Good Mourning (5 page)

BY THE
TIME
I got back to my apartment that night, I was too tired to make dinner, so I pulled a pint of chocolate froyo out of the freezer and collapsed onto my couch. My whole body hurt—never again would I wear designer heels to work—and I decided that maybe Monica had the right idea with her old-lady comfort shoes.

I heard my phone vibrate, and a text from Gaby popped up:
HEY! IF YOU'RE TOO BUSY TO BOOK YOUR FLIGHT TO LONDON, I'M MORE THAN HAPPY TO DO IT FOR YOU.

London. Ugh. I hated to let my best friend down, but there was no way I could go to the party. Monica had made the schedule for the week, and since I was the newbie, I got all the worst shifts—my days were going to be starting at either six a.m. or four p.m., and it wasn't going to be pretty. Plus, I had to work weekends.

I dipped my spoon deep into the froyo and picked up my phone.
SO SORRY HUN BUT I THINK I HAVE TO WORK.

Buzzzz.
BUT YOU CAN'T MISS THIS PARTY!! PRETTY PLEASE?? DON'T MAKE ME GO WITHOUT YOU. CAN'T YOU JUST TELL YOUR BOSS YOU HAVE PLANS OR SOMETHING?

Just as I was about to write back, Elaine's name popped up on my phone.
Why in God's name is she calling me?
I thought. Don't get me wrong—Elaine did the obligatory check-in call from time to time, usually to ask how “our” fabulous friends were doing. But she spoke to Max much more than me, and even when we did connect, it always felt a little awkward, like when you're sitting next to someone at a party who is four drinks deeper than you.

I'm not going to answer it
.
She is just going to say something stupid, and I'll hate her for it.
I hit “ignore” and reached for the TV remote, but her name started flashing again. (Elaine does not like to be ignored.)

“Yes, hi, Nanny,” I said, not even attempting to sound happy to hear from her. “What can I do for you?”

“Lizzie, oh good, you're there. I talked to your brother. What is this I hear about you working at a funeral home? I
know this couldn't possibly be the case, but I wanted to hear it from you.”

Sigh. My new gig might have been a disappointment for my mother, but it would be an outright embarrassment for Elaine, a woman so “refined” she refused to let her staff pour her milk straight out of a carton into her coffee. They had to pour the milk into a silver pitcher first,
then
pour it into Elaine's coffee or whatever Nanny Dearest was drinking.

“Nanny, I'm tired. I really don't feel like getting into this with you,” I said.

“Well, I didn't ask you how you
feel
, Lizzie. You need to stop this foolishness. I know you're upset that your father isn't here anymore, but this isn't the way a lady
deals with things
. You hear me? Can't you go out with your girlfriends or something? What's my Gaby up to these days? Why don't you both come down for a visit?”

A text from Gaby buzzed through.
HELLO? OKAY, I'M COUNTING YOU IN. LONDON! PARTY! YAY!

My head was pounding. Why didn't anyone in my life understand that this wasn't a joke? “Elaine . . . er, Nanny . . . I've—I've got to go,” I said, hanging up the phone before she could respond.

I looked at the clock: seven p.m. Normally I'd be making plans to meet friends in the Meatpacking District, or maybe for dinner in the East Village. But I had eleven precious hours before I'd be sitting at the reception desk at Crawford, and the thought of putting on a cute dress, cabbing it down
town, and squeezing myself into a booth next to a bunch of friends fresh from happy hour was about as appealing as whatever brown liquid had oozed onto my shoes earlier. I turned off my phone. The only thing calling my name for the rest of the night was a pair of cashmere sweatpants, an oversized T-shirt, and a bottle of water.

Besides, just about the last thing I needed was for someone else to ask me what the hell I was doing with my life, when I barely knew myself.

THREE

Dirty Business

W
hen I was seven, my parents signed me up for ballet lessons. Or rather, my mother signed me up—Dad had nothing to do with it. Mom bought me a pair of leather Capezio dance slippers, white tights, a pink leotard . . . and a tutu. I may not have been savvy in the ways of my mom's and Elaine's persuasion tactics just yet, but I was smart enough to know that this did not bode well for my afternoons playing soccer in the park. So I refused to dance, instead standing there with the tutu on my head while all the other little girls pranced around the Madison Avenue dance studio, their wispy buns bobbing up and down while their nannies looked on. Mom was too embarrassed to bring me back after that—are you sensing a theme?—and so she let me play with my brother and his friends in Central Park, with scraped knees and grass stains on our shorts. I guess
what I'm trying to say is: I've never been afraid to get a little messy.

That might be one of the reasons why after four months working at Crawford, I started to find myself less and less at the front desk with Monica, and more and more downstairs in the embalming room with Bill. Not only could he talk about the chances of the Giants winning that Sunday, he also didn't make fun of me in Spanish. (I'd picked up enough since I started to know that “
perra rica
” meant “rich bitch.”) Plus, it turned out that Bill was the Monet of the funeral business. Everyone who dealt with death knew him, or at least knew
of
him. Not to sound crass, but he could take the victim of a drunk driving accident, face all bashed in, and make him look so good, you'd think he was going to a five-star dinner at Daniel. Seriously, Bill was that good.

I looked on in amazement the first time I saw Bill prep a body in his immaculate prep room—it was by far the cleanest area in the whole funeral home. First, he looked at the folder to make sure he had gone through every one of the family's wishes and knew them by heart. People could be very particular about how a loved one should look—they'd request a certain shade of lipstick (sometimes they'd even drop it off) or hairstyle, specify how jewelry should be arranged. Bill listened to all of it. “Funerals aren't so much for the dead as they are for the living,” he said, busy at work. “You know, one last chance for friends and family to see that face, those hands.” And so, he made it his mission to see that
that
face
and
those
hands looked just like when the person was alive. More, and this is particularly true for people who battled with long illnesses (chemo made people lose their hair, steroids left bodies bloated, liver failure caused jaundice), he made them look alive and
well
.

After reading through the family's requests, Bill would then do something very important: he made sure the person lying on that stainless steel table was actually dead, either by checking for a pulse or holding a mirror under the nose to make sure it didn't fog up. I know, this sounds completely crazy, but early in his career, Bill started working on a body and it accidentally slipped off the stretcher. (This almost never happened, but it could.) When he went to pick the body up, he saw that blood was gushing from the head—a sign of a beating heart, which any well-behaved corpse doesn't have. “I lost my shit,” said Bill, recounting the moment with a slight smile. “Started screaming to the guys upstairs, ‘Call 911! He's alive!' And I think for a moment they thought I'd gone off the deep end. For a second,
I
thought I'd gone off the deep end. But hey, at least the guy got to live, right? Better to have a bad bruise on your head than to be dead.”

When it was actually time to work on the body, he'd retrieve it from one of the freezers, where bodies were kept cold on three slats. (Back in the day, Bill said that they literally kept the bodies on ice; the guys on staff also kept their beers cool in the freezer, sticking them around the corpses.
Ew!) He then transferred the body to one of the tables. The corpses were always respectfully covered, with just the part Bill was working on exposed. He was covered too—usually a long white coat with an apron on top, shoe covers, and gloves. The first part of body prep was to loosen up any rigor mortis that had set in by bending the arms and legs. Then he set the features, which meant slipping plastic caps under both eyelids to avoid a sunken-in look (eyeballs can sink back into the head after death) and closing the lids over them. The mouth was wired shut using small needles attached to metal wires. Next up: embalming. Like a surgeon, Bill cut a slit on the lower part of the body's neck near the collar­bone and drained out the blood through tubes inserted in the arteries, only to replace it with a pink-ish embalming fluid that brought color to the skin. You know those pretty pink cheeks you see at wakes? All smoke and mirrors. Or rather, dye and chemicals.

While the blood was being replaced by embalming fluid (the blood simply went down the sink drain as it flowed out), Bill washed the body with a sponge, which was less about cleaning and more about making sure that all the embalming fluid was getting distributed. Then he whipped out a trocar, which looks like a metal pencil with a really long, pointy tip attached to a suction tube, and inserted it in the abdomen to release any other bodily fluids and gases still hanging around. That part wasn't my favorite, I'll admit. But then again, wouldn't you be kind of creeped out if it were?

Finally, Bill would switch gears from surgeon to beautician. The man had a whole makeup station in the embalming room, filled mostly with special products meant to be used on cold, stiff skin. But there were also Essie nail polishes, Chanel lipsticks, hair extensions, and more blushes than the Saks makeup counter had, all left over from families who had dropped off their loved ones' beauty kits and never picked them up. Bill was also diligent about restocking the essentials, like fake eyelashes. He was a master at curling waves, covering gray roots, and trimming bangs, and he knew more beauty secrets than the glossy women's magazines. I swear, he gave better manicures than the ladies at the nail salon next door.

One night, I was heading out for an event and had changed into my velvet Roberto Cavalli gown at the office. The only hiccup: the dress was low-cut, and I had forgotten my boob tape. “Hold on, I got something even better,” Bill said. Then he pulled wig tape out of a drawer and told me to stick it wherever things were “jiggling around.” It worked better than any fashion tape, and from then on, I took all of my grooming advice from a middle-aged man who chain-smoked and spent most of his days around dead bodies.

“IF YOU'RE
GOING
to keep hanging out down here, you better put some gloves on,” Bill said one morning, tossing a box filled with white latex my way. Between the smell of
disinfectant from the cleaning supplies, the formaldehyde in the embalming fluid, and that powdery, plasticky latex odor, you'd think this would be the last place I'd want to be. But Bill seemed to know
everything
about the funeral business, and I couldn't get enough. Plus, he played much better music than the instrumental string shit always streaming through the lobby.

“Oh, I probably don't need them,” I said, putting the box down.

“You wanna catch something? Put the gloves on,” said Bill, pointing at the box.

“What am I going to catch from a dead person?”

Bill sighed. “You ever hear of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, kid?”

I shook my head.

“Of course you haven't. Now put the gloves on.”

I did as Bill said, not only because I wanted to stay in the embalming room, but also because I didn't want to catch whatever he was talking about. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you've never heard of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, either. (Or maybe you have, in which case you probably hang out with an even quirkier crowd than I do.) Embalmers are terrified of it, and you would be too if you spent your days cutting open dead people and touching their brains—which is exactly how it's transmitted. CJD is a rare brain disease that causes sudden dementia and other problems like seizures, jerky movements, and psychosis. Most
people who get it are dead within a year, and while CJD isn't a big risk for most of the population (the Department of Health reports about twenty-two cases a year in New York), embalmers are particularly at risk because they can be exposed to contaminated brain tissue. How someone hasn't made a zombie movie about this is beyond me.

“Kinda crazy that dead people can kill you, huh?” said Bill.

He also introduced me to tissue gas, which builds up in dead bodies and creates a sort of crinkling Rice Krispies sound. It takes a few hours for all the gases to work their way out, which isn't dangerous or toxic, but a little stomach-­turning to think about. “Snap, crackle, pop!” Bill said, and I couldn't help but laugh. Sure, it was a little gross—but I also found myself surprisingly curious about what, exactly, happened to bodies after death. Like most people, I'd thought a lot about where our souls might go. The decomposing corpse? Not so much.

YOU'D THINK
that Tony would have been annoyed I was spending so much time downstairs, but he was usually too busy trying to woo customers into buying overpriced crap they didn't need to even notice where I was. I'd caught a glimpse of his salesmanship when I came in to arrange Dad's funeral, but that was nothing compared to the show he put on for the families of celebrities, politicians, or anyone
whose name he recognized from the
New York Post
. Tony was a ­classic up-seller: he knew that if someone could afford to have their loved one laid to rest at Crawford, they could probably afford a pricier casket and anything else he threw at them. And since most people who came into Crawford were in a daze of grief, they were usually not in the mood to protest about prices. “Here's my AmEx,” they'd say, tossing their platinum credit cards across the desk. “Just make it nice.” In my opinion, Tony was sometimes a little
too
happy to oblige, but I was glad to be learning about the business in such a hands-on way.

Even though Monica didn't like my sitting with her at the reception desk, she seemed even more annoyed that I was getting special privileges, like being allowed to tell florists where to put flowers, going on removals, and of course spending time with Bill and learning the business. It's not that anyone told me to do these things; it's just that nobody protested when I did. And after practically growing up planning parties and events—if there's one thing you learn living in Manhattan, it's how to throw a killer fête—it felt natural to jump in and help make sure the prayer cards were stacked right, the paintings were level, the candy dishes were filled with upscale chocolates, and there weren't any stray petals on the floor. My years of attending charity dinners and other fancy events had taught me that the details mattered—and so did the attitude of the staff. I
cared
what the clients thought, and that they felt taken care of.
Monica, on the other hand, was mostly worried about scheduling the calendar so that I didn't have one Saturday or Sunday off, and monitoring my breaks to make sure I never came in a second after my thirty minutes were up. (I didn't. I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of scolding me in front of the other staff members.) She might as well have been working at the checkout in a grocery store for all the attention she paid to client satisfaction.

I'd been going in and out of the embalming room for a few days when Bill called me to come down again. “Do you have the folder for the body that was just brought in?” he asked when I walked into the chilly room. I wasn't on phones that morning, so I had no idea where the folder might be—although the stack of messy papers in front of where Monica had been sitting was one possibility. The folders were supposed to be stored in an area along the wall behind the desk that functioned like a library; only funeral directors were to grab them, and then return them promptly after use.