Fabulous Bodies

“I’m here for the body.”

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The kid doesn’t look up, but a slight huff of annoyance shoots from his nostrils. His bad attitude is not about my specific request; it’s because my word choice is a reminder of just how different our sensibilities are.

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Funeral directors, morgue attendants, medical examiners, and organ donation coordinators: all part of the same ecosystem, but not without friction. You’ll rarely hear someone at a funeral home say body, or corpse, or cadaver. With them, it’s always the departed, the deceased, or more likely, just the first name of whomever kicked the bucket — any title that stresses humanity.

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Insert eyeroll emoji.

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Medical examiners are more clinical. They usually go with the subject, or just boil things down to a case number.

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I, however, am here for the body. It’s a carcass, for fuck’s sake, bone and blood and meat, now woefully void of the previous electrical current that once helped it wiggle around.

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The funeral industry is a world that most people find unsettling, even frightening. It’s an uncomfortable reminder of their own inevitable end. Most folks would rather just pretend we go on living forever, doing anything they can to ignore the crushing existential truth that one day — a day not too far off, in the grand scheme of things— we’ll all end up on the slab.

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And when we’re finally crushed under the wheels of a twenty-five-thousand-pound semitruck, or crumpled on the floor of our own bathroom with a ruptured cerebral vein and a skull filling with blood, someone will have to clean up that mess — often figuratively, almost always literally.

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This is where I come in.