Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt

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?”