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.”
“Thanks,” the student said blowing her nose in the rough paper towel that the prep room was stocked with.
“No worries. Throw some music on, and get working on that one.” Carlie said nodding toward the body on the table in front of the student.
Carlie was finishing up the house call that they had picked up earlier in the day. The family made arrangements, signed for the embalming, and things were looking good. The last body of the day was the full bone and organ donor. Carlie had saved a happy little surprise for Brian.
Carlie loved the idea of donating eyes and organs and bones and saving lives. In fact, she had signed her own donor card. When it came to embalming though, donors were a nightmare. It took a lot of extra work to embalm because the entire vascular system was disturbed and the body needed plenty of tender loving care to become presentable for viewing, not to mention thousands of sutures.
Quite honestly, Carlie couldn’t wait to see Brian’s face when he got back to the prep room and the donor wasn’t started yet. He was likely taking his time so that the dirty work was finished, and he could get away with some suturing.
Carlie was in the middle of the final washing of the body that she was working on. It was important to clean and disinfect the body prior to dressing and casketing. Lots of people want to give a final kiss good-bye, so unless Carlie would kiss the body herself, she wouldn’t put them in a room for their family to be with. She was a fanatical embalmer, and crazy about details, but that described most funeral directors. One of the highest compliments that was paid between directors was, “Who embalmed this one? Wow – they did a great job!”
Carlie dried the body, and dressed him. The family had brought in a suit that must have fit at one time, but certainly wasn’t going to go around this guy now. “Graduation suit” was the name that directors gave to this kind of outfit.
Graduation Suit – noun – a suit worn when a person was in the prime of life for a special occasion that was to be used again decades later for another special occasion. Graduation suits – another reason embalmers use scissors.
Carlie finished up the last of the dressing by stitching the cut collars together with some suture cord. The rule of thumb for men’s collars was, if they weren’t dead before you dressed them, they’d be dead after. If the little ferret could wedge his pinky between the collar and the flesh of the neck, it was no good.
Just as Carlie and the student were lifting the body into the casket, Brian walked in to the prep room.
“Where the hell have you been lover boy?” Carlie said, setting the deceased’s head gently down on the casket pillow.
“We took another call.”
“What?!”, Carlie said exasperated. The last thing they had time for was to send the student out on a transfer, or worse, lose two of them to another house call.
“Yep. House call,” Brian said, barely hiding a smirk. It was an all too common joke, but after a few years on the job, you got to recognize it a little bit faster.
“You’re full of shit. Here,” Carlie said pushing the casket toward Brian, “wheel this one out and then help me get the donor on the table.”
“You mean you haven’t started the donor yet? That’s going to take hours, we’ll never get out of here!” Brian rolled the casket out of the prep room mumbling to himself.
When he came back in, Carlie and Brian wheeled the stack of transfer containers over that served as the temporary place of rest for the gentleman who had become known to them that day as 'The Donor'. Stepping up onto the lower rail of the prep table in her rubber boots, Carlie stretched over the width of the table to reach the deceased. She and Brian gathered up both sides of the sheet that he was resting on, and pulled him onto the embalming table.
After they rolled him off of the sheet, Carlie and Brian covered his genitals as they did with all bodies, and disinfected his mouth, nose and eyes. “I’ll mix the chemicals,” Brian said turning and opening a cupboard.
“Not so fast cowboy,” Carlie said, “check his paperwork.”
Brian walked over to the board that held all of the individual preparation instructions and pulled the gentleman’s paperwork. “Oh thank you Jesus!” Brian said smiling. “You dirty cow, I thought he was a prep. Woo-hoo!!!”
“Just features and an I.D.” Carlie said smiling. All the family wanted done was to set his facial features, wrap him in a simple white shroud (also known as a white sheet in the funeral business) and then have him cremated. The family simply had to identify the body before they drove him off in the funeral coach to the crematorium. In this case, the family was going to have a memorial service at the golf club that he belonged to, and scatter the ashes on the 18th hole. Beautiful.
“Everything is going well out front. The families are ok, I cleared both funerals for tomorrow. I’ve put you down for the Spanish mass, make sure you wear something warm, because it’s really cold in that church, and the doors at the back don’t close all the way.” Brian said to Carlie as he started washing the body.
Carlie was busy taking care of the man’s face, and just nodded as a gesture of acknowledgement. She was carefully shaving the deceased, one of her least favourite jobs. She was paranoid about nicking men on the face, and then having a huge red dry spot to cosmetize over. Carlie actually liked using regular cosmetics instead of the kind that most funeral homes used. The cosmetics sold by the suppliers were heavier, like stage make-up, and no one looked natural with that stuff plastered all over their face. Regularly made trips to the local drugstore to get the cosmetics that she needed – another thing that annoyed the ferret to no end. Although, there were plenty of circumstances that required the heavy duty stuff, Carlie used it sparingly.
While she was shaving him, she was thinking of how she would close his eyes since he had also donated his eyes. There was always more than one way to go about doing something that required some element of creativity, and Carlie had a formula that worked. She had already placed prep towel soaked in dry wash into the sockets to sear the tissue. After she shaved him, and tidied his eyebrows and ears, she would form balls out of what she liked to call “peanut butter”(it was known as hardening compound in the business), and then use eye caps and the sticky wax they used on lips to gently close the eyes.
“I’m glad you’re at that end,” Brian said. “I can’t handle eyeballs man.” And then Brian broke into song, Van Morrison’s Brown Eyed Girl no less.
“Really?” Carly said, “for me, it’s fingernails. It just gives me the willies cleaning fingernails.”
The student was unusually quiet at the next table. She was still injecting embalming fluid, but had to make a second and third incision in the right and left femoral artery and vein because the circulation was poor. “You ok over there,” Carlie said through her mask, and then stretching her back.
“Oh, yah, but I’m having trouble finding this one,” the student said looking up at Carlie.
It was a nerve wracking skill to master, finding the arteries and veins. They taught you how to landmark on the body to make incisions in order to find all of the vessels you would need to find, but once you made the incision and looked inside, it was a whole different ballgame. It certainly didn’t look like the old, standard black and white embalming text book.
Carlie finished shaving the gentleman, rinsed his face, and then took off the outer pair of latex gloves. She was one of few directors who always double-gloved. She slid on another pair, and then went over to where the student was standing. The student passed Carlie the scalpel. The aneurysm needles were on the side of the table in the trough where the water was running down and out of the drain hole into the embalming sink.
“Ok, I want to see how you mark for the femoral,” Carlie said to the student.
The student stretched her hand, thumb on the pelvic bone and index finger straight down. “Ok. That’s the problem. Use your middle finger and try again.”
The student did, and that made the marker about an inch and a half further down the leg distally. “Oh,” she said sounding defeated.
“No worries,” Carlie said, “we all do it. I’ll raise from the incision that you made, but next time you’ll know, ok?”
“Uh-huh.”
Carlie could tell that the student had been trying for a while to raise these vessels. The tissue had been dissected quite thoroughly with the aneurysm needles, perhaps a little too thoroughly. It didn’t help that the deceased had a good inch or so of adipose tissue under the skin. That made everything slippery, and even more frustrating when you were having trouble finding vessels. Carlie, although instructed never to do so in her embalming classes, used her index fingers to keep the incision open and feel for the arteries. In an instant she could feel the bundle of dead vessels and nerves through the gloves. The artery cracked under the pressure of her finger as she tried to raise it. With her left hand on the vessels, she picked up an aneurysm needle with her right hand, and slid it under the vessels next to her finger. She used the other aneurysm needle to carefully separate the surrounding tissue, found the nerve, and cut it very carefully with the scalpel. Once the nerve was cut, the vein and artery could move more freely, and with blocked arteries, the more flexibility, the better.
Carlie tied off the artery, and the vein for good measure. “Get me a smaller cannula,” she said to the student, pulling the larger one from the embalming hose. The student came back with two more cannulas. Carlie chose the smaller of the two. The artery was almost completely blocked, and she would have more success with the smaller one. “Ok, let’s give this a whirl. Turn it on.” Carlie and the student watched as the fluid came down the hose. What they didn’t’ want to see was fluid coming back out of the artery where the cannula was tied off. That would mean that the circulation wasn’t good, and they’d have to embalm the leg another way. They watched, and there was no fluid flowing back out, so with lots of massage and pressure, the leg would be fine. Carlie left the student to finish, and went back to her table to help Brian.
Brian had finished the washing, but hadn’t done anything else. The eyes, Carlie thought. “Really?” She said in a sarcastic tone to Brian, gesturing to the two pieces of cloth sticking out of the sockets, and then giving a chuckle.
“I’m going up front to make sure everything is ok at reception,” Brian laughed, taking off his gloves and beginning to take off his gown.
“Sounds good. Is there much left to organize in the office for tomorrow?”
“No. I did that already. I think we’re good to go so long as these families don’t drag it out tonight. “
Carlie took great pains to make sure that this gentleman’s face looked as peaceful as possible. That was all that the family would see, but everyone deserved at least that much respect. She wondered what he did for a living, if he had a wife or children. She looked at his smooth skin and unwrinkled hands and thought that perhaps he had been a professional of some sort. Tradesmen always had large, worn looking hands, but this guy worked in an office, you could just tell.
I wonder why he donated his organs? Carlie thought to herself as she combed his freshly washed hair. It was always sad to see someone his age die. She could only guess at the cause of death because she hadn’t seen the medical certificate, but she’d bet it wasn’t cancer or Parkinson’s, or ALS. Likely a sudden heart attack or stroke. May your soul rest in peace, she thought to herself, sending up a little prayer for this man who was physically at her mercy, but not really there at all.
Years ago, when she started working, there was a sign on the prep room door that said, “This room is sacred. We treat every human body with respect and as if their loved ones are in the room with us.” That was the golden rule of funeral service, and generally adhered to. Other than the foul language the directors used to shield themselves from any more devastation, the prep room was a sacred space. Although they laughed and joked and put on a tough show, there was a lot of respect for every body that passed through.
“Carlie?” Long Pause. “Carlie?” Pause. ”Carlie?”, the student said more loudly this time. It was as if Carlie was off in her own world, just standing there at the head of the table looking down at the body.
“Oh. Yah, sorry. I was a million miles away.”
“Should I raise the left axillary or go back to the jugular?”
Carlie looked over at the body on the next table. “Axillary definitely, and likely the ulner too if her hands don’t take it.”
The student was tired, and the thought of having to make two more incisions and find two more sets of arteries and veins was pretty discouraging, especially at this late hour.
Carlie dried the gentleman’s body carefully so as not to disturb the loose sutures that were done at the hospital, and then she rolled a sheet underneath him and wrapped him with that, and another sheet. All that was left to do was to transfer him to one of the plain, pressed-wood, cremation containers. This time, Carlie was on the opposite side of the cremation container, which was on rollers. She stretched over the container and reached way up to gather the sheets at his abdomen, and with one strong, swift movement, she slid his body from the table, down into the container. After she adjusted his arms so they weren’t sticking straight up into the air, she printed a label with his name on it from the old label maker they kept in the prep room, and stuck it to the outside of the container. She then screwed the bottom part of the lid on, and rested the top part of the lid on the bottom so that the family could do the identification. He was a pretty big guy to have to stuff into such a small container. Carlie pushed the container to the back of the prep room by the door so that it could be rolled into the chapel following the nine o’clock service for the eleven o’clock I.D. appointment.
Carlie scrubbed and disinfected the instruments that she had used, and then went to help the student. It’s a wonder what a little fatigue will do for your embalming technique Carlie thought to herself. With increased pressure, and lots of massaging, the student had managed to avoid raising the second set of vessels, and the woman’s fingertips looked lovely and plump. All that was left was to inject the head, and they could start suturing and dressing. Only a couple of hours left. If they were lucky, they’d be out by 10:30.