(no subject)
This is the thing about going to mortuary school: your conversations never match up with anyone. I mean, really, there’s lots of things about going to mortuary school, but that’s one of the main ones. There’s something inherently unsettling to others about what comes up in regular conversation now. My husband walked through the front door the other day, exhausted from an eight-hour shift, pulling his boots off his feet before the door had even clicked shut.
“Hey honey, how was your day?”
And this is coming from someone who knows what I do during my school hours.
“I learned how to protect myself from radiation exposure in corpses that have undergone chemotherapy.” I paused. “I mean, decedents.”
What can you say to that? It’s not him I feel bad for though; the man is stuck with my scholastic proclivities towards the dead. It’s everyone else I manage to accidentally blind-side that I feel bad about.
Mind you, it’s always accidental. To be polite, when someone asks me what I do, I just tell them I’m a student. Presumably they ask because I’ve got to be doing something other than showing up to cocktail hours as the new lieutenant’s wife. It’s bad enough I’m already the odd woman out in this squadron: at 23, I’m years younger than the other wives, who are already comfortably settled into their second and third pregnancies. For them, an exciting night out is a riveting game of Scrabble in the PAX terminal the third Tuesday of every month, especially if there’s free babysitting.
Of course, invariably, “What are you studying?” always follows, and I can hardly get past the “fun” in “funeral services” before they’re frantically searching for any exit sign out of the conversation. Dead bodies aren’t really supposed to be anybody’s “thing.” Well, not anybody normal. And then we begin the awkward fumble to find steady footing a little closer to their daily paradigm. Kids? Not yet. Mortgage? Nope. We settle on some mundane pleasantries about the fact that all our husbands are eventually going to Afghanistan. The fact that we’re avoiding the very clear issue of death in their chosen military profession isn’t lost on me.
Men usually handle it better, though I can see the revulsion masked behind momentary confusion, the clockwork grinding in their skulls: Why? What’s wrong with you? What the hell happened in your childhood that fucked you up so badly you want to play dress-up with dead people?
In America, it didn’t used to be this way. It used to be the dead were laid out on the well-worn dining room tabletop, painstakingly cleaned and dressed by the hands of their closest family members. The body was carefully measured and the pine-box coffin constructed as quickly as possible to those exact specifications. It used to be that America opened its front door wide and let death in to make himself feel at home. When, exactly, did we become so afraid to talk about it? Is it because it means looking our own mortality in the eye? When did the idea of anything other than a quick glance before the casket slams shut become the only acceptable interaction we have with death? And why should I feel embarrassed about what I’m studying?
When I was younger, before attending mortuary school was a concrete reality, I used to imagine I’d feel a sweet burst of satisfaction telling people I was studying to be a funeral director. Now that it’s a reality, I just get this momentary sinking in the pit of my intestines, following by a flash of frustration. It’s a perfectly legit - even honorable - career field, but shit. Here comes the conversation, and the part where you feel like you need an explanation from me, about why such a pretty, polite girl would want to do something so weird.
There are other students in my classes who really are there simply for the satisfaction of surprising people when they say what they’re studying. I hate the Cheshire grin pasted on their faces right before they open their mouths. I hate knowing they’re in it for the wrong reasons. I hate that the shock-value of the career field draws these low-level dregs. Because we’re in the basic classes of the program, nobody’s covered the psychology of grieving for them. The tiny steel casket, infant-sized, displayed on the desk beside them during Chemistry for Embalming, is just an object. There’s no understanding that the majority of their time spent at work is going to be dealing with real, live, heartbroken people, not the silent physical remainders of human life passed.
In fact, it’s not the blood and guts and gore of the job that scare me - the tug of a needle threaded through the thin membrane of an eyelid to keep the eyes shut post-mortem, or the heft of the trocar before aspirating the cavity; the gentle tissue massage of flesh to make sure the embalming fluid is evenly distributed or the way bone falls into grey ash following a rendezvous in the crematory. It’s the stories. Of the families. Of the dead. You learn a lot of things at mortuary school, but I think the skill of coping is learned hands-on. I am desperately afraid that the stories of the people I serve will be too much, too sad, too overwhelming, that I will not be strong enough to carry them through to the final resting place that they deserve.
I guess we’ll just have to see.
“Hey honey, how was your day?”
And this is coming from someone who knows what I do during my school hours.
“I learned how to protect myself from radiation exposure in corpses that have undergone chemotherapy.” I paused. “I mean, decedents.”
What can you say to that? It’s not him I feel bad for though; the man is stuck with my scholastic proclivities towards the dead. It’s everyone else I manage to accidentally blind-side that I feel bad about.
Mind you, it’s always accidental. To be polite, when someone asks me what I do, I just tell them I’m a student. Presumably they ask because I’ve got to be doing something other than showing up to cocktail hours as the new lieutenant’s wife. It’s bad enough I’m already the odd woman out in this squadron: at 23, I’m years younger than the other wives, who are already comfortably settled into their second and third pregnancies. For them, an exciting night out is a riveting game of Scrabble in the PAX terminal the third Tuesday of every month, especially if there’s free babysitting.
Of course, invariably, “What are you studying?” always follows, and I can hardly get past the “fun” in “funeral services” before they’re frantically searching for any exit sign out of the conversation. Dead bodies aren’t really supposed to be anybody’s “thing.” Well, not anybody normal. And then we begin the awkward fumble to find steady footing a little closer to their daily paradigm. Kids? Not yet. Mortgage? Nope. We settle on some mundane pleasantries about the fact that all our husbands are eventually going to Afghanistan. The fact that we’re avoiding the very clear issue of death in their chosen military profession isn’t lost on me.
Men usually handle it better, though I can see the revulsion masked behind momentary confusion, the clockwork grinding in their skulls: Why? What’s wrong with you? What the hell happened in your childhood that fucked you up so badly you want to play dress-up with dead people?
In America, it didn’t used to be this way. It used to be the dead were laid out on the well-worn dining room tabletop, painstakingly cleaned and dressed by the hands of their closest family members. The body was carefully measured and the pine-box coffin constructed as quickly as possible to those exact specifications. It used to be that America opened its front door wide and let death in to make himself feel at home. When, exactly, did we become so afraid to talk about it? Is it because it means looking our own mortality in the eye? When did the idea of anything other than a quick glance before the casket slams shut become the only acceptable interaction we have with death? And why should I feel embarrassed about what I’m studying?
When I was younger, before attending mortuary school was a concrete reality, I used to imagine I’d feel a sweet burst of satisfaction telling people I was studying to be a funeral director. Now that it’s a reality, I just get this momentary sinking in the pit of my intestines, following by a flash of frustration. It’s a perfectly legit - even honorable - career field, but shit. Here comes the conversation, and the part where you feel like you need an explanation from me, about why such a pretty, polite girl would want to do something so weird.
There are other students in my classes who really are there simply for the satisfaction of surprising people when they say what they’re studying. I hate the Cheshire grin pasted on their faces right before they open their mouths. I hate knowing they’re in it for the wrong reasons. I hate that the shock-value of the career field draws these low-level dregs. Because we’re in the basic classes of the program, nobody’s covered the psychology of grieving for them. The tiny steel casket, infant-sized, displayed on the desk beside them during Chemistry for Embalming, is just an object. There’s no understanding that the majority of their time spent at work is going to be dealing with real, live, heartbroken people, not the silent physical remainders of human life passed.
In fact, it’s not the blood and guts and gore of the job that scare me - the tug of a needle threaded through the thin membrane of an eyelid to keep the eyes shut post-mortem, or the heft of the trocar before aspirating the cavity; the gentle tissue massage of flesh to make sure the embalming fluid is evenly distributed or the way bone falls into grey ash following a rendezvous in the crematory. It’s the stories. Of the families. Of the dead. You learn a lot of things at mortuary school, but I think the skill of coping is learned hands-on. I am desperately afraid that the stories of the people I serve will be too much, too sad, too overwhelming, that I will not be strong enough to carry them through to the final resting place that they deserve.
I guess we’ll just have to see.