When You Least Expect It

Chapter 6

After she took her jacket off, and her lunch out of the fridge in the staff room, Carlie buzzed the students and told them to take a break. She checked her phone again, Graham hadn’t gotten back yet about the Christmas party. What the hell was wrong with her? Why did she even care about him getting back to her or not? She didn’t even mean to ask him to come to the party in the first place.  Carlie was exasperated.

She finished her sandwich and apple, and was just finishing her water bottle when the students came downstairs. “Do you guys have your dinner or do you need to go get something?”

“We need to pick something up.”

“Well, one of you go, and the other one can run flowers.”

Carlie knew they thought she was a slave driver, but that was the nature of the beast. There were always flowers at the back waiting to be placed in visitation rooms.  Carlie was getting up when Brian came into the staff room. “So Butrus, who’s your boyfriend.”

“Bugger off Brian.” Carlie said, and then headed back to the prep room to continue embalming, leaving the student and Brian in the staff room.

Carlie was all the way back at the prep room when she remembered she’d left her suit jacket in the lounge. She hurried back downstairs and walked in to the student straddling Brian’s lap, and his hand up the back of her skirt.

“Nice.” Carlie said, the student jumping off and staring back at Carlie. Carlie just turned and carried on out to the prep room as usual. Funeral directors tended to be a bit of a horny bunch. It was like the closer and more intense the death was that surrounded them, the more they reached out to dig their claws into life. This was not an unusual scene unfortunately, and quite frankly, Carlie could care less. Carlie thought it might be a toss-up whether there was more semen or more tears on the furniture in funeral homes.

Without fail, most people, upon hearing her profession would say, “That must be a really tough job,”. And Carlie would say no, actually ninety-nine point nine percent of funeral directors would say no. The reality was, the strength that it took to emotionally bear the suffering that they witnessed every day was buried much deeper than the human psyche can dig and still function. When the cracks erupted from deep, deep within the director, the pulse of life was the only cure. The more vigorous the life, the more robust the medicine. It was always one of the seven deadlies that cured the madness, but more often than not, it was lust and gluttony that won out. More accurately it was a gluttony of lust. It was a release of living energy that neutralized mortality, and quite often, caught you offguard.

Carlie remembered one difficult night at the funeral home when she was a student. She sat in the darkness of the back stairwell hoping that for just a few moments she could be alone. She was feeling  numb, when suddenly, the door opened, and another director leaned down, pressed her back against the stairs and kissed her, hard and passionately. “Are you crazy?!” Carlie had said, “We can’t do this here! Come upstairs.”, and that’s what they did.

So, knowing the hazards of, what do they say in the corporate world, “lack of work- life balance” when the student came back to the prep room, red-faced and humiliated, Carlie didn’t say too much. “Don’t worry about it. Trust me, it’s been done before.” Work-life balance for a funeral director, now that was ironic.

The student just looked up, not sure what to say. “What I mean is,” Carlie went on, ”it happens to all of us. I won’t say a word. Trust me, after a hard day, it’s either sex or booze for everyone of us.”

“Thank you,” the student said, and then burst in to tears for the second time today. ”I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Carlie laughed out loud, ”You’re becoming a funeral director. Don’t worry about it. You just need a couple days off.”