this particular funeral home was conspicuous in that it was at least 50% chapel, and therefore looked more like a church than anything from the outside. the inside, however, looked like a hotel, with crystal light fixtures on the ceiling and butter-colored wall paper. it smelled almost like a doctor's office but somehow less sterile. more like somebody else's pillow, but it a comforting way.
the funeral director i was interviewing looked every bit like someone who one might expect to have a sweet southern accent and shop at costco. however, she did not have an accent, and in fact had gauges twice the size of mine. she was wearing a light blue buttoned shirt and a pinstriped suit. i feel like these details are important. the room my teacher and i sat in while we waited for her to come in had the feel of a waiting room, but i realized after a while that it was probably the place the staff meets with families. there was a large television in the room which played a silent loop of photos of various services, and tall shelves on either side which displayed different styles of urns. my medical teacher pronounces urn "you-ren", so there's that. some of the urns looked more like scented candles than anything, glass cylinders with sunsets or tropical flowers painted on them. there was even some glass blown beads hanging from metal fixtures in which you could see the ashes, trapped inside. i guess this is actually a whole business now.
i learned a lot about the business during the interview, such as things like green funerals (because i guess even your death can be environmentally friendly now) and rental caskets, which involves velcro and caskets with drawbridge-like sides used to slide a body into a big cardboard box for cremation. i guess this is popular with families who request both a viewing and then cremation, so they're able to have a nice casket but not waste it when the "loved one" is cremated. this was a term i saw a lot in the brochures i looked at in the waiting room, and i found it slightly unsettling. maybe it's the idea that when we die, we become nameless, just a "loved one" gone away. but i think i'd have less of an issue with a term like "the deceased". loved one seems like a denial of death, in some ways.
at one point in the interview, the funeral director is describing, on my request, the tools she uses while embalming. she starts explaining something called a trocar, which she struggles to describe, the first comparison she makes being "it looks kind of like a sword." this instrument, as it turns out, is used to pierce into the internal organs of the body, and suck out whatever might be left in them - the trocar doubles as a device for pumping whatever it pokes full of formaldehyde, a smell i had previously solely associated with tenth grade biology frog dissections. at this point in the conversation, she says, "i could show you the prep room, if you want." from then on, the conversation goes something like this -
me: "wait, really?"
her: "yeah, sure."
me: "thatwouldbesoawesomereally?"
her: "..yeah."
me: "like, right now?"
so we went to the prep room.
on the way there we go through the garage, which houses a white cadillac brand hearse, a car nicer than any owned in my family. the prep room is small and has similar laminated signs on the walls to what i've seen in my medical and chemistry classes. the funeral director begins to show me the equipment, and it turns out a trocar looks exactly like a sword.
she also shows me a selection of similarly brutal tools, if not knarly in look, in their uses. there are some curved scissors used to dig for arteries, scalpels for slicing the jugular, and a large machine which has attached tubes for filling veins with formaldehyde while they are at the same time drained of blood. the prep table has grooves leading to a drainage system, and in the room is a baby blue casket, closed, with a large, semi-transparent papery covering over its entirety.
the room is a disturbing mix of mad scientist and suburbia. there is, for example, a massive metal freezer door built in to the wall, looking something like a safe, covered in caution and hazard stickers. however, by the closet hangs an ironing board with a canvas cover depicting tiny sail boats and waves. the funeral director explains what she has to wear before beginning to embalm, an outfit which entails a disposable, sleeved apron - a sight i can only compare to some kind of paper snuggie - a pair of large rubber boots, elbow-length blue gloves, a hairnet, and a plastic face cover resembling something one might wear when welding.
i was only at the funeral home a couple of hours, but i absolutely did not ever want to leave. i talked to the woman about an assisting job, something on a volunteer basis, and she said she would pass the request on to her supervisors. when she was in school, she explained that she was able to help with services to a certain degree some week nights, but to spend more time around the profession i'd stock shelves or file paperwork. at the end, my teacher hugged me in the parking lot. the evening came to a close with my realization that although i might have my future career path figured out, i am still unable to navigate my way through my own city. i relied on my teacher's car to lead my own back to a street i recognized. it was a good day.
