not do so unless there were satisfactions beyond the fee schedule. Most of the known world could not be paid enough to embalm a neighbor on Christmas or stand with an old widower at his wife’s open casket or talk witha leukemic mother about her fears for her children about to be motherless. The ones who last in this work are the ones who believe what they do is not only good for the business and the bottom line, but good, after everything, for the species.
A man that I work with named Wesley Rice once spent all of one day and all night carefully piecing together the parts of a girl’s cranium. She’d been murderedby a madman with a baseball bat after he’d abducted and raped her. The morning of the day it all happened she’d left for school dressed for picture day—a schoolgirl dressed to the nines, waving at her mother, ready for the photographer. The picture was never taken. She was abducted from the bus stop and found a day later in a stand of trees just off the road a township south of here. Afterhe’d raped her and strangled her and stabbed her, he beat her head with a baseball bat, which was found beside the child’s body. The details were reported dispassionately in the local media along with the speculations as to which of the wounds was the fatal one—the choking, the knife, or the baseball bat. No doubt these speculations were the focus of the double postmortem the medical examiner performedon her body before signing the death certificate Multiple Injuries. Most embalmers, faced with what Wesley Rice was faced with after he’d opened the pouch from the morgue, would have simply said “closed casket,” treated the remains enough to control the odor, zipped the pouch, and gone home for cocktails. It would have been easier. The pay was the same. Instead, he started working. Eighteen hourslater the girl’s mother, who had pleaded to see her, saw her. She was dead, to be sure, and damaged; but her face was hers again, not the madman’s version. The hair was hers, not his. The body was hers, not his. Wesley Rice had not raised her from the dead nor hidden the hard facts, but hehad retrieved her death from the one who had killed her. He had closed her eyes, her mouth. He’d washed herwounds, sutured her lacerations, pieced her beaten skull together, stitched the incisions from the autopsy, cleaned the dirt from under her fingernails, scrubbed the fingerprint ink from her fingertips, washed her hair, dressed her in jeans and a blue turtleneck, and laid her in a casket beside which her mother stood for two days and sobbed as if something had been pulled from her by force. Itwas the same when her pastor stood with her and told her “God weeps with you.” And the same when they buried the body in the ground. It was then and always will be awful, horrible, unappeasably sad. But the outrage, the horror, the heartbreak belonged, not to the murderer or the media or the morgue, each of whom had staked their claims to it. It belonged to the girl and to her mother. Wesley had giventhem the body back. “Barbaric” is what Jessica Mitford called this “fussing over the dead body.” I say the monster with the baseball bat was barbaric. What Wesley Rice did was a kindness. And, to the extent that it is easier to grieve the loss that we see, than the one we imagine or read about in papers or hear of on the evening news, it was what we undertakers call a good funeral.
It servedthe living by caring for the dead.
But save this handful of the marginalized—poets and preachers, foreigners and undertakers—few people not under a doctor’s care and prescribed powerful medications, really “appreciate” funerals. Safe to say that part of the American Experience, no less the British, or the Japanese or Chinese, has been to turn a blind eye to the “good” in “goodbye,” the “sane”in “sadness,” the “fun” in “funerals.”
T hus, the concept of merging the highest and best uses of land, which came to
A man that I work with named Wesley Rice once spent all of one day and all night carefully piecing together the parts of a girl’s cranium. She’d been murderedby a madman with a baseball bat after he’d abducted and raped her. The morning of the day it all happened she’d left for school dressed for picture day—a schoolgirl dressed to the nines, waving at her mother, ready for the photographer. The picture was never taken. She was abducted from the bus stop and found a day later in a stand of trees just off the road a township south of here. Afterhe’d raped her and strangled her and stabbed her, he beat her head with a baseball bat, which was found beside the child’s body. The details were reported dispassionately in the local media along with the speculations as to which of the wounds was the fatal one—the choking, the knife, or the baseball bat. No doubt these speculations were the focus of the double postmortem the medical examiner performedon her body before signing the death certificate Multiple Injuries. Most embalmers, faced with what Wesley Rice was faced with after he’d opened the pouch from the morgue, would have simply said “closed casket,” treated the remains enough to control the odor, zipped the pouch, and gone home for cocktails. It would have been easier. The pay was the same. Instead, he started working. Eighteen hourslater the girl’s mother, who had pleaded to see her, saw her. She was dead, to be sure, and damaged; but her face was hers again, not the madman’s version. The hair was hers, not his. The body was hers, not his. Wesley Rice had not raised her from the dead nor hidden the hard facts, but hehad retrieved her death from the one who had killed her. He had closed her eyes, her mouth. He’d washed herwounds, sutured her lacerations, pieced her beaten skull together, stitched the incisions from the autopsy, cleaned the dirt from under her fingernails, scrubbed the fingerprint ink from her fingertips, washed her hair, dressed her in jeans and a blue turtleneck, and laid her in a casket beside which her mother stood for two days and sobbed as if something had been pulled from her by force. Itwas the same when her pastor stood with her and told her “God weeps with you.” And the same when they buried the body in the ground. It was then and always will be awful, horrible, unappeasably sad. But the outrage, the horror, the heartbreak belonged, not to the murderer or the media or the morgue, each of whom had staked their claims to it. It belonged to the girl and to her mother. Wesley had giventhem the body back. “Barbaric” is what Jessica Mitford called this “fussing over the dead body.” I say the monster with the baseball bat was barbaric. What Wesley Rice did was a kindness. And, to the extent that it is easier to grieve the loss that we see, than the one we imagine or read about in papers or hear of on the evening news, it was what we undertakers call a good funeral.
It servedthe living by caring for the dead.
But save this handful of the marginalized—poets and preachers, foreigners and undertakers—few people not under a doctor’s care and prescribed powerful medications, really “appreciate” funerals. Safe to say that part of the American Experience, no less the British, or the Japanese or Chinese, has been to turn a blind eye to the “good” in “goodbye,” the “sane”in “sadness,” the “fun” in “funerals.”
T hus, the concept of merging the highest and best uses of land, which came to
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