The atmosphere is subdued among the ER staff, as it always is when a child has died. Even with sickness and injury surrounding doctors, nurses, and technicians every day, there is often levity, smiles, even downright jocularity. Not so when a baby has come in DOA. Medical people, so accustomed to seeing blood, hearing groans and wails on a regular basis, smelling feces and vomit, have developed a semi-permeable membrane to distance themselves emotionally from their work, allowing them to be compassionate but emotionally detached. No such membrane exists when it comes to children. Nobody ever gets used to children dying.
The ER clerk points to Room 5. The sliding glass door is shut and the curtains are drawn. A cart bearing coffee decanters is parked to the right, a sign that the staff are already attempting to minister to the survivors, offering a beverage, liquid solace, something warm to hold, a cup to grasp when one has no idea what else to do with their hands.
An uneasy feeling tugs at my gut as I slide open the glass door. I take a breath and push aside the curtain.
Neither parent glances up as I enter the room. The man has an arm wrapped protectively around his wife. Wrapped in a receiving blanket as though she were just born, her eyes wide open and staring vacantly at the ceiling, her face and tiny hands ashen and blue-tinged, is Baby Aria.
For several seconds, I am unable to speak. What does one say to parents who have just lost their daughter? My first few words come out as a stammer, but I manage to introduce myself and explain why I’m there, to investigate and hopefully find some answers in this terrible scenario. Briefly I consider telling the parents that my daughter is the same age, and that this will be difficult for me, but I think better of it. After all, my daughter isn’t the one lying there dead just days before her first birthday.
“Tell me what happened today,” I say.
The mother, still holding her dead daughter says, “I dropped her off at the babysitter this morning before work. She had a cough and a runny nose, so she had been fussy. The babysitter, Rosa, put her down for a nap about an hour before I came to pick her up. When I came to get Aria after work, I didn’t want to disturb her nap, so I stayed and talked to Rosa for a while. She and I are friends, so we just made small talk. Then Rosa went upstairs to get Aria up from her nap and…”
The mother paused and took a long, sobbing breath. “And then, I heard screaming. Rosa said, ‘Aria’s not breathing!’ and ran downstairs with her. She tried CPR until the medics got there.”
The paramedics had scooped Aria’s lifeless body into their arms and whisked her away to the ER, thumping on her small chest and attempting to breathe life into lungs that had probably been still for over an hour. Her back had shown the telltale purple discoloration of lividity, a clue that her blood had already begun to settle in the gravity-dependent parts of her body. It was more of a show for the parents, this frantic attempt to massage life back into the dead. Everyone knew she wasn’t coming back.
The ER staff had continued the resuscitation efforts, Aria’s mother watching the whole thing. Finally, there was nothing more left to do, and she was declared dead.
The initial run-down of the circumstances complete, it was now that dreaded moment when I had to take Aria from her mother.
“In need to examine and photograph her,” I say. “It’s best if you step out for this part. Would you like to place Aria back on the bed?”
Silently and with the utmost of gentleness, Aria’s mother tearfully places her dead daughter back on the hospital bed. She and her husband exit the room, leaving me with Aria.
The silence is deafening. It is almost as though her tiny presence fills the entire room with thick, heavy sorrow. I set to work.
I palpate her head to check for head wounds, depressions, any blood transferring to my gloves. Her hair is curly, clean, and fine, the hair of a baby. I look in Aria’s eyes, checking for petechiae, the tiny hemorrhages that can indicate strangulation. I find none. Her eyes are beginning to cloud over, her pupils dilated and fixed. I check her mouth for any foreign objects or signs of injury, and then move to her trunk and limbs. She will need to be X-rayed in the morning, prior to autopsy, for any signs of new or old fractures, which might indicate abuse. So far, I find no outward signs of anything that could have caused Aria’s death. I take the usual photographs, though she will be photographed again, in better detail, when she undergoes her autopsy tomorrow.
I close my camera case and place a blanket over Aria’s still body, just to the chin. I then walk down the hallway to the chaplain’s office to speak once again to the grieving parents and complete the dreaded Sudden Unexplained Infant Death Investigation form.
Since a baby’s death is never a “normal” event, by any stretch of the imagination, a multi-page questionnaire has been developed in an effort to better elucidate the cause of an infant’s untimely death. While it is excruciatingly detailed and leaves no stone unturned, so to speak, it is painful for both the grieving parents and, I suspect, every death investigator or detective who has to go through the process. It is intrusive, baring nearly every detail of the child’s short life and every suspected shortcoming on the part of the parents. Questions range from “Was the child premature?” to “Has there been any recent painting or pest fumigating in the household?” Do the parents smoke? How many other children live in the house?
Aria’s mother answers all the questions, while her father remains in a teary daze, seemingly unable to even comprehend the events that have so recently transpired. Mount Vernon Police detectives are completing their own form in tandem, with the babysitter, and the forms will be compared later for consistency.
As I wrap up the interview, the mother asks, “What happens to her now?”
“She’ll be taken…” I stumble on my words, “to the basement, where the morgue is located.” The word “morgue” seemed so harsh, as did “basement.” I could have chosen my words better.
Aria’s mother looks hurt. “That’s not what a mother wants to hear,” she says, and I instantly flush with embarrassment.
There’s nothing more to do now, than to speak to the detectives about their investigation, and begin the laborious process of writing up a report for the pathologist who will perform the autopsy in the morning.
My wife sends me a text message: “Are you okay?”
I text back “no.”
I gather up my gear and head out the ER doors into the night, feeling the cold of December contrasting with the artificial atmosphere of the hospital. If one never looked out the window, it could be any season at all. The Green Reaper awaits.
Driving home, my only thought is of my own little daughter, sleeping peacefully in her crib. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than losing her.
My wife is waiting up for me when I get home. She can see the toll this case has already taken on me.
“I need to see Klaire,” I say. “I know she won’t be happy with me when I wake her up, but I have to.”
Klaire snoozes peacefully in her crib, in a position we call “stinkbug” with her rump in the air, her arms and legs curled underneath her, and her head to the side. She’s wearing footed pajamas, a pink pacifier in her mouth. The room smells of lotion and baby wipes. Her sound machine glows blue in the corner of the room, emitting the sound of waves crashing to the shore. Moonlight shines through her blinds, illuminating the scant tufts of hair on her little head. She breathes. Thank God, she breathes.
Gently, I lift Klaire out of her crib and hold her to my chest. She whimpers. Her soft breath warms my cheek. I hold her for a few minutes, rock her, and thank God for her life.
I leave Klaire to her peaceful slumber, open up my laptop, and get to work. It’s time to make sense of this tragedy, time to write the report.
It’s a sleepless night.
A Lonely Death
“So, this one’s pretty bad,” comes Sgt. Martinez’s voice through the office phone. “The house is full of…all kinds of shit. She’s been down at least a week or more.”
“How old?” I ask.
“Born in sixty-six, so…forty-nine?”
Not even fifty. Definitely a call I need to respond to in order to rule out anything other than a natural death. What could have happened to her? Suicide, overdose, natural death, even homicide was a possibility. The inherent unpleasantness of examining a bloated, seeping corpse made missing a crucial detail, like a stab wound, much more possible. Extra vigilance was key.
I hang up the phone and go through my mental checklist of preparing to meet a decomposed corpse:
Heavy duty gloves: check.
Disaster Pouch: check. Love those things, but at $60 a pop, they aren’t cheap.
Full body biohazard suit: check. The boss has been kind enough to leave one of those fully-encompassing outfits by the door, the sort that makes me look like Tinky Winky, from the Teletubbies. Stylish—no. Essential—most certainly.
I suit up in my Tinky Winky outfit prior to jumping into my county van, The Green Reaper. It’s just a few blocks to the run-down trailer park where my client has been waiting for me, patiently, for days to weeks. It’s still warm, late summer, and this fact makes for happy Northwesterners but unhappy undertakers. Warm weather and undiscovered bodies make for a dreadful combination.
I spot Sgt. Martinez’s car, along with an unmarked detective vehicle, parked outside a nondescript, off-white mobile home. A beat officer and a detective stand outside the residence, which is never a good sign. I roll down the window to greet the officers. I can smell her from the street.
The odor of mammalian decomposition is like none other. Two ghastly chemical compounds, cadaverine and putrescine, combine to form a sickening olfactory signal that warns, “Stay away!” It seeps into any porous surface in a residence, be it a couch, curtains, clothing, or carpet. It clings to body hair, nasal hairs and mustaches, an unwanted hitchhiker that can linger for days.
Unfortunately for me, I’ve always been the sort who has run into situations that everyone else is running out of. Years ago, when I was a firefighter, I stretched hose lines into smoke-filled buildings as civilians coughed and headed for safety. These days, the danger is less, but the smell is worse.
“Ready?” says Detective Ford.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I reply.
I sling my camera around my neck, grab an extra set of gloves, and start towards the front door, the smell worsening with every foot I travel.
The yard is devoid of any landscaping whatsoever. Random weeds shoot up through the cracked and discolored concrete pathway that leads to a rotting front porch.
Once inside, it becomes obvious that my client was a very poor housekeeper. A dining-room table is heaped with a mountain of papers. Beer cans are strewn about the floor. A litter box in front of the table creates its own microenvironment of eye-watering stench. Brown fluid leaks from the refrigerator door. I open the door to a room that adjoins the kitchen. It is so full of beer cans the door cannot even be opened fully. Apparently this was her recycling room. In the bedroom is a stained mattress so covered with junk it seems that nobody would have been able to sleep there for some time.
“She had cats,” says Detective Ford. “They all ran off into the neighborhood when we opened up the house.”
There are no lights, so we have to work by flashlight. I catch a glimpse of a greenish-black lump on a couch in the living room, but resist the urge to immediately go over and photograph it. I have to document the scene before I move to the body.
“I found her purse stuck to the floor,” says Detective Ford.
I examine it briefly before giving up. It smells strongly of rot and I decide to just bag it up and inventory the contents at the office. A key chain with multiple keys is attached.
Detective Ford picks up a seemingly empty cardboard beer container. “There’s something in here,” he says.
He shines his flashlight into it. “It looks like feathers, or…fur.”
I take a look. The bottom of the box is full of what appears to be dark fur. Sitting atop the hairy mass are bones. I can identify a jaw and a few vertebrae. “Yup, it’s a cat,” I say. The poor thing looks like it’s been there for a year or so. No flesh clings to the bones. It appears to have mummified before falling completely apart. I put the container back on the floor, unsure what to do with it.
Moving into the living room, I come face-to-face with the source of the terrible odor. Bloated terribly and wearing only a T-shirt, the woman reclines on her back, sinking into a dark couch made darker by inky dark green decompositional fluid that puddles on the floor beside her. Her skin is dark green amid islands of normal-appearing tissue. The Clostridial bacteria, freed from her intestinal tract upon her death, have infiltrated almost all of her tissue, blackening it and making the veins bulge. Maggots wriggle in her mouth, nose, and nether regions.
On the floor about her are multiple empty and half-empty cans of cheap beer, along with dozens of bright pink tablets scattered about the floor. Looking closer at her swollen, boggy face, I notice bright pink residue surrounding her lips and dribbling down her neck like badly applied cosmetics.
“I think that’s Benadryl,” says Detective Ford.
In combination with alcohol or even by itself in a high enough concentration, Benadryl can be deadly. Before I started with the Coroner’s Office, I wasn’t even aware it was possible to overdose on Benadryl, and I’ve seen two since then. Among other obscure overdoses I’ve seen are a fatal overdose on blood pressure medication and a death caused by the mistaken ingestion of laundry detergent. It seems people are always coming up with novel ways of removing themselves from circulation.
Dressed head to toe in a disposal, fluid-impervious suit and sporting a dual-canister filter mask, Officer Martinez makes his way into the dank and dark room to assist us with moving the woman’s remains. It’s an absurd scene, really. The guy closest to the body, the one poking, prodding, and inspecting, is the one who isn’t wearing a mask. I guess one just gets used to the odor after a while—an olfactory overload of sorts.
After placing a sheet over the body to prevent squirting, splashing, or other untoward events, I heft her unceremoniously to the floor and into the waiting body bag. It’s never a delicate process. We drag the bag into the living room and zip her up in a second, heavier bag to keep the smell down and the maggots from escaping and making a home in the back of my van.
After loading the body in my van, I thank the officers for their time and help, strip off my suit, and drive back to the office. I’ve got quite a lot of work ahead of me. Does she have any family? I’ve got no leads. Her mother had died months ago, and the prospect of searching through her belongings to find anyone who might survive her is unpalatable at best. I’ve got a report to write, a funeral home to contact, a purse to inventory, a death certificate to sign…All this, and I smell like a garbage truck.
I arrive at the morgue and slide the mortal remains of my client into the 42-degree “reefer.” I hope she won’t remain there more than three or four days, as the hospital employees on the upper floors complain if I keep a decomposed body there too long. I enter her name into the Book of Death, flick the lights off, and leave her in the company of another silent customer, an elderly man who had died from sepsis in the hospital.
Arriving at the office, I begin the odious task of inventorying the woman’s purse, removing sticky gift cards, debit cards, scraps of useless paper, and the various and sundry detritus that accumulates in the abyss of a lady’s handbag. Emptying each zippered compartment, I scribble down the contents on an inventory sheet.
After tallying the loose change and few crinkled bills, I arrive at one last exterior zippered compartment. It seems suspiciously full, as though the contents were not meant to be contained there. The zipper separates to reveal something unexpected…fur.
With gloved hands, I gingerly pull the object from its container. A kitten. So young its eyes had not yet opened, body slack with death, maggots darting under loosened skin and wiggling back out
again.
I place the tiny animal on top of the soiled purse and snap a picture. Why, I’m not sure. Somehow I feel it’s pertinent to the case. Did the woman place the kitten in her purse alive? Did it suffocate or was it already dead? Was this the final straw for the poor, lonely woman, the death of a kitten?
And then…the old familiar feeling washes over me again. That pressure that rises up from my chest and into my throat. The feeling of being overwhelmed, of having handed enough sorrow for one day. That feeling I have, so often times ignored, pushing on, faltering, at times raging at my family as I internalize and push deeper and deeper the things that I have seen.
Time for a break.
I want to give the kitten a proper burial but putting one foot in front of the other is all I can do at this point. I seal him (or her, I didn’t look that closely) into a plastic sandwich bag and place him into the garbage can. I strip off my gloves and sink into a nearby chair for a minute. I’ve left the back door of the office open and the sunlight streams in, beckoning me.
Home is only five minutes away. I climb into the driver’s seat of The Green Reaper and turn the key. The familiar stench of death emanates from the rear of the van, but I know I’m only minutes away from the rejuvenation that a hot shower brings.
At home, I put the Green Reaper in park. Thus commences the ritual detoxification. Once the garage door closes behind me, the layers begin to come off, first the boots, then the heavy Nomex pants and with them, the stink of death is peeled away. I climb the stairs into the house and unbutton my shirt. Off comes the belt and the badge. As I strip off the layers of clothing, a metaphorical weight comes off my shoulders. From a removalist to just another human being, tall, balding, and slightly paunchy. A father. A husband. A brother. A son.
The hot water cascades over me, cleansing me of the sadness and the loneliness, scrubbing clean the hairs on which cling the funk of decay. All I feel now is fatigue, and it’s too early in the day for that.
I dry off, check my phone for messages, and open the sliding door to the outside world. The sun has always been a balm to me, its warmth searing away my worries, if only for a short while. The lawn chair awaits.
The Removalist Page 12