Down Among the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician

by Michelle Williams

  The atmosphere as soon as we got among the crowds was better than I could ever have imagined; there was no sense of menace, just one of togetherness and camaraderie and enjoyment, with a lot of families and ankle-biters, most of whom were well behaved. It was past two o’clock by now so we made our way around the stadium, through the gates and up inside the giant concrete stadium. Our seats were on the upper tier, so by the time we arrived we were out of breath and fairly thirsty, requiring a stop off at the nearest stadium bar. Such were the crowds that it took fifteen minutes to get served, but I did manage to sneak through, and so, by the time that we were lagered up and in our seats, the teams were all set to come on to the field.

  What followed over the next hour and three-quarters was simply brilliant. England actually managed to win, and win quite respectably, which, together with a top-up of lager levels at half-time, lots of shouting and listening to the various musical instruments belting out ‘Swing Low’, meant that by the time four thirty had arrived we were four happy people making our way down the staircase to the outside and the deepening gloom. We elected to catch one of the free buses back down to the town centre, then looked around, trying to decide which of the many alehouses would have the privilege of entertaining us. Opting for a large but stylish pub replete with bouncers on the door, we sallied forth and once more settled down to some serious beer talk, surrounded by like-minded, England-shirted punters, discussing the game and our prospects for the games that were forthcoming in the next few weeks. By the time we emerged, it was well and truly dark and we were hungry to the point of famine. Mindful that it would be a good idea to relocate closer to the hotel if we were going to take on board some grub, we hailed another (cheaper) taxi and were deposited in short order in Richmond High Street.

  I think it would be true to say that by this time we were all fairly merry and finding a restaurant proved, well, ‘interesting’. I decided that I wanted an Indian but no matter where we looked, there was not an Indian to be found. There were Chinese restaurants (which I hate), French restaurants and Italian ones, but no Indians; I mean, how can there be no Indian restaurants within walking distance of anywhere in this sceptred isle? Ed kept moaning bitterly whenever we walked past most of these, but I was intent on an Indian.

  I didn’t get my wish, though. We eventually settled for a Thai restaurant that was close to the hotel, one that Luke pointed out we had walked past three times already. Still, it proved to be a decent place, well frequented and with a very nice menu. We settled down at the table, ordered some wine and then thoroughly perused the menu, while getting warm after the chill of a November night.

  Over the next hour we stuffed Thai food. Towards the end of things I began to flag so made my apologies and disappeared back to the hotel bedroom, silently hoping that I was not about to meet another of the hotel’s uninvited guests. I didn’t, and plunged into such a relaxed slumber that not even Luke’s later return could disturb me.

  The next morning, I learned from Luke that it hadn’t been long before the three of them decided to decamp to the pub that we had originally frequented on our arrival in Twickenham. There they had had a few shots, spent a while more talking about important and serious issues, and then rolled back to the hotel. Considering, none of them looked too bad when we assembled at reception; they were a bit pale and certainly quiet, but not obviously wasted. We got into Ed’s car and drove out of the hotel car park, then through south-east London, tired but happy. The traffic seemed not too bad until we were nearly at the turn-off for the M4, then we got snarled into some seriously heavy congestion. Ed, who, it appeared, was not a particularly patient driver, began to curse under his breath in loud whispers that the CD player could not hide. ‘Bloody Sunday traffic . . . It’s worse than Saturdays now . . . Sodding Chelsea tractors . . .’

  After forty minutes, however, the reason for the hold-up became apparent and we all fell silent. There had been a bad smash-up just past Junction 2 of the M4. One entire carriageway had been closed and, as we drove past the carnage, we saw why. There were four ambulances, two fire engines and at least half a dozen police cars parked around a mess of shrapnel that had once been maybe four, maybe five cars. As if that weren’t bad enough, there were large bloodstains on the tarmac that we all knew were bad news.

  The pleasure of the weekend dimmed, overshadowed not by what we saw but by what we could only guess had happened. For Ed and me, it was especially depressing because we had vividly in our minds the kind of injuries that those bloodstains represented, and we knew at first hand the pain that the relatives would now have to endure.

  On the way back we called in again at a service station for coffee and a rest, just sitting in the restaurant and making idle chitchat. The joy of the weekend – as good as it had been – was now placed firmly into context. It might be that what we did in the mortuary was unseen by almost everyone, but I now fully appreciated just how important and relevant it was.

  THIRTY-THREE

  In my very first days at the mortuary, it never dawned on me to wonder how the deceased would be removed from us. Totally new to the job, I had never even thought about it. Who would? People die, and how they get to the funeral parlour is something that most of us don’t consider. I certainly did not.

  Within my first week I had met several undertakers who had come to collect bodies for their final journeys, and watched how Clive had gone through all the procedures to make sure that he was releasing the right person to the right undertaker, but doing it while chatting away about everyday topics. He made it seem a doddle. As the weeks passed, and I was trusted to release the deceased without Clive or Graham looking over my shoulder, I got to know the undertakers individually and on a personal basis. I became almost friends with many of them and, if not quite the sort of friends that you would socialize with, they were certainly people who you would put on a step above any other outside colleagues.

  Because of the small, intimate environment we work in, it is inevitable that this will happen, but it is also extremely useful to have a good solid relationship with the undertakers as you never know when you will need them, and they take the same view. They treat us well (or most of them do) as they too never know when they are going to get a demanding family who want a quickie funeral, in which case they rely on us to turn the paperwork around in as little as twenty-four hours. Since funeral arrangements normally take three to five working days (involving two doctors, the bereavement office, porters transporting the notes and relevant legal forms to us, the body going in and out of the fridge to check identification, and us chasing the pathologists to complete their part of the form – and they already have enough to do anyway), this is a big ask. It means a lot of extra work and grief, a lot of nagging of doctors, and the use of a lot of staff right across the hospital who are tied up with the sick and needy.

  So, when I got to know the various undertakers, personalities shone, and some of them shone big time. You have to remember that in this trade we are surrounded by death five days a week, and sometimes seven if you get a bad weekend on call. Respect for the deceased patient is our utmost concern, but for us – the living and breathing in the mortuary – interaction is vital, as it is for any human being. And so the banter began, and the jokes started to creep in; the conversations would become more in-depth, more personal, and most of the undertakers became like old friends. This led me to think about which firm I would use for myself and my family once the time came; one of the few perks of the job is that, more than anyone else, you know where to go to get a decent send-off for your kith and kin. Strange how you accept these things while doing this job, things that nobody else ever thinks about until they have to; I suppose it’s because you come to appreciate that death is the one thing certain in life and just hope that, when the time comes, you embrace it with dignity.

  Of course I have my favourites, undertakers who greet us with a smile when we open the door, respect the times that they know we are busy in the PM room in the mornings and n
ot come till we are finished and clean, and maybe stop for a coffee and a gossip in the afternoon. These are the guys that nothing is too much hassle for, and it is for these guys that we will work our socks off to make sure things run smoothly for them. And, likewise, they will do the same for us. If they do need that quickie funeral, they let us know as soon as possible, while certain others will only bother to ring on the actual morning and expect miracles for that afternoon.

  It is amazing to sit and listen to the stories of what allegedly went on before the days of CSI and Silent Witness, when people suddenly became a little more aware of what happens when someone breathes their last. Some of the stories would turn your stomach, and I refuse to believe they happened, while others are just downright hilarious.

  I recall one afternoon when, releasing a deceased patient to an undertaker, I commented that I had not seen his colleague for while. He then proceeded to tell me how his colleague was on a funeral a couple of weeks back, and had had the duty of picking up the next of kin from the house to follow the coffin, which had been in the same house overnight. It so happened that he did not have to leave the stretched limousine to collect the family, as they dutifully filed out of the house when he pulled up and no one thought anything of this. As soon as the family had entered the limo, he had driven them, as instructed, behind the hearse to the crematorium at a very slow, very respectful pace. All was well and good, and there was no reason to suspect anything untoward. On reaching the crematorium, though, he was required as part of his duty to get out of the driver’s seat and open the door for the bereaved family to enter the church. He never got that far because, as he opened the driver’s door, he at once fell out, face down on the concrete, not even leaving the seat, but almost oozing out of the limo. And that was where he stayed, eating dirt, as drunk as a skunk. Nobody had realized his state because he went straight to the garage from home to collect the limo; when he drove the family the screen was across so they couldn’t smell the alcohol on his breath, and the hearse was going at such a slow pace that no one could tell that they were being chauffeured by someone who, as it turned out, was completely legless. These factors, plus the fact it was a funeral – a day of total respect and a celebration of life – meant that no one had even the faintest suspicion that he had spent the night before and much of the morning emptying a whisky bottle down his neck. Needless to say, he was not in employment any longer.

  I’d guess that most of you have heard stories about undertakers. The tale about the beautiful coffin that cost hundreds of pounds because it was made of solid oak or beech, only the bottom fell out (along with the deceased) when they lifted it because it was made of thin, cheap plywood. Or the one about the undertaker who forgot to mention to the bereaved parents of a child that the doctors had waived all the cremation fees and charged them nonetheless. Or even the one about the undertaker who cremated the wrong body . . .

  Clive swears that such stories are true, but I don’t know; he likes a good tale, does Clive. Most of the undertakers that come to collect the deceased from the mortuary are good, loyal, hardworking people with normal lives, and take the job in their stride. They are immune to the environment that we work in and, like most technicians, they are fazed by very little. Of course there are those who are only in it to make money and who are less considerate than we would expect or wish them to be, but the families are not paying us for this service and it is not for us to quibble.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  It was clear to us all that Martin Malcolm Best had not been the luckiest of souls, but he must have been a game old boy. At the age of seventy-seven years, he had accumulated an impressive number of operations and chronic medical conditions. When I stripped him as he lay on the dissection table, his body resembled a map of the London Underground due to the number of scars he displayed, a testament to the wonderful care that the NHS can give us all. Both of his legs were wrapped in thick bandages that I knew Ed would want me to unravel; when I did so, I nearly gagged into my mask because the feet were horrible. They were swollen and looked like they’d originally belonged to an elephant, only it was a sick elephant, one with a dreadful skin disease, so that they were covered in disgusting brown polyps and there were ulcers on the tips of his toes. They stank, too, which made my stomach contents even jumpier. He was short and looked just plain ill. Each of his ears carried a hearing aid, too.

  All of this was interesting, but even I could see the thing that might have offed him; on his right forearm was a deep cut. This had been partly sewn closed but a goodly proportion of it was gaping open. I took a peek; it seemed to go down to the bone.

  When I did his evisceration, there was even more evidence of how much poor Mr Best had required the services of the medical profession throughout his life. He had had heart surgery: veins had been stripped from his leg and sewn around his heart to replace the native arteries (a Coronary Artery Bypass Graft, known in the trade as a ‘cabbage’) – an operation that I knew was a major piece of surgery. Not only that, I also found that he had three kidneys; two were in the usual place (looking to me a bit sick), but there was another tucked nicely into the left side of the pelvis. I knew from what I had learnt from Clive that this was a transplanted kidney, and it had been doing all the work since it had been put in.

  I hadn’t seen the paperwork and didn’t know the circumstances of Mr Best’s death so, apart from the cut on his arm, I had no clues. Ed said nothing while he performed the post-mortem so it was only when we were sitting in the office downing some coffee that I learned the truth. Clive asked, ‘What was the cause of death, then?’

  ‘As expected, he haemorrhaged to death.’ He bit into a chocolate digestive. ‘Hardly surprising since he was found sitting in his wheelchair surrounded by a huge pool of blood.’

  Full of curiosity, I asked, ‘So how did he get that cut on his arm?’

  ‘Apparently,’ he explained, his face completely serious, ‘Mr Best was not a man to be discouraged by the blows that life had dealt him. He might have been suffering from serious heart disease, had a renal transplant, be completely deaf and so blind that he could only make out vague shapes, and he might have been confined to a wheelchair, but that didn’t stop him continuing to do what he’d always done in his spare time. He was a keen woodworker.’

  I thought for a moment that I must have misheard. ‘Woodworker?’

  Ed nodded solemnly, while Clive chortled to himself and shook his head slowly. ‘He was really serious about it, too.’ The chocolate biscuit disappeared and there was a pause while he trawled in the tin for another one. ‘He had his own circular saw . . .’ he said, his head still down.

  ‘My God,’ I burst out. ‘He couldn’t have done.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he could, Michelle. Quite adept at using it, too. Unfortunately one of his friends came to call while he was using it and surprised him. That was how he got the cut. His friend took him to Casualty where it was sutured closed and he was kept in for a day or two. He returned home, refused all social services, and was intent on carrying on as he had always done.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘The police reckon that he was reaching up into the fridge to get some milk for tea. The act must have stretched the stitches too much and opened the wound up. The saw had cut through the radial artery so once it was open again, he would have bled to death pretty rapidly with no one to help him.’

  I winced.

  ‘Everyone has to have a hobby,’ observed Ed, shaking his head, ‘but even so . . .’

  THIRTY-FIVE

  There was only one occasion on which everyone in the Department of Cellular Pathology – the histology staff, the cytology staff and the mortuary – met together and socialized and that was the Christmas party. Apparently, this sometimes took the form of a disco or cabaret but, according to Clive (who had strong views on the subject), the only time it was worth going to was when there was a decent nosh-up in a nice restaurant. This year it was to be in Number Sixteen, a restaurant that he approv
ed of, often taking his wife, Sally, there. It was to be held on a Wednesday night in early December because it had been booked late; husbands, wives, boyfriends and girlfriends were not invited, the exception being the consultants, who were paying for it all. Graham had been invited and had accepted, which surprised quite a few in the department

  As was usual when going out with Clive, we changed at work and went straight on to the nearest pub for a few liveners, where we met up with Graham. He looked well, although he was limping badly and walking with a stick. He had a grin you could fall into for Clive and me, but I thought he was a bit off with Maddie, and I couldn’t help but notice that he kept ignoring her when she spoke. During the first part of the evening, Clive explained the way these events usually went.

  ‘You see, you have to understand, girls, that we might all be eating the same grub in the same room on the same night, but we’re not really eating it together.’ Graham chuckled and nodded at this. Clive went on, ‘The histology technicians mostly sit together, the cytology technicians likewise, the secretaries huddle in their own group, the consultants that choose to turn up usually talk amongst themselves, and then there’s us. Nobody wants to talk to us.’

  ‘Except Ed Burberry,’ pointed out Graham. ‘He always makes an effort.’

  Clive nodded. ‘Except Ed.’

  I’d been there for nearly nine months now and was beginning to understand the way things went, especially because, knowing her as I did, Maddie had given me the low-down on some of the characters upstairs in the lab, and how they looked down on us because of what our job entailed; they seemed to think that anyone who works with the dead must be weird, forgetting the fact that we care greatly about what we do and that we provide a good service for the next of kin.