In Austria, the cult of the good-looking dead is known as Schöne Leiche, or the ‘Beautiful Corpse’. Its goal is an aesthetically pleasing focus of the funeral – the deceased – as well as a grand, luxurious send-off with lots of mourners, insinuating that good looks, wealth, popularity and a lasting memorial all go hand in hand. It’s certainly not a new concept – after all, Egyptian pyramids and ancient embalming techniques are evidence of the human desire to make a good impression, even when dead. In fact, the word ‘mausoleum’ comes to us via King Mausolus of Asia Minor for whom, after his death, a huge and extravagant tomb was created in Halicarnassus (now Bodrum), Turkey. The word ‘mausoleum’ then became synonymous with any grand resting place. It seems that, as well as leaving a legacy of grandeur, everyone wants to walk through those pearly gates looking their very best. One of the more famous advocates of perfect post-mortem make-up was Marilyn Monroe. Her beauty routine, while alive, took up to three hours and she only ever had one make-up artist from her first screen test in 1946 right to the end of her life, Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder. They developed such a close relationship she asked him to do her funeral make-up in the event she died before him, a promise he fulfilled in 1962.
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I never needed to go and train as an embalmer as I acquired my dream job straight out of university. Becoming a trainee APT was my first full-time job, and as I settled into the routine and began receiving a steady wage, I embraced my independence once more and decided it was time to move out of the family home. A lovely little flat became available on a street within walking distance of where I’d been brought up and it was immediately opposite my gym: it was perfect. The road was Rose Lane, and the flat, instead of having a number, was called ‘Rose Cottage’. When I told June at work one day she couldn’t believe it.
‘Yer what?’ she exclaimed. ‘Rose Cottage?’
‘Yeah … what’s wrong with that?’ I countered, taken aback by her tone.
June would sometimes take off her glasses and wipe them on her scrubs when she wanted to drag a moment out. She had a lot to teach me so there were a lot of moments to drag out. Like this one.
‘Rose Cottage means “mortuary” in hospitals, ya know, Tiny,’ she said with a knowing look. She put her glasses back on. ‘And here’s you moving into one!’
I hadn’t known that, having not yet worked in a hospital mortuary at that point in my career. What a coincidence, though: Rose Cottage, the first home for the fledgling mortician.
I’ve since thought about the association with roses a little more, and I still find it unusual that these particular flowers are used in this euphemism, given how they represent love and sex. Roses are often symbolic of female genitalia, and the Ancient Greeks and Romans associated them with their goddesses of love, Aphrodite and Venus respectively. But the rose is also said to have bloomed from the blood of the crucified Christ, when heavy drops fell on to the parched ground, symbolising death and sacrifice. Its beautiful petals, which may be the colour of blood or flesh, can hide dangerous thorns which are perfectly placed to draw blood. The rose also speaks of secrets: in Ancient Rome one would be placed at the site of a confidential meeting or activity. To that effect, sub rosa, or ‘beneath the rose’, means something clandestine – ‘keep it quiet’. Perhaps this is what the rose of Rose Cottage speaks of? After all, mortuaries are normally hidden from view in hospitals and not clearly signposted. There are two fears: that a normal person will come to the mortuary and be traumatised, or that a weirdo will come to the mortuary for some lascivious reason. There seems to be no happy medium.
The Municipal Mortuary I worked in had its hidden entrance down an alleyway because it was tucked in behind one of the buildings of the medical school. This meant it was ideally placed for me to go and receive my first inoculations in years for hepatitis, tuberculosis and meningitis – a precaution against infection, along with all that PPE. But it also meant that it was used by people to carry out rather nefarious activities, normally once we’d gone home. Many were the mornings we’d find used condoms on our front step, those two bedfellows, sex and death, having united under the cover of darkness (probably prostitutes ‘carrying out transactions’ with their customers, although it may well have been couples enjoying each other after a night in one of the nearby bars). But all of the used condoms were a far better sight than the one time I arrived to discover a perfect spiral of human faeces on the stoop. Was it deliberate, perhaps someone expressing distaste for what went on in this tiny building hidden away from the road? Probably not, but evidently our sub rosa location wasn’t necessarily a positive thing.
* * *
Back in the PM room in our sub rosa building, once the tools had been prepared and the external examination had been carried out, I would take up a shiny new PM40. I’d bend over the deceased and make the first cut just like I had all that time ago under Jason’s supervision. I’d penetrate the flesh of the neck and slide the blade all the way down to the pubic bone to create the Y-incision. The cuts would open slightly like thin yellow smiles, since mainly golden adipose tissue is visible between the layers of skin. Often, and particularly if my case was someone frail because they were either young or very old, I’d place my gloved left hand on the forehead to steady them as I made the incision with my right. Sometimes it seemed perhaps too tender a gesture, out of place in such an environment, but it was a way to comfort someone who was about to undergo a procedure that many still consider a violation, and perhaps minimise the indignities of the patient at this final port of call. The person to be autopsied is dead and what remains may be just a shell, but that never stops us, the people who work with the deceased, considering them something ‘other’. When dealing with the dead I was constantly reminded of Thomas Lynch’s words: ‘The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality … It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honour.’
And just what if, at that particular point of penetration, the deceased woke up? Would that touch give them comfort? Perhaps their eyes fly open, they scream, or they reflexively reach out and clasp the scalpel-wielder’s wrist in a cadaveric death grip. I know that this is highly improbable but anecdotally it does happen – tales abound of people waking up in the mortuary, ‘on the slab’, even in coffins. As recently as November 2014, a ninety-one-year-old Polish woman, Janina Kolkiewicz, woke up in a mortuary eleven hours after being declared dead. In January 2014, Paul Mutora woke up in a morgue in Kenya, fifteen hours after swallowing insecticide, and in March of the same year, Walter Williams came to in a body bag at a funeral home in Mississippi. Perhaps most unbelievable was the Russian man who woke up in a morgue in December 2015 after drinking copious amounts of vodka, only to go back to the party and continue drinking! Spoiler alert: those people were never actually dead.
I once worked with a doctor who joked that with the first plunge of his blade into the neck of one of his cases he knew she’d been alive because of the unexpected spurt of her carotid blood. As I found out during my first embalming, the recently deceased do have most of their blood, but it doesn’t shoot out like it would in a live patient. Firstly, there’s no working pump – the heart – to force it around the body, and secondly, the blood begins to solidify or coagulate from the moment of death, settling into that reddish-purple hypostasis. When this doctor was asked by his technician at the time ‘Good God, was she even dead?’, he’d apparently quipped, ‘Well, she is now.’
It’s an implausible story – although perhaps it makes a good tale for him to tell at dinner parties – yet it’s not the only one I’ve heard, and not the most disturbing. An APT in a mortuary in northern England told me of a pathologist he knew, a borderline sadistic man who used to take pleasure in thrusting a thermometer into the vaginas of deceased females ‘to take their internal temperature’ (I put that in quotation marks because the correct way to do that is with an incision into the
liver). On one occasion his female decedent, who had been removed from a freezing river, was given the typical thermometer treatment, only this time an onlooker noticed a thin, silver tear slide out of her open eye and down onto the steel tray. The insinuation was that she hadn’t been dead, and instead was in a hypothermic state from her body shutting down in the river, yet evidently able to cry at the painful violation.
These are just stories I have heard over the years I’ve been working in the industry, urban legends; I have no way of knowing if there is even a kernel of truth in them. But the issue isn’t about people being resurrected and brought back to life so much as people being mistaken for being dead in the first place. In the book How We Die, Sherwin B. Nuland says that the ‘appearance of a newly lifeless face cannot be mistaken for unconsciousness’, but this is evidently not the case. The effect of extreme cold on the body can place it in a sort of suspended animation and it can be difficult to tell if the victim truly is deceased. Many examples of this preservation and recovery exist, from those drowning in icy water to others becoming suffocated beneath an avalanche, or simply falling unconscious and hypothermic until they are found and (hopefully) revived. But how they are revived can also be an issue. You wouldn’t want to be brought back to consciousness via the sting of a pathologist’s scalpel cutting through your carotid.
Perhaps the most disturbing case was in Romania in 1992, when an eighteen-year-old ‘dead’ female was brought back to life as she was being raped by a necrophilic mortuary worker. He was arrested, but the parents were so grateful to him for ‘resurrecting’ their daughter they refused to press charges, saying she ‘owed him her life’. Sex and death entwined once again.
Suffice to say I’ve never experienced any of my patients waking up, but there are certainly tricks to this effect that seasoned technicians and mortuary managers used to play on their newbies. For example, I heard tales of one ringleader constantly playing the same joke on their trainees. He’d get into a body bag in the cold store and have his right-hand man close him into the fridge. Then, when the trainee was being given the tour, the fridge door would be opened and the ‘body’ pulled out only for it to sit up and scream, scaring the impressionable newbie half to death. My favourite part of this story is when, one year, one of the more junior APTs decided to get revenge. The trick was carried out as usual, but unbeknown to the ringleader hiding in his body bag, the bag next to him in the fridge was also occupied … by the vengeful junior. As Mr Joker lay in the fridge, probably suppressing a laugh, ready to be pulled out to perform for the umpteenth time, the bag next to him started writhing and groaning in the darkness. He jumped so high he cracked his forehead open on the tray above him and never attempted that prank again.
One of my favourite quotes comes from Caleb Wilde, a sixth-generation undertaker from the US who blogs about his experiences. ‘As a mortician,’ he said, ‘I always tie the shoelaces together of the dead. Because if there is ever a zombie apocalypse, it will be hilarious.’ This is what we in the trade call ‘gallows humour’.
Thankfully, I’ve never experienced knocking from the inside of the cold store, hands grabbing my PM40, or any shuffling dead. But most of all the deceased do still remain human and in some cases seem ‘alive’. Positioned precariously on top of head blocks, they may slowly turn towards you. As I mentioned, they may groan, burp or fart. Sometimes tiny air bubbles of blood pop out of the nose, giving the appearance of breathing, just like the cat had done all those years ago. As Mary Roach mentioned in her bestseller Stiff, ‘cadavers occasionally affect a sort of accidental humanness which catches the medical professional off guard’. She describes an anatomy student who had the unnerving experience of a corpse’s arm around her waist. I discovered this myself frequently: when I’d lift an arm in full rigor over the deceased’s head and turn my back to wash down the side of the body, slowly, without me seeing it, the arm would circle back round again until suddenly I’d feel a cold hand on the warm flesh of my bottom, through my scrubs.
* * *
Back in the post-mortem room, once the incision had been made and the deceased had stayed (thankfully) lifeless and quiet through the whole ordeal, the next stage was to separate the skin of the chest from the ribs. This was always described by the people who trained me as ‘like filleting a fish’, which was most unhelpful as I’d never filleted a fish. I’d just nod my head and watch intently until eventually I had the knack.
Holding the skin flap in one hand I’d very gently pull it at the same time as touching the knife to the strands of white connective tissue being stretched taut by the action. This strips the skin away from the bone of the ribs and the intercostal muscle until it falls to the side like an open pyjama top on someone lying in bed. After repeating the action on the other side I’d be left with a wide V-shaped window through which I could see the striations of white and red as the ribs and intercostal muscles descended from the neck down, like steps on a ladder.
They abruptly come to a stop halfway down, giving way to a large, flat mass of bobbly yellow substance called the omentum. This is a sort of ‘fat flap’ which hangs down over the abdominal organs like a golden apron, protecting them. It’s attached at the top to the large intestine which sweeps from left to right, beneath the diaphragm, but it’s not attached at the bottom, it just lays over all the intestines then tucks down into the pelvis, keeping everything neat and safe.
This neatness, this perfect biological jigsaw, reminded me of the anatomical models I’d become familiar with during my years of study: those plastic, headless torsos I’d encountered at museums and at school, with organs that would pop out easily to reveal a shiny smooth cavity with little metal hooks inside to keep the pieces in place. But long before those armless, decapitated figures became the staple of every anatomical classroom or film set, some students used the Anatomical Venus to learn their subject.
These Venuses, made from wax and looking incredibly lifelike, were popular in the eighteenth century because they were a means for students to study anatomy despite the shortage of cadavers, and without having to get involved with the associated ethical restrictions of employing body snatchers. There was also no odour or icky fluid to deal with, something which the prospective doctors no doubt welcomed. But the unusual thing about these particular anatomical models is they were more often than not deliberately created in the form of a beautiful woman – they actually had arms and a head for a start. Some gorgeous examples are still on display and I’m lucky enough to have seen them in real life in both La Specola in Florence and the Josephinum in Vienna. They recline lasciviously in glass cases, often on velvet or satin cushions, and from the top of the head down they look like pretty shop mannequins, although instead of wearing clothes they wear a look of post-orgasmic bliss. This odalisque-like appearance is enhanced by their long flowing real hair, realistic glass eyes (half-open, which suggests life as opposed to death) and even pearl necklaces, tiaras or other jewellery.* This abruptly changes at the level of the sternum, however, when the torso blooms into an open cavity of organs like petals in dark red, dark yellow and brown. These organs, also made from wax, could be removed one by one and handled by the onlooker in the same manner as our current plastic models. Usually, once the uterus was exposed and opened it would even reveal an angelic foetus curled up inside.
These Anatomical Venuses, also called ‘Slashed Beauties’ and ‘Dissected Graces’, were objects at the interface of art and science. They were ostensibly used to demonstrate anatomy to a male student body, which may have had some bearing on their pleasing appearance. Perhaps it was less traumatic for the students to be faced with their own death in the form of a figure of the opposite sex? They certainly would identify with it less, unlike when I encountered the female prosthetic on the film set and saw myself in her unkempt hair and smooth skin. Perhaps it was simply an attempt to buffer an unpleasant image with an attractive casing? But these Venuses were also used to illustrate God’s ability to create, not only the beauty on
the outside but also the intricacies of the organs within. Whatever the reason for these perfect models, the audience is certainly confronted, in one arresting glance, by all the mysteries of life, sex and death.
But why are sex and death considered bedfellows? Most logically, the connection is that sex begins life and death ends it – a circle of life. The French call an orgasm la petite mort, or ‘the little death’, perhaps in honour of this association between the two great mysteries of life. Some creatures actually enter into a frenzy of mating that begins in sex and ends in death, and stories of fictional teens falling in love with the ‘undead’ saturate modern media.
Often we have to lighten the mood in the PM room with a joke or two, no matter how serious a doctor might be, and it can be gallows humour, or perhaps a bit more Carry On Mortuary. One day, while assisting on the autopsy of a man with heart failure, I noticed that one of the fingers on his left hand was white compared to the other more pink ones.
The Chick and the Dead Page 11