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The Prep Room – Day 1

April 12, 2010 in Funeral by admin | 1 comment

Caution: Contains some graphic info.

I spent a couple of mornings in the prep room and what I witnessed over those two days is too much for one post. As I write I’ll further be absorbing just what I was subjected to, which is never in my wildest dreams…or nightmares…what I ever believed I would see.

I met the prep room staff in the coffee room first thing in the morning and asked if there was something I could observe that day. As I think I mentioned in one of my last posts, it’s about taking some baby steps in the prep room to get me used to being around and handling the deceased to make sure this was a career I could deal with.  The embalmer jokingly, or so I thought, said “yep you can observe the two decomposed bodies we had delivered this morning” and chuckled. I said sarcastically “oh perfect” not realizing she was completely serious…until I followed her into the prep room and was nearly knocked off my feet by the smell. She handed me a medical gown, medical cap, mask, two sets of rubber gloves (to double up on my hands,) a paper and a pen.  I dressed up and took a look at the sheet of paper, it was to take down information about the deceased -checklists for what appeared (or didn’t appear) i.e. tattoos, teeth, clothing, decomposer…mold, signs of dehydration etc. The embalmer, Lynn, opened the first body bag and the smell was even more sickening then what was in the air. I could see the side of the body and it was covered in green fuzzy mold, exactly what you would see growing on really old food. The smell, as Lynn pointed out, did have a moldy scent to it, it was horrible to say the least.  I didn’t want to get too close, so Lynn read out to me what I needed to mark down on the sheet.  Tattoos, 4 of them but unrecognizable, autopsy had been performed, mold all over, eyes now non-existent, no teeth but in the body bag came a pair of dentures and a shirt, blanket, and pair of jeans. The body was arranged to be cremated so we transferred it to a box, marked the decedents name on it, and put it in the cooler until it would be time to have it transferred to the crematorium.

The second decomposed body was one that had been in a fire.  The sight is so horrific yet at the same time it doesn’t even look like a human being anymore so somehow my brain put some emotion aside, it’s like it wasn’t real.  There was no sign of skin, just a layer of what looked like thick black charcoal. I believe it was CSI or a similar show that I was once watching that had a burn victim, and now that I think about it, they were pretty bang-on.  What really grossed me out was the fact it had been autopsied. The thick string that held the autopsy openings together were pulling apart and the inside was a gut soup that was leaking out. There wasn’t much to write on the information sheet – “autopsy performed”, and “piece of a shirt in the body bag.” Once again, the body was transferred to a cremation box and put in the cooler. “Well” says Lynn, “you okay?” I had to take a second and take in what I just saw, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t passed out or barfed but like I said, it was hard to think of them of once people, they were so far from looking human anymore. “It’s hard to focus with such an awful smell” I said and Lynn surprised me with a “Smell?  That was nothing; I was actually surprised at how little they did smell!” I wish I could describe what the smell is like because so many people are curious but I honestly can’t, not yet.

The next task was to dress two decedents. They were washed and ready for dressing.  Both were women and they were elderly.  I looked for the clothes the family had brought for them in our closet.  The bags were tagged with our inventory forms.  I checked the clothes and accessories in the bags to the inventory forms to make sure it was all accounted for.  Sometimes families ask “do we need socks and underwear too?” and we tell them that it’s great to provide anything the person would have worn normally.  The embalming apprentice helped me with the first dressing and gave me tips along the way. He told me how to lift the legs, arms, what the best ways to get different kinds of shirts on, etc.  Dressing the dead is not easy. They are cold, heavy and sometimes hard to bend. To be perfectly honest, I found fitting the bras the most difficult.  Before you put it on, you hook it on the loosest loops then put it over the head, and then you put the arms through. Once the arms are through the arms holes, the band and cups are around the armpits to you have to try and yank it down below the breasts.  The other problem though is that the breasts are settled to the sides of the body and they don’t fill the cups no matter how hard you try.  Also, shoes can be tricky – the feet swell and they can be hard to fit. 

After the dressings I was called from upstairs to help a funeral director with a service and I was happy to call that the end of my day in the prep room. I was cold and desperately felt like taking a shower.

That afternoon I reflected on my first surreal time in the prep room, I remembered how I previously feared that it could go very badly, and I felt proud that I got through it.  Then I also remembered I had the next morning to experience it all over again, what surprises would tomorrow bring?  I don’t think there’s any real way to prepare.

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A Day of Removals and Transfers

March 20, 2010 in Funeral by admin | 2 comments

Management figured they better get me more involved with the deceased to make sure I could handle things before it’s time to sign me up for the apprenticeship.  Determining whether I can deal with the emotional and physical aspect that comes with being around the deceased will let us know for sure if I’m cut out for this profession.  Anyway so we’re taking baby steps and I was asked to follow the caretaker around for a day to do some removals and transfers.

Removal refers to removing the deceased’s body from either the hospital whether that was the place of death or another place of death to our funeral home. Transfer has a broader definition.  Some of our sister homes do not have a prep room or cremation. It can refer to bringing a prepared body for viewing to one of our sister homes or bringing it back to ours (usually to do the cremating since most of homes to do not crematoriums). Then transferring can also mean taking the cremated remains back to a home or even taking the deceased to the airport if they are going to another location. We have a care taker, Michael, we use to contact for all removals and transfers, we send him the appropriate paperwork (basic info…who, what, where) and then he prioritizes all the calls.

So we started off the day by heading to the local hospital to pick up a body from the morgue. We drove a van that has space for two gurneys in the back. When we arrived we pulled in front, reported to a small admin office, picked up the doctors paperwork and then headed in the van to the back of the hospital in a pick up/drop off zone.  There are a few security guards there but they knew the care taker so no identification was asked for. We pulled one of the gurneys out of the back and headed to the morgue. It was just as you see it on tv, just a room with a wall of metal doors. Each door had a number and a small slot with ID tags. We showed the security guard the paperwork, then we looked in a file there that told us what spot body was in.  We opened the door and slid the metal tray out, the body was in a white body bag. Mike explained that we have to open the bag, check the body for jewellery (the ears, wrists, fingers). This one was an older woman and there wasn’t really any smell. We didn’t find any jewellery on her but if we had we would give them to the admin office (the one we had checked in with and it would be there responsibility to take inventory and contact the family about the jewellery). When we open up the bag we also do a quick ID check, often they are still wearing the hospital bracelet or we do a quick comparison with the little information on Mike’s paperwork and the doctors. Then we tag them with our own bracelet and put it around the ankle. After that, we had to get the body on our gurney. Our gurneys have a fabric body bag that we place the entire body bag into, so we opened it up and there’s also a couple seatbelts to keep them strapped in. We pulled the gurney right up next to the tray used a pulley system to haul up the metal tray on an angle then just slid the body onto the gurney. There are no patients near the area so we didn’t have to watch out for anybody on our way out, we just wheeled it into the van and we were on our way back to the home.

The next trip was taking a body to the airport.  The woman had lived here a number of years but the family wanted her buried in her hometown where most of the family still lives. The price on flying a body is based on the weight and dimension, since weight is such an issue, most of the time a family chooses not to fly it in a heavy casket, it’s done at the funeral home receiving them. So we simply put it on a wooden board with a special insulated cardboard top.  There is some documentation that goes with it so we put it in an envelope and tape it on top. We dropped it off at a cargo area and that was it. Pretty simple.  I wondered this, so I know some of you are…yes they fly on regular passenger planes, you’re probably flying with dead folks all the time and you had no idea!

The next trip was doing a transfer of a prepared body from our funeral home to another sister home because there was a viewing that afternoon.  While we were there we picked up a person who had just been viewed that morning who had to be brought back to our crematorium, so we basically did a switch.

The final trip of the day was picking up a man from a care home. He was 90-something years old and his body had shut down, the nurses went to wake him in the morning and he had passed away through the night. Going to the care home was awkward. We reported to the front desk and it’s in a big open area where the residents dine and watch tv.  They were all around us and I think they knew who we were…what our purpose was.  I started reading their faces, I felt like they were judging me, I didn’t feel welcome.  We went into the man’s room, thank goodness it didn’t smell. His mouth was wide open and his eyes were open. I thought the open eye thing would really bother me when I would see it but it was fine actually, they were still glossy and not frightened.  There were a couple of rings and a watch left on him so it took a couple minutes to get them off, something the fingers swell up a bit.  I started thinking about my grandmother and how her room was very similar when she was in a home and started to wonder if she looked like that when she died. Then I snapped to it…what was I thinking?  I was mad at myself, you can’t go to that place in your head. When we were finished belting him on the gurney we told the nurse we would be making our way out.  She cleared the hallway of any people (without letting them know what was going on although I’m sure most knew) and then she opened the elevator so we could get out as quickly as possible.

Mike and I headed back to the funeral home and it was nearing the end of the day.  We figured since I was unfazed by the day’s events that we would take it one step further.  The embalmer, Lynn, had just finished embalming so Lynn and Mike suggested I go in the prep/embalming room and have a look.  There were two decedents completely uncovered on metal trays.  Lynn was washing one down with some disinfectant soap and a cloth. She was dressed in scrubs from head to toe. There was just some blood on the underside and either than that I stood far enough back that I couldn’t really see the embalming openings. Although I was surprisingly fine with what most would normally consider a disturbing sight, I figured this was enough for one day.

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We get all kinds of visitors

February 9, 2010 in Funeral by thefuneralgirl | No comments

We had a guy come in today completely smashed…true story.  He says he’s been wandering around the cemetery trying to find his friend’s grave and that every time he stops by, he has a hard time finding it.  He’s bent over the reception desk reeking like liquor and it looks like he hasn’t bathed in days. So the receptionist, Lauren, says “Okay sir, what is the name of your friend?” where he replies “I dunno.” Lauren goes “Well sir, we will need you to recall his name if we’re going to help you…why don’t we start with the year he died.”  Drunk guy says “In the 80’s.” At this point I am trying not to laugh and Lauren turns and looks at me like “WHY ME!?” He suddenly blurts out his friend’s name.  So Lauren asks him to have a seat and we’ll have a staff member look it up and give him a map.  He says he’s going to wait outside (which was quite a relief), but then he proceeded to hang out just outside our entrance.  In our entrance we have a water fountain and there he is running his hands through it and having a super time and even had his face about 2 inches away from it, Lauren and I were gawking waiting to see if he was going to drink from it.  Anyway the point of this story is, lay off the liquor and maybe you’ll be able to find your friend’s grave. Also, my job will never be boring.

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First Week

February 7, 2010 in Funeral by thefuneralgirl | No comments

Of course, that’s the way it goes – hire the new girl to assist the overwhelmed funeral directors and have the slowest week ever – even with a two funerals directors away.  I learned some basic funeral office stuff like how to answer phones, which is different from your typical office; you need to know what to say if someone is balling their eyes out.  I didn`t get any of those callers this week , although I did have one guy whose brother passed away who he was estranged from for the last 20 years and he was shopping around for the least expensive cremation service he could find.  He was NOT happy that he was left in charge to take care of the arrangements and cost.  He shouted the information to me and then when I passed him to a funeral director to speak to he yelled at her asking why he would have to give personal information to another person and demanded to know why we were so expensive…he ended up saying something nasty and hanging up on the funeral director.  We had a few people come in to pick up remains, so I learned how to sign out the remains.  I also did some paperwork including registering deaths (creating death certificates) and “fraud prevention” paperwork.  Identity theft is common for those who have deceased so we offer optional fraud prevention coverage. This entails contacting all the necessary agencies (government agencies, credit card companies etc.) on behalf of the family to let them know the person has died.

I had a tour of the cemetery. There are areas outlined for certain religions, the Muslims purchased one area, Jewish another, Armenians another, etc. and there was several welfare areas, meaning those who were on welfare at time of death are buried in designated areas which are paid by for the government.  We took a look at the private estates area. You could choose an area on the ground that has paver stones around it, or there were small gated areas that you could buy for just yourself, double plots, families up to 4 people, or with combinations of burials and cremated remains they can hold up to 20. The prices ranged from $75,000 to $110,000. Although they are beautiful, it’s too pricey for my liking (even with my 50% discount!) I’ll be happy to have my cremated remains in a public area or scattered somewhere.  They also have a large natural, beautiful pond in the cemetery where ashes can be scattered. I also got to see the crematorium which is located within the cemetery.  There was one large room with two cremation ovens; they are actually pretty new looking and sleek, they are like industrial stainless steel ovens with a bar on the door you pull up (there aren’t any windows on the doors though!) Also in the room were a couple of shelves for the bodies going in next.  There were a couple of bodies waiting, one was in a plywood box and then there was one I didn’t even notice until my tour guide pointed it out, just a little baby, the box was hardly bigger then a shoebox, so sad.  Only one person goes in an oven at a time.  Then there was a refrigerated room, I believe we counted 19 boxes in there.  Mostly made out of the basic plywood but there was one I hadn’t seen before, I can’t remember what they call it but it looks like a carpeted box with decorative handles around the side, I guess this would be considered the luxury burning box.  I believe they said the typical person takes 2 to 2 ½ hours to break down. I saw what the remains look like once they are removed from the oven, there are some ashes but also big chunks of bone are left and nails and metal pieces from the box.  They take a magnet and remove all metal remains then put the remains in a grinder to grind it down to ash.  That was basically it for the crematorium beside an office and a bathroom.  There are just two staff members at our location that take care of the cremations. 

The most valuable information I took in this past week was when I got to sit in on one meeting with one of our funeral directors, it gave me a much better idea of the process. This particular meeting was for what we call an “Imminent” (planning for an imminent/expecting death).  It was for a family whose father is in the hospital and he’s having good days and bad days, but he could pass at any moment and they are actually going on vacation.  They wanted to take care of all the paperwork so if he passed while they were away, all the arrangements are already taken care of.  The funeral director was caring but brought up questions in such a way that the conversation flowed but she could get through the massive amount of paperwork as they went.  The family was able to answer every question but it would be difficult for some to think of the answers especially if they were in mourning.  They were asked about the father`s parents (their full names, where they were born, the mother’s maiden name etc.) It turns out the wife had passed away 3 years earlier though so we pulled out the paperwork and discovered the father purchased a double urn at the time and requested that their ashes be co-mingled. Co-mingle means the ashes would be mixed together.  She currently rests in a memorial wall, so we would take them out and mix them with the father’s and put them back in the niche. 

The only other thing I could recall from this week which kind of surprised me was one family who came in that was arranging a funeral; they brought 12 people, including small children.  Apparently this was the fourth time they had been in and even scheduled a dress rehearsal again for the day before the service.  The funeral director assured me that this was not common. The kids were totally misbehaved, the parents let them run around the funeral home, but one family member got out his guitar and was playing songs, and they were all singing and laughing.  A few staff joked that they must have a huge inheritance coming for them to all be so giddy…probably true. I think we had over 10 services throughout the week, some services with receptions, some just viewings (to view the prepared body) and some just burials (no service inside, just graveside).  All went very smoothly and the families were pleased with the results which proved to be the result of good planning by the funeral directors.

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Getting in the Door

January 23, 2010 in Funeral by thefuneralgirl | No comments

The funeral service profession doesn’t often come to peoples’ minds as a career choice but I just so happened to always have it in the back of mine.  My cousin Faith is in the business and at one point even owned a funeral home.  It was hearing her stories from a young age that made me think that she had such an interesting job and every time I went to a funeral I’d think of her and the people behind the scenes.

At first, I decided to do some online research to see what it entailed and I discovered two things: 1) Although there are many different capacities and roles, funeral directing seemed to be the area I was most interested in and 2) it would require doing an apprenticeship to get a license and there was a high possibility it would also require training as an Embalmer.  Other than that I couldn’t find out much more – there’s a lack of information out there.  So I figured another two things: 1) I gotta call Faith and 2) if this works out, I should spread some information out there – voila, this blog.

I met with Faith and she agreed I fit the funeral director profile (see “About” page) and then I asked about the apprenticeship. She explained that the company she works for requires that funeral directors are also embalmers.  The reason being, that they own numerous homes (that’s common) and not all funeral homes have service centers.  A service centre is where all the preparatory work, embalming and casketing is completed.  So if I were hired to work in a smaller facility that did not have a service center, as a funeral director I would need to do the embalming as well as all the other duties required to serve the family.

It’s not that I have a problem being near a dead person, and I find embalming very interesting…I just don’t know if my weak stomach can handle it.  Faith explained that the actual fluid process is quite simple, just a small incision in the neck where the chemicals flow in and the blood flows out but it’s the autopsy bodies that take a while to get used to. Also, there’s no middle man between the time of death and the embalmer…the body goes straight to you from wherever it may be…the hospital, scene of the accident, you name it, you see it all.  She said though that it’s very rare that you jump right into an apprenticeship, you usually have to be involved with the funeral home first whether it be volunteering, being an attendant, being on call or lucking out with an admin job. I didn’t want to rule out this potential career, I’d try embalming, so I asked if she had any references.  The next thing you know, she’s opened the door for me and I’m meeting with a GM at a local funeral home, one who I shall call John.   

The first meeting with John was just to discuss the biz and offer my services on a volunteer basis but it just so happened that this funeral home was really swamped.  John took a closer look at my qualifications and then subjected me to a rather intense interviewing process.   Over the course of 3 meetings I completed a good 7 hours of sit down interview time. I also had several forms to fill out including drug and alcohol testing forms, a criminal record check and I supplied them with 6 references.  (I swear, if this career doesn’t work out I’m going to be a professional interviewer).  At the end of the process though, I was given an admin job where I will primarily be assisting funeral directors.   

I couldn’t ask for a better start though, I will be working with everyone – the funeral directors, managers, admin staff, cemetery staff and embalmers.  I already knew John and I would get along well, he was so kind-hearted, had a great sense of humor and we had some things in common, like our favourite place to travel.  A couple of other people I had met so far too I knew I would enjoy working with.  This was going to be a great start job to learn all about the profession and at the same time this would ensure that I was the right fit for myself and the company.  It was good timing too.  It’s almost February and the apprenticeships only start in September.  I will have a chance to witness embalming and determine if I want to go ahead with a funeral directing/embalming apprenticeship.  It’s not like I couldn’t just do a funeral directing apprenticeship, especially this place, it has the funeral home, service center and cemetery – the full package.  I just might be eliminating some options in the future.  Just so you know, there is just an embalming apprenticeship too. Some people go into it wanting to do both and love the embalming side.  No matter what though, John informed me that even if I don’t take the embalming apprenticeship that I am required, and will have fun doing, the washing, dressing, hair and makeup on the deceased.  “Fun?” I asked John, “Well yeah” he replied, “what are the first three letters of funeral?” and a big glowing smile wiped across his face.

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