The Removalist

by Matthew Franklin Sias

  Finally, I’m able to get the tissue to hold, and I continue the suture by passing the needle between Marilyn’s upper gums and lip and into the backside of her nose. The curved needle emerges out her left nostril. I then pass the needle through the septum, into the right nostril, and direct it back down into the mouth, completing the suture. After putting the mouth former in place, I gently close the jaw and knot the twine, stuffing the remainder into her mouth. Marilyn’s lips close naturally over her newly formed expression, one of peace instead of horror.

  Next, I open a jar of Kalon cream, a sort of postmortem beauty mask that will prevent the inherent dehydration in those folks whose cells no longer maintain homeostasis. Using a small paint brush, I slather the opaque cream over Marilyn’s closed eyelids, nose, mouth, forehead, cheeks, and ears. With her head on a block, her eyes and mouth closed, and her hands folded over her abdomen, her features have been set, and she is ready for the next phase of embalming, arterial injection, performed later today by my much more experienced supervisor, Dick.

  Setting features is primary in what those in the business refer to as creating a “memory picture.” Since embalming hardens and dehydrates tissues, if feature setting is done improperly, it is impossible to fix it afterwards. Along with washing the body with germicidal soap, feature setting sets the stage for the injection of a variety of chemicals into the circulatory system to preserve, sanitize, and rejuvenate dead tissue.

  I recall finishing a removal for another funeral home east of the mountains, Telford’s Chapel of the Valley. We were to perform the embalming and then ship the body for casketing and viewing several days in the future. Unfortunately, there had been a windstorm, and power was out to the funeral home. Even more unfortunately, there existed no back-up generator and the preparation room was windowless, so I had to go to work by flashlight. Spraying off dried-on shit, alone, in the dark, is one of those existential moments that make a person question the trajectory of one’s life work. I’m also lucky I didn’t stab myself with the needle while suturing the mouth shut, mostly by feel.

  Morticians are, in fact, master illusionists. Through the injection of chemicals into the arteries, inert tissue takes on an artificial vitality. Humectants combat the effects of dehydration. Rose-tinted dyes replace the sallow gray of death with the subtle pink of life. Specialized chemicals counteract the effects of jaundice, massive swelling, and chemotherapy. A cancer patient’s sunken cheeks can be filled out once again by injecting gel under the skin, restoring an image of health, even youth, sort of a postmortem Botox treatment. I have even seen postmortem restorations appear to make a body seem ten years younger. So if you can’t afford a facelift while still breathing, just wait a while, and it can be done when you are dead for a fraction of the cost.

  A typical embalming might provide two weeks of good preservation, enough time for the family to gather and say their final goodbyes. If longer preservation is needed or if the body has decomposed some to begin with, chemicals used are more concentrated, allowing for a more extended period of viability. The downside to this is dehydration, and after a time, dark spots begin to appear on the face and hands as the tissue loses all its moisture. It becomes increasingly harder to mask this effect with cosmetics. However, some bodies, like those of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, have been exhumed after decades and are still viewable, though this is the exception to the rule. Mildew and a variety of colorful molds take over as the body lies underground, exposed to damp conditions. A condition called saponification, or adipocere formation, occurs in the presence of dampness. The fat of the body turns into a hard, soapy substance. This can sometimes be seen in bodies immersed in water for long periods of time.

  Part of my job working for the Seattle-based mortuary service was to remove bodies from small funeral homes and transport them back to our facility for cremation. I once removed a rather malodorous body that had been marinating in a cooler for three months at a funeral home south of Seattle, but that experience didn’t even begin to compare with that of my girlfriend at the time, who also was a removal technician. She had backed her van into the garage at our mortuary, stepped out, and asked somebody else to please remove the body from her van, lest she vomit. It seems that she had been sent to this same funeral home on a mission to rid them of a gentleman who had been slowly disintegrating on their prep table for the past year. The man was, in theory, embalmed, and still wearing the suit he was dressed in a year prior, but was beginning to liquefy. The family had never paid for his burial, and so there he lay in the prep room, a silent witness to all the goings-on in the funeral home for the past year, as everybody hustled and bustled around him, shifting caskets, embalming other bodies, and trying to ignore the fact that he was decomposing in their midst.

  One of the apprentice embalmers, Craig, had opened the bag, looked at the poor fellow’s rotting remains, and asked the question: “What did they embalm him with? Tap water?”

  It was always a creepy experience to be in the prep room of that funeral home, located in the unmarked garage of an elderly house with flaking white paint. It had all the makings of a horror movie set: dim lighting, faint odor of decomposition, caskets haphazardly stacked on top of dressing tables and upended in the corner, and a large diagram of all the arteries and veins in the body displayed next to a rather old Porti-boy embalming machine. The only thing missing was the organ music. I could almost imagine Dr. Frankenstein at work in that dimly lit space, re-animating his monster.

  In stark contrast to the rather undesirable conditions under which she worked, the undertaker of this particular establishment was a downright friendly, animated woman who once greeted me with “Hi, honey!” as she rolled open the door to her dungeon. I’d never before met her.

  When all preparations have been completed, and Mrs. McGillicuddy lies in her casket, her hair coiffed just so, her makeup impeccable, wearing her favorite dress from forty years ago, we may gaze upon her and say such things as, “Doesn’t she look natural?” and, “She looks just like she’s sleeping,” never mind that most folks don’t choose to sleep in a rectangular box wearing clothing ill-suited for sleeping. It seems that pajamas might be a better choice.

  Embalmed bodies are weird creatures, the incorruptible saints of modern day, mere stand-ins for the persons they used to be, their skin cold, unyielding, and dehydrated. As the formaldehyde gas permeates every cell of the body, the tissue turns to gel. The stench of death is replaced with the odor of an anatomy lab, sterile and acrid. More mannequins than human remains, embalmed bodies are like elaborate full-body costumes, cleverly disguising death as mere stillness.

  What lies beneath the thin veneer of cosmetics and neck to ankle clothing is anything but peaceful. Mrs. McGillicuddy’s mouth has been sewn shut, her blood replaced with formaldehyde, and her internal organs poked full of holes by the wicked device known as a trocar. So much for Rest in Peace.

  The illusion produced by morticians is one of sleep. With the exception of an occasional odd family who wishes to have their loved one displayed astride a motorcycle or seated at a kitchen table with a cigarette between two stiff fingers, bodies are displayed horizontally. In larger funeral homes, bodies “repose” in “slumber rooms.” The analogy of sleep permeates not only the funeral industry’s lexicon, but the lexicon of modern society. Rest in Peace. Grant to the departed eternal rest. The Big Snooze.

  Grandma’s Last Trip

  Today my grandmother died, and I removed her body. I’ve never before been so personally invested in a removal as I have today. We had known for some time that her time was short, and I had made a silent promise to Grandma that I would see her through to the very end.

  At ninety-five years old, she was dying of what I could best describe as a general fatigue of life. She had been living in retirement homes for some time, had some dementia, but was able to function semi-independently. Her days consisted of sitting in her chair and reading large-print books, napping, and making frequent trips down the hallway to
either the community library or to retrieve a Styrofoam cup full of lukewarm, low-grade coffee from a machine that had been turned off hours prior. She had seemed content, though not necessarily happy.

  She had eaten “like a bird” as my mother put it, for many months, and it had seemed inconceivable to me that a human body could continue to exist for so long on so few calories. What she did eat was mostly candy, of which I made sure she had plenty every Christmas in a basket stuffed full of crackers, cheese, and chocolates. Still, she plodded along, enjoying more Christmases than we could have anticipated, surviving cancer twice, and burying two husbands along the way. My dad’s father had died when I was still a baby and when Grandma married again years later, she married a man much younger, vowing that she would never again be a widow. Ed died anyway, leaving Grandma in search of a new place to live. For a while, she lived with my parents at their home, and then, as her health progressively worsened, she went to an assisted living facility, and then another, and then another. Dad said he thought she might be immortal, and I was beginning to believe it also.

  One day, Grandma did nothing but sat and stared at her dinner, then walked back to bed, and never got up again. Within a few days, she was put on hospice care and I visited more frequently, as did my father and my wife, who had taken on my family as her own. On several occasions my wife would rise early and drive the half-hour from our town to Silverdale and sit at Grandma’s bedside, watching her sleep, holding her hand.

  On the morning she passed from this earth, I was on my way to work. My wife was at her bedside when it happened. She called me as I was on the ferry boat to the mainland.

  “I’m sitting with Grandma. Her eyes are dark. I think this is her last day.”

  “Should I turn around and come home?”

  “You probably should. I don’t think she’ll be here much longer.” She paused and then said, “She just took a deep breath.”

  “I’m turning around and getting back on this ferry as soon as we hit Edmonds.”

  “I think she’s gone, Matt. I can’t feel a pulse. I’ve never seen anyone die before.”

  I call my work and give them the news. Then I drive off the ferry and get right back into line to go back to Kingston. I couldn’t be with my grandmother as she died, but I could be there to support my family.

  When I arrive at the home, my wife and father are keeping vigil over grandma’s body. Eyes sunken and skin stretched over facial bones, she doesn’t look at all like herself. Her skin is tinged a sickly yellow. This is death, natural, normal at the end of ninety-five years, the same look of death I had seen hundreds of times before. But now it’s personal. This is somebody I love.

  Wordlessly, I pull the bouquet of flowers from the vase beside her and lay several long-stemmed roses on Grandma’s still chest. I place her cold hands atop the flowers and hug her for a minute, tears flowing down my cheeks.

  When Ibrahim from the funeral home arrives, he stands in the doorway for a few moments and looks as though he is about to cry.

  Ibrahim and I work silently, attaching a name band to Grandma’s ankle and then turning her so as to place a plastic sheet underneath her. Her back is purple with lividity, the postmortem settling of blood due to gravity. Crinkling plastic is the only sound as we place her on the cot. She is covered now from head to toe, really dead.

  Rain comes down in sheets as Ibrahim and I wheel the cot to the waiting van—a perfectly gloomy atmosphere for the circumstances, gray sky, wet pavement, and silence.

  We drive another hour to the crematory in Kent, a drab, industrial building that bears no outward signs of the business run within. Ibrahim backs the van into the dim garage where the crematory machines hum away and the acrid odor of cremated remains hangs in the air. Dark-suited technicians stand ready to take Grandma into their care.

  I wheel our cot alongside a mechanical lift with a sheet of plywood on top. An imposing black man in an all-black suit stands by to whisk her from one to the other. With a soft thump, he slides her to the plywood.

  “This is my grandmother,” I say unnecessarily. Why I feel this is pertinent, I do not know. Did I expect the tech to treat grandma with more care as a result of this knowledge? Or was I simply asking for him to acknowledge my great loss.

  “Yes, I know,” he says simply, and goes to work taping the plastic together into a bundle using a tape dispenser. As the last gray hair disappears into the plastic wrap, I am acutely aware that I will never see her again. She has now become a package, like to many others destined very soon to be placed on a shelf in the massive refrigerator, and later, packed in cardboard, then slid into a blazing hot crematory retort. She will be returned to us a week or two later, not in grandmother form, but as eight pounds of ground bone and ash encased in a non-descript rectangular plastic container.

  Having outlived most of her family and two husbands along the way, there are few to mourn and no funeral to plan. Her remains are spread in a park in Oregon, where her first husband’s, my grandfather’s, ashes were spread years before. A priest attends, and my parents, but they are the only ones.

  As Ibrahim drives back home, another removal already on his schedule, I gaze out the windshield and watch the rain splatter the freeway. The one we called Immortal was now dead, as were so many others whose bodies I had removed in the past. My sweet wife Kenzie was there for her final moments, and I had fulfilled my silent promise to her that I would see her to the very end.

  Burial or Cremation?

  Paper or plastic? Smoking or non-smoking? Decaf or regular? The question to me is a matter of preference, devoid of moral or ethical value judgment. What does my family want? Are we a traditional family or a cremation family?

  Traditional burial is not “green” in the least. Each year, thousands of gallons of embalming fluid and tons upon tons of steel, wood, and concrete, are placed in the ground for eternity. The practice of traditional burial is still the most popular in this country, with the stronghold still remaining in the south, where in many places the idea of forgoing a wake and “Christian burial” is anathema. In the states of Washington and Arizona, for example, cremation leads the way, with 70% of all dead people going up in smoke.

  I come from the Episcopal tradition, and Episcopalians cremate. No fanfare, all practicality. My parents have already picked out their double-occupancy niche in the columbarium behind St. Barnabas Episcopal Church on Bainbridge Island. My maternal grandparents’ ashes reside in a church wall. The remains of my paternal grandparents have been spread to the four winds. The mortal remains—or cremains, as they are also known—of our beloved pet cat, Custard, have been sitting on a shelf in my parents’ house for years now. They will be interred with the first of my parents to die. To my knowledge, my brother will end up there as well.

  My wife comes from a “traditional family,” Catholics that have buried their dead for generations, but there is no guarantee she will outlive me. My daughter, now a small child, may likely choose the postmortem fate of both of her parents. I wouldn’t deign to guess her choice, but ultimately, it will be up to her and those others left behind. I won’t care. My spirit will be light years away.

  Cremation has become more popular, in part, because it is much less expensive than traditional burial, the idea that it is considered ecologically more “friendly,” and the fact that families are now spread far apart across the nation. An eight-pound box of ground bone and ash can be distributed amongst several “keepsake urns” and kept on shelves, worn around the neck on a pendant, or even made into a diamond.

  With cremation, one can be blown into outer space, scattered in one’s favorite park, buried, interred, committed to a water burial in an “earth urn,” or simply forgotten on a shelf.

  I once had the unusual occasion of serving a client who had chosen both cremation and burial for himself. In the hospital, he had had both legs amputated. Wanting to be buried whole, he requested that his legs be cremated and then, later, when the rest of him had died, the ashes woul
d be placed in his casket. I had wheeled my cot into the morgue and then placed the plastic-covered limbs into the pouch and zipped it up, just as I would a complete body. The only question was how to label the bag—“Mr. Smith’s Legs?” Would each leg get a toe tag?

  Few images are as indelible as the first time one witnesses a flaming skull. In the process of cremation, the remains need to be “stoked” periodically, and this necessitates the opening of the heavy steel door to the retort, revealing a burning skeleton, the skull, pelvis, and long bones still readily recognizable, but glowing bright orange.

  The first time I set foot inside a crematory, I was immediately struck by the unmistakable odor of combusted flesh. It wasn’t an unpleasant odor, though it was distinctive, and I have recognized it immediately in many funeral homes and crematories since. The crematory resembled a warehouse, the floors, ceiling, walls, and equipment covered by a thin coating of black soot. The twin cremation machines rumbled, massive people-eating furnaces. Beside both lay cremation trays, bearing the products of cremation—still recognizable bones. Occasionally, a titanium hip replacement. Against the wall is a fifty-gallon garbage can, overflowing with artificial joints, titanium plates, screws, and various other hardware. When the can is completely stuffed, it will be sent to a local recycling center.

  Occasionally, something goes wrong. I recall one day when the crematory owner, Jerry, placed a body into the retort and closed the door. There was an almost immediate “whump!” sound, accompanied by a puff of black smoke escaping from all corners of the door.

  “See, it’s not supposed to do that,” said Jerry, stating the obvious. Later in the day, we received a surprise visit from the fire department, investigating a smoke complaint. Apparently, a plume of smoke had erupted from the chimney and descended over the neighborhood.