Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt

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.