Life the Anomaly, Death the Promise. Just Thoughts and Things I Memorized. Close The Door.
Where did this come from? Is there proof?
How did everything occur? From what did life stem?
Maybe there was a great creator, or maybe it was a cosmological fluke. The question as to the origin of the universe and all within it has been around since the beginning of recorded history, and probably then some. Debates occur in your average classroom and in the Supreme Court, and yet… and yet this question, while it has been present in my mind, has never been a bother.
Consider this a tip of the hat to Mrs. Johnson and her column which describes the three consistancies of life. The one I mean to talk about is the end of it, or, depending on how you look at it, the beginning.
It isn’t my concern, atleast for this (final) column, as to why we die and what may or may not happen following the promised event, but the process.
For those in the audience (persons reading or listening) who don’t already know, The summer precluding my junior year in highschool I held a seven week internship at the morgue. Mohnke’s funeral home, to be exact. Don’t get excited, I didn’t perform autopsies or embalmations or anything fancy, but I did get to hang around and watch. As weird as it sounds, I’m afraid working there was a bad idea, because I’m afraid that for the rest of my life I might not be able to observe and partake in anything as thought-provoking.
I remember my first corpse. Mind you, I’d seen dead people before, at funerals and in pictures, of course, but this was different.
I walked into the silver room with my hair in a net and hands in latex gloves that day and inspected from the corner for a little while before it was rolled in. The first thing I noticed was that the wheels of the cart needed greasing badly, and then the tarp. When it was pealed down it wasn’t too terrible, just a naked old lady. Letting my gaze linger I began to notice subtler details; the alabaster white surface of the skin, fragile as tissue paper; the mouth dumbly open, the tongue in the back of the throat; the eyes milky and unseeing, the lids unshut. This elderly woman died alone in her home, and was found by the family almost 24 hours after she became deceased. This information was told to me by my boss in explanation, for when the body was turned over the landscape was shockingly different. The body was maneuvered easily due to the rigor mortis, so there were no flopping limbs to deal with. When it was laid belly-down I could see that the blood had pooled to her underside; gravity had caused this disturbing bruise.
Mr. Mohnke went through the usual routines, all the while talking to me about the changes a body undergoes after dying. “A number of changes take place in the body during the period after death. The body becomes stiff after about three hours because of rigor mortis, before relaxing again after something like thirty hours. The blood drains from capillaries in the skin of the upper surface, and collects in blood vessels in the lower surface. Idle fluids may leak from natural body openings, particularly if decomposition is allowed to occur.”
Usually bandages are applied to the mouth and appendages to keep them in a certain position, and absorbent material is packed around the body openings. I’m sure most people exposed to this column will have uncommonly profound knowledge of the movements of bodily fluids and would-be excrement, so I need not go into reasoning for this.
I learned the stages of decomposition during the preparation of my second corpse. The first stage is autolysis (self digestion.) In short, cells break down the body into elements the cells can eat (does that make sense?) This generates a liquid that gets between the layers of skin and causes the skin to peel off. (I’m sure again, that it can be left to your imagination what would happen if a body was not taken care of, and allowed to decompose if flies are present and start to lay eggs in the openings of the body (eyes, belly button, open wounds, other orifices, etc.))
When we are alive bacteria makes gas from the food we eat. Once we die, however, bacteria instead feeds off the tissue in the body. Gas collects in the corpse because the small intestine collapses very early on. The ballooning first is seen in the abdomen, but in some cases I have seen it in the mouth and genital region, where the most bacteria flock. The tongue will swells and sticks out if decomposition continues without interruption after fourteen days or so. This is why you take your dead to a morgue. Otherwise the inflation will keep happening until something gives way; most of the time the intestines, but on occasion it can be the actual torso, usually involving a ripping noise, I was told.
The third and logest part of decomposition is putrefaction, which begins during the swell stage, but the results aren’t evident until later than the bloat phase is complete. Putrefaction is when the body breaks down, and tissues and bacteria liquefy. The digestive organs, the brain, and lungs disintegrate first because that’s where the most bacteria are. For about three weeks the organs inside are still identifiable, but after that everything inside turns into the consistency and color of chicken soup. The muscles can be eaten by bacteria and in some circumstances the skin is bacteria too, or it just dries out and hardens. Eventually, you guessed it, there’s just the skeleton.
I got way ahead of myself there, sorry. The only hands on, bona fide experience I got was applying make-up (yeah, I am the most qualified beautician in the school.) Prep before the actual application of the make-up is tedious but premeditated and easy to go through once you’ve got the system down. Since I’m Jewish, and I found Jewish Burial Customs much more interesting and romantic, I choose to explain the begininnings of that.
The body is first uncovered and then washed carefully. As all blood must be buried along with the deceased, any open bleeding is stopped. The body is next thoroughly cleaned of dirt, body fluids and solids, and anything else that may be on the skin. The body is purified with water by immersion in a mikvah or by pouring it in a stream, according to custom. The body is then (usually) dried and dressed in traditional burial clothing called tachrichim. Once the body is dressed, the coffin is sealed. Unlike other religions, in Judaism there is no viewing of the body and no "open casket" at the funeral, though the immediate relatives are allowed a visitation prior to the coffin being sealed. Interestingly in Israel caskets are not used at all, excluding military funerals. Ordinarily the body is carried to the grave wrapped in a tallit.
Though in Big Rapids there aren’t too many Jews so most every ‘case’ I ‘dealt’ with went through another process. Before a body can be embalmed the face is cleaned, very cautiously, so as not to tear the skin, and then shaved. The eye sockets are filled with cotton, so the lids don’t look hollow and frighten children, or anyone when I think about it, at open casket funerals and the like. Also aiding are eye caps, to keep them shut. The jaw is sutured to keep it from gaping. Embalming in the simplest sense is the utilization of the circulatory system to pump fluids into the cells to postpone the previously described decomposition process: Mr. Mohnke would use one of the common carotid arteries to distribute the fluids into the body, rehydrating the tissues to keep the face from appearing so gaunt, and adding a little colour to the skin.
I think Jews have got the right idea though. I don’t want to offend anyone (well, maybe subconsciously, I do) by saying that, but I do believe it. Putting the dead in boxes and burying them six feet under disallows them to keep rollin’ in the circle of life, if you know what I mean. I think our cases are meant to be reabsorbed when we’re shuffled. Anyhow, there are other ways of dealing with the bodies, but, not surprisingly, I doubt I could have achieved the prescribed word count if I had instead talked about cremation instead. Now that I’ve written all of this I feel bad but I’m wanting to erase it all, because I keep thinking about how much I’ve left out. To be honest, I don’t think any amount of words could describe the feeling of being in a room with a used and abandoned shell. I don’t know why I tried.
