Good Mourning by Elizabeth Meyer Read Free Book Online Page B

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 guesswhat 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 faceand 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