Mortuary Confidential

When a death happens, the family contacts the neighborhood funeral home. This initial report of the death is known in the profession as the “first call.” Soon after it, the remains of the dearly departed are removed from the place of death and brought back to the mortuary for preparation. Unfortunately, the dead have no sense of time; they pass from this life to eternity at all hours of the day and night. And we, the undertakers, are often summoned out of deep sleep, away from the dinner table, and out of the shower, sometimes in bitterly cold weather, to perform the removal.

When we start in this business, we generally exchange an apprenticeship for being on call for the firm. Consequently, the apprentice is usually the one to take the first call and make the removal. The apprentice can sometimes have a difficult job. Depending on the company, the hours can be long and relentless. But as in every other business, you have to start at the bottom. Typically, as you’ll see illustrated in several stories throughout the book, apprentices are given an apartment in the funeral home while they serve their tenure.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, most removals were made from the home. Some of the old-timers I work with can remember some of the old-timers they worked with who would embalm people right in their beds (by a method called gravity injection) and then make the funeral arrangements at the kitchen table with the family, usually with a bottle of spirits in the middle of the table. This was back when people were laid out in the parlors of their homes on cooling boards, and the wakes would be big social events. An old family friend, who isn’t an undertaker, likes to tell me about helping one of the local morticians in the ’40s, doing removals using wicker baskets instead of the stretchers we now use. Interestingly enough, that is rumored to be where the term “basket case” comes from. Things have changed since then. Bodies are prepared at the funeral home, and most wakes are held at the funeral home or church.

As America shifted from a predominately rural, agrarian society to an urban, industrial/technology-based nation, the sick and dying were shifted from the home to institutional care. Nowadays, most removals are made from hospitals and nursing facilities. Thanks to the emergence of the hospice program, there seems to be a rising number of home deaths. People can once again die at home, in their bed, surrounded by loved ones.

The stories in this section include house calls as well as removals from hospitals/nursing facilities—both of which, as you’ll see, can present some… interesting challenges.

CHAPTER 1 The Scream Contributed by an amateur boxer

I’ve been in the business of death many, many years. I’ve met a lot of different people; seen a lot of deaths, many tragic; and been in too many strange situations to count, much less remember. Today I’m older and grayer, and my memory is fading a little, but there is one incident of a middle-of-the-night body removal that I will never forget as long as I’m not laying on my porcelain embalming table.

I can still picture in my mind the house where I heard a dead man scream.

I started out working for my dad’s best friend, a man I called my “uncle.” He ran a funeral home in a small city with a sprawling suburb. We serviced a fairly large geographic location and a very diverse demographic. On night calls, you never knew what end of the county you’d end up in or what type of people you’d be dealing with.

On the night of this particular event, I happened to be taking the calls with my uncle. In typical fashion, the phone rang in the wee morning hours. I fumbled for the receiver and grunted, “Hello?”

“Death call,” my uncle replied. “Meet me up at the funeral home.”

I mumbled something unintelligible and hung up. Instead of lying in bed and contemplating another five minutes of darkness, the best thing to do was just hop up—like ripping off the proverbial Band-Aid. I threw on my suit, knotted my tie, donned my topcoat, opened both eyes, and cruised up the highway to the funeral home in my beat-up Buick.

At the office, I loaded the station wagon with the supplies we would need and warmed the engine until my uncle arrived. Once he arrived, we drove a hundred yards to an all-night-diner, as was our routine, fueled up on caffeine, and set out again.

It was just a few days after the New Year, and as we drove through the suburbs, faux candles lit the way from windowsills. The occasional Christmas tree could be seen peeking from a passing house.

“Here it is,” my uncle told me, after we turned down a few quiet, tree-lined streets.

“Think so? Not too many cars,” I replied.

My uncle consulted his note. “Yep, this is it. Look at the lights.” And it was true. Every single light in the house was turned on—a sure sign of a death.

I backed the big old boat of a wagon slowly into the vacant driveway and we got out. The house was a rancher that had fallen in benign neglect; mold grew on the sides of the house and we had to push bare branches out of the way as we navigated the front walkway. My uncle knocked, and I buried my hands deep into my topcoat pockets. It had to be one of the coldest nights of the year.

“Oh, hello,” the middle-aged woman who answered the door said. “Thank you for coming this quickly so late.”

“That is what we do,” my uncle replied.

Introductions were made. Then the woman, Sue, gave my uncle the wounded expression that I had seen scores of times before, and my uncle thousands. It was the look of loss. “Come on in,” she said somberly. “Dad is in the back room.”

We trooped in, grateful to get out of the biting cold. By habit I stamped my snowless shoes on the mat as I crossed the threshold.

“This is my husband, Harold,” Sue said, and gestured to a man standing on the opposite side of the living room. He nodded at us and we both nodded back. “And that is Peaches.” Peaches was a large orange tabby sitting on the dining room table near Harold. She watched us with hooded eyes.

“Hi Peaches,” my uncle said. Having a cat of his own, he considered himself a cat person. He made a sucking sound with his mouth and Peaches’s attitude shifted. The bright ball of fur meowed and ran over to rub against his legs.

“There are more running around here,” Sue said.

My uncle smiled. I could tell he liked Sue and Harold because they were cat people.

“Dad’s back this way,” Sue said and headed towards the rear of the house.

We followed. The rooms were neither tidy nor messy; they were lived-in and had the pleasant aroma of fresh evergreen and holiday candles. Sue and her husband were old enough to have grandchildren, and the remnants of gifts for little children were strewn in our path. The three of us arrived at a bedroom at the back of the house, Harold trailing somewhere behind us. The room appeared to have been a porch at one point and we stepped down into it.

Sue’s dad lay on an old cot that looked like an iron camp bed. He was a little lump swaddled in white. Even the small bed dwarfed his tiny size. A small gold crucifix decorated a wall, but, overall, the room looked like a storeroom, which it probably was before Sue’s father moved in.

“Oh, Dad,” Sue said and she plopped next to him.

As she sat down, a bloodcurdling scream discharged from the bed. The shriek was louder than a drill sergeant’s bullhorn. It was a sound straight from hell.

My entire body went rigid and (I swear to this day) blood froze in my veins. Sue jumped up as though she’d been electrocuted and flew across the room to the safety of a corner.

I stole a wide-eyed glance at my uncle. He had seen everything in his years as an undertaker. At that moment, though, he was a shell-shocked soldier. With his mouth agape and eyes wide, he clearly wanted to run. Like me, he stayed put, scared stiff by the scream from a dead man. I am not very religious or superstitious, but standing in that room, I felt a powerful energy course through me.

Harold, behind us in the hallway, was the only one with any composure. He strode in, got down on his knees, and dragged a squalling black cat out from underneath the bed. When he let go of the cat’s scruff, it fell over, writhing and still screaming.

“Oh my gosh! Is Ridley alright?” Sue wailed. She rushed over to the cat.

“Your father is dead, tend to him,” Harold said briskly. “I’ll take care of Ridley.” With that, Harold scooped up the squalling cat and took it from the room. My uncle and I made some comments to the effect of “that poor cat,” but we were really trying to mask our feelings of terror.

We made the removal without any further surprises, and back in the station wagon, we sat in the driveway with the engine idling for a minute. “I thought—I thought—” I said, but was unable to complete the sentence.

My uncle said nothing but crossed himself.

The next day Sue and Harold stopped by the funeral parlor, with Ridley the cat, to make arrangements for Sue’s dad. They had just come from the vet’s office, where Ridley’s leg had been set in a cast. My uncle insisted they bring the poor thing in rather than have it wait in the cold car. It was both sad and comical to watch the furry survivor, with his look of obvious irritation, hobbling stiff-legged around the parlor while his masters made funeral arrangements.

To this day, whenever I see a black cat, my mind flashes back to that cold night years ago when I heard a dead man scream.

CHAPTER 2 Lost in Translation Contributed by a food bank volunteer

I was having a dream that I was late for class. The bell kept ringing and ringing, but I couldn’t seem to run down the hall fast enough to make it to class in time. That’s when I woke up.

Reality was much, much worse. The phone next to my bed was ringing off the hook. I blinked my eyes several times at the bedside clock. It was one of those old alarm clocks where the tumblers turn over new digits. A tumbler turned and the new time read: 4:17.

I cursed and then blanched. My mouth felt like it was filled with cotton and cigarette butts. Next to me, the girl I had met at the party, and whose name I couldn’t remember, stirred. The phone trilled again and I snatched it off the hook. “What?” I growled.

It was my boss. It was a death call.

I took down the address, and slammed the phone back into its cradle. I cursed again, this time loudly, and flopped back into my pillow. The city’s lights filtered in through my uncurtained windows and played across the ceiling. I tried to focus on the bars of light. It didn’t work. Last night’s and this morning’s party had agreed with me too much. The last time I had glanced at the clock had been only two hours prior, and my lady friend and I were hardly in the throes of passion then. I had probably only been out for an hour.

Idiot! Idiot! I mentally berated myself. I knew better than to drink too much when I was taking death calls, but one vodka and soda begets another and I started having too good a time. I threw off the sheets and summoned the courage to climb out of bed. I stumbled my way across the remnants of party clothing littering the floor. When I flicked on the bedroom lights the inert form beneath the sheets didn’t even move.

I did the best job I could dressing myself and on my way out of my loft stopped in the kitchenette and chugged a gallon of water. My place, in the old industrial district of the city, was only a few blocks away from the mortuary, so I didn’t have far to go. Walking in the crisp air helped clear my mind.

I got the old station wagon loaded up with a cot and headed for the convalescent hospital. I drove down into the bowels of the hospital and parked by the loading dock. The smell of rotting garbage and soiled sheets in the contained basement assaulted my senses and I staggered to the front of the wagon to empty my guts. When I had collected myself enough to unload the stretcher, I went inside to the nurse’s station.

“Hello,” I said, trying to smile even though I felt like crap.

I was half-drunk, half-asleep, and the nurse spoke half-English. She glowered at me. “Helwoe,” she replied.

I don’t want to be up either, lady, I thought, and returned the sour look.

“I’m here for—” I had to think for a moment—“Betty Hancock.”

She looked at me with a puzzled expression.

“She’s dead,” I said in a voice reserved for small children and animals, “and I’m here from the mortuary to get her.”

She gave me a blank look.

“Dead!” I gave her a hard stare that finally got her in gear.

She shuffled some papers, made a hushed phone call, and then shuffled some more papers and pointed down the hall. “Forry-sen Bee.”

“Forty-seven B?” I repeated.

“Yes,” she said, agitated. “Forry-sen Bee!”

I shot her a withering stare and loped down the hall, my head pounding. It felt like I walked down three miles of ammonia-smelling, tiled hell before I arrived at Room 47. Thankfully, the residents were all asleep. I didn’t waste time on ceremony and steered the cot into the room. I jockeyed it up next to bed B and went around to the other side of the bed and yanked the sheet down. The person under the sheets moaned, arms flailing in the air.

I let out a scream as I jumped back. I caught my breath and quickly threw the sheet back over the patient. That seemed to soothe her and she (I think it was a she) became still. I rushed out of the room and checked the room number. It was forty-seven. I was about to run down the hallway to scream at the nurse for her incompetence when a light bulb went off in my aching head. I went over to bed D. Sure enough, there was Mrs. Hancock.

As I wheeled her out of the hospital I nodded at the nurse and said, “Forty-seven D—just where you said she’d be.” The nurse looked at me like I was crazy.

Later that night, after a long, miserable, hung-over day at the mortuary, I had just laid down in bed to get some much-needed rest when the phone rang. I cursed and grabbed the forever-offending thing. “What?” I yelled, expecting another death call. It was the girl I had left before dawn.

“Whoa, you sound mad,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. “I thought it was someone else calling.”

“Obviously. Say, what happened to you this morning? I don’t even know what time you left. I was kind of confused when I woke up. I thought maybe you had ditched me or something.”

“Work,” I said and massaged my eyeballs.

“Work?”

“Yeah, and you wouldn’t believe the day I had.”

“Try me.”

I did. Now I’m married to that girl and we have three grown children. My wife’s name is Liz, or Elizabeth, which is sometimes Betty.

CHAPTER 3 Patch Out Contributed by a tennis player

It was summertime, an early Friday morning, when I got trapped with the talkers. I was looking forward to a nice relaxing weekend at the lake, where I had pitched in with a bunch of friends to rent a cabin for the summer. My girlfriend and I were both “weekend warriors” at the house, and I knew there was a lounge chair on the dock waiting for me that afternoon, so I didn’t even mind that much taking a death call at 5 A.M.

When I arrived at the house, I backed the van into the driveway to be as discrete as possible. It was one of those Cracker Jack box houses constructed after the Second World War to accommodate the population explosion. The place looked well maintained and the yard was neat. I guessed the couple had bought the house in the late ’40s after the gentleman was discharged from the service and that they had lived there ever since. Sure enough, once I was inside, I found old pictures of the decedent in his military uniform on walls of the bedroom where he lay.

I surveyed the scene, got my equipment, and made the removal.

As I left the house, pushing the gentleman on a cot, the children—a son and two daughters—followed me out; their mother chose to remain inside. For some reason the children felt it was imperative that they make all the funeral arrangements right then and there in the front yard at 5:30 in the morning.

I tried to interrupt at numerous points during their rapid dialogue and let them know they would have plenty of time to fulfill their father’s funeral wishes when they came in for the arrangement conference later in the day. When that didn’t work, I started edging closer to the van with the cot, hoping they’d get the hint. They didn’t.

The paperboy drove by gawking at the draped figure on the cot. I tried using his presence as a distraction to wrap things up. It didn’t work. One of the daughters merely picked up the paper while trying to talk over the other two.

I stood at the rear of the van for as long as I could bear, but when I realized they were never going to stop, I decided to load their father in front of them, hoping that maybe then they would get the hint.

They didn’t get it then either.

They continued talking while I placed their father in the van and slammed the doors. They talked some more while I stood outside and stamped my feet. Even though it was summer, it is cold in the arid climates in the early morning and I had forgotten my jacket.

The paperboy rode back by, this time a lot slower. He wanted more of the show. The daughter with the paper in her hand waved. I wanted to bury my head in my hands.

Finally, I hopped in the van and started the engine and turned on the heater. Still they talked, now over the roar of the idling engine, each one thinking of something and throwing it out, and the others would hop onto that new bandwagon. In mortuary school I had been taught, in painstaking detail, the virtue of patience and politeness. But my patience was gone. After almost 45 minutes in their driveway, I had yet to say a word! Tired of trying to cut in gracefully, I announced it was time for me to leave and said I would call them in a couple of hours, after they had some time to think.

So frazzled was I by the three talkers that I accidentally gunned the engine and dropped it into drive at the same time. The van made a loud screech as the tires spun. I rocketed out of the driveway at a speed a NASCAR driver would have envied. I barely had time to spin the wheel hard to avoid careening into the neighbor’s front yard. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw two nice thick sets of burnt rubber on their driveway.

The cardinal rule of leaving after a house call is to drive as slowly as possible. It gives the family a sense of security knowing their loved one is safe and sound, and, unlike me on that day, not in the hands of some madman.

I remember thinking as I drove down their street, a little slower: I hope they didn’t get the wrong impression.

CHAPTER 4 The Fly Swatter Saga Contributed by a fitness buff

It was June. I remember because my partner and his wife always take the last week of June and go on a cruise. That summer they were in the Mediterranean. While they were being waited on hand-and-foot and sipping tropical libations, I was back home trying to keep the shop running.

Of course, with my usual luck, I received a call that someone had died at our local hospital in the early hours of the morning. Normally, a hospital removal isn’t a big deal at all; one person can do it, except that I have the nasty habit of nodding off while I’m driving at night. I have a form of sleep apnea, and, although I wear a Darth Vader mask when I sleep, I am still prone to napping while driving. The rumble strips have saved my life more than once, and it’s not nearly as funny as when Chevy Chase did it.

Generally my partner, Chuck, will drive us at night or just go by himself, but since there was no Chuck, my wife, Sammy, offered to drive me to the hospital. She stipulated that she’d only do it if she didn’t have to dress up or get out of the van. I gratefully accepted her terms.

We made the long forty-five minute trek to the hospital, which at that time of the night was closed for all intents and purposes. I signed the necessary paperwork at the front desk and then directed my wife around the building to the loading dock where the removals are made. I left her listening to the new Rascal Flatts CD in the van and met the sleepy orderly at the back door.

The orderly led me down the familiar path of twisting hallways and anterooms that led toward the morgue and then helped me transfer the remains. I bid him adieu after giving him a little something for his help and saw myself out through the bowels of the hospital.

I banged against the crash bar to the back door and passed through. It closed with a loud click. Sammy, seeing me coming down the ramp with the body, hopped out of the van, slammed the door, and went around to open the rear panel doors.

They were locked. She ran around to the passenger side to unlock the rear doors, but it was locked too. So was the driver’s door.

Unfortunately, in her zeal to help me she had hit the automatic locking button.

No problem, I told myself, I’ll just call the front desk. I reached for my cell phone and remembered, it’s in the pocket of my suit, which is… in the van. So there I stood with my barefoot wife behind a locked, vacant hospital with a locked, idling van in the middle of the night as we contemplated the body on the cot.

“What do we do now?” my wife asked.

I looked at her and raised an eyebrow. I wasn’t mad at her. She had only been trying to help, after all. But I paused before I spoke to make sure no angry words would come out. She used the pause to ask, “Is there a phone in there?” She gestured to the door I had just exited from. “Perhaps we could call the cops to come and pop the lock.”

I shook my head. “Cops don’t do that anymore. Besides, even if there was a phone inside that door, it’s locked this time of night.”

She shrugged and asked for the second time, “What do we do now?”

Good question.

We talked about calling for a locksmith, but the closest one was in our town, forty-five minutes away, so we nixed that idea. There were spare keys to the van hanging at the funeral home, and we batted around the names of several people we could call at this time of night to bring the keys out to us, but we didn’t want to ask anyone such a huge favor. I had never popped a car lock before but decided this was a good time to try. First I needed some tools.

“You want to come with me to the front desk or do you want to stay here?” I asked Sammy.

“What about the body?” she protested.

“I care more about your safety right now. The body will be fine here alone for a few minutes at this time of night.”

“I can’t let anyone see me like this! I’ll stay here,” Sammy said. And indeed, besides being barefoot, she was only wearing a tiny pair of sweat shorts and a novelty spaghetti-strap top that was a spoof on the milk commercial. It read: Got Formadehyde? I had given it to her as a joke for Christmas; she of course never wore it outside the house. Sammy is the type of woman who would rather (excuse the pun) die than have anyone see her dressed so inappropriately.

“Suit yourself,” I told her and set out to make the long trek around the hospital. It took me what seemed like ages to hike around the sprawling medical complex. Where are those little trams when you really need them? I remember grumbling to myself at one point. During the day the hospital has courtesy golf carts to ferry people around. Not so much at the witching hour.

I was sweating bullets by the time I marched through the front door. The receptionist gave me a surprised look when I strode up to her for the second time and asked politely, “Could I please borrow a metal coat hanger?”

She laughed. “Honey, we ain’t got nothing like that here.”

I explained the situation and the grin on her face got wider. When I finished my saga she said, “Wait here. Let me go see what I can find.” She disappeared and after a few minutes re-appeared with an old fashioned fly swatter. “Here. Try this. It’s the only thing I could find.”

I gingerly took it, thanked her, and made my way back to my van, this time through the hospital. The vehicle still sat idling with the cot resting next to it, but my wife was gone. I looked all around. No Sammy. “Sammy?” I called. “Sammy?”

She came around one of the dumpsters, picking her way delicately through the scattered trash.

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“I didn’t want anyone to see me like this! So I found a chair the employees use during their smoke breaks and was just waiting. Did you get it?”

I showed her the fly swatter, its yellow plastic mesh surface speckled with the mangled pieces of its victims. Sammy grimaced. “Sorry, it’s all the lady at the front desk could find. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.”

I bent the white wire handle into a hook and jammed it between the glass and gasket of the window and made a motion like I was churning butter. Nothing happened. I twisted the wire. It got stuck. Sweat rolled off my face, as I gave it more elbow grease. I was about to call it quits when I angled the wire down and felt it catch. I gently pulled toward the side mirror and it slipped. I released a stream of language that made Sammy blush; wiped my face with my shirtsleeve and repeated the same procedure. The second time I felt the lock click.

Victory!

I loaded the body into the rear of the van and we drove back to the front of the hospital. I bent the wire handle of the fly swatter back into its original configuration as best as I could and proudly returned it to the receptionist.

My wallet now contains a spare set of keys.

CHAPTER 5 Business Hours Contributed by an artistic gymnastics competitor

It was one of the usual morning staff meetings. All the guys I work with sat guzzling their coffee and I sipped on my Mountain Dew. I can’t stand coffee. I can’t figure out how they can drink it all day long. In fact, I won’t even date guys that drink it. That’s how much it grosses me out.

As with most morning meetings, I was bored. Our manager, Hunter, is a numbers guy. So we have to hear about casket sales this quarter compared to this point last quarter. Up. Down. He whines either way. Just give us our daily assignments and be done with it, I want to scream. But I don’t. I just sit there and sip my green soda and hope Hunter and his spreadsheets will get devoured by a pack of rabid beavers on his way home. I say this because Hunter looks like Howdy Doody, and Howdy Doody is made of wood… you get the picture. I was entertaining my usual beaver fantasy when an old woman poked her head into the employee lounge.

“Can I help you?” Howdy Doody asked. He was clearly annoyed at being interrupted while discussing the things we could do to increase fuel economy in the company fleet.

“Oh, dear. I hope I’m not interrupting,” the woman said. She looked like a sweet old grandmother.

“No, you’re not,” Howdy Doody said in a tone that suggested otherwise.

“My husband died,” the old woman said.

“Oh, my. I am sorry,” Howdy Doody said. He didn’t sound sorry.

Pick me! Pick me! I silently willed him.

“Heather will help you take care of everything,” he said and made a motion with his head as if to dismiss me.

Needing no further urging, I nearly ran out of the meeting. As I turned the corner I heard Howdy Doody pick up his monologue where he left off.

I led the frail old woman, whose name I learned was Mrs. Brewer, to the arrangement conference room and poured her a glass of water to drink while I went and gathered my papers. “Okay, Mrs. Brewer,” I said when I returned, “when did your husband die?”

“Last night.”

I wrote down the previous day’s date on my paper. “Which hospital did he die at?” I assumed it was a hospital because a nursing home surely would have called us to come take his remains as soon as he passed.

“He died at home,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Home?”

“Yes, that’s what I said.”

“Last night?”

“Yes,” she sounded slightly annoyed at being questioned, but looked so meek and mild sitting across the vast conference table from me. Her withered hands were folded neatly on the polished surface.

“Mrs. Brewer?”

“Yes, dear?”

“Why didn’t you call us to come pick your husband up last night?” I asked slowly, trying not to sound patronizing.

“Oh, dear,” she said and waved a hand at me, “it was far too late, nearly half past eight. You wouldn’t have been open; it was too late.”

“We never close—” I stopped and collected my thoughts. “You can always call us. Anytime. Day or night. We’re a funeral home. That’s what we do.”

“Well, it was no matter, Heather, dear. I got to sleep next to him one last time. The only thing was that I had to vacuum the ants off of him this morning. I didn’t want them on him when you all arrived.” She smiled at me.

I shivered.

“Okay, well,” I stalled, “why don’t we go on over to your house now and get Mr. Brewer. I’ll follow you.”

“Oh, no, dear,” she laughed. “I don’t drive. I walked to town this morning and took the bus in.”

“Where is the nearest bus station?” I asked. I had never seen buses anywhere near the funeral home.

“About two miles from here.”

“Two miles!” I nearly shouted.

She laughed again. “That’s nothing. When I was a little girl I used to walk over five miles to school—”

I gently cut her off. “Mrs. Brewer. Why don’t we ride on over now and get Mr. Brewer. I’ll make arrangements at your house and my colleagues can bring Mr. Brewer back here.”

She frowned. “I don’t see what all the hurry is about.”

I thought quickly. “I am just thinking of the ants. Keep him safe from those ants.”

She smiled. She liked that idea. “Okay. Let’s do it. Can I ride with you or do I have to take the bus back?”

I laughed. “You can ride with me. Hang tight here and I’ll be right back.”

I went and got one of my colleagues from the never-ending meeting and, in hushed tones, told him about the current situation. He nearly yelled, “What?” down the hallway after I told him about Mr. Brewer, Mrs. Brewer, the bus, and the ants.

I called the Medical Examiner’s office and asked them what they wanted to do. The deputy examiner told me she’d call me back.

We drove over to the Brewer house in two vehicles (fuel efficiency be damned, Howdy Doody). On the way over I received a call from the deputy examiner; she had sent a paramedic over so the death could be pronounced. She had talked to Mr. Brewer’s doctor’s office and his death wasn’t unexpected. He was eighty-one, after all.

The Brewer house turned out to be a small cabin on the river, about three miles from the closest town. We had to wait a few minutes for the paramedic to show up and hook Mr. Brewer up to a wireless EKG machine so a physician at the closest hospital could pronounce his death. My co-worker and I performed the removal and then I sent Mr. Brewer off with my colleague while I stayed to make arrangements with Mrs. Brewer.

It was unseasonably clear and sunny for this part of Oregon. Mrs. Brewer invited me out to sit on their deck that overlooked the river and offered me a drink. I declined. She brought out a large glass pitcher of iced tea anyway. Real brewed, she informed me, complete with slices of lemon floating among the ice. How could I pass it up? Birds chirped and swatches of sunlight managed to penetrate the great leafy barrier above us as the sound of the river coursed softly in the background. It was a magnificent morning.

“Jim loved it here,” Mrs. Brewer informed me, breaking my reverie. I noticed she had poured me the glass of tea. I sipped it. “We moved here from Maryland after his first heart attack in the late ’70s. He just couldn’t take the stress of litigation anymore. So we moved out here, he lost forty pounds, and we both learned to enjoy the simple life.”

“You’ll miss him, huh?”

“I will, but I won’t. Jim is all around me… here. This place gave me another twenty years with him.”

“I understand,” I said, but in fact I didn’t understand her not missing her husband. Her acceptance of his death and her total peace were puzzling to me.

“After he’s laid out so our few friends and acquaintances can come pay their respects, I want him cremated so I can pour his ashes on the land he loved… the land that gave him—and me—his life back.”

I stared at her, waiting for her to go on. She did.

“We had the cars. The money. The clothes. But that’s about it. We didn’t realize it at the time—you know—what we were missing. When we moved to Oregon we found that the void was our relationship. Out here we discovered the simple joys of just living an unhurried life, together. Jim and I created a world out here where money is of little consequence and folks don’t call each other after regular business hours.”

Taking another drink of iced tea, I realized she was right about what really matters. After that, whenever Howdy Doody tormented us with his boring rants, I pictured myself on Mrs. Brewer’s porch, enjoying the tranquility of nature’s beauty.

CHAPTER 6 Grandma Talk-Talk Contributed by an entrepreneur

Death is a fact of my life. I’m around it all day—everyday. But I had never buried a family member until my grandmother died.

When she passed away my relationship with death shifted from professional detachment to real human grief. Burying my grandmother was a strange and humbling experience. And, surprisingly, it was my grandmother who got me through it.

Grandma Talk-Talk helped raise my sister and me and was a real presence in our lives. She did all those grandmotherly things like letting us stay up late (blazing a trail of candy wrappers across her nice rugs), and slipping us a one-dollar bill to spend on even more candy. But she also did things that I didn’t understand until much later.

She encouraged me to pursue my dreams. When I told her I wanted to be a funeral director, I can still hear her saying to me, “Kenny, open up your own mortuary. I know you can do it. Make something of yourself. You’ll never go anywhere working for someone else.”

I took her advice and now own a successful mortuary.

My sister, as a five-year-old, said about our grandmother, “all she does is talk, talk, talk…,” hence the nickname. Grandma Talk-Talk had the same soft accent as Blanche on the Golden Girls—but Grandma Talk-Talk had more bite. There was a crispness to her speech that matched her dry humor. She danced with elegant, lightning speed from one subject to the next, wasting no time on breathing. Her “talkees” never stood a chance of talking.

When the mortuary phone rang and it was Grandma Talk-Talk, I knew I had to clear my schedule for at least an hour. I’d hear what food is being served in the retirement community; what birds she spotted that morning; what those “scoundrel Republicans” were up to; and the line she never failed to say, “Kenny, when I die, I want you to take care of me. I don’t want some stranger who won’t do nearly the job you do. You promise?” That request always made me uncomfortable, but, luckily, I knew she’d change the subject fast.

Burying a family member was still an abstract concept to me. Friends and neighbors, sure, but family? I figured that Grandma Talk-Talk had always been there—and would always continue to be there.

Then the day came when I felt for the first time that she wouldn’t always be around. Her retirement home called my mortuary: Grandma was in the healthcare center and was fading fast.

Her retirement community is a seven hour drive south from where I live. With a cot and my dog, Roxy, I reluctantly set off. After Roxy and I were on the interstate for a bit, I started to notice the pavement whizzing by, butterflies collecting in my stomach, and I felt an uncontrollable urge to turn around. Instead of running away, though, I took deep breaths and slowed down. I wasn’t sure I was ready to do this, but knew I had to. I was about to provide a woman who gave me so many gifts with the last gift I could give her.

I thought about trips to the beach with my sister and Grandma Talk-Talk. Grandma Talk-Talk in the driver’s seat with no regard to (minimum) speed limits. Her giant boat of a Cadillac with its enormous front bench seat that the three of us shared, inching at 7mph while she talked nonstop. My sister and I hanging our heads out the window like happy summer dogs.

I dreaded the next few days. It would be so quiet. I had never been with my grandmother without her talk-talk. Roxy sat on the passenger seat, staring at me. She liked to stick her head out the window during car rides but, despite my offering a rolled-down window several times, today she just sat still.

By the time I arrived, Grandma Talk-Talk was dead.

My mother and sister greeted me at the door of her room.

“Kenny,” my mom said, coming to hug me, “Grandma Talk-Talk is gone.”

I nodded, didn’t say anything, and opened the door. The lights were off but it was bright and sunny in her room. In the air hung the heavy smell of disinfectant and death. Dust motes swirled in the shafts of sunlight. Her oxygen machine had been unplugged and unhooked. The room was silent. I have seen thousands of dead people during the course of my career. This was the only one I can recall fearing to see.

I crept up to the bed and pulled down the sheet covering the still form. Grandma Talk-Talk looked peaceful, like she was asleep. Looking at her wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. She almost looked like she was smirking in her sleep. I breathed a sigh of relief and pulled the sheet back over her face.

My sister took Roxy for a walk while I performed my job. I didn’t want to dally; I had another job to do back at the mortuary. Thirty minutes after I pulled into the retirement community, I drove out of the parking lot yelling to my mom and sister, “I’ll call you tomorrow!”

Roxy knew something was amiss. She lay down on the front seat and covered her head with her paw, something I had never seen her do before. The light was low as dusk set, and I headed for home with my dead grandma in the back.

I flipped on the radio to try to fill the void, but no matter how loud I turned the volume, it couldn’t cover the lack of her talking. I sighed, turned the radio off, and rode in deafening silence.

As I hit a beltway and merged into rush-hour traffic, my grandma’s voice popped into my head. “Kenny, take the HOV lane. You’re allowed. We’ve got three!”

“What the hell,” I muttered.

The silence wasn’t so bad as I hurtled down the HOV lane reminiscing with Grandma Talk-Talk.

CHAPTER 7 A Case of Mistaken Identity Contributed by a Red Sox fan

I work in a business traditionally recognized as a man’s trade, and though I’m just a little girl playing in the big boy’s club, I can handle it. I’m a Southie. And Southies are tough as nails.

Where I come from in south Boston, each group sticks to its own kind. It’s more a matter of comfort level than prejudice against another ethnicity. The Jews go to the Jewish undertaker, the blacks go to the black undertaker, the Asians to the Asian, and so on. The undertakers for each group are familiar with the customs, rituals, and procedures at their places of worship.

At our company, we service the Irish Catholics. That’s it. Don’t get me wrong. Every once in a blue moon we work with a family that’s Italian Catholic, Irish Protestant or even Russian Orthodox, and we are glad to provide them service. It’s just a simple fact that when a family picks up the phone to dial the undertaker, they usually dial the firm down the street, not the one across town.

I was born to second-generation immigrants. My grandparents came from the town of Carrick-on-Shannon in the county Leitrim in the late ’40s following the war and settled on the west side of south Boston. My grandfather worked as a machinist and my grandmother was a housekeeper. My grandfather is retired but still drinks full-time and my grandmother hasn’t missed a day of work in almost twenty years. My father, whom I have never met, is rumored to have dealings with the IRA. He disappeared before I was born—a deadbeat (I’ll leave out the adjectives I normally use). My mother worked for a meat packer for several years before landing herself in jail when I was five years old. I don’t remember anything from when she was around other than the beautiful steaks we ate every night in our dingy little apartment. After my mother went away, I moved in with my grandparents and they raised me.

I went to work for an Irish-Catholic funeral home right out of mortuary school. I was the first woman funeral director they ever had in their fifty-plus esteemed years of business. I had it easy in some respects because the men went out of their way to help the “helpless” woman, but in other respects I had it much harder. I had a lot to prove in the all-boys club.

One morning, when I was as fresh in the business as a newborn babe in the woods, Kevin, the supervisor of the funeral home, came charging down the hall. “Katie!” he shouted. “I need you to head up to Lawrence today and pick up a trade job we got in last night.” Kevin never speaks; he shouts.

“Who got it?” I inquired.

“The firm we always use up there.” He looked at me like I was stupid, and his nose glowed like a red turnip on his flat face. “Turnbull Funeral Home.” Kevin, though a blunderbuss, dresses impeccably, and on this day, already had his custom-made Cambridge suit jacket off and had sweated completely through his shirt. He’s a real sweaty type guy.

“Oh,” I said. I had been there once before and didn’t realize Turnbull was the one we always used. But I kept quiet about that and filed that tidbit of information away. “You have the information?”

“Here it is,” he said, pressing a slip of paper into my hand along with a twenty-dollar bill. “For tolls,” he explained and winked.

Though Kevin sometimes has the temperament of a hibernating bear that has been woken, he can be a real sweetheart, too. “Thanks, Kevin,” I said. “You’re a doll.” We both knew that as soon as I pulled out of the funeral home, I’d be pulling into the 7-Eleven to fortify myself with cigarettes and coffee.

He smiled at the praise and his bulbous nose wrinkled.

I loaded up the mini-van with a cot and was off, after stopping at 7-Eleven of course. The funeral home I work for sits outside of the city of Boston in one of the many suburbs, so when a death call comes in late at night from somewhere as far away as Lawrence, we call the local undertaker in that area to do the removal and, if necessary, embalming. There’s no sense tying one of our directors up for three or more hours in the middle of the night, especially if we had a house call come in; the director on-call would have no way of getting back in time to make a speedy removal. Besides, the funeral home we use up in that area knows the hospital procedures, and can do the removal much more efficiently.

The drive took me the better part of an hour, during which I smoked damn near half the pack out of sheer boredom. I drove into the circular drive of the converted Victorian mansion and pulled around back. The grounds lining the drive were immaculate and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a full-time groundskeeper.

I backed the van onto the ramp leading down into the basement and hopped out. After popping into the office to let them know I was there, I went and waited by the van. One of their directors, the young guy I met last time I had been there, appeared. “Hi Charlie!” I said, perking up. I had the biggest crush on him. He was about my age—22—and looked like he played football in high school. I love burly guys.

“Hi.” He flashed me a smile. “What’s your name again?”

I was crestfallen. “Katie,” I replied. We had had at least a twenty-minute conversation the last time I had been to Turnbull. Obviously, I hadn’t plied my charms as well as I thought.

“Oh right,” he said. “Who you here for?”

I didn’t want to talk about that. I wanted to talk about giving him my phone number. But instead, the only thing that came out was, “Mrs. Walters.”

He made a face. “Oh,” he muttered, “I got her last night. What a night.”

I changed the subject to something flirtier as I unloaded the cot from the van and followed him down the ramp.

He didn’t take the conversational bait. He was only interested in business. “Here she is,” he said and peeled back a sheet covering one of the many bodies in the morgue, just enough so the wrist tag could be read. I noted Mrs. Walters was a very handsome looking African-American woman, but I was too busy sweet-talking Charlie to glance at the tag. I just nodded.

He lowered the sheet.

I was grabbing at straws. I had already been through weather, traffic, and work. “Sorry we got you out of bed last night,” I said and I cringed hearing my own cheesy laugh.

Charlie made another face. “Yeah, thanks.”

I grinned.

“Let’s get her moved over.” Charlie consulted his watch. “I have a wake that’s wrapping up in twenty minutes.”

Damn, he’s too preoccupied with his service to think about me, I thought dejectedly.

We transferred Mrs. Walters and I was on my way without Charlie’s phone number. Next time, I promised myself. I really needed to meet Charlie somewhere more conducive to flirting than a morgue, though I wasn’t sure how I was going to orchestrate it. Wasn’t like I was going to run into him at the neighborhood pub. I smoked the other half of the pack of cigarettes on the return trip and tried to formulate a plan.

When I arrived at my funeral home I unloaded Mrs. Walters and wheeled her into our morgue. “Hey, Kevin,” I called, running after him as he charged up the hall.

“Everything go all right?” he called over his shoulder, not stopping but slowing down.

He was getting to the point in the day where his neatly pressed clothes had long since lost their crispness.

I shrugged. “Yeah. Fine. This is the first black woman we’ve had since I’ve been here.”

He stopped in the hallway, turned and just stared at me. His face was bright red. “McCullough, you dumbass!” he exploded. “You got the wrong person!”

I froze. “Huh?” I replied dumbly. A million thoughts raced through my head. I hadn’t been cautious and checked the tags as I should have. I had been too busy flirting. Charlie had given me the wrong person! “Are you sure?”

“Yes!” he screamed. “I just met with the family. They’re white! Now get her back to that funeral home and get the right person before we all lose our licenses!” He turned heel and stomped toward his office, cursing under his breath.

I ran into the morgue and ripped the sheet off and checked Mrs. Walters’s hospital ID bracelet—the end-all of identification. I read it and re-read the name—Joanne Walters. They had mislabeled her.

I raced into his office. “Kevin, the hospital mislabeled her! Maybe the real Mrs. Walters is still at the hospital morgue.”

He stared at me with his beady eyes. Behind his desk he looked like a big red toad, all puffed up and furious.

“I’m serious. The bracelet says—” I trailed off feebly.

Kevin got up, glaring at me, and stalked out of his office.

I went to follow but he held up a pudgy finger indicating for me to wait. A few seconds later, after what seemed like an eternity, Kevin came back chuckling. “That’s her, all right,” he said.

“What?” I said, confused. “I thought you said she’s white.”

“She is white.”

“Huh?”

“Jaundice. It can sometimes give the skin a tint like that.”

“Like that?” I was relieved and flabbergasted.

“You know how jaundice turns the skin yellow?” Kevin said, still laughing.

“Yeah.”

“Well, sometimes the embalming fluid will react with the chemical that causes the jaundice and turn the skin other colors.”

“Oh jeez, you nearly gave me a heart attack a minute ago,” I said.

“You? What about the heart attack you nearly gave me!”

“I didn’t mean to,” I protested.

He laughed. “Rookie mistake. Hell, McCullough, get out of here. Go home and pour yourself a stiff drink. We’ll chalk this one up to inexperience… and I won’t tell the boys,” he said, referring to the other men.

“Thanks,” I said, really meaning it. “I don’t think I’d ever live this one down.”

“They were rookies at one point. We all were.”

Though Kevin was trying to be nice, I was still mad at myself. A magician’s sleight of hand involves using psychology to direct your eye one way while she or he manipulates the trick elsewhere. I performed a sleight of hand on myself; right before my own eyes, without realizing it, so engrossed was I with the less-fair sex.

The dead can’t tell you who they are. That’s my job: to know, to make sure, to double check, and to triple check. That day was an important lesson in doing my job. No matter what the job, do it right, and do it right the first time. No excuses.

Southies don’t make excuses.

CHAPTER 8 Ousting the Coroner Contributed by a college basketball fan

I used to contract with the county to do body removals for the coroner’s office. When a death occurs outside of a normal setting like a hospital, convalescent home, or home hospice care, the coroner is called to investigate. His investigation of the scene determined where I took the body. If the coroner believed the death to be anything other than natural (or sometimes, accidental), I took the body back to his laboratory for an autopsy by a pathologist. If he ruled it to be a natural death, then I would take the body back to my funeral home, or another funeral home of the family’s choosing, and things would proceed from there. The money was terrible, but it kept my fledgling business afloat through some rough patches in the early years.

Before the state allocated money for an official county coroner’s building, the autopsies used to be performed at my funeral home. To my relief, the state later coughed up enough money so we no longer have to deal with our morgue being commandeered as a quasi-government facility. The pathologist always left a mess.

It can be a raw job at times—doing removals for the coroner. I’ve been summoned at all hours of the night, to all kinds of places, and seen bodies in all kinds of conditions, in all types of weather. The coroner doesn’t get called if some sweet, old lady dies of heart failure at home under hospice care. No, the coroner gets called when there’s a mess to be cleaned up. When he got called, I got called.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called to the scene of a car wreck and lined the body bags up along the shoulder of the road while deputies and firemen collected the body parts, or been called to a homicide so recent that the blood hasn’t had time to congeal—the sweet smell of iron hanging heavy in the air. The suicides made me introspective and the freak accidents made me believe in Existentialism, but they all made me just a little bit more jaded. I had the contract with the county for seven years before the strain of the work became too much and I called it quits. The tragedy of all those shattered human beings drained me emotionally and physically.

These days I’m happy to sit in my big-cheese office, in my fine suits, and go about my business in a relaxed fashion while some other hungry upstart funeral director deals with the dirty job of doing removals for the coroner’s office. I saw a lot of things during those seven years, but the removal that I remember most happened the first year I held the contract.

My funeral home wasn’t doing very many calls a year. One weekday morning I was drinking coffee and reading the sports scores when the phone rang. It was the coroner’s office; a body had been found in the foothills. I took the location from the woman, thanked her, and hung up. I called a part-time guy, Paul, who helped me do removals, and he agreed to me meet me at the funeral home.

We piled into the run-out old Chevy station wagon and drove out to the site. I live near the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The weather fronts that blow off the Pacific Ocean hit the mountains and have nowhere to go, so they dump their precipitation. It’s usually raining in my neck of the woods. This day was no exception. It was more like a heavy mist than an actual rain, but combined with the chilly air, it was a certifiable foul day. One of the sheriff’s deputies recognized my vehicle as we pulled up to the scene and waved us through the cones he had set up on the lonely mountain road.

I stepped out of the wagon and turned my collar up. It was no use; the wind still cut right through the fabric. The area where the body had been found was on a bend of a secondary road leading up towards the mountains. Old-growth forest towered over the road on one side, and on the other, an embankment dropped away from the road. I walked over to the guardrail where the coroner was staring down the hill intently.

“Hey, Joe,” I said, fumbling for my cigarettes in my pocket with frozen fingers.

He glanced at me, grunted, cigar clamped between his lips, and then looked back down the hill.

I pulled out a cigarette and inserted it between my lips. “Nasty fall, huh?” I said, following his gaze down the steep embankment to where I could see two deputies picking their way through the brush around the little stream at the bottom of the ravine.

Joe grunted again, and pulled his cigar from his lips with his thick fingers.

I tried lighting a match but the moisture just made it crumble. I tried several before I gave up and flicked my unlit cigarette down the hill in disgust. “So, what’s the story?”

Joe sneered. “What does it look like?” he said. “Asshole fell. Got what he deserved for walking around here at night. No street-lights out here in the boondocks.”

I stared down the muddy embankment to the little creek that had formed at the bottom of the ravine and wished I hadn’t worn one of my few suits. I knew this wouldn’t be a tidy job.

“Hey fellas! Find anything down there?” Joe yelled.

The deputies at the bottom of the ravine looked up and shook their heads. Not that they were really looking any too hard for clues. They were pussyfooting around in the tall grass, trying to steer clear of the mud and water.

“Well, Toules, looks like we have an obvious accident on our hands.” Joe pushed up off the guardrail where he had been resting his foot, using his knee as a leaning post.

“You going to go down and look for yourself?” I asked, incredulous. Joe was lazy and had the kind of stupidity combined with cunning intellect that could get you in trouble if you crossed him. He had been elected into office eons ago, and just kept getting re-elected. It was almost like he got recycled in spite of himself. The more he got re-elected the lazier he got.

“I can see just fine from up here what happened. Obvious accident.”

I squinted down into the ravine. “You sure?” I asked dubiously.

“Fell.”

“He fell over the guardrail?”

Joe took the stub out of his mouth and flicked it at my feet. “What? You want to play coroner today, Toules? My job here is done. You and your corpse-humping friend get your asses down there and drag that body out of that water, and try not to get your nice shoes wet.” He pounded me on the back and laughed meanly. “I’ll stop over later to make an ID,” he called over his shoulder.

Asshole, I thought, as Joe got into his government-issue sedan and took off with a squeal of tires.

“Does he do anything?” Paul asked as I returned to the wagon.

“No, except stuff his face at Smiley’s Diner.”

We both laughed.

“Lets get this over with,” I said and sighed.

“Bad?” Paul asked.

“It’s going to be messy.”

I put on a pair of rubbers to protect my good shoes and donned a pair of large yellow kitchen gloves, the kind that go nearly up to your elbow. We used them for coroner-related work because we never knew what kind of mess we’d find, and they afforded a little more protection than regular latex gloves. Paul pulled the cot out onto the pavement and collapsed it to the ground. I got out a black body bag and a coil of rope. Handing the coil of rope to my partner, I hopped over the guardrail and wind-milled my arms as I slid down the muddy slope. Thankfully, I made it to the bottom without falling. Paul wasn’t so lucky.

I found myself standing in sixteen inches of muddy water and him sitting in it. We turned the air blue with our language as we got to work. I unfolded the thick vinyl body bag on the tall grass of the stream’s embankment parallel to the facedown man.

We both stood in the stream. I grabbed the arms, Paul took the legs, and we hoisted him right out of the stream and into the bag. I zipped it up, and we flipped the body bag over so we didn’t drag the man facedown. Paul looped the rope through one of the sturdy nylon handles and climbed the ravine hill. He slipped a couple of times, and each time a loud cuss word cut through the silent mountain air like the report of a gunshot. When Paul made it to the top of the embankment, he looped the rope around the guardrail. Then he pulled on the rope as I grabbed a handle and helped drag the body bag back across the stream and up the muddy hill.

Paul and I loaded the body bag onto the cot and put it in the back of the station wagon. We waved to the deputies and sped off.

Hours later, after I had time to change out of my ruined suit, shoes, and raincoat, Paul and I stood in the morgue and placed the body bag on the porcelain embalming table. Since the zipper was on the underside of the man, I took a pair of shears and cut the bag down the center.

We stepped back in surprise, and I think Paul captured both our feelings with two words. He covered his mouth with his gloved hand and whispered, “Oh, shit!”

The man lay on the table, staring up at us with surprised, vacant eyes. A ten-inch piece of chrome bumper stuck out from his torso. Clearly, he had been the victim of a hit-and-run.

I was on the phone to the state within minutes. Coroner Joe offered his resignation less than a week later.

CHAPTER 9 Spare Donuts Contributed by a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fighter

When I was in mortuary school my roommate was raped. I took to carrying pepper spray in my pocketbook for protection, which in hindsight would’ve been as effective as trying to use a garden hose to put out a forest fire. By the time I had identified the danger, dug around all the junk in my purse looking for the darn can, and then figured out how to point and spray, I would have been a goner. But it made me feel safe at the time. After college I was looking for a hobby, something to unwind from work, and started doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, partly to learn something new, partly because I like to exercise, and partly to replace my can of pepper spray.

Jiu-Jitsu is a martial art used by ancient Samurai warriors. It uses punches, kicks, throws, and ground grappling. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is a derivative of it that focuses more on takedowns and ground grappling than its counterpart. Over 90 percent of street fights end on the ground, so it’s imperative that you know how to get your opponent on the ground and then control him. I don’t go around looking for fights. I’m just comfortable in situations where most women wouldn’t be… like stranded on the side of Interstate 25 in the dark with a van full of dead bodies.

I work for a mortuary near Santa Fe. People who aren’t familiar with the area would have no idea where my hometown is, so I just tell everyone “Santa Fe.” It’s a quaint little town sitting on the edge of the desert framed by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. I’ve lived in the Southwest my entire life and would never dream of moving. I love it too much.

We were quite busy at work one day with three funerals, and during the course of the day two calls came in from Albuquerque, which is only about an hour away. It’s not uncommon for calls to come from families with loved ones at Albuquerque-area hospitals because they have excellent care facilities and some of the most advanced trauma units for hundreds of miles.

It was early evening in the wintertime, so it was getting dark when I loaded up the panel van with a cremation box. I was going to stop on the way back from Albuquerque at our retort—the technical term for a cremation chamber—that’s across town and then drop the body off. It would be ready to be cremated first thing the following morning. The van has two steel shelves built in, almost like the old World War I ambulances, so that up to four bodies can be carried at once. With the help of one of my co-workers, I put the box on one of the shelves, loaded two empty cots, and headed out.

I made good time going to Albuquerque because all the rush hour traffic was heading out of the city as I was heading in. I stopped at Presbyterian Hospital and picked up the first body, and then stopped at UNM Hospital and picked up the second. Because it was after hours and I had to wait for security to key me into the morgues, it took about two hours to get both bodies. At this point it was near 8:30 and I was starved, so I stopped at a café and parked the van out front where I could see it while I grabbed a quick bite to eat. I did some quick time calculations in my head and called my boyfriend.

I told him I was running a little late, and probably wouldn’t be home until ten o’clock or so, and asked him if he could give the babysitter a ride home. Freddie, like me, sometimes works late. He told me he was just leaving the office. We exchanged “I love you’s” and hung up.

I hopped back in the van, wanting to get home to Freddie and my daughter as soon as possible. I navigated back onto I-25 and headed north. I was doing a pretty good clip when I hit some road debris. The van jolted so hard I looked in the rearview mirror to see what I had hit. I couldn’t tell what it was. No matter, I thought, and quickly forgot. About five more miles down the highway I heard a noise. It got louder until it sounded like a helicopter was hovering over me. When the tire exploded it sounded like a bomb going off.

The van swerved wildly, but I managed to keep control of it and pulled off to the side of the interstate. I got out and inspected the left front tire. It was totally shredded. There was almost no rubber left on the smoking rim. This is just great! I kicked the side of the van in frustration. There goes my Q.T. with Freddie tonight!

I retrieved my cell phone from inside and called an emergency roadside assistance company. The dispatcher notified me help was on the way, and advised me to hang tight. I hung up and got back into the nice warm van. While I waited, I called my partner at the mortuary and told him the situation, and that I’d probably be an hour late. The original plan was for me to get the bodies from the hospital and he was going to embalm them. Upon hearing that I wouldn’t be back at the mortuary until eleven o’clock, he told me to leave them and he’d take care of them in the morning.

Bored, I flipped through the radio stations for almost an hour before a pair of headlights pulled up behind me. I hopped out into the freezing desert air and ran to the rear of the van, hugging my wool coat tight around me. The figure in the white pickup truck engaged an emergency light bar over the cab of his truck and got out. He was an elderly gentleman, probably working during his retirement years to stay busy.

“Hey there,” I greeted him. He clutched a couple of road flares in his hand.

“Hull-o, Miss,” he replied. “I understand you have a blowout?”

“Yeah. Left front tire is completely gone.”

He smiled at me with crooked teeth. He wasn’t wearing much more than a heavy flannel shirt and a ball cap. He was the type accustomed to working outdoors in the cold. “We’ll have you underway in just a few minutes, Miss.” He popped the flares and dropped them on the rumble strip alongside the van.

“Oh, thank you, sir,” I said. “It’s been a long day and I’m ready to get home.”

“Let’s have a look.” He loped up to the front of the van and poked at the tire. “Yup. Blew it out all right. Thankfully you didn’t bend the rim, so everything is going to be fine. You probably won’t need a tow unless you bent the axle.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Seems to me, if I remember correctly, the spare for this is located behind the front seats in the cargo area under the floor-boards.”

“Okay,” I said and swung the doors open.

The man peered into the cargo area. “What’s that?” he asked and put a crooked finger on his grizzled chin.

“Just a couple of bodies,” I said briskly. “I’ll move them out of the way so you can get to the tire.”

The man recoiled. “I’m not touching this van!”

“What?” I said, confused. “Don’t be ridiculous. I’ll pull the bodies out and you do your job. You don’t have to touch them.”

“I’m not getting in there!” he said. “There are dead people in there!”

My gratitude quickly melted into frustration. “Then what are you here for if you’re not going to help me?”

“I’m not getting anywhere near no dead people.” He took a step backward toward his pickup.

I snorted. “Then just get the hell out of here! I’ll do it myself,” I yelled. I had never changed a tire before on a car, much less a giant van, but I wasn’t going to sit around and suffer this fool.

I pulled the two cots out onto the shoulder of the freeway. The cars zipping by slowed; a strange scene was unfolding on the side of the road and the drivers wanted to rubberneck. I crawled into the back of the van, lifted up the floorboard, and retrieved the spare tire and jack. The tire didn’t look like the regular ones. It was smaller and didn’t look as sturdy—almost like a donut.

I rolled the donut between the suspended steel bays and crawled out, my charcoal pantsuit pants now smeared and greasy. I noticed with annoyance the guy was sitting in his pickup, watching. I loaded the two cots back inside the van and marched back to the pickup and rapped on the window. He rolled his window down.

“There,” I said, “the bodies are all gone, now do your job.”

He looked at me and said, “I told you I’m not going near that death van.”

“Then go on. Get the hell out of here. I don’t need you if you aren’t going to do anything.”

“Can’t. Gotta stay. Rules.”

“Do the rules also mention you sitting on your ass doing nothing?” I glared at him and marched back to the spare and jack. I picked them up and went around to the front of the van and got down on my hands and knees and looked under the chassis of the van. I found what appeared to me to be a suitable place to put the jack and started cranking. After I had the rim off the ground a few inches, I took the wrench and tugged at the bolts holding the old tire on.

“You’re doing it wrong!” the man called from his truck. I ignored him. The bolts were stiff and I was using every ounce of my strength. The van rocked perilously. I stopped and waited for it to stop moving. Then I tugged at the wrench, applying more even force. These bolts are really on there, I thought as I gave the wrench a final pull. The jack kicked out from under the van and it crashed down. I dove out of the way just in time. I sat on my rear end a few feet away, shaking from my close call.

“You’ve got to loosen the lugs before you jack up the van!” the man in the pickup truck called.

Thanks, asshole! I thought, picking myself up off the shoulder and dusting my coat off.

I retrieved the wrench from where I had flung it and found that by partially standing, I could put all my weight into loosening the bolts. I got all five loose and again jacked up the van. I slipped the spare on the rim and let the vehicle down. The spare donut seemed really soft, but I wasn’t going to ask the useless idiot in the pickup for anything like an air pump.

I tightened the bolts and navigated slowly back onto the interstate. Opening my window, I flipped the old guy the bird before I roared off. I kept the van at thirty-five all the way to the mortuary.

It was a long ride back.

CHAPTER 10 Severe Clear Contributed by a bicyclist

One night about ten years ago, I received a call at the witching hour. It’s not at all unusual in my business to get calls in the middle of the night, but this call was quite unusual. It went something like this:

“Freeman Mortuary. Gabe speaking.”

“Yes,” the shaky voice on the other end of the line said. “My name is Betty Drake. I’m sorry to bother you but I didn’t know who else to call.” She paused and wept.

“Did someone pass away?” I inquired, still lying in bed with my wife, the lights out.

“Yes… no. It’s our dog, Clear.”

“Oh,” I replied. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you,” Betty said. “We heard some noises about an hour ago and came out to the kitchen—my husband and I—and found him… dead!” She wept again. I remained silent. Betty composed herself and continued. “We just moved here and we didn’t know who to call. My husband suggested I look in the phone book for a funeral home. We knew the undertaker where we used to live and he came and got our last dog twelve years ago. I found your number in the Yellow Pages and called.”

“You want me to come get your dog?” I asked.

“Well, yes,” she said. “If that’s something you do.”

No, that’s not something I do, I thought, but what the hell. “I’d be happy to come get your dog,” I said. “What kind is it?”

She told me and gave me her address. I promised to be there within the hour and hung up. I redialed the phone. “Hey, Tom, don’t be mad, but—”

When I hung up with Tom, I lay in bed for a moment thinking, Don’t look at the clock, don’t look at the clock. I looked and groaned. My wife just rolled over and continued sleeping.

Tom and I arrived at the Drake household forty-five minutes later and found a crying Mrs. Drake and a somber Mr. Drake. They were an older couple; I guessed them to be in their early to mid-sixties. Mrs. Drake led us into the kitchen, where one of the most beautiful dogs I have ever seen, a husky with a black and white coat lay on the floor.

“We were never able to have children,” Mrs. Drake said. “So our dogs are like—” She bit her sentence off.

Mr. Drake knelt next to the dog and stroked the fur around his neck. “You ever dive?”

“Excuse me?” I said, confused.

“Dive. You know, skydive?”

“No,” I said, “can’t say that I have.” I was lost.

“We called him Clear,” he said. “His official name on his kennel papers is Severe Clear because his eyes were the exact color of the sky on a perfect skydiving day, called a severe clear day.” Not sure if I was supposed to comment, I remained silent. “I was Airborne. I used to dive,” Mr. Drake said, looking up for the first time from his place on the floor.

I nodded.

“I dove for sport later in life. When Betty brought this little guy home from the kennel and I saw those eyes, I knew exactly what we were going to name him. Either of you guys have dogs?”

Tom and I nodded. Tom has a chocolate Lab, and I have a Yorkshire terrier, so we know what it’s like to be attached to a dog. People who don’t have pets don’t realize what a big presence they are in the house, but they each have their own personalities. They become part of the family.

We expressed our sympathies to the Drakes and Mr. Drake escorted the still crying Mrs. Drake out of the kitchen while we loaded the eighty-pound husky onto the cot and took him back to the funeral home. The Drakes stood on the front stoop and watched as we pulled away. Mrs. Drake hugged herself while Mr. Drake stood with his arm around his wife’s shoulders.

The next day I took Clear to the animal crematorium, and later in the week transferred his ashes from the little plastic box that held his remains to a small blue painted steel urn.

I got busy, and it was two weeks before I was able to deliver the urn to Mrs. Drake. When she saw the urn with the name Severe Clear on the brass nameplate, she started to cry. “I thought the color was fitting,” I told her.

She just nodded through her tears. Finally, she regained her composure enough to ask, “How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing. Just count this as a favor from one dog owner to another.”

“Thank you so much,” she gushed. “Could I invite you in?” I declined, saying I was busy. As I turned to leave, Mrs. Drake said, “We miss him so much, you know. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Gabe. You have made this really easy.”

I thanked her for her kind words and bid her goodbye, and chalked the whole thing up to good karma.

Now, I’m not trying to toot my own horn, telling people they’ll “get something” for doing a good deed. I certainly wasn’t looking to get anything from the Drakes. But in the ten years that have elapsed since I went to their household in the middle of the night to get Severe Clear, both of Mrs. Drake’s parents have died and she called me, remembering my kindness. And recently, when Mr. Drake died, Mrs. Drake called me to take care of him. We placed the blue urn in his casket.

“It just seems fitting,” Mrs. Drake said.

I agreed.

CHAPTER 11 Roadblock Contributed by a retired infantry officer

I grew up in the city. My favorite time of year is winter. There is nothing more beautiful than a snowy cityscape. The whiteness blankets the filth and urban ugliness with cleanliness and soft edges while the urbanites run for the shelter of their giant buildings, leaving the streets deserted. The only problem is that the snow makes my job damn near impossible to do, or so I found out the hard way one night when I nearly quit, but I’ll get to that later.

I was a career infantry officer in the Army. Got commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant, saw some combat, got decommissioned with silver oak leaves—a light colonel. I traveled around the world several times over and saw a lot of things. Some good. Some bad. But it was all interesting. My career propelled a troubled eighteen-year-old boy out of an equally troubled area, gave him an education, and gave him a life. I shudder to think what would have become of me if I hadn’t joined the Army. I’d probably be in prison, or worse.

When I retired from the Army at age fifty-four I didn’t know what to do with myself. I still got up at 5 A.M., I still kept my hair high and tight, and I still rolled my socks the Army way. It’s hard to know what to do when nobody’s giving you orders, if all you know is how to take orders. My wife finally shooed me out of the house. I was driving her crazy.

I took some classes, volunteered, and even tried a new hobby—watercolor. I found I hate watercolor. My colors always ran together and I all I ever got was a big brown mess and elevated blood pressure. The classes bored me, and the volunteering… let’s just say I’ve found that I’m too old to change the world, or too tired. I can’t decide. I was like a ship in a storm without a tiller.

Then my mother died and everything changed.

We called the undertaker my family has used in town for ages: Pickering and Sons, Inc. They came to my house, where my mother had been living with us, and did the removal. The next day I went in and met with the owner, Thomas F. Pickering, V, to make arrangements.

It wasn’t a sad occasion. My mother was old, and it was her time. She had lived the hard life of a single parent, trying to feed herself and her son by cleaning hotel rooms. My wife and I were planning on burying her in the cemetery plot we were eventually planning to use ourselves. No fuss. No fanfare. I told Thomas Pickering my plans, and afterward we got to talking. I told him how as a boy, when I lived in the city near their old funeral home, I used to wash cars for his grandfather, Thomas F. Pickering, III, and do other little jobs to earn a bit of money to blow at the five-and-dime store. I then proceeded to tell Mr. Pickering how if I hadn’t gotten into mischief and subsequently gone into the service to avoid jail time, I could easily have envisioned myself as an undertaker.

I was half joking.

“It’s never too late,” Mr. Pickering told me and handed me his card.

It was an impressive card, cream-colored linen stock with raised ink lettering bearing fancy script and the family crest.

“We use part-time employees all the time, and I’m always looking for reliable help.”

“I don’t know, sir—”

He interrupted. “Please. It’s Tom.”

I laughed. “Sorry. Force of habit. Back to what I was saying. I’ll be pushing sixty real hard in a few years. I imagine you need strapping young recruits to do this job.”

He shrugged. “Obviously you need to have some strength, but older guys can do it just as well. I’ve found that older people are much more reliable than the younger crowd. I call some twenty-something part-timer on a Friday evening and what’s he tell me?”

“He’s gotten into the sauce?”

“Exactly!” Tom exclaimed and pounded the desk. He stroked his silver goatee, looked at me, and winked. “Not that I don’t like a pop every now and again, but you can’t go pick up a body when you’re drunk. It’s not professional, and it’s dangerous.”

I was listening.

“Well, Nicholas, if you find you’re ever interested in pursuing that second career, or just looking for something to keep you busy, give me a call. I’d be happy to add you to my roster. Besides,” he said and gestured across his giant mahogany desk to me, “you don’t give yourself enough credit. You look as fit and trim as any twenty-year-old who has ever worked here.” And it was true that the Army had instilled in me a rigorous schedule of exercise that kept me limber and free of the paunch many of my peers were plagued with.

I placed his fancy card in my shirt pocket. We settled up the bill and later that week buried my mother.

Tom’s card sat on my bureau for a couple of months. I suffered through some more interminable watercolor attempts and too many sessions of a dreary class at the senior learning center (a name I hate) called “Manifest Destiny: Land Bondage of the American Indians” before I mustered the courage to pick up the phone. Tom hired me right on the spot. Soon I was doing removals for the firm, a week on, a week off. When I am “on” I carry a pager with me twenty-four hours a day. Another gentleman and I work together, alternating. He does a removal and I do the next one. And if it is a residential removal, we both go together.

I finally had a mission!

The beauty of the job is that I can just get in the van and go, and there is enough work that it keeps me as busy as I want to be in my retirement years. Sometimes, they even send me on road trips to pick up or deliver a trade job (a body that’s embalmed by another funeral director) or take a burial out of town in the hearse. I am in different places and situations every day, meeting people at every turn. It’s certainly never dull, almost like being back in the good ol’ Army.

The only time I almost quit was a couple of years ago right around Christmas. I was dispatched to a nursing home in the city. I hate doing removals there because of the parking problems, and to top it off it looked like it was going to be a white Christmas. It was snowing hard.

This particular nursing home was in an established residential section of the city, where there was just room enough for the building—nothing else—certainly no parking lot. The ambulance ramp at the rear of the building extends out to the sidewalk on a one-way street. Normally, this would worry me because I have to park in the middle of the street and block traffic, but the snow compounded my worries. Snow and ice make navigating the cot hard enough, but going down a slippery ramp with at least a hundred pounds of weight is a near-impossible feat. The only thing I had working in my favor was the fact that the call came in at eleven o’clock at night. That meant traffic would be light.

I got to the nursing home, parked the van in the middle of the street, and took the keys out, even though it was below freezing and I would have preferred to keep the heater running. I put the emergency flashers on, wheeled the cot up the ramp, and was buzzed in. A sleepy and slightly hostile nurse threw some papers in front of me and pointed me to Mrs. Jardeen’s room. Much to my dismay, Mrs. Jardeen was, to put it nicely, a big woman. I hefted her onto the cot, pulled the straps tight, and headed back out into the tempest. The staff at the nursing home hadn’t salted the ramp. Holding onto the rail with one hand and allowing the weight of the cot to pull me, I slowly slid down the ramp without incident.

I was so pleased with myself at successfully navigating the slushy ramp that I threw caution to the wind. Mistake. As I lowered one end of the cot off the curb it hit a patch of ice and swung wildly to the right. I desperately twisted the rear of the cot into the skid, trying to stop it, but the weight on the cot torqued it right out of my hands. The force I was using to pull the cot suddenly wasn’t counter-balanced and I fell backward. I ended up sitting hard on my rear on the snowy sidewalk. The first thing out of my mouth was, “Oh, shit!” I watched in slow motion as the front wheels swung back to the curb and hit it. The forward momentum of Mrs. Jardeen kicked the legs of the cot out. It flopped on its side in a growing snow bank with a sickening thump.

I sat for a moment on the cold, snowy sidewalk, stupefied by the little drama that had just played out before my eyes. I finally got up and dusted myself off and tried hefting the cot up. She was far too heavy for me to dead lift—no pun intended. There I was, out on the deserted city street in the middle of the night with a flipped cot and my van blocking the road… in a snowstorm.

Making a quick decision, I ran back up the ramp and got re-buzzed in. I found the surly nurse and explained my situation to her.

She looked at me like I was crazy. “Honey,” she said, “I just got off disability. There’s no way I’m going out and lifting something heavy like that. Once Mrs. Jardeen went through that door she was no longer my responsibility.”

“What?” I was incredulous that she could be that callous.

The nurse pursed her lips.

“Is there anyone in here that can help me?” I nearly screamed at her. I pounded on the counter, my eyes bulging. I stopped and collected myself.

The nurse didn’t seem concerned. She pulled a strand of hair and looked at the ceiling, deep in thought. After an eternity she said, “Nah. I can’t think of anyone on tonight that can help you.”

Oh, great, I had visions of jumping over the countertop and wringing her apathetic neck.

“Oh, wait,” she said. “Jamal, he can help you.”

My spirits rose, but she quickly dashed them. “No, wait, he called in. Ain’t coming in on account of the storm.”

“Wonderful.” I didn’t know anyone in the city who could help me. I’d have to call my partner and wait for him to drive the twenty or so minutes. “Can I use your phone?” I asked.

When she offered it up, I nearly ripped it out of her hands. As I told the dispatcher at the funeral home what had happened, I heard him mutter, “Christ,” under his breath. I wanted to strangle him. He was in his nice warm home sleeping and judging me! But I kept it together long enough to slam down the phone on him after he told me he’d put a call in to my partner.

I stalked back out to the van, so mad at myself I wanted to scream. I like things to work as planned. I think it’s the Army in me. When I screw up and the plan goes awry, it makes me furious. There was nothing I could do at that point. So I did the only thing I could do for Mrs. Jardeen—I dusted off the snow that was accumulating on the cot cover and got in the van to wait for my partner.

Several cars pulled up behind me flashing their lights and honking, and each time I had to get out and tell them to back up and detour. I wasn’t about to leave Mrs. Jardeen alone, even for a second. It took forty-five minutes for my partner to arrive due to the snow and ice. He later told me that he wanted to laugh, but after he saw the murderous look in my eye decided against it.

The next day Tom called me into his office. I thought for sure he was going to fire me, and to be perfectly honest, I was so embarrassed I wanted to quit.

“Nicholas,” he said to me, “I heard about your little incident last night.” He laced his fingers together and stuck them under his chin. His serious face melted into a mischievous smile. “Sounds like you had quite the little adventure in the city.”

“Yes,” I said, sitting rigid in the chair facing his desk. “It was an absolute nightmare.”

He laughed.

“What?” I demanded.

“You should see your face!”

“What about it?”

“You’re so serious.” Tom was belly laughing. “I bet you were a sight to see last night. Blocking the street… body laying on the sidewalk… nurses basically telling you to go chase yourself.” The laughter was shaking his entire body. “Nicholas, you’re too serious.”

“I like to be as professional as I can—”

Tom cut me off. “I can remember this one time I let a cot fall off a ramp into the bushes. The ramp had no railing and I drove the cot right over the edge.” Tears were coming to his eyes. “A pebble got caught in the wheel and it turned suddenly and I basically lost control of it. Boy, was my father mad at me that day! Man, oh man. He wouldn’t talk to me for the longest time. And you’re sitting here all upset because you slipped on the ice. What? Did you think I was going to fire you?”

“Well, yeah—”

“Nicholas, you’ve got to lighten up a little. I realize you do your best all the time, but this job is so unpredictable you have to laugh sometimes or you’ll cry. The important thing is you didn’t hurt yourself last night. That nurse should be tied and quartered, but what can you do? Honestly, Nicholas, what can you do? You did the right thing, and that’s all I can ask. I wish I had two more of you.”

“Thanks. I guess,” I said.

I left his office that day feeling puzzled but relieved. I did learn an important lesson about my limitations. Our motto in the 7th Infantry was volens et potens, willing and able. My new motto, a quote by Horace, is: mors ultima linea rarum est, death is everything’s final limit. Working around death sure has showed me some of my own limitations.

And I still hate watercolor.

CHAPTER 12 Human Wedge Contributed by a shameless karaoke singer

Where do most unexpected home deaths occur? Think about it. The bathroom. Picture this: you’re not feeling well, so you get out of bed or your comfy chair and when you stand up, the feeling persists. You can’t put your finger on it, but the uneasiness is spreading. Something just isn’t right. What do you do? You head for the nearest bathroom, moving as fast as you can. Something is really not right. You walk through the bathroom door and keel over, dead.

I have hauled countless people out of bathtubs, off toilets, and off the bathroom floor over the years, all to the same tune of the spouse in the background saying, “I don’t know what happened. He/she was fine last night. I heard him/her get up and get a drink of water around midnight, and then I found him/her like this in the morning.” It’s always the same story, different bathroom.

The one incident I vividly remember is when I went in to do a removal, not through the bathroom door, but through a hole chopped in the side of the house.

An elderly gentleman lived alone. After a few days of not seeing the man, and the newspapers piling up, a concerned neighbor keyed herself in. The gentleman’s keys were on the kitchen counter as was his wallet, and there was a strange smell coming from his bathroom. The woman called out but got no answer. After trying the knob and finding it unlocked, she tried pushing on the door. It was jammed, as if a large weight was lying on the other side. Fearing for her friend’s safety, the woman dialed 9-1-1.

The police and firemen showed up. After some investigation, one of the cops, a friend of mine, called me to get over to the house. “I know decomp when I smell it,” he said. Decomp is short for decomposition. “I know he’s dead in there. The old guy must’ve had a heart attack in the bathroom and fallen against the door.”

“Family?” I inquired.

“Didn’t have any. I’m calling on behalf of the neighbor lady. She told me she’s going to be making the arrangements.”

“M.E.?”

“Medical Examiner already called the doctor. They don’t want the case. Old guy had a long history of heart problems. He was a ticking time bomb. Once we get him out and the paramedics pronounce, he’ll be all yours.”

“Be right over,” I said.

I puttered over in my hearse at my leisure. I knew it would be a while before the firemen took the door off its hinges and the paramedics pronounced his death from “the field.”

As soon as I walked in the house, I knew the man was dead; decomp has a distinct smell if you’re accustomed to it. The firemen and policemen were in an intense huddle.

I banged my cot through the door. “Pronounce yet?” I asked the group.

My friend broke off to tell me the news. “We haven’t been able to get the door open, even with four of us throwing our weight against it.”

“Can’t you take it off the hinges?” I asked.

“Hinge pins are mounted on the inside of the bathroom. And, of course, there’s no bathroom window.”

“Great. So now what?” That’s when I found out what the huddle had been about.

The firemen were in favor of cutting the door open with a chainsaw, but the police officers were worried about the dead man accidentally getting mauled in the process. The firemen were trying to reason with the officers about their skill level, but the officers were having none of it. I threw my two cents in and sided with the officers. I didn’t feel like doing any reconstructive work, especially from a chainsaw. It went back and forth until, finally, the decision was made to break in from the outside of the house so as not to harm the dead man. The firemen liked that solution; it gave them something more substantial to break than a simple door.

The firemen went to work with sledgehammers and wrecking bars, first on the brick, then the lath, and finally the plaster and tile. They made a huge mess and a tiny hole, right above where the pre-formed ABS plastic bathtub was. They didn’t want to smash the tub up and risk damaging the house too much so they refrained from making the hole any larger. Great idea—break through an exterior wall but leave the $200 bathtub alone, I thought.

The house sat on a raised foundation. The hole was a good five-and-a-half feet off the ground. Being the smallest person at the site and the one most accustomed to handling the dead, I was nominated by my cop friend to go through the hole. After a lot of bullying and cajoling by both the firemen and the cops, I accepted the dubious honor of being stuffed through a hole in the side of a house into a bathroom where a dead man lay.

I stripped down to my undershirt and suit pants, and then allowed them to hoist me up and stuff me through the wall. I sat on the biggest fireman’s shoulders and dove through the wall while the men pushed my legs in. I ended up in a dusty heap inside the mint green bathtub, no worse for wear, and from there, it was a cakewalk. The rescue men hadn’t been able to push the dead man out of the way because the bathroom was so cramped that he was between the tub and door and there was nowhere to push him. He had made the perfect door wedge.

I do a lot of different things and am exposed to a lot of unique situations in my job, but I think this one was probably the most off-the-wall.

At least it was a ranch house.