A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford.
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“I do most of the embalming. My gloves go all the way up to my forearms. A lot of people are donating their organs nowadays, so they basically look like Jell-O when they come in, ’cause there’s no bones, no organs, no lungs. We have to put them back together.
“The mom wanted to see him. We said, ‘Give us a week.’ We were able to reconstruct that side of his face with waxes. The mom was trying to touch him, and I was standing over the casket guarding him, because I didn’t want the face to melt in her fingers. That would be kind of traumatic.
“I did an internship in a funeral home in Saint Louis. The first night I was there, they called me up at two in the morning: “We have a house call. Put your suit on.” It was a lady that had died on the sofa watching TV. Her daughters were there, and they were pretty traumatized. They were kind of lost at that moment. After we were done, they hugged us. At that moment, I said, ‘Oh, this is not your typical job.’ This was real, and it mattered. I had never felt like that before.”
