On my first day I took a call from a nursing home where a patient had expired. Nervously, I wrote down the details and paged the on-call funeral director. But as the days passed and I was drafted for an increasing number of bizarre chores, I realized I was going to function as much more than a secretary.
Most of my time was spent alone in that empty, quiet building, but when we were busy, I rushed around doing things I’d never imagined I could. I painted cold fingernails and lips a bright, cheerful pink. I helped embalmers dress bodies that flopped like rag dolls. After a few weeks I no longer gave any thought to hanging my coat in a closet half-filled with cardboard boxes holding unclaimed remains. I even got used to the peculiar smell of a funeral home, that oddly sweet combination of flowers, brewing coffee and embalming fluids.
Morbid? You bet. But as people remarked upon learning my occupation, “Well, I guess someone’s got to do it.” For a time I thought that someone was me. My family tree is filled with deeply caring yet reserved relatives. Thanks to this genetic taciturnity, I was well equipped to be a funeral-home worker. Honest sympathy and emotional distance are what keep you sane in that industry, and I had both. I learned how to harness that stoicism in order to get the job done, whether I was greeting dazed parents who’d just lost a baby or fastening a bra on the large, uncooperative body of an acquaintance’s mother.
I never cried on the job, although the lone female funeral director in the company showed me it was all right to do so. She didn’t seem to fear death or the emotions it evoked in bereaved survivors or in herself, and admitted to crying with the family of a girl who’d been killed when she swerved her car to miss a dog. “They need to cry,” she noted as the family, smiling at her through their tears, left the building. “Scientific evidence shows tears release built-up toxins,” she’d often say, “so cry your eyes out!”
Perhaps the toxins built up in me as the years progressed. I gradually became irritated when the funeral directors made golf plans and read People magazine in the office while real people grieved in the nearby chapel. But I developed a callous attitude myself. I swelled with frustration when a family tried to remember the spelling of their mother’s sister’s last name for an obituary. I became impatient with poky grievers. I wanted to shout, “Just get over it!” to people quite correctly dwelling on death.
In my young life, death had always happened to someone else, and it seemed –dare I say it?–dramatic and exciting. But the more I saw how randomly death struck, the more I realized how vulnerable we all are.
One morning on the way to work I noticed flashing lights and rescue vehicles. As I drove past them, I saw the gnarled tangle of a sports car imbedded in an overpass support. When I got to the office, I took the call from the hospital. The businessman’s body, taken to the hospital morgue for inspection by the county medical examiner, was ready for removal. The subsequent funeral services weren’t anything unusual, but I remember watching the new widow and her children with a penetrating eye. This man had been alive just minutes before I came along that highway, probably drinking coffee from a travel mug and mapping out his day on a cell phone. But suddenly his day’s agenda was erased, and he’d become an inanimate component in the funeral-home process.
My association with his transformation scared me. I’d been involved with enough deaths by this time to have a certain level of comfort with the work at the funeral home, but I was not at all comfortable witnessing the scene of death. The novelty of my job lost its appeal, and the satisfaction of assisting a family through one of its darkest moments disappeared. I no longer felt like an outsider, because now I knew I wasn’t. I, too, could be snuffed out like a match. Sickened, I recoiled from the process of postmortem.
The local hardware-store owner once told me, “You’ve got to have a leather a– to do that kind of work.” After three years, I finally accepted that I didn’t. I needed to release my pent-up emotions and reclaim my humanity. I quit my job and spent the summer with friends and family before going back to college. Death, of course, didn’t take a holiday. It had a job to do. But it was going to do it without my help.
