How to Live Forever

Hi.

Hi.

I'm Mark.

I'm Nadine.

Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you, too.

Ready to see Edna?

Yeah.

OK.

Behind locked doors, huh?

-Yeah, she likes to roam and wander around, and if we

didn't, she'd find her way out.

I've got her up here waiting on you.

We like poetry today.

What's she singing?

This film represents about three

years of my life.

It'll take up around an hour and half of yours.

When I turned 50, a friend sent me this cartoon.

It cracked me up at the time.

I'm 53 now, and with each passing year I find I laugh

less and less at it.

It's not that I lack a sense of humor about the realities

of aging, but I'm bothered more and more by the speed on

that downward slope.

I guess I wouldn't be in this rather morose frame of mind if

it wasn't for my mother.

She died recently.

Her downward slope began in 1996.

She was an accomplished painter.

She lived for work.

But that year, she lost her studio and most of her

canvases to a fire that took to the canyon where she lived.

She seemed sadder after that.

That's why even though she died at 85 I prefer to picture

her like this, high-spirited, creative, young.

So planning her funeral was really difficult, but it had

to be done, and it got me thinking about the inevitable.

-I've spent my career, 30 years, whatever it's been, as

the guy that nobody wants to do business with

professionally.

One of the challenges that we have is no one wants what I

have to offer.

-Though this is not an easy subject to deal with, we have

to do this because death is no respecter of age.

Come here, look.

I don't know why we don't think about death.

I think it's just because we think we're

going to keep on living.

Isn't that smart for a blonde girl to say?

A funeral director's convention

is not unlike a medical soiree where all the, you know,

urologists get together for a couple days.

Always there is one part of the conference that has sort

of a social aspect to it, the sort of hail and farewell, how

you been type of thing among strange colleagues who speak

in odd lexicons, you know.

-We're focusing on our embalming fluids.

They're formaldehyde-based, used to preserve human remains

after they die.

And I'm the embalmer that can walk them

step-by-step through that.

So a lot of fun.

This is the Body Scoop.

The Body Scoop is designed to make a one person lift, a

person of almost any size.

I do think we confuse the essential obligations of a

funeral with the accessories to a funeral.

There's nothing I can sell you that'll get you into heaven or

keep you up.

These are accessories.

They're boxes.

-Our caskets are designed for those families that appreciate

We've added some specialty items like 24 karat gold for

the hardware.

-These are caskets made out of paper veneer.

It's a very similar process just like

brands of Ikea furniture.

People are changing their styles from traditional burial

caskets to a rental type of casket where the deceased

stays in a cardboard container.

You open the front, and now you're able to remove the

deceased through the front of the casket.

-A typical person would fit in an urn that size and still

have some room left over.

Right I never wanted to make one that things just fit.

So mine are always just--

just a little bit bigger than you need.

To deal with mortality, you must

deal with the mortal thing, you know, the corpse, getting

it to its grave or tomb or fire.

But ours is truly the first generation that has tried to

accomplish this without having to deal with the dead guy.

And we just have fun with it.

It's all about celebration of the cowboy's life.

We are constantly organizing

these memorial services or celebrations of life, whatever

euphemism du jour is.

The talk is uplifting.

The music is life-affirming.

The finger food is good.

Someone is on hand to declare closure, usually just before

the Merlot runs out.

And everyone is welcome except the one who has died.

-The boomers want something different from the traditional

funeral, and that's kind of the niche where we fell into.

We've done some really special funerals for people where you

went actually bar-hopping with the body.

-Once families get started going through the grieving

actually to through, choose their loss experience type.

Was it sudden death?

Was it general grief?

Death of spouse?

Suicide?

We're even expanding right now into pet loss as well.

Ours is a culture that's very

comfortable with a good laugh but hasn't a clue about the

usefulness of a good cry.

It's hard to laugh in the face of a corpse.

Everything is sort of diminished in importance by

this dead thing and the mystery it represents.

It makes me think things I wouldn't otherwise think.

It makes me wonder more.

I wonder a lot as well about

every new grey hair, every new nose hair, every new pound in

my ever-widening midsection.

Each one is a cruel reminder that maybe my best

years are behind me.

Is this it?

Am I past my prime?

Actually, it's not death I fear so much as it is being

stuck with the uncool trappings of old age.

Early bird specials, senior discounts,

Lawrence Welk reruns.

Happy birthday from Smucker's.

How sweet it is.

Take a look at our Smucker's far.

Cordelia--

I love that name--

Cordelia Figgatt.

The centenarians are one of, and if not, the fastest

growing group in America.

There's over 100,000 out there now, and most of them are in

pretty good shape.

They have that makeup in 'em where

they're, you know, resilient.

They don't look back, like , something's

gaining on you, you know?

Something is gaining on all of us.

When your colon's out of whack--

Thanks for

reminding me, Willard.

-My doctor told me I should be doing more for my high

cholesterol.

That's not exactly a

comforting thought, especially since American pharmaceutical

companies do such a great job stressing out the boomers

about the perils of getting older.

Viva Viagra!

When I saw a picture on the front page of my paper, a

senior woman eating dog food out of a garbage can, I said,

what's wrong with this picture?

So I decide well, what would happen

if an older woman got as much attention as a MIss.

America?

So you're at the Ms. senior America Beauty Pageant, and

the women are 60 years and older.

I'm 75.

And I'm 74.

-We tell our ages because it's promoting the positive image

of aging, and we're having a ball.

And there they are, the delegates

competing for the title of Ms. Senior America

National Queen, 2007.

We have a pageant which has to

address the older person, but I have a problem.

I can't have swimsuits or else we might have

wrinkle city winners.

I had to replace that category with something else, and

that's called philosophy of life.

-Life is like a river, sometimes

calm, but often turbulent.

-I want to live life like a ray of sunshine.

Yesterday is history.

Tomorrow, a mystery.

-I may be a senior, but I'm still hot.

It just comes in flashes.

-Life is a journey, and I am enjoying the trip!

And with the evening gowns, very

elegant, and the philosophy of life, and the talent, and

interview, the women had four categories

in which is to compete.

-I'm 80 years old, and I never really found myself until

about 7 years ago.

I kind of woke up one day and thought, well, I don't even

know who I am, so I started looking for who I was.

And I found me, and I liked me.

How do you do that?

I mean, I said my knees are never going to last that long.

Didn't you say you were 80?