Mortuary Confidential: Undertakers Spill the Dirt

I didn’t want to make her feel worse so I didn’t laugh. “Just leave it,” I said. “It’s fine.”

“No!” she wailed.

I could tell there was no use arguing with her; she wasn’t leaving the house unless her makeup was done. I had a sudden flash of inspiration. “Hey girl, go lay down on the couch.”

“Huh?” she said. She gave me a dumb look.

“Lay down on the couch. I’ll do it for you. I’m qualified.”

She complied.

“Sue,” I said to one of our friends, “run up and grab her grip—er, I mean, makeup kit.”

Sue returned with the makeup kit. “Hey, look!” she called. “The gay undertaker is going to give us a makeup demonstration!”

All the drinking games suddenly weren’t as entertaining as a gay funeral director applying makeup to a drunken girl laid out on her couch. “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” blared from the stereo as the crowd gathered.

“Close your eyes and lie as still as possible,” I told Jamie. I knelt down and from the hooting and cheering around me, you would have thought a cockfight was going on in the middle of the circle.

I’ll admit, I was trashed, and it wasn’t my best work by a long shot. But it was good enough to appease Jamie, and it gave the crowd a good show, as I provided running commentary and took much longer than I should have because I was hamming it up. I think she was too drunk to realize she looked like the Joker from Batman, but for my first attempt on a live person I’d give myself a “D+” grade. Hey, that’s passing!

Three years later, people who were at that party, or have heard about it, still kid me about doing their makeup. Sure, I tell them, but with one stipulation, they have to lie down and close their eyes.

CHAPTER 16. A Solution for Sagging

Contributed by an Atlanta Falcons fan

When somebody dies, gravity pulls everything down. Everything. For example, take blood. Since the vascular system is no longer circulating blood, the erythrocytes (red blood cells) get pulled to the lowest point, making those areas of skin dark red. The pooling of blood in those low areas is called livor mortis. Gravity pulls other things down. Most notably on women, their breasts.

If the breasts are allowed to lie as they will, they will invariably fall to the sides. If you don’t compensate for this gravitational phenomenon, women look unnatural when they are laid out for the wake. The average layman probably wouldn’t be able to pinpoint exactly what wasn’t right, but would just know something didn’t look right. That something would be the lack of a bust.

I have talked to embalmers who embalm women in their bras, but I have found that to be wholly un-practical. The bra can get stained with blood if one isn’t careful, and it always has to be dried out after the washing of the body, and sometimes you just can’t get a bra in enough time before the embalming has to occur. So I have to come up with a way to hold the breasts up during embalming. It’s the perfect solution, or so I told my aunts one afternoon.

My aunts Millie and Vicki are my dead maternal grandmother’s only siblings. They live together in a big old plantation-style house on a shady, tree-lined street in your typical southern town. Since I work close to them, I try to sneak away from the mortuary at least once a week during the warm months to join the two old fire-crackers for afternoon tea on their front porch. They drink iced tea on their front porch every afternoon starting at about three o’clock and going until suppertime. As the afternoon wears on they begin pouring a little Southern Comfort in their tea. They get a little sassier with each passing hour; if you happen upon them near dark, it’s damn near like being at the Friar’s Club.

On this particular day I arrived late and they were giggling like schoolgirls, a sure sign of the So-Co.

“Trey, Trey,” my Aunt Vicki waved to me as I crossed the lawn, “we were just talking about you.”

I kissed them both and sat down in a rocking chair.

“Tea?” Aunt Millie asked.

“Please.”

“The special blend?” she asked innocently.

“No thanks, Auntie. I have to get back to work.”

Aunt Millie opened a silver ice bucket and used a pair of dainty tongs to drop three ice cubes into a glass. She carefully poured from a pitcher sitting on the table between her and her sister.

“Mint?”

“Please,” I said.

She dropped a mint leaf into the glass and half a lemon slice.

“Sure I can’t interest you in a little additive?”

“Maybe next week. Too much work.”

“How dreadful. On a beautiful day like this too!” Aunt Vicki said.

“So what were you two up to?” I inquired, taking the highball glass. The three measly ice cubes looked pitiful in the giant glass. I tasted the tea. It was watery. I knew my aunts reused tea bags—a vestige of the Depression.