Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [29]
What happened after this was even weirder. After the evisceration of the torso, I needed to remove the brain. While Graham held the head on the table, I pulled the helmet off and, as I did it, I saw that even he found the whole thing a bit uncomfortable. He then had to continue holding it while I first retracted the scalp, then removed the top of the skull with the bone saw and took out the brain. Not a word was spoken between us while this was taking place, but the look on his face became more and more pained.
During the post-mortem, I was quietly hoping that Dr Gillard would find a cause of death that was other than the obvious. I wondered if maybe this guy had had a massive heart attack which had caused him to come off his bike, but no such luck; it appeared that this was just a horrendous accident.
With the PM over, Clive had decided that he was going to attempt to stitch the head back on to the body. He told me that he thought it best just to go for it and, after half an hour of stitching, the head was indeed reattached to the body, the shroud covered the stitching, so that the poor motorcyclist looked very peaceful as he lay in the viewing chapel. We all felt a huge sense of relief and also one of achievement. Although I could not expunge the facts of what had happened and the thought that the family would feel a sense of loss for the rest of their lives, we had managed to create an aura of unharmed peacefulness about him and hoped that therefore we would not add to the discomfort his family would be experiencing when they came to identify his body.
Bill arrived ten minutes before the family and we both stood over the motorcyclist in the chapel of rest. Bill is a tall, thickset man with a very loud voice. He is the lead of the three Coroner’s officers in the county and is very good at his job. Being ex-police force, he is an excellent judge of character and knows how to handle people. I stayed while the family arrived, and as far as identifications go, this went much better than I had expected. Of course the family were gutted, but because of the work on reconstruction that Clive had put in, we had achieved our goal. Although most of the time this goes unnoticed by the family (as my previous weekend had proved) it’s not always about the thank-yous, but about knowing we do our job well.
On days like this, there is little room for humour. Graham had told me that when Peter Gillard first came to work in the mortuary, he had been so nervous and flustered that he had put a blue plastic overshoe – designed to be used when someone in normal shoes enters the PM room – on his head instead of the normal disposable theatre cap. He’d appeared in the dissection room looking like a member of the Thunderbirds family and no one had had the heart to tell him. Maddie came to the PM door, but had to turn around and walk away as soon as she saw this, as she could not hold back her laughter . . . Worse than that, for the rest of the day he had a red line running across his forehead where the elastic had bitten in. In honour of this, Peter Gillard will occasionally put one on again, just for a joke, but not today. Today was a day only for due respect and the right headgear.
SIXTEEN
When stuff goes wrong in the mortuary, it goes seriously wrong. For instance, a few weeks later, in among the masses we had two bodies with the same surname. Both were female, both were called Jones and both were for burial. The first Mrs Jones was going back to her native