hymns playing softly in the background. His parents were very religious and appreciated the solemnity of Christian music for a churchlike atmosphere. But the decedent’s hoodlum friends requested that I instead play the rap CDs they had brought along. I looked over the cases and discovered warnings proclaiming that the talentless ramblings contained extremely explicit, profane, and sexually degrading lyrics, obviously inappropriate for a funeral. I showed the CDs to the parents, and to my surprise, they said to go ahead and play them. Well, after about three minutes into the first selection, the father frantically begged me to go back to the hymns. He and his family had probably never heard the bittersweet recollections of a “ho” shaking “the junk in her trunk” and feverishly fondling many male appendages until they “shot their spunk.”
When a fun-loving seventy-year-old attorney died, his widow expressed to me his desire to have no minister present. One of her late husband’s law firm partners would officiate at the funeral instead. Once everyone was seated in the chapel, I escorted the speaker to the podium, noting that he had clearly had a few too many martinis. Not overly concerned, though, I took my position outside the chapel doors to watch the ceremony on a closed-circuit television screen.
What I saw and heard was most amazing. This fellow began the ceremony with offensive jokes about Jews, blacks, homosexuals, and Mexicans. It turned out that this was the daily water-cooler banter of the deceased and his colleagues; therefore, such material was deemed perfectly appropriate for his funeral. His widow did not even seem offended. Quite a few attendees, however, succumbed to embarrassment and departed, red-faced, through the rear chapel door. Many more left in disgust as the speaker began an X-rated appreciation of various female attributes.
Honoring last requests is often a simple matter of inclusion. Over the years I have placed myriad items inside caskets—fishing rods, a bow and arrow, golf clubs (sometimes a whole set), golf balls, basketballs, autographed baseballs, baseball gloves, and other sports memorabilia, along with complete baseball, football, and basketball uniforms. Unloaded handguns, rifles, and shotguns often find their way into the casket—sometimes because the deceased was an avid hunter, but just as often because someone apparently didn’t want certain family members to take possession. I’ve included playing cards, bingo cards, lucky pennies, room keys from hotels in Las Vegas and other destinations, cigarettes, marijuana joints, pet rocks, favorite books, a tape recorder, a glass eye, sexual devices, jewelry (some expensive, some not), apples, oranges, buckeyes, walnuts, photographs, leaf collections, coin collections,
Then there are the dead animals—cremated remains of beloved dogs and cats or the recently euthanized dog, which is placed in a plastic bag and laid at the feet of the deceased.
One recent casket-depositing incident caused quite a furor. The late gentleman was thrice married and divorced, and all three of his ex-spouses insisted on attending the services. His current female companion abruptly requested that I remove one of those ex-wives from the funeral home as soon as possible. “Why?” I inquired. She informed me that the woman had just peeled off her panties and placed them in her late ex-husband’s hand.
The majority of gestures are loving, however. An elderly gentleman friend contacted me when his wife passed away. After the service and with the room empty of mourners, he and I approached the casket. He then handed me a $50 bill and requested that I slip it into his wife’s bra. Apparently it was a tradition of sorts— whenever she went someplace without him, he would playfully slip $50 into her bra so she would always have some money with her. This time would be no exception.
CHAPTER THREE
In most cases, the deceased human body is not the most pleasant sight to behold. Immediately after death, many changes begin to take place: discoloration, bowel and bladder evacuations, drainage from the mouth and nose.
Only once can I recall a time when a dead body was actually good looking. On Christmas Day, 1978, I was called to a newly constructed apartment complex to remove a twenty-four-year-old suicide victim. A young woman, apparently distraught over a recent breakup with her boyfriend, had hung herself in a clothes closet. This was long before
The figure lying on the bed was at first breathtaking. She resembled Marilyn Monroe, and her breasts protruded straight upward from her chest like twin Mt. Fujis. There was no droop to one side, which is normal in death. There was no sheet covering her, because life-squad personnel and the police photographer were as utterly stunned as I was. The only other woman in the room was a paramedic. She touched them and testified that those breasts were indeed not God given but saline implants. I had never heard of such a thing. By 1970s standards, this young woman was something of a trendsetter.
A closer examination of her body revealed that, except for her breasts, there were the usual damning influences of death—her mouth and nose were full of foamy lung material; a deep, ear-to-ear gash reddened under her chin from her ligature of choice (a Venetian-blind cord), and the increasingly pungent odor of body wastes filled the room. So much for beauty. So much for leaving a good-looking corpse, as the actor John Derek said in the film
I learned another valuable lesson once when removing a nude, deceased man from his second-floor bathroom: There are never enough linens on a mortuary cot. The man in question had just drawn a bath and was sitting on the toilet. He died while he was still on the commode.
My assistant and I draped a bed sheet across the bathroom floor, then placed the decedent on the sheet and wrapped it around him. We had left our mortuary cot at the foot of the stairs near the front door, since it was not possible to carry it up to the bathroom. We began to hoist the decedent to move him downstairs. My assistant’s left arm was under the nape of the man’s neck to support his head. His right arm was under the small of his back. I had placed my left arm there, too, with my right arm under his knees. As we made our descent down the stairs, I felt a warm sensation on my thigh, followed by more warmth on the top of my right foot, accompanied by a familiar odor. I strained against the weight in my arms in an attempt to discover the source. Just as I suspected, the decedent’s bowels had given way in a shower of feces that trailed all the way down the carpeted steps and all over our pants and feet.
After placing the decedent on the mortuary cot, I asked the family if I might use their telephone. I called several carpet-cleaning companies and ultimately reached one that would come to the residence right away. Of course, I paid the carpet cleaner myself, still resplendent in my odiferous attire. But from then on, I always made certain I brought an extra three or four sheets along with the cot. If we had wrapped the man in several sheets, rather than just one, the problem would have easily been contained within the linens. And in most situations, people normally are wearing some sort of clothing, at least pajamas or underwear.
A house call to remove a decedent from a private residence, as opposed to a medical facility, often involves entering the person’s bathroom. Such scenarios used to dumbfound me. However, an obvious case can be made in that the elderly sometimes experience difficulty with their bowel movements, and the inherent strain may be a contributing factor in their deaths. We call it “death by defecation.”
Many years ago, the county coroner summoned me to a residence. As I wrote down the street and house number, it sounded very familiar. Once I turned onto the street, I realized that I was on my way to the home of a kindly old minister friend. Over the years, I had driven to his house several times to take him to the funeral home to preside over services.
As I pulled in front, I noted an ambulance parked nearby. The EMTs and two police officers stood on the
