CHAPTER NINETEEN: Undertaker Fakery

Over dinner with Allen that night, I let it all out. 

“It’s just one thing after another,” I complained, chewing on a hangnail.  “This #house and my #tenants are, like, running my life now.  I can’t think about anything else.  And it’s so hard trying to concentrate on studying when I’m just worrying all the time about what else is going to go wrong.  You know me.  If I don’t get all A’s, I get depressed.”

 Allen smiled at my moody expression and reached across the table for my hand. 

“You poor thing.  You do seem to be going through a tough spell right now.  But look on the bright side.  Miz James seems to be a good tenant at least. Natasha will hopefully soon be gone.  We’ll make the place nice again.  And you can find a better tenant.  You know I’m getting really good at cleaning ovens.”

“I suppose so,” I grudgingly agreed.  “You should have seen the fridge, though.  It was worse than yours!”

Allen’s refrigerator presently contained seven cartons of milk in various stages of decay.  Every other weekend, when my daughters stayed at their father's house and I stayed at Allen’s place, he would buy a carton of milk for me to have with my tea and cereal.  But he never threw out the old ones.  Since he didn’t drink milk himself, the cartons had been steadily increasing in number.

“You know,” I added, before he could get a word in to defend himself, “I know it’s gross talking about this over dinner, but I've never smelled anything as bad as those garbage bags.  It was like there were dead, rotting animals in them, and this yucky stuff was oozing out all over the floor.  And to think that I wanted to be a pathologist when I grew up. Quincy was one of my favorite T.V. shows when I was little.”

“Does sound pretty gross,” Allen agreed, patting my butt as we left the restaurant.  “But I don’t think I’d really enjoy going out with a girl whose job consisted of working with dead people.”

“No, seriously,” I said as we walked to the car.  “From this #writing course I’ve been taking, I actually do know a bit about what undertakers do to make corpses presentable for viewing.”

Allen opened the car door for me, ever the gentleman.  “What type of writing course is that?”

On the drive home, I regaled him with the details. 

To my delight, our English Composition class had been required to read an excerpt called The Embalming of Mr. Jones from The American Way of Death, by Jessica Mitford.  Being a bloodthirsty ghoul at heart, a characteristic which frequently caused disagreement with the more squeamish Allen at the movie theater, my interest was instantly piqued.  Suddenly, I felt I had always wanted to know about how one embalms a dead body.  And now I was about to find out.

With relish, I read about how the blood is drained from the body and replaced by embalming fluid, and how each operator has their own favorite injection and drainage points. 

Apparently, there are several kinds of embalming fluids.  One of them, called Flextone, produces a “mild, flexible rigidity,” the resulting velvety feel of the skin making it ideal for women and children.  Then there’s a cosmetic called Suntone, which comes in several shades – pink being “especially indicated for young female subjects.”

This had actually started getting quite boring, but I perked up at the next paragraph which described how the mouth is sewn together with a needle passing through the upper lip and gum and out through the left nostril, with the corners raised slightly “for a more pleasant expression.” 

If the deceased is buck-toothed, the teeth are cleaned and coated with clear nail polish.  And, should the corpse be missing a limb, an artificial one can easily be made from plaster of Paris.  In the case of a missing hand, sometimes the back of the hand is all that is required.  If the corpse has suffered the misfortune of being decapitated, the ragged edges of the head and neck are trimmed, and the head is joined to the body with splints, wires and sutures. 

“Of course, it’s good to tie a scarf or something around the neck to hide the embalmer’s handiwork,” I proclaimed.

“Well, of course,” Allen agreed, mashing the gears and almost stalling the car.

Undaunted, I continued reciting as best I could from memory.

“Finally, massage cream is injected to smooth out sunken areas, even in the hands, and the lips are positioned properly, ‘lip drift’ being remedied by the insertion of pins cemented into place with denture replacer. 

"For an especially stubborn pair of lips, the lower jaw can actually be dislocated and held in position with wires running through holes drilled through the upper jaws.

“Naturally, the book created some outrage amongst funeral directors,” I finished, “But this is all taught in the Mortuary Science program.  I must admit I’m rather tempted to change careers.”

“I sincerely hope you don’t,” Allen said feebly, looking a little green around the gills.  “Psychology is a much more respectable profession, in my opinion.”