The Removalist

by Matthew Franklin Sias

  After I transport the seeping, purging, rotting, or bleeding remains back to the morgue or funeral home, what happens next? Does everybody get an autopsy? The answer is no. Only a select few do. In most cases of natural death, a person has had an illness for some time that would explain his or her death. The deceased person usually takes medications and has a physician who has seen that person regularly and is willing to sign the death certificate. In cases of a person who is found dead and has not seen a physician recently and/or has no significant medical history, an autopsy is usually performed. A pathologist or coroner would sign the death certificate in that case. In the cases of accidental and suicidal deaths, autopsies are usually performed, depending on local protocols. Homicides are always autopsied.

  Small-Town Funeral Parlor

  I first met my next employer one evening on a cold night, down a long driveway, on Bainbridge Island, a bedroom community of Seattle in the Puget Sound. We had each been dispatched to the residence for different reasons, different missions. I was an EMT and my job was to try to make the dead guy come back to life. Dick’s job was to take over after I had failed at my job.

  Along with several other firefighters, I had helped move the man’s body onto a gurney and conveyed him down the stairs to the aging Dodge minivan I would soon come to know as Old Smeller. Since I had some free time and a willingness to help, I offered my services to Dick as a removal technician. Several months later, he called me back and offered me some part-time work, probably because I knew how to use a gurney and had seen some dead people. This made me instantly more qualified than the next guy, I suspect.

  So I bought a few cheap suits and shoes that were both practical and, I hoped, not a complete embarrassment to my vocation. Looking good was important, but so was not ruining your shoes slogging down a muddy driveway on a removal, or first call, as it was also known. A silk tie could be a nice touch, but not terribly practical when leaning over an oozing body, so I often omitted this detail, except at funeral services, where more formal dress was required.

  Before long, I was not only removing and transporting the dead, I was also helping to dress and casket them. (Yes, casket is also a verb.) I even moved from behind the scenes to the forefront, becoming an apprentice funeral director, and helping to conduct many funerals and graveside services. Burials were usually pretty sedate, predictable affairs, with the exception of one I conducted in which the town drunk wandered by, howling, “I love you, Grandma!”—he wasn’t related to the deceased—and then teetered on the edge of the grave. Disaster was averted by several relatives of the deceased, who yanked the drunk from the precipice, and escorted him a distance away, where he proceeded to sulk behind a tombstone for the remainder of the service.

  The best part, perhaps, of my funerary career was driving the lumbering white hearse with the gleaming Landau bars on the back. It drove like a dream and parked like a Sherman tank. Piloting this beast through town was like being on stage in a morbid play—a stylish, if ghoulish reminder of the universality of mortality. My wife hated the thing; it spooked her. To this day, she averts her eyes when one passes by. At times her panic has been so severe, she has had to pull over to the side of the road and wait for her heart to beat regularly again.

  Mom, Lend a Hand

  The van is in the shop, so we’ve got the hearse this evening. The nineteen-foot long Cadillac Victoria hums along Highway 305 toward the Little Boston Indian Reservation, where we are to make the removal of a man who was found dead in bed this afternoon. My fellow removal tech, James, rides beside me in his gray suit. The hearse, with its red velvety interior, smells much the same as my grandfather’s Cutlass Supreme did, of leather and cleanliness. The aroma is distinctly different than that of our van, Old Smeller, a Plymouth Voyager with the ever-present but faint odor of death combined with overtones of alcohol hand sanitizer, embalming fluid, and long-forgotten flowers. It was a comfortable odor, in a weird way.

  Prior to leaving the funeral home, we had taken a gurney out of the prep room and loaded it into the back, along with an ankle tag and a box of gloves. We did, however, lack a backboard or a body bag, items that are sometimes useful in tight spots. Using a hearse to do a home removal wasn’t routine, but we had no other logical choice.

  The only information we had, written down on a scrap of paper, was the address, the name of the dead man, and the approximate weight—four hundred pounds. I was hoping the police would offer to help us move the body, but, as I have learned, that is never a sure thing.

  As we approach our destination, the scenery changes. Two-story houses with landscaped yards give way to moss-covered single-wide mobile homes and dilapidated and ancient travel trailers. We are now on the reservation. Pontiacs and Fords, old and ponderous, some of which haven’t run since the turn of the century, line the weedy gravel driveways. Rusted lawnmowers, scrap metal, discarded and mildewed furniture, and broken flower pots sit, frozen in time, among the tall blades of grass that had taken over the majority of what once passed for a yard. It was the accoutrements of institutionalized poverty, the yards of people who never moved more than a mile away from the homes where they were born and seemed content to just exist.

  The dark blue police SUV parked outside a multi-family dwelling, along with ten or so people milling about in the yard, indicates the dead man’s residence. I position the hearse along the curb, grab my clipboard with the first call sheet clipped to it, and James and I walk towards the front door.

  Tribal members have set up camp in the front yard, a weed-strewn patch of off-green in front of the one-story dwelling. Small children chase each other and a matronly woman of about sixty has brought food. Death is a spectator event here.

  A stocky female police officer with lieutenant stripes below her shoulder patch leads us through the front door into a dimly lit man-cave of a living room, dominated by a massive flat-screen TV. The floor feels sticky below my feet and I notice multiple crushed Coors Light cans haphazardly strewn about, some on a rickety table, the others behind a worn and threadbare couch. I narrowly avoid hitting my head on a strip of flypaper that had already claimed multiple winged victims. The house smells dank and unventilated.

  “What’s the story?” I ask.

  “This guy was drinking with his buddies till late at night, watching the game. Then he stumbled into the back room to sleep. He didn’t wake up this morning when his friends came to check on him,” she says.

  “Have you found next of kin?”

  “An aunt. I’ve got her phone number written down.”

  James and I make our way down a short, dark hallway and open the door that the lieutenant indicates. The door opens inwardly, but only halfway, as there is something in the way—the body. I turn sideways to squeeze through the narrow aperture into the room.

  An immense middle-aged man lies on his back on a bare, stained mattress. A vomit-stained white T-shirt barely contains his abdominal girth and he is naked from the waist down, with the exception of socks. His legs are bent at the knees and his feet touch the floor. To his left, a pair of cast-off underwear lies in a heap, soiled with feces.

  Why so many people choose to die in such inconvenient spots, I will never know. One removal technician I used to work with, a heavy man himself, said he would like to die in his attic after having stacked up furniture in front of the door, just to make things interesting for the funeral workers.

  “The door will have to come off,” I say. “Anybody have a screwdriver?”

  The male police officer goes out to the crowd outside to see if anyone has any tools. A few minutes later, two younger Native men come in with tools to take the door off its hinges. While we wait, James and I move the gurney inside, lower it, and unzip the cot cover. We can only get it as far as the living room, since it wouldn’t make it into the bedroom, even with the door off.

  After the door is removed, it is time for the unpleasant and logistically difficult task of moving the body off the bed and onto the gurney. Since the ma
n wears nothing but a T-shirt, there is nothing to grab hold of, and this necessitates the use of a tarp or blanket to go underneath him and slide him on the floor towards the gurney. A dead body isn’t worth risking our backs. The standard plastic liners we usually use are not strong enough to hold four hundred pounds.

  I walk outside and ask the throng for assistance. “Does anyone have a tarp we could use?”

  A woman leaves and comes back a few minutes later with a new Pendleton wool Indian blanket. It seems a shame to waste it, as she will never want it back after it is used but the woman seems willing to donate to the cause.

  By this time, the door is off its hinges and we are ready to move the body.

  I rehearse the plan with the police officers and the two neighbors who have offered to help. “James and I will roll him towards us, then you shove the blanket underneath him, and then we will roll him back,” I say.

  As James and I strain to turn the flaccid bulk of the dead man, two rather disgusting, but not entirely unexpected events occur: First, the man burbles up dark fluid, known as purge, from his mouth, and then, as the female police officer tucks the blanket underneath his bottom, he issues a long, loud, extraordinarily smelly fart.

  “Give me a minute,” says the lieutenant, and quickly steps out of the room.

  The male officer says, “I think we’ve lost her.” We continue without her assistance, eventually getting the body onto the blanket and slid onto the floor. With five of us dragging, we move him into the living room and then heft him onto the gurney. We wrap him in the plastic liner, but it isn’t big enough to contain him. The top strap is also too short to buckle him in.

  After zipping up the cot cover, we wheel the body towards the hearse, our cargo jiggling precariously like Jell-O.

  Once we are out in the open, all eyes are on us. It is as though we are on stage. This is never a good time to screw up and do something disastrous, like drop the body, or bang the dead man’s head into a door. Families and friends have a tendency to remember those things. Thankfully, all goes well, and James and I drive back to the funeral home, a little rumpled, red-faced, and sweaty.

  Now comes the even more challenging part—sliding, pushing, shoving, yanking, or rolling four hundred pounds of dead flesh onto a narrow porcelain embalming table. What makes the task even more difficult is the prospect of placing plastic blocks underneath the torso and head so as to elevate the body and allow water, blood, and embalming fluid to flow freely around it and down the tiny drain at the bottom of the table.

  I coat the edge of the embalming table with liquid soap in an attempt to make it more slippery. James grabs a leg, I grab an arm, and, with an indelicate thump, we heft our client onto the table.

  “We need to get these blocks underneath him,” I say.

  James gives me a look that indicates this task is not high on his list of priorities. “I guess,” he says.

  I move to the man’s left side and reach over to pull his right arm up, in an attempt to get him onto his side. James attempts to push the plastic block underneath but gets only as far as a shoulder before he is stopped by sheer mass. He shoves, but the dead, unyielding flesh prevents him from accomplishing his task. If it were any less morbid, this whole scenario might be funny—two small men in suits attempting to move a giant, completely uncooperative, dead man.

  We stand back and breathe heavily before deciding it isn’t worth the trouble. I turn on the fan that blows cold air into the room, slowing decomposition, before turning off the lights and shutting the door.

  On my way home, I pass by the Bainbridge Library, where my parents are attending a lecture given by a man who wrote a book on being homeless. I’m feeling a bit guilty about leaving the body on the table without blocks, making it very difficult for Dick to complete the embalming in the morning.

  “Dad, would you mind helping me with a body down at the funeral home?” I ask.

  “I don’t think so. I don’t want to hurt my back again.”

  My mom, sixty-seven years old and all of one hundred and twenty pounds, pipes up, “I’ll help!”

  “Are you sure?” This is an unpleasant task for anyone, let alone someone whose contact with death has been minimal.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Mom says with some hesitation in her voice.

  We travel down to the funeral home. Once we are in the embalming room, Mom stands at the door, unsure of this task. “What do I do?” she asks.

  “Here, put on this gown and these gloves.”

  I’m beginning to feel increasingly guilty about dragging my poor mother into this awful task. Mom struggles into her paper suit, looking particularly uncomfortable.

  Mom wants to be cremated when her time comes, a fact that she has stated to me on numerous occasions. “I’ll finally be warm!” she has said.

  The idea of being pumped full of chemicals, painted up, and put on display fills Mom with revulsion. Despite my having explained to her that funerals are for the living, she has chosen to take her privacy and reserve with her to the grave, or to the niche, in this case. Her wish is to be cremated, her ashes placed in a niche at the rear of the church she has attended for going on forty years, and for there to be a quiet service to memorialize her. It was the wish of her parents as well, no-nonsense Episcopalians, not wanting to make a fuss either in life or in death.

  Of the two options of burial or cremation, our large customer has chosen the former, or rather his tribe has chosen for him. His fellow tribal members, most of whom are also relatives, will gather together in an auditorium, dressed in casual clothing, and pass by his casket. They will place their hands on his still chest and kiss his cold forehead. And when the service ends, they will form a line behind his casket and escort him to his final resting place at the tribal cemetery. Shovelful by shovelful, his brothers and cousins and uncles will fill in the grave by hand.

  As I turn the man to the side and Mom prepares to shove under the plastic blocks, the man’s bowels let loose and a rivulet of diarrhea dribbles onto the porcelain. Mom gags. “This is really gross,” she says.

  Indeed it is, and Mom’s efforts to slide the blocks under the fat folds prove about as effective as using a crayon to write on a balloon. A lift would be most helpful, but since we don’t have one, we are left to give up, turn off the lights, and let the mountainous man lie there until morning when, with any luck, somebody with more strength or knowledge will come up with a solution to the problem.

  Alas, when Dick opened the door the next morning and saw the task ahead of him, he almost immediately called a trade embalmer in do the work for him—a sort of rent-a-mortician, who offers his services to multiple mortuaries. I imagine the trade embalmer’s work involved much sweat, towels, and swearing, but the job got done, as the man was eventually embalmed and laid in his casket for his viewing and burial. I thought he had looked a bit constipated, but it is darn difficult to get a four hundred-pound man wearing a suit to look decent lying on his back.

  Setting Features

  Marilyn has been yawning since early this morning, when she died in a local nursing home. She yawned all through the removal, her mouth gaping open in an expression reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. She kept yawning as she was being wrapped in plastic, and, to my knowledge, all the way back to the funeral home. When I placed her on the embalming table, her expression didn’t change. She looked bored with the whole process, her eyes half-open, irises directed slightly upwards as if to express her irritation with all the jostling.

  I knew Marilyn was dead, but I didn’t want her to look dead, and neither did the cadre of family members coming to bid her adieu at some time in the next several hours. The family wanted her to look as though she were asleep, the ultimate goal of any embalmer.

  For several years, I held the distinction of intern embalmer/funeral director. The process to become an intern—the modern term for an apprentice—was simpler than obtaining a food handler’s permit. The fact that I worked under the license of a fully q
ualified funeral director/embalmer enabled me to learn how to prepare a body for burial, handle arrangements, and assist with other aspects of disposition.

  An essential element of embalming is the task known as setting features. When a person dies, all muscles relax. This causes the mouth to yaw open and the eyes to assume a half-closed position, generally not the effect desired by families who are to view the body. Setting features involves various techniques of closing and keeping closed the eyes and the mouth, providing the illusion of sleep. As there are several methods of doing this right, there are innumerable ways of doing it wrong. If the mouth is closed too tightly, the lips will curl into a scowl. Too loosely, and the expression will be one of boredom. The most popular method of mouth-closing involves the use of a needle injector, a device that shoots metal wires through the upper and lower jaw with a rather disturbing “ka-chunk” sound. The two wires are then twisted together. A second method involves threading a needle through the mouth and the nose and securing the mouth with twine. It was this method that my director preferred.

  An embalming textbook had described the desirable setting of the eyes—closed, with the upper eyelid covering 2/3 of the globe and the bottom eyelid covering the lower 1/3. There are a few methods of closing eyes, including stuffing small wads of cotton beneath the eyelids or the use of commercially produced devices known as eye caps, convex pieces of plastic with tiny spikes designed to catch on the lids and keep the eyes from popping open.

  Marilyn is proving difficult. Her age, ninety-four, has contributed to a general breakdown of the tissues, including those in her mouth. Again and again I thrust the needle through the fragile tissue and it keeps pulling through. The other challenge is her complete lack of teeth, which have caused an atrophy of the gums and jaw. I will need to use a mouth former, a plastic device resembling a hockey player’s mouth guard, to compensate for her lack of teeth and fill out her sunken cheeks.