“I won it someplace and never had any use for it,” said Merlin Manatt, the owner of the mausoleum.  So the dish, Manatt said, sat in its box in his office for five or six years.  “I didn’t know where the hell I was going to put it,” he said.

One day, by Manatt’s account, a few co-workers were joking about it with him.  At some point, someone suggested that he should take it to his “next house.”  So the satellite dish has been sitting outside the Manatt mausoleum at Hazelwood since the week before Memorial Day.

Manatt is slightly coy – or would that be cryptic? – about the details surrounding the dish’s installation.  “I have been lying about it so much, I can’t tell the truth any more,” he said, laughing.  His favorite explanation for the dish is that it has been equipped with a hidden camera to catch the quizzical expressions of those who peer at it.

Manatt doesn’t have cable television at home, let alone a satellite connection, so the afterlife could be his first taste of, for example, 24-hour news networks. (Whether one is more likely to run into such things above or below isn’t clear, of course.)

“It will be comfortable,” Manatt said of the mausoleum in the good-natured but self-consciously macabre way that he discusses the dish’s installation.  “I don’t have the heater and air conditioner in there yet.”  Manatt also jokes that he plans to set up a card table with four chairs, a deck of playing cards, and a fifth of Jack Daniels whiskey.  But that, Manatt confessed, will probably never happen.  Indeed, he sometimes seems slightly conflicted about the whole operation.

“A cemetery’s not a place for jokes, is it?” he asked.  “It was just put up there as a conversation piece,” Manatt said.  “And it’s certainly generated a lot of that.”