Down Among the Dead Men_ A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician - Michelle Williams [66]
It is amazing to sit and listen to the stories of what allegedly went on before the days of CSI and Silent Witness, when people suddenly became a little more aware of what happens when someone breathes their last. Some of the stories would turn your stomach, and I refuse to believe they happened, while others are just downright hilarious.
I recall one afternoon when, releasing a deceased patient to an undertaker, I commented that I had not seen his colleague for while. He then proceeded to tell me how his colleague was on a funeral a couple of weeks back, and had had the duty of picking up the next of kin from the house to follow the coffin, which had been in the same house overnight. It so happened that he did not have to leave the stretched limousine to collect the family, as they dutifully filed out of the house when he pulled up and no one thought anything of this. As soon as the family had entered the limo, he had driven them, as instructed, behind the hearse to the crematorium at a very slow, very respectful pace. All was well and good, and there was no reason to suspect anything untoward. On reaching the crematorium, though, he was required as part of his duty to get out of the driver’s seat and open the door for the bereaved family to enter the church. He never got that far because, as he opened the driver’s door, he at once fell out, face down on the concrete, not even leaving the seat, but almost oozing out of the limo. And that was where he stayed, eating dirt, as drunk as a skunk. Nobody had realized his state because he went straight to the garage from home to collect the limo; when he drove the family the screen was across so they couldn’t smell the alcohol on his breath, and the hearse was going at such a slow pace that no one could tell that they were being chauffeured by someone who, as it turned out, was completely legless. These factors, plus the fact it was a funeral – a day of total respect and a celebration of life – meant that no one had even the faintest suspicion that he had spent the night before and much of the morning emptying a whisky bottle down his neck. Needless to say, he was not in employment any longer.
I’d guess that most of you have heard stories about undertakers. The tale about the beautiful coffin that cost hundreds of pounds because it was made of solid oak or beech, only the bottom fell out (along with the deceased) when they lifted it because it was made of thin, cheap plywood. Or the one about the undertaker who forgot to mention to the bereaved parents of a child that the doctors had waived all the cremation fees and charged them nonetheless. Or even the one about the undertaker who cremated the wrong body . . .
Clive swears that such stories are true, but I don’t know; he likes a good tale, does Clive. Most of the undertakers that come to collect the deceased from the mortuary are good, loyal, hardworking people with normal lives, and take the job in their stride. They are immune to the environment that we work in and, like most technicians, they are fazed by very little. Of course there are those who are only in it to make money and who are less considerate than we would expect or wish them to be, but the families are not paying us for this service and it is not for us to quibble.
THIRTY-FOUR
It was clear to us all that Martin Malcolm Best had not been the luckiest of souls, but he must have been a game old boy. At the age of seventy-seven years, he had accumulated an impressive number of operations and chronic medical conditions. When I stripped him as