Death and Funeral Homes

“Autopsy Report” reminded me of some of the more bizarre experiences with death that I've had in the last couple of years. The primary thought that came to mind, while Purpura was describing the autopsy room, was two trips that I took to funeral homes in the fall of last year for my class on death and dying. For the class we had to do a mandatory visit of Summers Funeral Home—the first trip to the Ustick chapel, and the second to the one in downtown on Bannock. I initially chose to go to the Ustick chapel, which is where their crematorium is located, and was a bit taken aback at the sterility of that side of death. In the embalming room there are a number of horrific-looking tools—in my mind they looked like something that would be used in the Saw or Hostel movies. After the embalming room my classmates and I were escorted into the crematorium, which honestly looked like any other hospital-type room, but with a giant pizza oven-looking thing in the middle of it. The funeral director suggested we look inside and note that even though they had just cleaned it out, there was always residual dust left over from the last person cremated, which made the whole process seem so much more personal. As if when you get cremated it’s not just your body returning to the earth, but those that came before you, as well. The description of the procedures the funeral director told us about dulled the clinical aspects that were described in Purpura’s account.

More interesting than the first visit was the second visit to the Bannock chapel, which is allegedly haunted because it was built in an old home from the turn of the century. Perhaps because the building was so old and smelled like grandparents, my classmates seemed more at ease, which as the funeral director pointed out, allowed him to approach more difficult subjects during the tour of the facility and his talk. He wasn't allowed to show us the bodies waiting to be embalmed downstairs, but he snuck us down there where two old men—one large, one impossibly small—and a blue-haired little old lady lay motionless and cold. In order to keep the bodies from rotting before the embalming process they’re kept in a cooler that stays around 35 degrees, which gives an uncomfortable frostbitten look to the skin. While I was reading “Autopsy Report” I just kept seeing the faces of those old people, waiting for the next steps towards eternity, and flinching at the fact that these people had loved ones and that they would soon be emptied of the essential bits that made them human. Despite Purpura making analogies about the organs being like other cherished fruit, the eye with which she took to describing them in her initial experience seemed to bring the clinical feeling back to what I had understood prior to my funeral home visits.