Open caskets

Having boycotted the sports night weekly church activities for as long as I could remember, they suddenly proposed an excursion that appealed to my thirst for the shocking. As part of a “learning about possible careers night,” we would visit a funeral home/mortuary and talk to the guy who embalmed the bodies. Way better than basketball.

So we visited the funeral home and went to the basement where we met with a funeral director that mixes now with the mortician in the movie Arachnophobia. In fact, when I remember the visit, I remember that actor as the guy who spoke to us. He described how you drain the blood from the bodies through veins in their legs and then inject formaldehyde in through the same place. He talked us through the makeup as we sat in the place where he did it, as we looked at the chair that, as I try to picture it now, looks like the chair in the dentist’s office.
Then he told us stories about “the field.” One time, apparently, a guy had decided to take his life by laying across the train tracks so that a passing train decapitated him.

We were enthralled, as the funeral director knew that only a group of 16 year old boys could be. Funeral directors are, if not storytellers, certainly story facilitators. They provide the settings, the bindings for the funerary text, arrange the images, the painted cadaver, the flowers, the seats and the speaking space for the stories that we use to make sense of death. Here, the director got to go beyond his role as set decorator, as cinematographer, as costumer and move to the spotlight. He loved it, and I think the manic joy on his face is what I remember best, even if I only remember it in the nonchalant sandwiches that the Arachnophobia character ate.

So the funeral director gets called to the scene to collect the body. No autopsy needed, the cause of death was clear, hard to keep living when your head and body have parted company. “I put the body in the back of the hearse and then put the head in a basket and put it between the legs and headed back here.”

He paused. “That was a puzzler, but as I stood here, trying to figure out what to do, I saw an old broom in the corner. I cut off the handle, sharpened both ends and then jammed it down his spinal column, popped the head on top, and we had an open casket!” He was so proud and we were very impressed. At that moment, I think we all thought it would be pretty cool to be a funeral director. As we left, we walked by a gurney with a sheet draped over a body. That was almost as cool as the story (it’s pretty hard to beat a head on a pike). As we had listened so intently to tales of locomotives and sharpened sticks, death was there, not just in the setting, but as a fresh corpse ready to experience the stories we had just heard. I don’t remember seeing any brooms nearby.