My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  Even as an adult, I imagined my death as an extraordinary turn of events. I’d be in an elevator when the earthquake hit and the cable snapped, sending me plummeting to the basement. I’d be lolling on my back in the ocean and feel a tug on my arm. When I’d turn to look, nothing would be there. Except the shark rearing out of the water to finish me off. There would be enough time to process the terror of what was happening, but no time to say my good-byes or ask someone to throw away my vibrator so my parents wouldn’t find it among my personal effects.

  My fear had nothing to do with the afterlife, but with death itself. All fears were rooted in death, Dr. Bob explained. “The strongest basic instinct is survival. Evolution has programmed our fears into us to help keep us alive.” I couldn’t give fear its due, I decided, if I didn’t face my fear of death. The idea of working at a funeral home actually came from Dr. Bob.

  “It seems to me you’ve already faced these death scenarios that you’ve imagined all your life, in almost every way you could,” he said. “You’ve swum with sharks and jumped from planes. Now maybe it’s time to try something different. Perhaps you need to go look some dead people in the eye, so to speak, and see what that feels like.”

  He had suggested that, instead of making this just a one-day event, like most of my challenges had been, I spend some real time with this fear—a few days at least. That way I couldn’t just psych myself up until it was over, I’d actually have to try to get comfortable in the situation. I’d see every stage of the process, from the time the body was brought in, to seeing their families grieving at their funeral. It would be a form of what he called exposure therapy.

  “Being around the dead will remind you that there is nothing to fear from the dead,” Dr. Bob said, “and remind you to get on with the living.”

  The funeral home was run by a man named Terry. I’d found him through a friend of mine whose mother was an undertaker and had worked with Terry a number of years ago before he opened his own funeral home here in a small town in Ohio. When I’d explained the project to Terry, he said I was welcome to come spend a week shadowing him and his employees.

  The funeral home actually looked like a home, a two-story redbrick house with a porch on the upper level with rocking chairs, and bright flowers lining the path to the front door. A sign said PLEASE COME IN, and when I opened the door, a soft ding sounded inside. I stepped into what looked like a dining room with assorted brass lamps and red valances hanging regally around the windows. In the center of the room was a glossy rectangular table with matching wood chairs, the kind families gathered around on special occasions, except here there was always one person missing. An office door opened and a jolly-looking man in wire-rimmed glasses strode out.

  “You must be Noelle!” And this must be Terry, the funeral director. He was tall but extremely pear shaped, as though the upper and lower halves of his body came from two different people. He’d told me on the phone that he was thirty-eight, but with his graying hair and little-boy face, he looked both older and younger than his years. The effect was incredibly endearing.

  “Thank you again for letting me help out this week,” I said, shaking his hand.

  “I’m a firm believer in facing one’s fears, as well as in educating people about the funeral directing business, so you’ll have full access this week. Let me show you around.”

  I felt like I was about to walk through a haunted house. There could be a dead body lurking in any of these rooms. He ushered me through a small utility room just off the dining room and stopped in front of a closed door.

  “This is our preparation room,” he said, reaching for the knob. “It’s where the bodies are embalmed and prepared for the funeral.” He opened the door and I braced myself for the horror to come. But when the fluorescent light came on, it looked more like a regular lab than a mad scientist’s lair. The walls were lined with cabinets holding various instruments and chemicals. All five of the stainless steel tables were empty.

  “It was a slow weekend, so there are no bodies or services here today,” he explained and led the way to another room just off the foyer. “Obviously, this is our casket showroom.” A dozen gleaming caskets were parked end to end, like new cars at a dealership, lids propped open like hoods. Their satiny interiors and plump pillows were patiently awaiting their next customer. It was an eerie sight. Open caskets have always disturbed me. The way the casket was bisected and only the top opened reminded me of that magic trick where they pretend to saw a person in half. Open casket funerals, to me, possessed the silent horror of a magic trick that had gone horribly wrong and killed the person after all.

  He took me up the stairs, which were covered in the same floral carpeting as the first floor, to ensure a light tread. The second floor hosted a chapel and a sitting room full of formal wingback chairs and stiff couches decorated in calming pastel blue and cream. “Amazing Grace” played softly on the funeral home’s sound system. The entire CD was devoted to “Amazing Grace,” I realized, each version played on a different musical instrument. “Amazing Grace” on piano, violin, harp, and so on, in an endless loop. This was the scariest part of my day so far.

  I picked up a pamphlet titled Coping with Death from the handsome secretary.

  “Terry, are you up here?” A voice called from below, followed by the drumming of feet running up stairs. “I’m gonna run over to the crematorium and—oh, sorry.” A young man with slightly unkempt brown hair bound into the room but stopped short when he saw me. He wore black slacks and a white button-down shirt like Terry, but no sweater vest or tie.

  “Noelle, this is my intern,” Terry said. “Lucas, this young lady will be helping us out this week, trying to overcome her fear of death.”

  “Cool.” He smiled goofily at me and pushed his sixties-style glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Hey, I’m taking a body to get cremated. Wanna come?”

  I didn’t, but this was what I’d come here for, after all. I looked at Terry and he waved us on. “Have fun, you two!”

  Lucas led me out the back door to a six-car garage behind the funeral home, which was packed with limos and hearses in blacks and muted grays. Lucas made his way past them to the cadaver refrigerator, which was the height of a normal refrigerator but about seven feet deep. He grabbed the handle of the steel door, paused, and looked back at me uncertainly.

  “You’re not going to, like, faint, are you?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered nervously. Looking for street cred, I added, “I’ve been to two open-casket funerals.”

  He nodded thoughtfully, satisfied with that, and yanked open the door. I stiffened, having no idea what to expect. Lucas slid out a corpse on a gurney.

  “Meet Mr. Danbury.”

  I exhaled, and my insides unclenched. The body was covered by a sheet except for a pair of feet sticking out at one end. They were a surprisingly normal color. More ripe peach than the cliché gray I’d expected. Lucas reached under the sheet and lifted up the man’s fingers.

  “See how they’re turning purple?” he asked. “That’s the beginning of the decomp process.”

  There was a tingling in my stomach as I eyed the dead man’s mottled fingertips. I was relieved that, instead of taking the sheet off, Lucas rolled Mr. Danbury toward a van with the funeral home’s logo printed on the side. Lucas was only five feet seven with a slight build, but he loaded the gurney into the back with ease.

  Before climbing in the passenger’s side, I held up a clip-on tie someone had left on the seat. “Is this yours?”

  “Guilty,” Lucas said cheerfully. He grabbed it and tossed it onto the dashboard. “I wear it when I’m picking up a body from a hospice or someone’s house. Terry says it looks more respectable.” Until I heard Lucas’s drawl, I didn’t realize people from rural parts of Ohio have southern accents.

  He waited for a sedan to pass and slowly eased the van out of the driveway onto the two-lane
country road. Cornfields glided by in a slow, hypnotizing blur. When the corn gave way to farmland, I snapped out of my daze to see two young boys in black vests, slacks, and straw hats running across a field. They were giggling, trying to keep up with a horse-drawn buggy clip-clopping down the adjacent dirt road.

  “What’s that about?”

  Lucas glanced out the window to where I was pointing. “Amish. We got the highest concentration of ’em in the country. Decent folk. Pain in the ass getting caught behind one of their buggies, though.”

  “Have you always wanted to be a funeral director?”

  “Always!” Lucas said proudly. “When I was a kid, I used to bury my sister’s Barbies in boxes in the backyard. What do you do?”

  “I’m a freelance writer. I write about pop culture, celebrities, that kind of thing.”

  “Have you ever interviewed celebrities?”

  “Sure, all the time.”

  “And they pay you for that?” he asked in a high-pitched, disbelieving voice. “Wow, I can’t wait to tell my friends what you do for a living. They’ll never believe it.”

  Funny, I was thinking the same thing.

  In his excitement, he didn’t notice the sedan in front of us had stopped to make a left turn. He stomped on the brakes. Mr. Danbury and his gurney rammed into the back of the driver’s seat with a loud tha-rump.

  “I hate it when that happens,” he said, massaging his whiplashed neck with one hand.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, unsure of whether to be concerned for him or scandalized that he was just rear-ended by a dead body. Then something else caught my eye.

  “Lucas!” I exclaimed in disbelief. “How can you work at a funeral home and not wear a seat belt?”

  He shrugged. “I forget.”

  The crematorium was an unassuming warehouse tucked discreetly at the end of a long driveway. As we pulled up, my heart jolted against my chest, unaware of what I’d find inside. I prayed I wouldn’t become sick.

  “That’s Fred, the crematory operator,” Lucas said, nodding at a gray-haired man in overalls who appeared in the doorway. The man tipped his baseball cap in greeting.

  Lucas hopped out. “Fred, this is Noelle. She’s helping us out this week.”

  “Right pleasure, ma’am,” Fred said with a country accent even heavier than Lucas’s. When we shook, I thought about where his hand had been.

  “What ya got for me today, boy?” Fred asked as Lucas opened up the back door of the van.

  “Dude in his seventies. Died of some kind of cancer called”—Lucas referred to his paper, sounding out the word slowly—“my-el-oma.”

  They unloaded the gurney and wheeled it into the warehouse, stopping in front of one of the cremation ovens, which looked disturbingly like a pizzeria oven. It was made of special fire-resistant bricks, with a small steel door, just large enough to accommodate one body at a time. The metal tube on top was the exhaust chimney, which had a special ventilation system to remove the smoke and human odor from the cremation process. This was why the building smelled like aluminum and concrete, not burning flesh.

  I thought of something Bill said to me once. I’d asked him how he wanted to be buried and he’d said, “I’d like to have my ashes compressed into diamonds and make all my friends wear me.”

  Lucas pulled off the sheet and I saw Mr. Danbury for the first time. It wasn’t frightening at all, surprisingly. Instead, the sight of him pulled at my heartstrings. Dressed only in boxers, he had the defenseless look of a mannequin between costume changes. In fact, with his sleek peachy skin there was something almost nonhuman about him, like someone trying to do an impression of a human.

  Fred sized him up. “Any jewelry or pacemakers?”

  “Oh, thanks for reminding me!” Lucas pried the man’s wedding ring off his finger and dropped it in his breast pocket. “I’ll make sure that gets back to his children. He died in a nursing home only a few months after the wife. Kinda sweet, right?” He pressed his hands on the man’s chest and felt around his breastplate.

  “You can feel the pacemaker from the outside?” I asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Fred answered, “and if they have one, we have to cut it out ’fore they go in the oven or it’ll explode right outta their chest. Hell, we still got one stuck in the side of the wall in there.” He opened the oven and pointed inside at a small metal disk half embedded in one of the bricks, as if a miniature flying saucer had crashed into it.

  Fred chuckled. “Just about scared the bejesus outta me when it went off. Sounded like a gunshot.”

  Lucas pronounced Mr. Danbury pacemaker-free, and he and Fred zipped him into a body bag and loaded him into the oven. The bag would eventually be vaporized, Fred explained, but was there for sanitary reasons. He checked the temperature gauge. The remains would be incinerated over the course of three hours at 1,700 degrees, then cooled down for one hour before they could be removed.

  “You’re just in time, matter of fact. This guy’s about done.”

  I followed Fred around the corner to another oven. He opened the hatch and when the residual heat hit my face, I felt the millions of pores on my face expand simultaneously, like mouths opening to scream. Inside the oven sat a pile of ash and bones. The heap smelled of chemicals and gases I couldn’t place. Using a long-handled wire bristle rake, Fred scraped the steaming pile into a tray and carried it over to a worktable. It was like watching a cooking show where the chef prepares a meal, sticks it in the oven, then immediately opens another oven and brings out the same dish, already cooked. The thought of this made me half gag, which I played off as a cough.

  Fred explained that the bone fragments would eventually be fed into a machine that pulverized the bones into “cremains.” “But before we pulverize ’em, we gotta dig through the bones and pull out all the manmade stuff.” He picked a bucket off the floor. “Look here.”

  It was full of jumbled hardware—screws, metal pipes, nails—only they were scorched and covered in what looked like dust. With sudden queasiness, I realized I was looking at reconstructed joints, surgical pins, and metal limbs. And that dust was people. People dust. Using his bare hand, Fred plucked an ash-covered ball-and-socket mechanism off the top. My gag reflex wobbled again.

  “That there is a hip replacement.” He rummaged around like a kid going through his Halloween candy. “And this is my favorite!” Beaming, he pulled out a delicate lattice of thin metal tubes held together with screws. “This was in someone’s spine, if you can believe that!”

  I caught Lucas’s eye. Noting my stricken expression, he cleared his throat and said, “We have to be getting back. Fred, I’ll be back for Mr. Danbury’s cremains tomorrow.”

  Fred dropped the lattice back in the bucket and blew the powder off his fingers. Poof! It formed a cloud—a person cloud—suspended in the air, then vanished.

  “Nice meeting you!” I said, hurrying back to the van before he could shake my hand good-bye.

  Lucas was laughing so hard he could barely steer the car. “You shoulda seen the look on your face when he showed you that hip replacement!”

  I was as grateful to Lucas for making light of the moment as I was that he had gotten me out of there as quickly as he had. Soon I was smiling, too, and my queasiness subsided. Once we’d settled down, I asked, “How much of your business is cremations?”

  “It used to be fifty-fifty, but cremations are on the rise, what with the recession and graveyards runnin’ out of space.”

  “What does the recession have to do with it?”

  “Cremation is only about $1,500 compared to a $7,000 casket funeral.”

  “No way!” I’d always balked at the idea of being burned, but it was hard to argue with those prices.

  He nodded, but his expression was grim.

  “I take it you’re not a fan of cremation?”

  “Cremation is just pi
cking up bodies, refrigerating them, dropping them off at the crematorium, and picking up their ashes later.” He sniffed. “You might as well be a chauffeur.”

  “So you appreciate the theater of the open-casket funeral?”

  “When someone tells me, ‘He hasn’t looked this good in twenty years,’ that makes me happy. I’ve done them all—kids, murder victims, suicides. I even embalmed my grandmother.”

  “Ugh! Really?” I physically recoiled in my seat. I wasn’t sure if it was the idea of draining your own grandmother’s blood or seeing her naked that threw me more.

  “She gave me permission, you know, before.” His tone was defensive. “She knew how much I enjoyed it.” His phone rang. “Oh, hi, Terry. . . . You want me to go right now? . . . Okay . . . Bye.”

  Lucas hung up and reached for the clip-on tie on the dashboard. “We have a pickup.”

  Outside the local hospice, visitors glanced up and immediately looked down as we made our way, ominously, through the parking lot, the funeral home logo on full display. Lucas pulled around back and reversed until the van was practically flush against the rear exit. Using the rearview mirror, he fastened the tie beneath his throat.

  “You’ll have to wait in the car,” he said apologetically. “Might be family in there who wouldn’t take kindly to having someone standing around just watching.”

  While I waited I pulled out the Coping with Death pamphlet I’d picked up at the funeral home. The introduction explained that at one time, death had been an integral part of family life. People died at home surrounded by loved ones. Adults and children experienced death together, mourned together, comforted one another. Today death is lonelier. Most people die in hospitals and nursing homes. Their loved ones have less opportunity to be with them and often miss sharing their last moments of life. The living have become isolated from the dying; consequently, death has turned into something mysterious, something to fear.