a microphone on her chest. She never left the house. The local market delivered her groceries, and the doctor made house calls.

Her radio soap opera dramas kept her company all day. At night she listened to what she called “real life dramas” as she eavesdropped on conversations. A frantic call to Doc Guilford that a baby was on the way, a house fire, the lonely calling the lonely, the soft dry whispers of illicit lovers — Hester devoured it all.

She knew every voice in town, but very few faces. She heard a lot but passed along nothing. Women often dropped by to bring her baked goods or pecan-filled fudge, but they quickly got to the real reason for the visit as they attempted to mine Hester’s trove of secrets. “Honey, what’s really going on in the Gillum house? Is she drinking again?” Hester never revealed any of it.

Then, after 60 years plugging cables and mutely listening, she died. Ed Capito, the grocery delivery boy, found her face down in a snarl of cables.

First Baptist Church was as full as Easter for the funeral. Hester was a beloved figure because of her service and her discretion.

The casket was in front of the sanctuary. It was open, revealing Hester with her headphones firmly set over her ears. A large microphone nestled in the valley between her heavy breasts. Even in death, her lifeless lips lost none of their pout.

At the appointed hour of the funeral, Transition Counselor Virgie Warren, swathed in black, walked slowly and solemnly down the aisle carrying a tall, slim pedestal table. Centered on the table was a telephone with the receiver off the cradle. Virgie placed the table in front of the casket, her back to the expectant people in the pews. She carefully placed a large white placard next to the phone and then dramatically stepped away with a magician’s flourish. The congregation gasped when they saw the black printing on the card.

“Jesus called.”

Mac McLeod is a new poet and an old man. At 89, he looks back on a rich and eclectic life. A father of five, former Senior Military Aviator, Lawyer, and Episcopal priest. He’s earned various degrees; a B.A., M.Div., Juris Doctor. Mac is on the cusp of death and many of his poems reflect him standing on the ledge, the rocks at his feet already crumbling, tumbling down. Mac often writes about the comic absurdity of life both in poems and flash fiction. Support this writer.