As I read this, I thought about my grandparents; all four of them died within a year and a half of one another when I was in college. Every phone call to my dorm meant a last-minute flight to Texas and a return flight, sometimes still wearing my black dress. At the funeral, I would stare at the casket, willing the knowledge of their death to sink in. There was something about the experience that just didn’t feel real.
Lucas returned ten minutes later with the stretcher, covered in a green felt blanket embroidered with the name of the funeral home. On top of the blanket sat a pair of neatly folded eyeglasses.
When my paternal grandmother died, everyone gathered at her house for the funeral reception. At one point I passed by my grandfather’s office and saw my grandmother’s empty wheelchair parked in the middle of the room. Somehow the emptiness of that wheelchair was more moving than the utter fullness of her casket. I felt a dull ache in my throat thinking of that wheelchair now as I stared as these forlorn-looking glasses.
“Hospices are always easier,” Lucas said cheerfully as we pulled away from the building. “It’s hard when they die at home and the family watches them leave their house for the last time.” When we got to the stop sign, he stepped on the brakes a little too aggressively and, once again, the stretcher crashed into the back of his seat.
He turned and gave the body an admonishing look. “Oh, lighten up.”
After leaving work, I grabbed some fast food, which I wouldn’t let myself eat until I’d washed my hands three times. Back at the motel, I took a shower to rinse off any ashes that might’ve settled on me at the crematorium and dried myself on the small stiff towels. I changed into a pair of Matt’s boxers and a nightshirt and climbed into bed with a couple of Eleanor books. I wanted to learn how death affected her life. Franklin passed away suddenly at age sixty-three, but his doctors had been worried about his health for some time. His blood pressure registered 240/130 while he was campaigning for his fourth term in office. A cardiologist was called in and forced Franklin to cut his cigarette habit from twenty or thirty a day to five or six. But the damage was already done. On April 12, 1945, Eleanor was called away from a benefit and summoned back to the White House.
“I knew in my heart that something dreadful had happened,” she later said. They told her Franklin had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his winter home in Warm Springs, Georgia. The First Lady flew to Georgia immediately. When she arrived at the cottage, two of Franklin’s cousins—Laura Delano and Margaret Suckley, who’d been vacationing with him—sat her on the couch in the den and told her the story. Franklin had been in a good mood, laughing it up with his visitors while posing for a portrait.
“I have a terrific pain,” he said suddenly, his hand flying to the back of his head. Then he collapsed and never regained consciousness.
When Eleanor asked about the portrait, they admitted it was commissioned by Lucy Mercer, the woman Franklin had had an affair with thirty years prior. Now a widow, Lucy had planned to give the painting to her daughter as a gift. Lucy had been Franklin’s guest for the past few days and was in the room when he died. Eleanor calmly asked if Franklin and Lucy had seen each other before this final visit. Laura confessed that Lucy had been a guest at Warm Springs several times. When Eleanor was traveling, Lucy often joined Franklin for dinner parties at the White House. It was an open secret that Eleanor wasn’t in on. Worse, she learned that her own daughter, Anna, had arranged many of their rendezvous.
“Wow,” I murmured. “That’s some Dynasty shit.”
Yet Alexis Carrington would’ve been disappointed in Eleanor’s reaction. She sat there silently for a few moments, processing the information. Then she rose from the couch, walked into the bedroom where her husband’s body lay, and shut the door. When she came out a few minutes later, she was still dry eyed and perfectly composed. She was emotional, I suspect, but after a lifetime of practice, she’d learned to manage her feelings when she had to. She never commented publicly about her husband’s dalliances, but she alluded to it in one of her autobiographies.
“Men and women who live together through long years get to know one another’s failings,” she wrote. “He might have been happier with a wife who was completely uncritical. That I was never able to be, and he had to find it in other people.”
When I walked into the funeral home the next morning, the phone was ringing manically and Terry was holed up in his office taking calls.
Lucas yawned. “We had three deaths last night.” He was stretched out rather unsuccessfully on a love seat in the dining room.
“You did all the pickups yourself?”
“That’s nothing.” Lucas took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes and I saw that he was a pretty cute guy. “One time we had seventeen deaths in one weekend. We lined them up three deep in the garage.”
When Terry was overloaded, he occasionally had other funeral directors come in and freelance. Which is how I ended up in the preparation room with Sean, a funeral director from Columbus, about to witness my first embalming. Embalming made me more uneasy than I’d been before seeing the bones yesterday. Bones were anonymous. You never knew who they’d been attached to. But there was something primal, almost satanic, about draining the life force out of someone. So I was relieved that Sean was the human equivalent of Winnie-the-Pooh—blond, round, and gentle of tone (but, thankfully, wearing pants).
On the stainless steel embalming table lay the naked body of a woman in her seventies. Her skin had taken on a yellow cast. Her gnarled yellowish-green toenails extended far beyond the ends of her toes.
“The Mennonites are hardy folk,” Sean said, and I detected a faint Irish accent. “They don’t care much about keeping up their pedicures. Around here we call them ‘the plain people’ on account of their simple dress and because they work in the fields.”
Next he opened her eyelid and placed what looked like a spiky plastic contact lens on her eyeball.
“To keep her eyes closed,” he explained. “If the eyelids start to open, they’ll catch on the barbs.”
As I watched him sew the insides of her mouth shut, I thought of that old Dennis Miller joke. “This has to be the easiest job in the world. Surgery on dead people. What’s the worst thing that could happen? If everything went wrong, maybe you’d get a pulse.” It was surreal seeing an injury inflicted on someone who felt no pain.
He grabbed a few bottles of formaldehyde from the closet and set them down next to the embalming machine.
“Decomposition requires warmth and moisture, so preserving a body means drying it out as much as possible. That’s where embalming comes in.”
The smell of formaldehyde slipped into the air. Not the invasive, eye-burning smell of chemistry class, but a whiff, like talking on my grandmother’s Bakelite rotary phone from the 1950s. As he poured the mixture into the large clear cylinder of the embalming machine, he brought to mind a witch bending over a cauldron.
“It looks like blood,” I noted uneasily.
“It’s dyed that color on purpose. To bring back that rosy hue to the skin.”
Using a small blade, he made a four-inch incision near her collarbone and inserted a metal tube into her carotid artery. Then he made another incision on the opposite side of her neck and inserted a metal tube into the jugular vein. With a series of clicks, the machine began pumping the embalming fluid into the body. From the carotid artery, it would travel through the circulatory system, pushing out the blood, which would flow out of the jugular vein and onto the table. Lining the perimeter of the table was a gutter which would catch the runoff and whisk it away into a funnel-shaped receptacle near the woman’s feet and, eventually, the sewer system.
“Luckily, Mennonites don’t believe in autopsies,” Sean said. “An autopsied body takes three to six hours to embalm because all of the organs have been removed. We have to go in and track down all the different arteries and embalm the arms and legs separat
ely.”
As the embalming fluid snaked through the woman’s circulatory system, her complexion pinked up, just as Sean anticipated.
“Is that a C-section scar?” I asked, pointing to her abdomen.
He frowned. “That’s unusual. Amish and Mennonite women almost always have their babies at home.”
“I wonder what went wrong that caused her to go to the hospital,” I said, talking more to myself than to Sean. The scar reminded me that there was once life here.
“So do you feel like you’re at peace with death?” I asked.
“I thought that I was. As a funeral director, you understand that it’s a natural part of life. Yet when my mother died, I was completely devastated.” There was a faraway look in his eyes. “She always sat in the same seat at the dinner table, and there was a lightbulb over her chair. It was really uncanny because the lightbulb never had to be changed. It stayed lit for years. Then the day she died the lightbulb burnt out. When I saw that, I just fell apart.” He shook his head and smiled sadly. “So yes and no is the answer to your question.”
Not knowing what to say, I said nothing. I felt incredibly guilty for stirring up such a painful memory. We stood in silence for a long time after that. An hour and a half and four gallons of embalming fluid later, Sean poked the woman’s arm with his finger and gave an appraising nod.
“She’s firming up real nice.” He turned off the machine. While he sutured her neck, I gingerly touched her arm. She felt, as I’d anticipated, cold and stiff. This wasn’t so bad, I thought, exhaling with relief.
“Hey, what’s that?” I asked.
Sean held up an ominous-looking tool attached to a suction hose. It was a hollow metal rod about two feet in length, but sharp on one end like a spear. “This is a trocar. It’s time to aspirate.”
Before I could respond, he plunged the spear into the woman’s abdomen. Startled, I jumped back a little and watched in horror as he proceeded to empty her of any blood left behind. This was the moment I started thinking seriously about cremation.
A few minutes later he extracted the trocar and popped a plastic plug into the hole in her abdomen. Then he pulled out a fat tub of moisturizer and a hardware-store paintbrush and dabbed the cream on her face and hands to keep her skin from drying out.
“I think she came out pretty good myself,” he said with obvious pride. “You came out pretty good too. You could be a funeral director.”
I smiled weakly. That night Chris called and relayed a story about something funny that had happened at work. I was grateful for a distraction from the events of the day. Just before we hung up, I asked, “What do you think happens when you die?”
He was quiet for a second. “I have a very vivid memory of being maybe nine years old and sitting in the back of my parents’ car as we were driving somewhere in rural Maine,” he said. “It was a time in my childhood that I was really afraid of dying. I was looking out the window at the trees as they went by. Since it was so dark, you could only see them in front of and alongside the car. But as they slipped past the headlights, right beside my window, they would just wink out and I couldn’t see them anymore. And I remember thinking that death was like that. Suddenly you were gone and there was nothing.”
The next morning I woke up feeling better, knowing that the worst was over. When I arrived at the funeral home, I heard voices coming from the prep room and slipped inside. The room was full of people. Not just the three dead bodies lain out on the stainless steel tables, but also Sean, Lucas, and a handsome Italian-looking guy who was built like a fire hydrant.
“Noelle, this is my partner, Antonio,” Sean said. “We operate a funeral home together in Columbus.”
“I’m not your partner,” Antonio countered. “I’m not gay like you.”
“Gay, am I?” Sean guffawed. “Gay with a wife and seven children?”
“Overcompensating,” Antonio said with a smirk.
“How’s your divorce going, by the way?” Sean asked. Then he turned and gave me a wink.
Antonio’s smirk disappeared. “Lorraine and I are in counseling,” he said huffily. “That’s not the same as divorce.”
While they quibbled I checked out the body Sean had been working on when I got in. He was extremely thin with brown hair and a matching beard framing his haggard face.
“Um, is it just me or does this guy look exactly like Abraham Lincoln?” I asked.
“Totally!” Lucas called out from across the room. “That’s what I said when he came in.”
“Have all of these bodies been embalmed already?” I asked Sean.
“They have. Now we’re preparing them. Makeup and such.”
“And such” turned out to include plunging a disturbingly long needle into the man’s eye socket and injecting it with pink gel.
“After people die, their face changes immediately,” Sean explained. “It sinks in. We had to build the tissue back out.” He inserted the needle into the side of the man’s face and his hollowed cheekbones rose up like baking bread. Sure enough, he looked almost . . . alive at the end. My mind went back to the stuffed birds at Springwood that Franklin shot as a boy, which had been posed to look as though they were flying. It was slightly unsettling but I felt okay.
Justin appeared behind us. “It’s open casket. Here’s what he asked to be dressed in during the service.” He handed me a pair of folded khakis and an orange and brown shirt.
“Is this a . . . Cleveland Browns jersey?” I asked in a disbelieving voice.
Sean shook his head. “It’s bizarre what people want to be dressed in.”
I helped Sean awkwardly maneuver Abe’s cold rigid limbs into the clothes. “Do you know where he stands on tucked in versus out?” I asked. “Because it really sets the tone for the whole outfit.”
He left the decision to me and turned to his next customer, a Hispanic guy in his late forties. He pulled off the sheet, revealing the man’s naked body. “Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph!” he exclaimed.
I whirled around and was faced with the biggest penis I’d ever seen.
Antonio came over and squinted at it. “Was this guy related to a horse?” he asked. “Can you imagine how big that thing was when it was standing at attention?”
“He’s got my attention,” Sean said.
“See, I knew you were gay!” Antonio crowed, and Sean rolled his eyes.
“What did he die of?” I asked.
“Leukemia,” Lucas said. “Picked him up from the hospice yesterday morning. Name’s Ortiz.”
I’d overheard Terry talking about him yesterday. There had been a problem with the death certificate. They hadn’t been able to fill it out because no one knew Ortiz’s birthday. He had no family or friends, and the nurses were trying to scrounge money together for a funeral service. How sad, no one knowing your birthday, I’d thought. A few years ago, my friend Rob’s parents died, and though he was in his forties, he felt like an orphan. It was strange, he said, that there was no one left in the world who’d known him all his life.
“Lucas, your girl looks like shit!” Antonio shouted from the other side of the room. “What the fuck did you do to her?”
Sean and I abandoned Ortiz to see what he was yelling about. We crowded around the table. Sean let out a low whistle.
The “girl” Antonio had been referring to was a sixtysomething African American woman weighing around four hundred pounds. The trademark Y incision of an autopsy stretched from her shoulders to her abdomen, the oversized stitching reminiscent of a baseball. What really stood out was how bloated she was—not her body but her skin. Water was oozing out of her very pores. Large wobbly blisters were bubbling up all over her body.
“That, my dear, is called edema,” Sean told me. “When you’re in the hospital and there’s nothing they can do for you, they just pump you full of fluids to make you comfortable. And all that water h
as to go somewhere.”
“How do you make it stop?” I asked.
“Usually embalming takes care of it,” Sean answered.
“Are you sure you embalmed her, Lucas?” Antonio asked. “Because if so, you did a crappy job.”
“She was autopsied!” Lucas said defensively. “You know that makes ’em harder to drain.”
“That’s no excuse,” Antonio tut-tutted.
“I even used Purple Jesus on her!”
“What’s that?” I murmured to Sean.
“You use different embalming fluids based on the condition of the body. Purple Jesus is one of the strongest. It’s used on the most difficult cases, like to flush out the jaundiced tissue of an alcoholic, for instance.”
“Why do they call it Purple Jesus?”
“Because if Purple Jesus doesn’t work, nothing will save you.”
I was wondering who was going to save Lucas from Antonio, who was still lecturing. “Next time just call me when you get a tough case like this. Because I don’t like having to come down and clean up other people’s mistakes.” He furrowed his brow and leaned in closer to the body. “Her tongue is coming out, for chrissakes! Did you even bother sewing the mandibles shut?”
Lucas stammered, “Uh, well, I—”
“Never mind,” Antonio cut him off. “We’ll just superglue the mouth closed and be done with it.”
Sean tried to change the subject. “Lucas, how about you show us her burial clothes?”
Lucas returned with a mustard yellow dress on a hanger. “Her family says it was her favorite outfit.”
Antonio stared at the outfit incredulously. “When? In 1965? There’s no way she’ll fit into that. It’s half her size!”
My Year with Eleanor Page 25
