My Ghost

Removals of dead bodies tend to be swift—most deaths we are called for tend to take place in nursing homes, and most elderly patients tend to be lightweight and easy to remove. It is easy to detach oneself emotionally from cases such as these when the family isn’t present. It becomes like a medical procedure, transferring the body from the hospital bed onto the cot, propping their head up with a pillow, then zipping the red-clothed body bag closed.

With house calls, the type of emotion in the room varies. Some families expect the demise of a loved one and had plenty of time to say their goodbyes. There have been some cases where I’ve joked with families in the same room as the deceased. In other cases, the room is solemn. I don’t speak above a whisper, holding eye contact with the mourning family members as little as I can out of respect for their grief.

When speaking with EMTs, I often find that with people who have been on the job for a long time, there are stories that they don’t want to share for the simple reason they’re personal and emotional. Those stories live in the back of their minds as ghosts. On a good day, they don’t pay much attention to the stories, and their ghosts are content as they are. It’s hard to think about anything else on worse days, analyzing over and over, wondering if there was something different that they could have done.

Something most people don’t realize is that funeral directors have a similar phenomenon. However, unlike EMTs, funeral directors aren’t usually asked about the “worst” jobs they’ve had or the grisliest ones they’ve had. Even then, “worst” usually doesn’t equal “most upsetting.” We have our ghosts, too.

It was a sunny afternoon. The sun was shining brightly outside, and it was hot enough that even just wearing my thin, long-sleeved collared shirt had me covered in sweat. We received the death call close to the office’s closing time—four in the evening. The receptionist briefed me on the decedent: upwards of five-hundred pounds, upstairs on the fifth floor, and the family was there along with a squad of police officers and the coroner.

Typically, we are supposed to bring partners on every home removal, but I was the only person at the time who wasn’t preoccupied with something important. I set off on my lonesome, taking the removal van and ensuring that I brought along the largest cot that we had. The assisted-living apartment complex wasn’t challenging to find. Pre-COVID, there were no restrictions on entering the lobby, so the doors were freely unlocked. The hall space was tight, and I barely managed to squeeze the removal cot into the tiny elevator, but I successfully arrived on the fifth floor.

The family members were gathered by the elevator when I arrived. There were three in total—the decedent’s mother, hair whitened by age, the decedent’s sister, chubby-cheeked with soft brunette hair; a teenager, hair dyed green and black, clad with a band t-shirt. The teenager seemed to be the least affected of all—usually, younger family members won’t be as phased unless they were close with the deceased. The mother’s eyes were red and puffy, although she greeted me with a warm smile and trembling lips.

“I haven’t been in to see her yet,” was the first sentiment the mother shared with me. “Would it be possible to see her before you… take her?”

Before I responded, I turned toward the deceased's sister, whose mouth was partially open as if she were about to speak.

“I was the one who found her,” she explained to me. Her eyes were similarly red and puffy, although she spoke with a clearer voice than her mother, free of any vocal trembles. “She- Well, she’s… not in the best shape. If we can, though, we still would like to view her before she goes.”

Near the end of her sentence, a crack slipped into her voice. I nodded with a soft expression.

“If it’s all right with you, I’m going to take a look and make sure she’s okay to view before taking her into our care, okay?” I folded my hands in front of me, speaking in a hushed tone. “Sometimes, depending on how a person passed and the details surrounding their passing, they might not be presentable to the family, as viewing them could potentially be traumatic. Once I take a look, I’ll come back and let you know, all right?”

The family members nodded. The teenager looked up from her phone and stowed it away in her jeans pocket, opting to take hold of the elderly mother’s arm. I nodded once to the family respectfully, then turned to proceed down the hallway and into the apartment.

Five officers were crowded in the two-room apartment along with the coroner. They all looked at me as I entered. I tried not to make any kind of expression, being hit with a farm-like odour once I passed the door’s threshold. There was an uncleaned litterbox to my left with litter having been tracked across the carpet every which way. The cat was nowhere to be seen, so I supposed that it must have been taken care of earlier.

The decedent, a heavyset woman in her forties, lay back on her recliner that had been propped up. The lower halves of her calves dangled off the leg rest. Her arms were spread out and draped over the armrests of the chair, her head lolling back into the seat. She was in a rough shape as well—her face was red and purple, saliva and other bodily fluid draining from her mouth and down her cheek. Undoubtedly, the recliner cushion beneath her would be wet with the release of her bowels upon passing. She smelled like the apartment around her. Her thinning hair was matted and knotted, almost attached to the back of her head. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered she had three hair ties stuck in her hair as well.

According to the coroner, she had suffered from a probable myocardial infarction—medical-speak for “probably a heart attack.” Although the coroner couldn’t say what exact time the woman had passed, she at the least had been deceased since that morning. Her sister had discovered her that afternoon when she came to check on her. The woman’s weight would be the biggest obstacle in transferring her to the cot, but otherwise, with the almost nonexistent lighting in the room, it should be easy to clean her face up a bit and let her family see her one last time.

I excused myself from the apartment and returned to the family members waiting down the hall by the elevator. They sat in the armchairs, watching me expectedly as I approached them.

“She’s not in too bad of a condition,” I told the mother primarily. “We’ll have to wipe her face down and still need to transfer her onto the cot, but you’ll be able to view her before we take her into our care.”

The mother teared up at this, pursing her lips as she struggled not to let out a sob. Her other daughter leaned over to rub her shoulder comfortingly with a hand. The mother managed to rasp out a “thank you” before I left.

With the total of seven people that were in the apartment, moving the woman had been more straightforward than I initially thought. Regardless, it’s always stressful moving anybody weighing more than one hundred pounds. There’s always the fear in the back of your mind that you’ll drop a person—horror stories flash through your brain in the moments that the decedent is airborne. There was frustrated, urgent whispering between all of us throughout the few minutes we spent moving the woman from her recliner to the cot. Above all, we wanted to make sure that her head was taken the most care of—we specifically had one officer designated as the person to hold her head throughout the process.

I had lowered the cot to its lowest position and set it close to the armchair. Once we had the woman on the cot, I propped her head up with a pillow and buckled her in with the cot’s straps. With the officers' help, I zipped the cot’s bag up until the zipper reached her chin, leaving her face exposed for her family. The next step was the most difficult, as we would have to dead-lift the cot back up to its original height. Two officers lifted the foot end as two more helped me raise the head end.

I ducked into the woman’s bathroom quickly, retrieving what looked like a used washcloth and dampening it with water before returning. I wiped her face down, and the coroner smoothed her hair out, both of us doing our best to have her look presentable. Her eyes were already shut, but her mouth hung open, and I discreetly wedged some cloth beneath her chin to keep it closed. The zipper of the cot’s bag helped hide the fabric. I returned the washcloth to the bathroom afterward, then left to retrieve the family.

This specific case, I believe, is one of my “ghosts.” Sometimes, just a small, innocuous thing will remind me and take me back to the exact moment I brought the mother, sister, and niece into the apartment. I have a dual memory of the time I spent in there, half dissociating and half ever-present. Paradoxically, I have both a vague memory of what happened after that point and clearly remember the details.

Words don’t do justice to the raw emotion that was displayed in that apartment. The woman's mother began to cry at the sight of her daughter on that cot, her other daughter accompanying her with tears of her own. The mother took her deceased daughter’s face into her hands, kissing her forehead as she attempted to not break down—then her crying turned into sobs as she started shaking the woman through the cot’s cloth.

“Wake up!” she shouted through tears at her daughter, shaking her.

The officers in the room stared blankly into space, hands folded in front or behind themselves. The coroner held the clipboard to her chest, staring down at the carpet with no expression on her face. I, the closest of all, stood in the entryway, looking away every so often in an attempt to give the family some semblance of privacy, but being unable to keep my eyes away, feeling as if I was ignoring the family members otherwise.

“Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!” I don’t know how many times she tried to wake her daughter up. My heart ached and, although I’ve said this of many other cases, I honestly would have brought that person back to life if I had been able to. I’d never known the woman in life, but I personally felt that she had passed before she was supposed to.

“This isn’t right, this isn’t right,” the mother kept repeating. Eventually, the teenager stepped up to her, taking her arm in one hand and rubbing her back with the other.

“She isn’t waking up,” the mother sobbed, sounding defeated. She looked to her granddaughter, wrinkles on her face trembling with each breath she took. “Why won’t she wake up?”

I still don’t know how long we were in there. It was well past five in the evening when I returned to the funeral home with her loved one. Even thinking back, my heart still hurts. While I am not a parent and don’t plan on being one, I can’t imagine the pain that must accompany outliving one’s child. The suffering that accompanies the world-shattering, life-altering moment of somebody so dear to you suddenly being gone forever is unspeakable.

The grieving that death entails is an exclusive club that, ideally, you won’t be invited to until you’re much, much older. Going through the process of losing somebody you love is one of the hardest inevitabilities of life. During that period, every person who helps you, who sees that vulnerability in you and still decides to stay with you, becomes family. Death is the invisible constant of life that bounds us all together.