Stiff (9 page)

Her hand rests sweetly on his chest. Concerned, she calls Theo over to look. They talk quietly and then he turns to me. "There's material sitting in the mouth," he says.

I nod, picturing corduroy, swatches of gingham. "Material?"

"Purge," offers Nicole. It's not helping.

Hugh "Mack" McMonigle, an instructor at the college, who is supervising this morning's session, steps up beside me. "What happened is that whatever was in the stomach found its way into the mouth." Gases created by bacterial decay build up and put pressure on the stomach, squeezing its contents back up the esophagus and into the mouth. The situation appears not to bother Theo and Nicole, though purge is a relatively infrequent visitor to the embalming room.

Theo explains that he is going to use an aspirator. As if to distract me from what I am seeing, he keeps up a friendly patter. "The Spanish for

'vacuum' is
aspiradora
."

Before switching on the aspirator, Theo takes a cloth to the man's chin and wipes away a substance that looks but surely doesn't taste like chocolate syrup. I ask him how he copes with the unpleasantnesses of dealing with dead strangers' bodies and secretions. Like Arpad Vass, he says that he tries to focus on the positives. "If there are parasites or the person has dirty teeth or they didn't wipe their nose before they died, you're improving the situation, making them more presentable."

Theo is single. I ask him whether studying to be a mortician has been having a deleterious effect on his love life. He straightens up and looks at me. "I'm short, I'm thin, I'm not rich. I would say my career choice is in fourth place in limiting my effectiveness as a single adult." (It's possible that it helped. Within a year, he would be married.) Next Theo coats the face with what I assume to be some sort of disinfecting lotion, which looks a lot like shaving cream. The reason that it looks a lot like shaving cream, it turns out, is that it is. Theo slides a new blade into a razor. "When you shave a decedent, it's really different."

"I bet."

"The skin isn't able to heal, so you have to be really careful about nicks.

One shave per razor, and then you throw it away." I wonder whether the man, in his dying days, ever stood before a mirror, razor in hand, wondering if it might be his last shave, unaware of the actual last shave that fate had arranged for him.

"Now we're going to set the features," says Theo. He lifts one of the man's eyelids and packs tufts of cotton underneath to fill out the lid the way the man's eyeballs once did. Oddly, the culture I associate most closely with cotton, the Egyptians, did not use their famous Egyptian cotton for plumping out withered eyes. The ancient Egyptians put pearl onions in there.
Onions
. Speaking for myself, if I had to have a small round martini garnish inserted under my eyelids, I would go with olives.

On top of the cotton go a pair of eye caps. "People would find it disturbing to find the eyes open," explains Theo, and then he slides down the lids. In the corner of my viewing screen, my brain displays a special pull-out graphic, an animated close-up of the little spurs in action.
Madre
de dio! Aspiradora!
Come the day, you won't be seeing me in an open casket.

As a feature of the common man's funeral, the open casket is a relatively recent development: around 150 years. According to Mack, it serves several purposes, aside from providing what undertakers call "the memory picture." It reassures the family that, one, their loved one is unequivocally dead and not about to be buried alive, and, two, that the body in the casket is indeed their loved one, and not the stiff from the container beside his. I read in
The Principles and Practice of Embalming
that it came into vogue as a way for embalmers to show off their skills. Mack disagrees, noting that long before embalming became commonplace, corpses on ice inside their caskets were displayed at funerals. (I am inclined to believe Mack, this being a book that includes the passage

"Many of the body tissues also possess some measure of immortality if they can be kept under proper conditions…. Theoretically, it is possible in this way to grow a chicken heart to the size of the world.")

"Did you already go in the nose?" Nicole is holding aloft tiny chrome scissors. Theo says no. She goes in, first to trim the hair, then with the disinfectant. "It gives the decedent some dignity," she says, plunging wadded cotton into and out of his left nostril.

I like the term "decedent." It's as though the man weren't dead, but merely involved in some sort of protracted legal dispute. For evident reasons, mortuary science is awash with euphemisms. "Don't say stiff, corpse, cadaver," scolds
The Principles and Practice of Embalming
. "Say decedent, remains or Mr. Blank. Don't say 'keep.' Say 'maintain preservation.'…"Wrinkles are "acquired facial markings." Decomposed brain that filters down through a damaged skull and bubbles out the nose is "frothy purge."

The last feature to be posed is the mouth, which will hang open if not held shut. Theo is narrating for Nicole, who is using a curved needle and heavy-duty string to suture the jaws together. "The goal is to reenter through the same hole and come in behind the teeth," says Theo. "Now she's coming out one of the nostrils, across the septum, and then she's going to reenter the mouth. There are a variety of ways of closing the mouth," he adds, and then he begins talking about something called a needle injector. I pose my own mouth to resemble the mouth of someone who is quietly horrified, and this works quite well to close Theo's mouth.

The suturing proceeds in silence.

Theo and Nicole step back and regard their work. Mack nods. Mr. Blank is ready for embalming.

Modern embalming makes use of the circulatory system to deliver a liquid preservative to the body's cells to halt autolysis and put decay on hold. Just as blood in the vessels and capillaries once delivered oxygen and nutrients to the cells, now those same vessels, emptied of blood, are delivering embalming fluid. The first people known to attempt arterial embalming[
3]
were a trio of Dutch biologists and anatomists named Swammerdam, Ruysch, and Blanchard, who lived in the late 1600s. The early anatomists were dealing with a chronic shortage of bodies for dissection, and consequently were motivated to come up with ways to preserve the ones they managed to obtain. Blanchard's textbook was the first to cover arterial embalming. He describes opening up an artery, flushing the blood out with water, and pumping in alcohol. I've been to frat parties like that.

Arterial embalming didn't begin to catch on in earnest until the American Civil War. Up until this point, dead U.S. soldiers were buried more or less where they fell. Their families had to send a written request for disinterment and ship a coffin capable of being hermetically sealed to the nearest quartermaster office, whereupon the quartermaster officer would assign a team of men to dig up the remains and deliver them to the family. Often the coffins that the families sent were not hermetically sealed—who knew what "hermetically" meant? Who knows now?—and they soon began to stink and leak. At the urgent pleadings of the beleaguered delivery brigades, the army set about embalming its dead, some 35,000 in all.

One fine day in 1861, a twenty-four-year-old colonel named Elmer Ellsworth was shot and killed as he seized a Confederate flag from atop a hotel, his rank and courage a testimony to the motivating powers of a humiliating first name. The colonel was given a hero's send-off and a first-class embalming at the hands of one Thomas Holmes, the Father of Embalming.
[4]
The public filed past Elmer in his casket, looking every bit the soldier and nothing at all the decomposing body. Embalming received another boost four years later, when Abe Lincoln's embalmed body traveled from Washington to his hometown in Illinois. The train ride amounted to a promotional tour for funerary embalming, for wherever the train stopped, people came to view him, and more than a few must have noted that he looked a whole lot better in his casket than Grandmama had looked in hers. Word spread and the practice grew, like a chicken heart, and soon the whole nation was sending their decedents in to be posed and preserved.

After the war, Holmes set up a business selling his patented embalming fluid, Innominata, to embalmers, but otherwise began to distance himself from the mortuary trade. He opened a drugstore, manufactured root beer, and invested in a health spa, and between the three of them managed to squander his considerable savings. He never married and fathered no children (other than Embalming), but it wouldn't be accurate to say he lived alone. According to Christine Quigley, author of
The
Corpse: A History
, he shared his Brooklyn house with samples of his war-era handiwork: Embalmed bodies were stored in the closets, and heads sat on tables in the living room. Not all that surprisingly, Holmes began to go insane, spending his final years in and out of institutions. At seventy, he was placing ads in mortuary trade journals for a rubber-coated canvas body removal bag that could, he suggested,
double as a
sleeping bag
. Shortly before he died, Holmes is said to have requested that he not be embalmed, though whether this was a function of sanity or insanity was never made clear.

Theo is feeling around on Mr. Blank's neck. "We're in search of the carotid artery," he announces. He cuts a short lengthwise slit in the man's neck. Because no blood flows, it is easy to watch, easy to think of the action as simply something a man does on his job, like cutting roofing material or slicing foam core, rather than what it would more normally be: murder. Now the neck has a secret pocket, and Theo slips his finger into it. After some probing, he finds and raises the artery, which is then severed with a blade. The loose end is pink and rubbery and looks very much like what you blow into to inflate a whoopee cushion.

A cannula is inserted into the artery and connected by a length of tubing to the canister of embalming fluid. Mack starts the pump.

Here is where it all begins to make sense. Within minutes, the man's face looks rejuvenated. The embalming fluid has rehydrated his tissues, filling out his sunken cheeks, his lined skin. His skin is pink now (the embalming fluid contains red coloring), no longer slack and papery. He looks healthy and surprisingly alive. This is why you don't just stick bodies in the refrigerator before an open-casket funeral.

Mack is telling me about a ninety-seven-year-old woman who looked sixty after her embalming. "We had to paint in wrinkles, or the family wouldn't recognize her."

As hale and youthful as our Mr. Blank looks this morning, he will still eventually decompose. Mortuary embalming is designed to keep a cadaver looking fresh and uncadaverous for the funeral service, but not much longer. (Anatomy departments amp up the process by using greater amounts and higher concentrations of formalin; these corpses may remain intact for years, though they take on a kind of pickled horror-movie appearance.) "As soon as the water table comes up, and the coffin gets wet," Mack allows, "you're going to have the same kind of decomposition you would have had if you hadn't done embalming."

Water reverses the chemical reactions of embalming, he says.

Funeral homes sell sealed vaults designed to keep air and water out, but even then, the corpse's prospects for eternal comeliness are iffy. The body may contain bacteria spores, hardy suspended-animation DNA pods, able to withstand extremes of temperature, dryness, and chemical abuse, including that of embalming. Eventually the formaldehyde breaks down, and the coast is clear for the spores to bring forth bacteria.

"Undertakers used to claim embalming was permanent," says Mack. "If it meant making the sale on that family, believe me, that embalmer was going to say anything," agrees Thomas Chambers, of the W. W.

Chambers chain of funeral homes, whose grandfather walked the boundaries of taste when he distributed promotional calendars featuring a nude silhouette of a shapely woman above the mortuary's slogan,

"Beautiful Bodies by Chambers." (The woman was not, as Jessica Mitford seemed to hint in
The American Way of Death
, a cadaver that the mortuary had embalmed; that would have been going too far, even for Grandpa Chambers.)

Embalming fluid companies used to encourage experimentation by sponsoring best-preserved-body contests. The hope was that some undertaker, by craft or serendipity, would figure out the perfect balance of preservatives and hydrators, enabling his trade to preserve a body for years without mummifying it. Contestants were invited to submit photographs of decedents who had held up particularly well, along with a write-up of their formulas and methods. The winning entries and photos would be published in mortuary trade journals, on the pre-Jessica Mitford assumption that no one outside the business ever cracked an issue of
Casket and Sunnyside
.

I asked Mack what made the undertakers back off from their claims of eternal preservation. It was, as it so often is, a lawsuit. "One man took them up on it. He bought a space in a mausoleum and every six months he'd go in with his lunch and open up his mother's casket and visit with her on his lunch hour. One especially wet spring, some moisture got in, and come to find, Mom had grown a beard. She was covered with mold.

He sued, and collected twenty-five thousand dollars from the mortuary.

So they've stopped making that statement." Further discouragement has come from the Federal Trade Commission, whose 1982 Funeral Rule prohibited mortuary professionals from claiming that the coffins they sold provided eternal protection against decay.

And that is embalming. It will make a good-looking corpse of you for your funeral, but it will not keep you from one day dissolving and reeking, from becoming a Halloween ghoul. It is a temporary preservative, like the nitrites in your sausages. Eventually any meat, regardless of what you do to it, will wither and go off.

The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off. They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing. Even cremation, when you get right down to it—as W.E.D. Evans, former Senior Lecturer in Morbid Anatomy at the University of London, did in his 1963 book
The Chemistry of Death
—isn't a pretty event: