Graveyard
rib-ticklers

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

This poem has become a local mystery for some of us with too much time on our hands. “Free your body and soul, Unfold your powerful wings, Climb up the highest mountains, Kick your feet up in the air, You may now live forever, Or return to this earth, Unless you feel good where you are.”

The verse appears on the back of John Laird McCaffrey’s headstone after he died aged 54 on August 14, 1995. Anybody strolling through the sombre Section 1300+ of the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery might also notice that the message projected by the deceased Irish guy from the Point spells FUCK YOU when read vertically. The cryptic message occurred to the monument maker after he finished sandblasting it into stone. “Afterwards, as I’m done, I’m looking at it and I’m like, ‘Wow.’ I noticed it just like that,” says John, whose full name won’t be published here for professional reasons. “This guy’s ex-wife and mistress came in together and ordered the stone. They said the message represented him. It was a thing between the three of them,” says John, who notes that the only other such hardy-har headstone he’s been hired to write says: “I’d rather be in Boston but my wife buried me here.”

Ian Aiello, a third-generation monument maker from Aiello Sebastiano Monuments, notes that most don’t go for knee-slappers in the boneyard. “We don’t do it much, although every once in a while you’ll get requests. The classic one is, ‘I told you I was sick.’ I think it’s healthy and good, because monotony is the biggest problem in today’s cemetery.”

You might as well start flipping through the joke book, because increasing numbers of Montrealers are getting their headstones popped into place well before they even feel the first sign of the inevitable. With those pre-planned deals, once you expire, all the headstone folks have to do is inscribe the day you took your last breath. One Montrealer even included that pertinent detail in his “pre-need” package. “A guy came in about 15 years ago, in his early 40s, well-to-do, driving a nice Volvo,” says Aiello. “He bought a monument for himself and he asked us to write his date of birth and date of death. He knew which day he was going to die. We were apprehensive,” says Aiello. But the headstone went up and indeed, “When that date came, he committed suicide.”

Cemetery monuments can cost between $225 to $3.8-mil, says Aiello, whose company has designed and created the final resting places for thousands, including increasing numbers of bargain-hunting Americans and countless locals. Among their creations are family plots for the Cotronis as well as the Rizzutos. “That one is carved out of the side of Mount Royal. It’s made to look like this mausoleum goes straight into the mountain. It’s pretty big.” Yet one of Aiello’s favourites celebrates a local fireman who had his plastic fire helmet bolted to the top of his grave in the East End cemetery on Langelier.

But at least one Montrealer went overboard. “There’s a guy who has a company here in the East End that makes pretty much every shopping cart in North America,” says Aiello. “He came in here with this plan where he was going to put this gold-plated shopping carriage at the top of an eight-foot column with a rotating dish on it, so it’d turn around, and he wanted a spotlight on either side of the monument. I said, ‘You must be kidding, it’d look like an advertisement.’ He was insulted. I told him that the graveyard would never allow this anyway.”

The carriage-titan found another designer to create a scaled-down version featuring a granite cube sandblasted with a grid design meant to look like a shopping cart. He had it propped atop the headstone that would mark his future site of eternal rest, but Aiello proved correct. When cemetery authorities noticed the flying cart, they covered it in a garbage bag and carted it away. :