Does This Mean You'll See Me Naked? (10 page)

I brought the body back to the funeral home and placed it on the embalming table. A full autopsy had been performed, so the internal organs were in a plastic bag in the victim's thoracic-abdominal cavity. I removed the bag, opened it, and poured two sixteen-ounce bottles of high-index formaldehyde-based chemical onto the organs to preserve them. I retied the bag and began to inspect the empty thoracic-abdominal cavity of the young stabbing victim who lay before me.

Observing the interior of a deceased human being devoid of life-sustaining organs is awe inspiring, as in “Look at what God has devised for us.” There are bony ribs to protect our organs from accidental falls and a massive spinal column that assists us in standing upright. In this case, though, further observation revealed the magnitude of multiple stab wounds. One-inch slices, some vertical and some horizontal, peppered the interior of the young man's back. Knife thrusts had chipped many of his ribs.

After arterially embalming the young man, the interior of the body was dried, and I had to do something to address the huge number of stab wounds in the back, which would cause liquids to leak onto his clothing without treatment. Instead of sewing each wound from the outside, I decided to cover the entire interior of the body with a four-inch coating of plaster of Paris. After the plaster dried, I laid a sheet of thick plastic over the plaster, returned the bag of organs back inside the body, and sewed the thoracic-abdominal cavity together. The next day, the young man was dressed and placed into his casket and delivered to the church for the all-night visitation.

On arriving at the church, I was surprised at the number of police officers present. I was informed that the killers were still at large, and that many times a murderer will return to the scene of the crime or even attend the funeral of the victim. As it turned out in this case, the girlfriend of the deceased man had known the two killers and had given the police the necessary information, but the two assailants were hiding. This case turned out to be one of mistaken identity—the victim was not the killers' intended target. Instead, the victim's cousin had reported the two killers to the police for a minor theft, and the killers had vowed revenge on him. However, they took out their revenge on the victim, not his cousin. The two killers, who were brothers, were eventually apprehended and imprisoned. Perhaps poetic justice prevailed for the victim's family—one murderous brother was stabbed to death in prison and the other committed suicide in the same prison.

With all of these terrible things happening, I still had my own reasons to be happy. I left the all-night visitation and went to the hospital to check on the birth of my daughter. We had quite the all-night vigil as well, and Anna was delivered by Caesarian section at dawn. My sister was and is a labor and delivery nurse at the hospital, and she presented my daughter to me covered with muck. I thought there was something wrong, but she just had not been cleaned up yet. After a thorough cleaning, my wife and I marveled at the beautiful, healthy Anna, who had no hair on her head, which turned out to be a trend with all three of our children. I could easily distinguish my babies in the hospital nursery from any others because of the lack of hair on their heads.

I left the hospital, retrieved the hearse, and went to the Pentecostal church to conduct the funeral ceremony for the young murder victim. Such is the life of the funeral director—welcoming a new life and my own child into the world and thirty minutes later depositing the body of someone else's child into a grave.

When my son Michael was six years old, a family a few streets over from us was in the process of moving to another house in town. The father of the household owned several handguns and stored them in his basement in square milk crates. The family had a seven-year-old boy, and he and his nine-year-old cousin were assisting in the move by carrying small items into waiting pickup trucks. The two little guys came across the container of guns, and like most inquisitive little boys, each armed himself for a make-believe shoot-out. The nine-year-old shot his cousin in the forehead, just above the left eye, with a .38 caliber police special that should not have been loaded. The incident caused lifelong resentment among family members, and I'm sure the boy who lived will never forget the accident.

As I prepared the seven-year-old for burial, I saw many things that reminded me of my own son. The dirty fingernails from a hard day of playing in the dirt; scrapes on both knees, perhaps from falling off of a bicycle or scooter; and mussed, sweaty, and unruly blonde hair. I glanced over at the department store bag that contained the boy's burial clothing—new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles underwear and the cutest little suit and tie—items that my own son sometimes wore. This silent little fellow lying on the preparation room table required little restoration for his wound. I inserted a ball of mortuary wax about the size of jawbreaker into the almost perfectly round bullet hole, and then smoothed and feathered it into the natural skin of his forehead. The exit wound in the rear of head was more extensive, but I tightly sewed together the ragged skin of the scalp. When I placed the little guy in his casket, I dropped his head deep into the casket pillow to hide the ugly exit wound.

After an experience such as this one, I hid my only handgun in the trunk of my car, under the spare tire. I hid it so well that when I traded in that particular car for a new one a few years later the gun inadvertently went with the car.

I suppose many families are like ours, not realizing the everyday dangers that can lead to death. Once I realized another danger when I met with an extremely distraught husband and father to arrange for the funerals of his wife and four-year-old daughter. The evening before, the gentleman's wife was relaxing in the bathtub and his daughter peeled off her clothes to get in the tub too. In her haste to climb into the tub, the girl snagged a plugged-in blow-dryer with her foot, and the appliance splashed into the water, electrocuting both mother and daughter.

In my house, we always had a plugged-in blow-dryer resting on the countertop in the bathroom. When my own daughter was about the same age, she sometimes took a bath with my wife. After I talked with the grieving father, I immediately told my wife to unplug our blow-dryer and put it in the vanity cabinet.

This particular case was the first time I was asked to place a mother and her child together in the same casket. I happened to think that it was a nice touch, and I was supportive of the husband. The cemetery, however, was not amused. The cemetery superintendent had wanted to sell the husband two graves, not one. After some negotiation, I convinced the cemetery sexton to go along with the husband. It was not a particularly hard sell—the sexton had a daughter about the same age, so he understood. Since this experience, I have placed a child and parent in the same casket several times.

No matter how old the child is, the grieving is painful. A twenty-four-year-old recent college graduate's car slid on a rain-soaked country road and collided with a signpost. Attached to the post was a square piece of yellow steel with the S-curve warning emblazoned on it. The square was just substantial enough to blast through the windshield and cut into the young man's forehead. He died instantly, with tremendous damage to his face. The car then careened into a ravine, violently tossing the defenseless occupant to and fro inside and causing even more damage to his lifeless body. When I first saw him, the decedent was broken and torn from nearly head to toe, which made for a very time-consuming restoration.

Following the embalming, I encased his limbs in plastic to ensure against leakage, and then I dressed the entire body in a “union suit,” a one-piece, form-fitting, thick-ply plastic garment that covers the deceased from neck to toes. After filling in the traumatic facial and scalp defects with wax, I then glued those areas and allowed them to dry. Because there were so many lacerations, this was a three-hour job then followed by cosmetics and insertion of hair from the back of the head into a wax scalp bed.

After dressing the body and placing him in the casket, I called his parents to see whether they wanted a private viewing to approve of my efforts. They approached their dead son's casket on tiptoes, as if careful not to wake him, and wearing that familiar look of devastation that I have witnessed far too many times. As they neared, their output of tears increased—but strangely enough, there was not a howl or a wail or a scream or a sob. The emotional outbursts I had been expecting did not come. Instead, both stood hand in hand in front of the casket and stroked their son's hair and cheeks.

I cautioned the mother that his cheeks were freshly waxed and had cosmetics on them, but she didn't heed my warning and continued to stroke her son, eventually rubbing off a lot of my handiwork. She then turned to me and declared that she wanted to see his injuries firsthand. She demanded that I remove the cosmetics and the wax so that she could see for herself the trauma that had caused his death.

At first I was rather irate at such a notion. However, that feeling left me when I remembered that this was her child. How can you say no to the mother who carried him in her body, nourished him at her bosom, changed countless dirty diapers, and endured so many sacrifices and setbacks? If she wished to see what had caused his demise, then so be it.

I excused myself from the chapel and gathered up paper towels and a spatula to begin to undo what I had thought was a triumphant restoration. I slowly began to peel off the natural-looking cosmetics and wax, soon revealing a forehead with a wide gash from the right eyebrow upward into the hairline. When I uncovered the right cheek the result of jagged windshield glass against skin became visible.

After a few more moments, lucky for me, the mother asked me to stop. She and her husband had seen enough. Deep down, I was glad that I would be able to salvage some of my previous efforts. But then I was stunned when the mother told me that she was considering leaving her son unrestored for all to see, especially his friends, so that they might witness the damage that can take place as a result of careless, alcohol-impaired driving.

We sometimes assume that a mother's grief at losing a middle-aged child might be a bit less because an adult child has at least experienced some of what life has to offer. Well, not always. I sat down several years ago with a wealthy seventy-five-year-old widow to arrange services for her fifty-six-year-old son, who was an alcoholic. He had been married and divorced three times, had no children, and was the black sheep of his mother's well-to-do and socially prominent family. The woman was in complete denial about her late son's alcoholism and proclaimed that his liver failure was due to other circumstances. After arranging for an evening visitation, a funeral mass the next day, and selecting an expensive solid copper casket, she revealed that I should prepare for a large crowd consisting only of society's upper crust.

She was correct. At the visitation, the parking lot began to swell with many Cadillacs, Mercedes-Benzes, and even a Bentley or two. Society's best had indeed arrived to pay their respects to a deceased man whom everyone had assumed to be a productive manager with his family's very successful insurance business. In reality, according to associates of the deceased, the gentleman had spent his days in bars, drinking with unsavory associates, and his nights in the furnished condo his family provided.

The moment of truth occurred when some of his alcoholic buddies made their way toward the casket, shook hands with the mother, and remarked within earshot of her friends, “Too bad about Jim, but what did you expect? He was a drunk, just like us.” The mother attempted to save face: “You must be thinking of someone else.” Surely her momentary embarrassment must have been eclipsed only by the shame she endured upon her next visit to the country club.

Perhaps the most enraging and heart-wrenching case was that of a two-year-old child whose parents were estranged. The child had been in the care of his mother and her new boyfriend, who described the toddler's death as an accident. When I called the medical examiner's office to arrange for the release of the body, the morgue secretary told me that the coroner had ordered an autopsy and was investigating the case as a homicide.

As I placed the cute little scamp on the preparation room table, I immediately recognized the same signs of abuse that I have unfortunately observed far too many times—facial bruising; bruises on each arm that matched the shape of adult fingertips; and two telling, perfectly round bruise outlines on the chest—about the size of quarters and matching the buttons you might see on a child's jumper or bib overalls.

I covered the bruises with makeup and placed the child in a thirty-six-inch white fiberglass casket, larger than necessary to accommodate the toys and trinkets I knew his family would place inside with him. I awaited the family's arrival. The father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and others showed up en masse, and the touching, familiar cries began. The mother soon arrived with her boyfriend, and the crowd in the chapel parted to allow her access to her deceased son. All the while, those in attendance, myself included, studied her to gauge her reaction. She stood over her child and began speaking to him, asking him why he had to die and saying she was so sorry he had to be in this place. Her boyfriend never left her side and followed her around like a lost puppy.

When I was alone with the mother for a few moments, she asked me why there were cosmetics on her son's face. When I explained that I had needed to cover the bruising, she seemed to be astonished. She attempted to explain what had happened: she was supposedly at the store with her mother while her boyfriend was home alone with her child. On her return, she found the ambulance in her driveway and saw her son being rushed outside. He had supposedly fallen over backward from a chair onto a carpeted floor. Then the story changed to a hardwood floor. Then it changed again. She didn't really know what had happened, because she was in the bathroom at the time, not out shopping at all.