My Father Ran The Funeral Home For Forty Years And Always Sat Up With Them The First Night. Now I Know Why. |

Garrett Vance grew up in the apartment above Vance & Son Funeral Home, the only child of the only undertaker in Pelham Crossing, and he swore he'd never take it over. He went away, did other things, made a life. But his father got old the way undertakers somehow never seem to, all at once and quietly, and when the old man died Garrett came home to bury him and sell the place — and found, in the leather daybook his father kept for fifty years, a single instruction that the old man had followed without exception, for every body that ever lay in the preparation room overnight: SIT UP THE FIRST NIGHT. DON'T LEAVE THEM ALONE TO DECIDE.This episode includes AI-generated content.