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I did funeral work while I was getting my degree. Mostly it was overnight stuff - I'd just be at home chilling until I got a phone call that there had been a car crash or a suicide or something and then I'd suit up and go to the scene and take the body to the coroner once the cops' forensics people were done getting what they needed. I also got a second job doing cremations for a while.
I highly recommend the death industry - you accumulate no end of great stories.
I see, thank you! I was under the impression that undertaking and funeral work were almost entirely hereditary jobs, at least in the UK. 'Mucky' but lucrative jobs like undertaking and sewage work often seem to be that way - they accumulate close-knit communities who don't stigmatize their work and because the work itself is lucrative, fathers don't try to get their sons out of it in the way they do for mining or farming.
Yeah, there's a lot of family connection in the funeral industry. Even among the ones that aren't directly family-owned, a lot of the workers tend to be related. There was a while where myself, my two sisters, my wife, my brother, my brother-in-law, and my mum were all working for the same funeral business.
Fascinating. And would you say that working with dead bodies for a few years had any effect on you? All the philosophical stuff about getting closer to death, corpse meditation, etc?
Or does it mostly get siloed into the mental filing cabinet for 'that job I did during my degree' and doesn't really relate to your feelings about life in general?
I grew up on a farm so I always had a pretty grounded attitude to life and death. It didn't affect me a huge amount. That said, no matter how jaded you are something will get to you eventually.
There's two events that still make me cry whenever I remember them. Both of them involved dead babies. The first one was a large Catholic family. They had seven boys and then finally had a little girl with their eighth child. She had health problems and survived for a while after birth but ultimately didn't make it. At the funeral her older brothers each went up and talked a bit about how much they loved their little sister and would miss her, etc. All very sad, all of them young men trying manfully to hold themselves together.
It got down to the fourth brother in line who was around 13 I think. And he gets up there and he tries to offer some words for his baby sister and he just can't. He can't speak at all, he's trying so hard not to cry but every time he tries to say something he just breaks down. And I've been in all sorts of awful tragic situations and it didn't bother me, but somehow just watching that kid trying to speak and failing cut right into me and I've never really been able to recover from it.
The other time that really got to me was the day I burned ten babies.
The first 9, I was ok. It's confronting the first time you see one of those little shoebox sized coffins, but you get used to it like you get used to anything. And so I put them in the oven one after the other, box after box, and just didn't really think about the enormous tragedy that each one represented.
Then number ten comes down. It's the last funeral of the day, the last cremation to be done before I go home to my own baby (yes I was married with a kid at this stage). But before I took him to the oven the funeral director came to me with a little toy car. He tells me the parents asked if I could put it in the coffin with him. Of course I can.
So I remove the lid. And I see him. And he's such a cute little boy. He's a stillbirth - I'm not exactly sure how far along, but he's pretty much fully developed except his ears aren't separated from his head yet. And of course he's tiny, would have fit in my hand. And for some reason the unfairness of it all just hits me in that moment. This little kid lying in front of me who's died before he even had a chance to live. He deserved so much better than that.
But there's nothing I can do. I tuck the little car in next to him, I close the lid, I apologize to him through my tears, and I put him in the fire. I hope there's some justice for him in the next life because there's sure as hell none here.
I go home to my family. I get over it. I sleep fine. And then the next day I go back in to work and the first thing I have to do is rake his ashes out of the furnace. And I'm doing that and putting them into a little porcelain urn to give to his parents, and I find something in the ashes. It's a little button from his little onesie. And it just sets me off again.
So there's those events that still affect me on an emotional level. In terms of my outlook on the world though I would say that it's given a more visceral understanding of things that I already knew but didn't really feel. I knew suicide was awful and tragically common. But now I know in my gut how terrible and how frequent it is. I've seen the kids whose dad hung himself in front of them. How is a family supposed to go on after something like that?
Same with car accidents. They happen all the time and they barely make news. But I know exactly what it looks like and what those statistics mean. The woman with the destroyed legs who bled out on the side of the road. The dad who picked up his two girls for the weekend and got T-boned. The grandfather with his chest caved in on Christmas day. Self driving cars can't come fast enough.
Thank you for the stories, and I apologise for dredging up painful memories. I've mostly been fortunate enough that the funerals I've been to have almost all been for the elderly. The one exception is for a schoolmate who developed a condition that killed him in university. In general the funeral wasn't so bad; almost a school reunion with everyone gathered for the first time since graduation. The thing that really got to me was the obituary, because of course there was nothing to put in it. He'd been a good boy, worked hard, did well at exams, and then he died. Bravely and stoically, by all accounts. We sang the old school hymns and then we went back out into the world.
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