Pining For The Fjords

He's not dead, the two women said. He's resting.

He is no more, said the official at John Lennon Airport in Liverpool. He is deceased. He has gone to meet his maker.

He's pining for the fjords, they said. Or perhaps it's the Black Forest Forest he's dreaming of.

If you hadn't propped him up in the wheelchair he'd be pushing up daisies, retorted the official. He is an ex-pensioner.

What had worked so well as a premise in a Hollywood movie didn't play out as expected when a pair of travelers tried to bring a dead man on a plane. The sunglasses didn't fool anyone. Assurances from the two ladies that their companion was asleep flew in the face of the fact that the elderly man was not breathing.

Authorities would like to know how the pair managed to move Grandpa in a taxi from their home to the airport without raising the suspicions of the taxi driver, miscellaneous people standing around at the unloading zone of the airport, and the throngs inside the terminal.

No one asked questions until the women were trying to board the plane to Berlin and someone noticed that the elderly gent was behaving like dead weight rather than a live body.

Everything is so expensive these days, and the airlines aren't so amenable to process changes at no charge. If the old man had a ticket for his return flight to Germany, it made no sense financially not to use that ticket since he had to go back, dead or alive.

Imagine the paperwork and the nightmare involved in reporting his demise. Not that there would be any suspicion attached to the women. The man was 91 years of age, after all, and had enjoyed the blessings of longevity.

Still, there would be delay and then it's three tickets that aren't refundable. Add to that the costs of shipping a body across the English Channel. Processing the request could take who knows how long, and if you're heading back to Germany for a relative's wedding, you wouldn't want to miss it for the sake of some legal mumbo-jumbo.

The simplest solution might have worked, if the dearly departed had looked a bit less moribund. A touch of cosmetics, pass him off as an old queen, and the trio might have arrived in Berlin as planned. Fly the body back home on the cheap, confine all funeral expenses and undertaker's services to German hands, and it's a cost savings all around.

Instead, someone realized that the pensioner had joined the bleedin' choir invisible and the ruse fell apart.

Like so many other cost-saving ventures, this one proved to be a case of false economy. The two women were charged with failing to report a death and they'll have legal fees and court costs on top of the expense of shipping the old man back to Germany.

And all for the sake of not wasting a perfectly good plane ticket.