The Removalist

by Matthew Franklin Sias

  Breaking the News

  Though it could certainly be argued that my compassion for animals has always exceeded my compassion for humans, there is one aspect of the job of deputy coroner that still makes my heart churn—death notifications, occasions when it is necessary to either make a phone call or travel to the residence of the identified next of kin and “drop the bomb,” so to speak.

  The first duty of a medicolegal death investigator is to identify the deceased, whether by comparison to a driver’s license or mug shot photo, or by more advanced methods such as fingerprinting or dental record comparison. The second duty and, arguably, the most mentally and emotionally taxing, is the notification of next of kin. While many think the job of coroner is primarily as a body-snatcher, they don’t seem to grasp that most of our work is done with the living. We have to be de facto grief counselors, as well as scientists. Fortunately, in our county, we have a cadre of individuals dedicated enough to volunteer to assist us in this task—the county Support Officers. Clergy, retired teachers, and volunteer firefighters make up their ranks. They usually arrive before us on scene, having been dispatched by fire personnel or police on scene with a death. They are instrumental in explaining to the family “what happens next” from the often-unpleasant process of body removal, to the selecting of a funeral home.

  I never do a death notification alone. Families’ reactions to the news of the death of their loved one range from numb silence to outright denial, to bizarre behavior, screaming, pounding of fists, death threats to the investigators, “killing the messenger” so to speak. It is also not a good idea to approach a residence, unarmed, at 2 a.m., by oneself, and knock on the door. People woken out of a dead sleep can be confused, scared, and arm themselves readily either with a bat, a crowbar, or a double-barreled shotgun. Also, some folks are just plain nuts. In order to prevent my career from being cut short in such a fashion, I will either be accompanied by a Support Officer or a member of law enforcement on every in-person death notification.

  Nothing in my training has been adequate at preparing me for the reactions I get when I give the worst news. When I stand at the door and inform a mother and a father that their son has shot himself in the head, that he’s never coming home again, that he will forever now be referred to in the past tense, I have delivered a crushing blow. With a few words, I have effectively just destroyed their world.

  When I deliver the worst news, various reactions may occur, among them a shocked silence, weeping, sudden collapse, and spontaneous destruction of property. The worst though, is the death wail.

  I will never forget the first time I heard it in the early morning hours of a foggy winter night in 1989. I was a volunteer firefighter and we had just concluded a valiant attempt at saving an elderly man’s life. We had failed. As I stood in the darkness beside the ambulance, I heard the wail cut through the night, the most piercing, agonizing, hopeless sound I had ever heard. It seemed to tear into my solar plexus, then exit, removing a little bit of my soul as it left. The lead paramedic had just informed Cliff’s wife that, after fifty years of marriage, he was no more.

  Since that time, I’ve heard the death wail countless more times. I’ve had the sad duty to inform a young boy that his mother had overdosed and died—on his birthday of all times. The look of utter shock, the keening, the slow collapse to the floor, the primitive knowledge that life has forever changed…I have felt my mouth go dry and my heart beat in my throat as I spoke on the phone to a mother hundreds of miles away, telling her that her son had hanged himself. I know what is coming next. As devoid as I feel of emotion at times, and as easily and nonchalantly as I am able to walk into a room full of flies and stinking of human decomposition, I will never be able to rid the death wail from my mind as long as I live.

  On one of the last days of summer, with the chill of fall already in the air and the leaves beginning to turn, I heard the death wail again, but this time it came from my own throat. I stood over the tiny and lifeless body of my dog, killed at four years old by the neighbor’s lab. “Not now. Not Micah,” I had thought. The wail pervaded the neighborhood, and soon two neighbors came running. I didn’t care who heard. He may have been “only” a dog, but he was better than most people I had met.

  When I could wail no more for the loss of my friend, I sank to the grass, exhausted, and stroked his blood-streaked fur. I was no longer just the bearer of bad news. I was also its recipient. The sudden death of a loved one cuts us from the inside out and forces us to re-evaluate our priorities. Shortly after Micah’s death, I began to think more seriously about my own mortality. Perhaps I don’t have forty or fifty more years left on this planet. I may leave as quickly and as unexpectedly as Micah did, or as precipitously as the folks I zip into a plastic bag in the afternoon, when just that morning they had expected to live forever.

  Rest well, little friend. I’ll see you at the end of days.

  But…in the midst of sorrow, there is always the promise of new life.

  Klaire

  On a cold, gray January 27, at 0931 hours, my beautiful baby daughter Klaire was born and life was forever changed.

  I was forty and had thought I would never have children. It just didn’t seem to be in my nature. I had considered children an annoyance, a disruption of my peace—noisy, clumsy, dirty organisms who only bore a passing resemblance to adults. Even my own father disliked children, and does to this day. Shortly after he and my mother married, it became obvious that they had failed to have a very important pre-marital discussion on the subject of children. While my mother wanted kids, my father envisioned a future with small, furry, four-legged children. It seemed to be, in part, an attempt to recapture what he had lost as a youth. When he was young, his family had owned a beagle. One day, he had attempted to give her a bath. Apparently, the beagle had disliked this idea so much that she had run off, soapy water dripping off her, and was never seen again.

  In the end, my mother had won, (obviously) and my father was either blessed or cursed with two boys. I was the oldest; my brother followed three years later. Though I had given both my parents innumerable headaches and sleepless nights, especially during my rebellious teenage years, my father does confess that I have made life “more interesting” for both he and my mother. “Without you guys, our lives would be boring,” he had once said. I wasn’t sure whether to take this as a compliment or not.

  Long before there was Klaire, there was Micah, the little Yorkshire terrier my wife and I had adopted as a couple three years prior. I had never been a “dog person.” I thought they resembled children in that they seemed overly friendly, smelled bad, and would jump on people when they least expected it. They were fine in theory, as long as I wasn’t slobbered on. But Kenzie wanted a dog, and she wouldn’t give up until we had the small, furry bundle in our arms.

  She did internet searches for Yorkie puppies deep into the night while I lamented the responsibility of caring for a dog. I issued such bright-line imperatives as “the dog will not be allowed in or on the bed” and “the dog will be your responsibility.” At the time, Micah was just “the dog,” devoid of personality or even gender.

  When we finally found a breeder that we felt fairly confident wasn’t going to swindle us out of our money, we traveled to the breeder’s home to select a puppy. A new litter of Yorkies had been born as well as a new litter of YorkiePoos—a blend of Yorkie and Poodle. While Kenzie oohed and aahed over the YorkiePoos, I thrust my hand into the wriggling mass of tiny newborn Yorkies in the cardboard box and pulled out the second-smallest, a little runt that was trying to nurse but kept getting trampled by the bigger puppies. I held him up, proclaimed him “The One,” and the rest, as they say, is history.

  When he arrived home that night, Kenzie and I wrapped him up in much the same way as a newborn human baby would be swaddled, gazed adoringly on his fuzzy countenance, and put him to bed. He cried all night.

  It was then that I felt the first real stirrings of affection for the little creatu
re. Here was an animal that missed his litter-mates and depended on us for every aspect of his survival. Within weeks, my hard-nosed approach to dog parenting disintegrated entirely. I became Micah’s playmate, his janitor, and his waiter, making sure he always had clean food and enough water.

  “The dog will not be allowed in or on the bed” became “Sneak Micah into the bed, give him his own little blanket, and let him sleep beside me all night.” I had become a sucker.

  So it was of no surprise that when we welcomed Klaire into our lives, I would fall in love with her as well.

  Klaire decided to make her grand entrance onto the stage of life through a window instead of a door. Dressed in surgical garb, I held Kenzie’s hand as four doctors and as many nurses pulled and prodded our little progeny through an abdominal incision and into a bright, cold world.

  I watched helplessly as the pediatrician and her staff dried and stimulated a limp and blue Klaire, attaching an oxygen mask onto her tiny face, and slapping EKG electrodes on her chest. It was a Caesarean Section like so many others that, I am sure, took place across the nation that day, routine as morning coffee for the hospital staff, but extraordinary for me. Etched indelibly in my memory of that day was, in a scene reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Creation of Man on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Kenzie reaching out and being able to briefly touch the hand of her newborn before she was whisked away to the nursery.

  Within a few minutes, Klaire’s dusky blue fingers and toes turned to a more reassuring pink, and she screeched her lungs out, announcing her triumphant debut as planet Earth’s newest citizen.

  She was beautiful and perfect and a miracle. As a man of science, with a degree in Human Biology, I understand embryology and human development pretty well, so I don’t toss out the term “miracle” in a cavalier fashion. How lucky were we!

  The birth of my daughter was also the first glimpse I had of my own mortality. Klaire was my legacy, the progenitor of all future generations to replace me. This wiggling, pink little being was to become the gray-haired woman who, many years in the future (I hope) would sit at my bedside during my last days. Having a child forced me to acknowledge the fact that life is astonishingly short. As we parents begin our inevitable physiological decline with slowing metabolism and its attendant weight gain around the middle, the sagging flesh, the graying hair, those who are to survive us are just beginning their evolution into fully formed human beings.

  Klaire’s birth brought other feelings I had never expected. I’d always been ambivalent about children, though I had little experience dealing with their premature deaths. A couple of months later, my wife and I were driving in Northern California, on vacation, far away from work, when a vivid image flashed into my head—that of a young father lowering his infant son’s tiny white casket into a shallow grave. I had been one of two funeral directors leading the service of a baby who had died shortly after birth. I looked back at my own child, snoozing peacefully in her car seat, and my eyes filled with tears, the first tears I can remember shedding for the death of a child. In this child’s death, the natural order of things had been fractured, palpably so, and it had meant nothing to me until Klaire had awakened in me a long-dormant or long-suppressed paternal instinct. As never before, I had the need to protect, to walk through fire if it was necessary, my daughter, my bloodline, my DNA.

  Moreover, with Klaire’s birth, I realized that every life decision I had made, every job I had lost, whether by my own stupidity or other circumstances, and every relationship that didn’t work had led me to this beautiful place. Were it not for every nuance, every turn in my life’s path, she wouldn’t be here.

  That night, I put Klaire down in her little fold-up crib next to our bed at the in-laws’ house. I kissed her forehead and hoped a million things for her future. At two and a half months old, it was the first time she had ever slept through the night.

  River Body

  “Why would you do this job?” asks the deputy sheriff, with a mixture of incredulity and disgust.

  “Somebody has to,” I reply. “Why not me?”

  He’s piloting the inflatable County Sheriff boat up the Skagit River as I shiver in the bow in my shirtsleeves, ill-prepared for the brisk late October weather.

  The deputy is persistent. “Why would anyone do this job?”

  “I enjoy it,” I say simply.

  The other deputy relaxes in the stern as we motor out to a sandbar, where I am told, a dead body lies, and has been lying for some time. The trip is taking a while.

  “How bad is he?” I ask.

  “Like a dead seal,” he replies. “All bloated up…stinks.”

  I had parked my Green Van O’Death at a fairly remote boat launch about forty minutes east of our office in Mount Vernon. The detective I had spoken to had asked me to bring “a lot of equipment,” whatever that meant. Was he in pieces? Did I need a separate little bag for each body part? And what kind of equipment did he think I had? Other than a body bag or two, a stretcher, and a full tank of gas, I didn’t have much.

  The victim, I had been told, had been missing for three months and presumed dead, after falling out of his boat in a state of intoxication. In July, witnesses had reported seeing a man falling out of his boat and subsequently flailing in the water before disappearing as his boat, unmanned, went around in circles nearby. He had been reported missing by his wife shortly thereafter, and she had provided, in the missing person report, a description of a distinctive tattoo on the gentleman’s right forearm.

  The deputy cuts the motor and the boat drifts to a stop on the rocky shore. I bring with me a bright orange water recovery bag, basically a mesh bag with a zipper that would allow us to strain the water out of a corpse as we lift it into a boat. Additionally, I bring a light, zippered body pouch, of the style used in hospitals, to contain as much of the “juice” as possible. Bodies leaking all over my van are not my cup of tea.

  A third deputy stands ashore a short distance away. When we approach, he points in the direction of a tangle of downed trees that could have been a logjam had the river been higher. Amidst the scatter of tree limbs is barely visible a still figure, gray as molding clay, partially hidden by a large tree trunk. I approach, snapping photos as I go.

  What remains of the man we believe is Neal Backman is at once both pitiful and terrifying. He is terrifying in that he resembles the best of a Hollywood make-up artist’s attempts to create a zombie, gray skin hanging in shreds, ribs visible, facial features distorted and sloughing off. Pitiful in that as he lies on his left side, his left arm outstretched, it is as though he is grasping for a life ring that never arrives.

  Oddly enough, in three months of bobbing about underwater and being caught in various eddies, currents, and log-jams, he still wears a pair of cargo shorts of an indeterminate color, and his wristwatch still gleams on his left wrist. A gold chain adorns his neck, contrasting with his unnaturally gray skin tone. His chest is split open mid-sternum, which I assume is an open-heart surgery scar that had come undone as his body disintegrated, and through it I can glimpse his shriveled heart. His tattoo is still legible on his forearm.

  “How do you want to do this?” asks one of the deputies.

  “Well,” I say. “You grab a leg and I’ll grab an arm and we’ll scoot him on over to this bag.”

  “What if his arm falls off?” asks the deputy.

  I shrug.

  “I’ll hold your camera for you,” says the deputy.

  The arm stays intact, as does the rest of him, and within a few minutes we have the sodden remains enclosed in a thin white zippered body bag and make our way along the rocky beach back to the waiting boat. It is at this auspicious moment that the deputy actually uses the camera. “This would be a great picture for the Christmas party,” he says. I’m glad he’s found something positive about the whole situation.

  Through the choppy water we go, our decomposed cargo in the bow, back to the dock. The pre-attached identification tag flaps in the breeze. The
putrescent stench of decay is replaced by the aroma of mud, trees, and burnt fuel.

  Once the body is secured on the cot and in the van, the smell, for so long dissipated by ambient air, reaches out with a vengeance. Like a living thing, it creeps through the partial partition and invades the driver’s compartment. I roll both windows down and set course for the morgue. I wish I had a cigar. I am reminded of a case I did years ago when I volunteered for another Coroner’s Office. My partner, Rico, and I had a badly decomposed alcoholic in the back, which seemed to smell worse than a “standard” decomp. Rats had been munching away on his hands and face for several days. Rico had brought along two large stogies, and we had cruised, windows down, cigar smoke billowing, on a sunny day, past motorists and pedestrians, who, for all they knew, were witnessing two golf buddies, on their way home from the bar, enjoying the evening. The van was unmarked, allowing us to travel in relative obscurity, to and from our morbid destinations.

  A light rain sprinkles the asphalt as I back the green van into the parking lot outside the morgue. I can’t smell the body anymore, due to olfactory overload, but what I can smell is the dumpster outside the morgue entrance, hardly an improvement.

  I pull the cot out and the two sets of wheels extend and automatically lock in place. With my ID badge, I open the secured door and wheel my cargo into the morgue anteroom. It’s a sparsely furnished and silent place. A walk-in cooler, set at a constant 42 degrees F, hums in the corner. A desk is situated near a door that opens to the greater hospital, next to a folded-up reserve removal cot and a covered hospital gurney, used to remove bodies from the various floors of the hospital. Adjacent to the morgue anteroom is the autopsy suite, a cramped space that reminds me of the funeral home embalming room in which I used to work. The ubiquitous smell of disinfectant fills the air, certainly preferable to the decomp stench I bring with me.