My body positivity comes from a lot of places – how I grew up, my stellar academic training, becoming a mother, my voracious appetite for reading, but, also, my personal and professional experience with death. Death positivity wasn’t a term really twenty years ago when I first started researching and reading about the American way of death. I began to wonder how we mourned our dead differently in the past and wondered what would happen if we talked about it more publicly and honestly? I began a quest that has lead me to a lot of work in the death field, and it all began in my early 20s as the only female in our small Oregon town who worked at a funeral home picking up dead bodies at night.
I’ve spent a lot of time in cemeteries researching and have given historic art and architecture walking tours of these cities of the dead since I was in graduate school. During the pandemic I’ve taken to walking a mile every single day through and around one of my favorite cemeteries in the city.
My grandparents started dying when I was just 14 years old, three of them in the span of just over a decade. All in Weiser, Idaho, at the same family funeral home that all my relatives have been viewed and celebrated, embalmed and cared for – at Thomason Funeral Home. The undertaker went to high school with my parents. The caskets were open and my grandparents’ embalmed, typical customs, in modern America and among Mormon traditions in Idaho. Such traditions include private family viewings of the bodies, a public service, and dinner at the senior center or a local restaurant and, of course, a burial in a plot at the city cemetery. The open caskets at these funerals revealed the first dead bodies I’d ever seen. They didn’t look like my grandparents any longer. That wasn’t the most upsetting thing to me, though. The most traumatic part of the service was seeing my parents weep with such sadness, for the first time in my life. And the realization that this is an important life transition.
Fast forward to my early twenties and I’d never been able to shake the thoughts I was having about the American way of death and the way people celebrate life through that transition. I watched friends grieve parents and lost a few of my own friends to suicide and saw people deal with the important death ritual differently, many coming out scarred and scared and in denial. I’d graduated from college and was living with my boyfriend in Corvallis, Oregon, where he was a PhD student and I was paying back my student loans bills in the ever fulfilling job title of RECEPTIONIST, first at the county mental health clinic and then on the Oregon State University campus working with international students on visas. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d like to change the way we grieve our dead. I wondered about things like why we embalm them, what happens to their bodies at night, alone at the funeral home, and why caskets cost so much. So, I picked up the seminal 1963 book by Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death, became simultaneously disgruntled and mortified and decided I was going to become a mortician at the age of 25. I did some research, and found out that morticians require special degrees and medical certification, much like doctors and other medical professionals, and that there were only a handful of mortuary science degree programs around the country.
The next time I was in Idaho, I set up an appointment with the mortician at our Weiser family funeral home and he suggested that I think long and hard about this career, as it is very taxing on families and he wasn’t sure he’d recommend becoming a mortician to someone who didn’t HAVE to do it. Most mortuaries are family businesses – they are passed down from generation to generation and often children feel compelled to take over for their fathers. Yes, since about the 1950s, most morticians in America have been men. Women have only recently begun to be prominent in the field in the past ten years or so. He suggested I talk with some other morticians, and that I get a job working in the trade, at a funeral home or cemetery first, to see if it was something I’d like. Solid advice, I thought, and the same that I received from the next three interviews I did with Oregon morticians. One of two mortuaries in Corvallis, the McHenry Funeral Home, has been around since the 1920s. And they had a job to offer me: nighttime removal driver and mortician’s assistant. I got a pager and was told I’d be picking up dead bodies at night between the hours of 6pm and 6am. They handed me the keys to the unmarked, dark window-tinted minivan turned cadaver transport, and instructed to dress “kind of nice but not too nice” because I’d probably ruin my clothes. If someone dies at the hospital or nursing home, I was to go alone; if someone dies at their home or elsewhere, I’d take the male mortician apprentice with me. He lived in an apartment above the prep room (aka the room with the freezer for corpses, the room where the embalming takes place and, little did I know, the room where I’d help a medical examiner saw open a skull for a cranial autopsy and remove eyeballs to be donated). That was about it for my training talk.
I handled lots of calls, or removals, during my stint as a mortician’s assistant; the bodies were moved quietly in the night with little fanfare, and placed inside the freezer at the funeral home to await direction from the family and embalming the next morning. Some of my calls involved feats of strength – like when the apprentice and I had to remove a very large dead man from his teeny tiny upstairs bedroom floor, onto a gurney that was not wide enough, and down a steep, narrow flight of stairs. His body came tumbling off the gurney more than once, much to the chagrin of the police officers watching the scene. Other calls came with seemingly impossible requests. One time I had to drive the deceased body of a woman who died in Oregon but needed to be transported to Seattle ASAP to be reunited with her loved ones and I was instructed to drive all night speedy delivery style and never leave the body unattended in the unmarked minivan but wait WHAT ABOUT PEEING AND FOOD? So I took the Mrs. through the Burger King drive-thru, ordered an extra-large Coke to get me through the night and later relieved myself in that very same cup. I’ll never forget the time I loaded a sweet old man into his body bag with his wife and daughter present. They walked with me and him on the gurney out to the minivan. I rammed the gurney into the back of the minivan. The gurney was supposed to roll gently onto the ambulance-like track when the heavy steel legs collapsed, but nothing happened. I backed him up and rammed him again. Still nothing. I started sweating bullets when Eric (who was just my sweet boyfriend at the time and was hiding in the front seat) hissed at me what the hell is happening back there? I hissed back, OMG HELP ME and he hissed back no way. I tried again and again, ramming the dear sweet father and husband into the back of a minivan to no avail. The nurses were watching angrily from the window and they came out and hissed at me, too, and I said, you wanna try it? They tried and it still didn’t work, so we lowered the gurney to the ground and it took six of us to deadlift the dead weight of a full-grown man plus a hundred pounds of steel into the back of the minivan.
There are some stories, though, some nighttime stories of death in our little Oregon Valley, that will haunt me forever.
I got a call from the police at 7:30pm on an unusually warm night. A 50-year-old woman had been found dead in her completely unsanitary, garbage-filled home and we were instructed to bring our protective body suits, tarps and gloves because it appeared as though she’d been deceased at least two months. We could smell it as we entered the neighborhood. The police lent us some gas masks and flashlights and had found a shovel near the garage and said we would need it to dig our way into the house and perhaps to move the body. There were two dead dogs inside with her. The floors were piled with plastic milk bottles, hair, fecal matter, bugs, maggots, books, papers, urine, and food. Massive dust-filled cobwebs hung from the ceiling down past my shoulders. She was curled up on the floor in the fetal position, wedged between a dirty mattress, a big dog carrier and a wooden chest. She was naked and partially buried in garbage with her big, fluffy white deceased dog wrapped over her head. It was blurry looking out through the thick plastic and disturbing hearing my own breath pushing in and out so loudly. There were maggots, bugs and flies eating what was left of her flesh. Her head and face were entirely decomposed, leaving only the skull. Her skin split easily under the pressure of my shovel. I slipped once on the mess and nearly fell directly on her body. We loaded her into the minivan and I tore off my gear. I was soaked with sweat. It took several hours, but once home, I threw open the front door to the apartment and yelled for Eric. I began to strip on the porch. He came running downstairs and gagged from my stench. He grabbed a garbage sack and put everything (panties, bra, shoes, etc.) into it and took it to the trash. I ran to the shower with tears in my eyes. I turned on the water as hot as I could stand. When I got out I asked Eric to check inside my ears and in my hair for maggots. I couldn’t sleep that night; every time I dozed off I relived it.
These stories probably sound pretty horrible, like, this job can’t possibly get worse, right? There’s nothing more heartbreaking than that, is there? While removals like that were awful and sad and nightmarish it was the pick-ups I did when there were real live bodies present, those who loved those dead bodies something fierce and were transitioning themselves through a kind of departure that were the hardest part about being a mortician’s assistant for me.
Most of the time hospital and nursing home staff would wait until the families had said their goodbyes and were long gone from the building before calling us for a removal. This is a typical American funerary service custom, as it’s deemed too traumatic for the family to see the body of their loved one zipped in a body bag and taken away.
One night I got a call from the local hospital. A young man in his early 30s from Russia had died from cancer. His grief stricken young bride met us in the lobby and wanted to know about American death customs – what was it we were about to do to her husband? We explained so carefully and kindly to her that we’d treat his body with the utmost respect and only do to him what she wanted – and that all of that could wait until morning. The hospital room was full of cousins and other family. A priest had placed an icon on his chest and left when the family remained adamant the man was not to be jostled. Don’t bump his head or let his mouth open, one sobbing cousin told us. She was kissing him and crying about us zipping up the body bag. NO ZIP, NO ZIP she called in her broken English, while we tried to politely explain that we didn’t want his body to fall out, and we knew that the precious icon was certain to slide off his chest and we didn’t want to lose it.
At my very last pick-up for the funeral home I was called to a nursing home in Corvallis, a pick-up location we had frequented. I went to pick up the body of an old man who had died in his sleep, after his daughter was apparently gone. The staff would often try to sneak me and my huge gurney into the place, as the sight of it rolling down the hallway was sad, scary and depressing to both residents and their families. We loaded the man up, the nurses and I, and as I was wheeling him through the halls towards the front doors, his daughter came out of the bathroom, much to the horror of the nursing staff who thought she was gone. IS THAT MY DAD?! she cried out at me. Not knowing if it was or not, I looked at a nurse with searching wide eyes for help. Yes, she said softly, rushing to the woman’s side. The daughter ripped her arm free from the nurse and ran full speed at me, screaming I HATE YOU FOR TAKING HIM AWAY. I HATE YOU. I HATE YOU. She dissolved into uncontrollable sobs and all I wanted to do was go to her. But the nurses behind the station hissed at me to get out now and fast, so I rushed out with tears spilling down my face. I never returned.
I was often there for this final departing scene with two types of bodies – those dead and those still alive. I was the angel of death to the very body these people had known so well – kissed, laughed with, hugged, slept with and danced with. I didn’t become a mortician after all – this job was proof that that career path wasn’t the right choice for me, but my work in the funeral industry went on to shape and form my future graduate studies, my art, and my life in profound ways. Most importantly, it shaped my acute awareness that this body, this life, these moments – together – they are fleeting and fast. Use them wisely. Be vulnerable. Say I love you. Stand brave. Take that hand. Cherish your body.
++ you can hear me tell this story here which gives it more life (pun intended), including moments where I nearly cried on stage for a celebrity version of our local storytelling event called Starry Story Night in 2015