day at a large Pentecostal church. We were to take the casket to the church at 4 p.m. and it would stay there until the funeral the next morning. After completing the funeral arrangements, I made the trip to the coroner’s office to retrieve the body.
The coroner’s personnel were amazed at the manner of this young man’s death; they gave me all the gory details the moment I arrived. The chalkboard in the autopsy room reported the grisly findings: the number eighty- eight was scrawled next to the words
I brought the body back to the funeral home and placed it on the embalming table. A full autopsy had been performed, so the internal organs were in a plastic bag in the victim’s thoracic-abdominal cavity. I removed the bag, opened it, and poured two sixteen-ounce bottles of high-index formaldehyde-based chemical onto the organs to preserve them. I retied the bag and began to inspect the empty thoracic-abdominal cavity of the young stabbing victim who lay before me.
Observing the interior of a deceased human being devoid of life-sustaining organs is awe inspiring, as in “Look at what God has devised for us.” There are bony ribs to protect our organs from accidental falls and a massive spinal column that assists us in standing upright. In this case, though, further observation revealed the magnitude of multiple stab wounds. One-inch slices, some vertical and some horizontal, peppered the interior of the young man’s back. Knife thrusts had chipped many of his ribs.
After arterially embalming the young man, the interior of the body was dried, and I had to do something to address the huge number of stab wounds in the back, which would cause liquids to leak onto his clothing without treatment. Instead of sewing each wound from the outside, I decided to cover the entire interior of the body with a four-inch coating of plaster of Paris. After the plaster dried, I laid a sheet of thick plastic over the plaster, returned the bag of organs back inside the body, and sewed the thoracic-abdominal cavity together. The next day, the young man was dressed and placed into his casket and delivered to the church for the all-night visitation.
On arriving at the church, I was surprised at the number of police officers present. I was informed that the killers were still at large, and that many times a murderer will return to the scene of the crime or even attend the funeral of the victim. As it turned out in this case, the girlfriend of the deceased man had known the two killers and had given the police the necessary information, but the two assailants were hiding. This case turned out to be one of mistaken identity—the victim was not the killers’ intended target. Instead, the victim’s cousin had reported the two killers to the police for a minor theft, and the killers had vowed revenge on him. However, they took out their revenge on the victim, not his cousin. The two killers, who were brothers, were eventually apprehended and imprisoned. Perhaps poetic justice prevailed for the victim’s family—one murderous brother was stabbed to death in prison and the other committed suicide in the same prison.
With all of these terrible things happening, I still had my own reasons to be happy. I left the all-night visitation and went to the hospital to check on the birth of my daughter. We had quite the all-night vigil as well, and Anna was delivered by Caesarian section at dawn. My sister was and is a labor and delivery nurse at the hospital, and she presented my daughter to me covered with muck. I thought there was something wrong, but she just had not been cleaned up yet. After a thorough cleaning, my wife and I marveled at the beautiful, healthy Anna, who had no hair on her head, which turned out to be a trend with all three of our children. I could easily distinguish my babies in the hospital nursery from any others because of the lack of hair on their heads.
I left the hospital, retrieved the hearse, and went to the Pentecostal church to conduct the funeral ceremony for the young murder victim. Such is the life of the funeral director—welcoming a new life and my own child into the world and thirty minutes later depositing the body of someone else’s child into a grave.
When my son Michael was six years old, a family a few streets over from us was in the process of moving to another house in town. The father of the household owned several handguns and stored them in his basement in square milk crates. The family had a seven-year-old boy, and he and his nine-year-old cousin were assisting in the move by carrying small items into waiting pickup trucks. The two little guys came across the container of guns, and like most inquisitive little boys, each armed himself for a make-believe shoot-out. The nine-year-old shot his cousin in the forehead, just above the left eye, with a .38 caliber police special that should not have been loaded. The incident caused lifelong resentment among family members, and I’m sure the boy who lived will never forget the accident.
As I prepared the seven-year-old for burial, I saw many things that reminded me of my own son. The dirty fingernails from a hard day of playing in the dirt; scrapes on both knees, perhaps from falling off of a bicycle or scooter; and mussed, sweaty, and unruly blonde hair. I glanced over at the department store bag that contained the boy’s burial clothing—new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles underwear and the cutest little suit and tie—items that my own son sometimes wore. This silent little fellow lying on the preparation room table required little restoration for his wound. I inserted a ball of mortuary wax about the size of jawbreaker into the almost perfectly round bullet hole, and then smoothed and feathered it into the natural skin of his forehead. The exit wound in the rear of head was more extensive, but I tightly sewed together the ragged skin of the scalp. When I placed the little guy in his casket, I dropped his head deep into the casket pillow to hide the ugly exit wound.
After an experience such as this one, I hid my only handgun in the trunk of my car, under the spare tire. I hid it so well that when I traded in that particular car for a new one a few years later the gun inadvertently went with the car.
I suppose many families are like ours, not realizing the everyday dangers that can lead to death. Once I realized another danger when I met with an extremely distraught husband and father to arrange for the funerals of his wife and four-year-old daughter. The evening before, the gentleman’s wife was relaxing in the bathtub and his daughter peeled off her clothes to get in the tub too. In her haste to climb into the tub, the girl snagged a plugged-in blow-dryer with her foot, and the appliance splashed into the water, electrocuting both mother and daughter.
In my house, we always had a plugged-in blow-dryer resting on the countertop in the bathroom. When my own daughter was about the same age, she sometimes took a bath with my wife. After I talked with the grieving father, I immediately told my wife to unplug our blow-dryer and put it in the vanity cabinet.
This particular case was the first time I was asked to place a mother and her child together in the same casket. I happened to think that it was a nice touch, and I was supportive of the husband. The cemetery, however, was not amused. The cemetery superintendent had wanted to sell the husband two graves, not one. After some negotiation, I convinced the cemetery sexton to go along with the husband. It was not a particularly hard sell—the sexton had a daughter about the same age, so he understood. Since this experience, I have placed a child and parent in the same casket several times.
No matter how old the child is, the grieving is painful. A twenty-four-year-old recent college graduate’s car slid on a rain-soaked country road and collided with a signpost. Attached to the post was a square piece of yellow steel with the S-curve warning emblazoned on it. The square was just substantial enough to blast through the windshield and cut into the young man’s forehead. He died instantly, with tremendous damage to his face. The car then careened into a ravine, violently tossing the defenseless occupant to and fro inside and causing even more damage to his lifeless body. When I first saw him, the decedent was broken and torn from nearly head to toe, which made for a very time-consuming restoration.
Following the embalming, I encased his limbs in plastic to ensure against leakage, and then I dressed the entire body in a “union suit,” a one-piece, form-fitting, thick-ply plastic garment that covers the deceased from neck to toes. After filling in the traumatic facial and scalp defects with wax, I then glued those areas and allowed them to dry. Because there were so many lacerations, this was a three-hour job then followed by cosmetics and insertion of hair from the back of the head into a wax scalp bed.
After dressing the body and placing him in the casket, I called his parents to see whether they wanted a private viewing to approve of my efforts. They approached their dead son’s casket on tiptoes, as if careful not to wake him, and wearing that familiar look of devastation that I have witnessed far too many times. As they neared, their output of tears increased—but strangely enough, there was not a howl or a wail or a scream or a sob. The
