Down Among the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician

by Michelle Williams

  They knew the cause of death and a death certificate had been written by the doctors, stating that Mrs Dellaway had died of bronchopneumonia with ischaemic heart disease as a contributory factor. The family decided that they would like her to be cremated and, in accordance with the law, cremation papers had to be filled out and signed; as far as the hospital staff are concerned, this means that one of the doctors who looked after the deceased certifies that they are happy the death was natural, and an independent but experienced doctor then makes inquiries to ensure this is, in fact, the case. Sometimes this whole process can be protracted – the next of kin may even complain to the Trust chief executive – but in the case of Mrs Dellaway there was no problem at all. Everything sailed through. Accordingly, just two days after her death Mrs Dellaway was picked up by the undertakers, and, as far as we were concerned, we had done our job and done it very well. She had left our care and we moved on to others.

  We found out fairly quickly that Mrs Dellaway had exploded in the crematorium. Clive, Maddie and I were sitting in the office at about three o’clock the next day, just having got the dissection room clean after three PMs and Peter Gillard spraying blood about like air freshener, when the phone rang. Clive answered and was very soon holding the phone away from his ear because whoever it was was giving him a right royal bollocking. He looked across at us as this was going on and the expression on his face told me immediately that serious shit was happening. Eventually, he managed to squeeze a few words in. ‘Look, I’m really sorry, Dave . . .’ Dave Mansard, the manager at the local crematorium, hadn’t finished, though. As Clive held the phone away from his ear again, we could hear for ourselves that Dave was not the happiest of bunnies.

  Eventually, Clive put the phone down and his face told of someone who was seriously out of sorts. With barely contained anger he asked of Maddie and me, ‘Who checked out Mrs Dellaway?’

  It took a few moments for the two of us to get our brains in gear. ‘It was me, I think,’ said Maddie nervously.

  ‘Did you follow the protocol?’ he asked. His voice was dangerously calm.

  ‘Of course,’ replied Maddie at once, and full of confidence.

  ‘Then would you mind explaining,’ asked Clive, ‘why she just exploded and did God knows how much damage to the crematorium?’

  The point is that when our patients come into the mortuary, they are liable to have had all sorts of things done to them, and all sorts of things put into them, and some of these have consequences even after they have passed away. On the whole, fillings, artificial hips and knees, and most of the ironmongery that surgeons put in are fine and the fire of the crematorium doesn’t touch them; they’re left among the ashes to be retrieved by the crematorium staff. Pacemakers, though, are different. Pacemakers, when heated to the temperature of the fires at the crematorium, explode, and it’s not a muffled little affair, either. They go BANG and will easily damage the walls of the furnace. Not only that, but can you imagine the distress of the deceased’s nearest and dearest when, just as they are filing out of the chapel saying their thank-yous to the vicar, there is a loud explosion, the ground rocks and things fall off the walls of the vestry? Not surprisingly they are perturbed and, when they discover that Uncle Alf hasn’t so much been cremated as splattered all over the shop, they are upset.

  So it’s important that pacemakers are taken out before they go to the fires. The cremation papers specifically ask if there is a pacemaker (and, if so, has it been removed) but it is usually down to us to do the actual business of making the incision and winkling the thing out. In the case of Mrs Dellaway Maddie had forgotten to do this, and so she had gone out with a bang rather than a whimper.

  Actually pacemakers cause us a lot of trouble in the mortuary in other ways. In the old days, all pacemakers were just harmless little things about the size of a box of matches; they’re usually put in just under the skin in front of the left shoulder, with a lead going from there into the heart, and they’re accordingly easy to take out. All these ones do is send a regular, small electric shock to the heart to make sure it keeps beating. Nowadays, more and more of them are sophisticated and actually sense what the heart is doing; if it stops, they will deliver a large electric shock to restart it. From our point of view this presents a serious problem: in order to get the pacemaker out, we have to cut the leads to the heart, and the bloody thing interprets this as the heart stopping, so we get the shock. Some mortuary staff have been severely injured. The cardiac technicians have to come over and wave a special wand over them to switch them off, and if this is not picked up on and the leads are cut, you may need an ambulance on stand-by.

  Telling which are the ordinary ones and which are the lethal ones is becoming harder and harder, so every time we take out a pacemaker, we tend to utter a silent prayer to St Dismas, the patron saint of mortuary technicians.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Christmas in the Williams household has always been a big deal. When Michael and I were children, it was a strict rule that no matter what time we woke up in the morning, be it five or eight thirty, we were not allowed downstairs until our parents woke and took the lead. Right up until our early teens, before we both discovered alcohol and Christmas Eve on the town with our friends, Michael and I would always abandon one of our bedrooms and share the same room on the night before, and wait and watch for Father Christmas. This process usually involved one of us dragging the mattress across the landing to whoever was occupying the bigger room, and it was the only night of the year we would be granted Mum’s approval for this act.

  Dad would always go first down the stairs when my parents woke on Christmas morning. He would open the door to the lounge and, guaranteed every year, would turn to us both and say, ‘Sorry, kids, he’s not been,’ his face looking disappointed. And, again, up until our early teens Michael and I fell for it every time. As our faces dropped while we sat on the bottom of the stairs, Dad would open the lounge door slowly to reveal the whole room overflowing with presents. An armchair each piled high, with plenty surrounding the floor around them.

  Michael and I might now be grown up, with our own homes and lives, but it’s as if it has been ingrained into us unconsciously that Christmas Day needs to be spent with each other as a family. Around about November each year, Mum asks us what we have in mind for the big day, if anything, and tells us earnestly that she doesn’t mind if we have plans to spend Christmas Day elsewhere. ‘Dad and I don’t mind at all,’ she always says. ‘We can see you before or after, it’s not a problem. We know you’re grown up now.’ I wouldn’t have things any other way, though, and even Michael will spend the day away from Sarah his girlfriend, while she is with her parents (although his mobile, guaranteed, will be going non-stop during the day, and she will always happily join us for the evening). Luke and I share our families; his being larger than mine, we are able to spend Boxing Day with them without feeling we have left anyone on their own.

  When Mum had initially mentioned Christmas in early November, my first thought was to wonder, Am I going to be on call? As much as I cared about the mortuary and its patients, this was the last thing I wanted. Being on call meant no participation in the champagne breakfast, staying on soft drinks in the local pub for the customary two hours it would open in the morning, one glass of wine with Christmas dinner to toast the day, and being the sober hostess for the evening while all the family and friends arrived and tucked into the spirits cabinet. I fully admit, I cringed at this thought. In my old job, if I had to work – and as I organized the rotas, I had an advantage – I would make sure that I was on the night duty Christmas Eve, which no one wanted to work anyway, with a finish at seven in the morning Christmas Day, so the whole day was free; or, if not that, then the early shift with a two-thirty finish Christmas Day, ready to catch up with the festivities in the afternoon.

  Clive was not overly impressed when I had asked him about the on-call over Christmas, and I fully understood that he must have had an absolute gutful of doing it
over the years. He started to tell me about how he had been called in for a forensic post-mortem at 6 p.m. one Christmas day, and that he had brought his pudding with him, along with a paper hat, cheese and biscuits, and a cigar, and had enthusiastically partaken of these in the office while he was waiting for the police to arrive. My spine ran cold at the thought of this happening to me, but I also felt I could not let him down, and that he half expected me (all right, three-quarters expected me) to take the stand this Christmas. With Graham no longer around as a working body, and Maddie fairly new on the scene, I knew I was trapped and the responsibility was going to lie with me.

  Maddie had yet to arrive for work, because she had an appointment that morning and was not going to be in till a couple of hours after our normal 8 a.m. start. With no PMs that morning, Clive and I sat in the office, me with a face that could sink a battleship at the thought of working Christmas Day, and Clive reminiscing about Christmases past, almost like a modern-day Scrooge. Always pleased to see Maddie, I cannot explain the feeling of relief when she walked into the mortuary late that morning. Clive continued with his Scrooge impression and Maddie gave me that ‘What is he on about?’ look as she sat down. Clive must have seen this, as he started to repeat his stories to Maddie about covering the mortuary over Christmas. I could see that Maddie could read the pain on my face and she interrupted Clive confidently. ‘So who is supposed to be covering this year?’ she asked brightly. The room went silent; I was not about to offer my time, and neither was Clive.

  ‘I haven’t yet done the rota,’ Clive replied. ‘As Graham’s no longer with us, I need to think about things carefully.’

  What came next out of Maddie’s mouth was music to my ears. ‘I’ll do it. I hate Christmas. As long as somebody is willing to cover New Year’s Eve and Day, I’m happy to do the Christmas period cover.’

  I wanted to jump out of my seat and hug her. Clive’s response was not as swift though, until I reminded him that I, too, had only been with them a short time when I took on the responsibility of the out-of-hours service. And the fact that I then said I would support Maddie in any major problems over the festive season probably clinched the deal with Clive and he agreed since this took him out of the equation completely. Total and utter relief on my behalf. I knew Maddie would not be in contact with me on a work basis unless it went completely Pete Tong, and this doesn’t happen often as the dead, despite rumour to the contrary, do not go anywhere.

  So, Christmas Day arrived, and Maddie did ring early, but only to wish us Merry Christmas. I invited her to join us at my parents’, but she had her mind set on staying in and wasting the day. Maddie was a huge learning curve for me: I think it seemed so odd that not everyone celebrates Christmas. We don’t exactly do it in a religious way, for the reason that the Christian churches believe it should be celebrated, but I was not about to argue with the public holiday and the sense of family love it gives us.

  Luke and I, again dressed in our Sunday best as has always been the norm when it comes to the Williamses on Christmas Day, walked to my parents’ with the dogs after our short morning together enjoying each other’s presents and breakfast at home. We settled Harvey and Oscar on the sofas once we arrived, then waited (as usual) on Michael arriving while the dogs were teased by Dad for the ‘doggie antlers’ they were wearing. We then all attended the local pub on my parents’ estate. Just as we started to get into the Christmas spirit the pub called time and we returned to the dogs, who had taken up residence in the kitchen at Mum and Dad’s house thanks to the smell of the turkey and beef coming out of the oven. Then, as on every other Christmas Day, we amused ourselves with games, these days DVD interactive ones which have taken over from the old board games. But, as ever, the playing cards and dominoes came out at some point. Dad won every one, as per tradition, but not without strong competition from Michael and Luke. We were then interrupted by the one and only Mrs Williams presenting a fantastic traditional Christmas dinner.

  This devoured, the table was cleared, then there were more DVD games for a while, before moving on to music at about six o’clock as other family and friends began to arrive. It usually turns out that at least fifteen people pass through my parents’ door on Christmas Day alone. Mum always makes sure that she has enough food for a cold buffet to feed everyone. It was going just as it should do and, I suppose, going too well.

  My mobile rang. When I looked at the screen, I saw that it was Maddie and I knew at once that here was trouble. ‘Yes, Maddie?’

  She sounded devastated. ‘I am so sorry to be bothering you, Michelle . . .’

  My heart, hovering somewhere about the level of my knees, dropped to the soles of my shoes. ‘What is it, Maddie?’

  ‘There’s a forensic. A young lad’s been knifed in Whaddon and he’s high risk.’

  THIRTY-NINE

  I had to get a taxi to take me to the hospital because Luke was a little too far gone to drive and I couldn’t blame him; I have to admit to being slightly frayed at the edges myself as I sat in the back of the taxi and cursed my luck. It was costing megabucks, but I hoped that Ed would swing it for the Trust to pay. I felt mighty low, what with being dragged away from the celebrations and sitting in the back of a smelly taxi, probably on a dried sick stain; the driver was none too chatty either; seemed to think he was doing me a favour. I thought, Should have turned my phone off, but I knew that I would never have done that to Maddie.

  She was in a right state when I arrived. The forensic pathologist, Nick Jones from Cardiff, had already arrived and wanted to get going double quick, and poor Maddie had gone into a bit of a meltdown. She had only done two forensics before but never a high risk one (for which two people are needed anyway). I took charge at once, finding it surprisingly natural. I put on scrubs and told her that I would act as the technician while she would be the runner. She didn’t argue and immediately looked relieved.

  When I entered the dissection room, I began to understand why she had been so nervous, because for this particular forensic the whole shebang was there – enough police officers to control a riot, SOCOs, two Coroner’s officers and, I was astonished to discover, the Coroner himself. That was unheard of and I began to suspect that this was no ordinary deceased person.

  Nor was it, because it was the grandson of General Armitage, who had had a long and distinguished war record. Bill explained to me in a whisper that the grandson, suffering from schizophrenia, had gone off the rails big time and fallen among drug-dealers, living in a squat and no longer taking his medicine. He had contracted hepatitis from dirty needles and been in very poor health for some time. He had apparently got into a knife fight with one of the other members of the squat and been stabbed several times in the abdomen.

  There wasn’t much conversation and certainly not much Christmas cheer about the place. Bill’s face when he muttered, ‘Merry Christmas,’ could hardly be described as enthusiastic. As I looked around the room, I could see, too, that I was not the only one who had been called away from the party spirit.

  As it happened, it turned out to be a typical forensic post-mortem. The wounds had penetrated his liver and small intestine, causing him to bleed to death in fairly short order. Unfortunately for me, Nick found several potential injection sites which he enthusiastically cut down on, as well as several bruises large and small on his arms and legs from which he stripped the skin with gay abandon. By the time he had finished, the corpse looked as if it had been through a flaying machine.

  Three hours later and he was done, so that the mortuary emptied with quite astonishing speed; by three o’clock Maddie and I were alone, tired and depressed as we looked at the work that was still to be done to clear up. We set to with energy that came from an overwhelming desire to be up and out of there, and managed to get things fairly clean and tidy in forty-five minutes.

  I got out of the taxi outside my parents’ house at five thirty on Boxing Day morning ready to drop and not get back up again. I tried not to make too much noise as I let mys
elf in, then crept up to the spare room where Luke was snoring to himself. I climbed in beside him without waking him up.

  FORTY

  Clive summed it up. ‘Whose stupid idea was it to have two bank holidays in a row?’

  Both Maddie and I could only agree. Because I’d been the one on call over the New Year, I’d had to go into the mortuary after a busy social weekend and, accordingly, had been feeling like a corpse myself; it was unseasonably warm and that somehow made it worse. This year was proving a nightmare because the bank holiday period was even longer than usual and bodies were piling up after several days of only the porters having access to the mortuary. Because all the porters are able to do is take them from the place in the hospital where they died, or give access to undertakers bringing in Coroner’s bodies, then put them in a fridge and shut the door, it means that eventually we run out of space, and then they ring one of us, at any given time of the day or night, to say that there’s only one fridge space left. So what are we supposed to do? Take the dead home with us? Do I prop them up on my dining-room chairs till the holidays are over? So, at three-thirty in the afternoon on the Tuesday after New Year, I had to make my way into work.

  Over my first few months in the slightly tatty mortuary, I had learnt to enjoy coming into work. Despite what we have to do in there, despite the terrible things we see, and the sadness and tragedy that inevitably accompany death, the people that I work with – the sense of teamwork and comradeship – and the knowledge that we are doing an important job mean it isn’t always a bad place to be.