When The Mortician Cried

For someone who truly believes that life goes on for mortals after the death of the physical body I do not handle death well. I am always devastated when someone I know passes on. Oddly enough, I do not fear making the transition to the other side for myself so much as I fear the mostly terrible ways that bring on the transition. There are few calm and kind ways to release from the physical body and the ways that humans deal with what we leave behind are horrifying to say the least. In an attempt to make peace with the rituals that are used in this world to (supposedly) care for the dead I have watched a multitude of videos that explain the processes and I can tell you right now that they haven’t helped me one bit. They only keep me awake at night feeling a morbid dread of having to leave here with the burden of how I might rest in peace left to my children. Every aspect of after life care seems traumatic and invasive and violent. Maybe I won’t care at all what happens to my physical body once I pass on, but I will tell you that what I know about the spirit being out of the body makes me reluctant to believe that. I assume that I will get over the trauma of what I might see happening to my remains and my family from above it but I cannot truly be sure of that.

They say that people used to be terrified of being buried alive and it makes sense when you see stories about near death experiences and people waking up in the morgue and at the funeral home. I am convinced that for my own peace of mind and for the peace of mind of my children the best way to manage what remains of me once I go to the other side would be to bury me in a mass grave with other people three or four days after passing on to make sure that I truly have passed. Just leave the body as it is, wrap it in a sheet and allow nature to reclaim it naturally with no scalpels, fire, chemicals, or unnatural attempts to make death look pretty. It isn’t.

I have been watching videos made by a mortician who truly does her absolute best to take the fear and dread of death to a manageable level but for every video that she makes there are ten or more videos describing vile and unscrupulous morticians who have done the unspeakable to people who were entrusted to their care by the loved ones of the deceased. Who to trust in the funeral business is getting harder and harder to figure out now.

When I was a teenager, my boyfriend Mike, had an older brother who was married to a woman whose father was a mortician. One day Mike managed to muster up the courage to ask her father if he could see how he took care of the deceased. Surprisingly, he was allowed to witness the process. Mike never told me or anyone else that he was going to do this prior to going, but after he went, he came straight over to my house to see me. He was visibly shaken and unable to talk about it at first but after a few minutes of pacing the floor and wringing his hands he told me where he had been. I don’t know how much help I was to him, fifteen year old kid that I was, but I knew that he must have placed a high level of faith and trust in me for me to be the person that he chose to come to first to try to unburden himself. He had difficulty describing the processes that he saw but after a few minutes he began to be less shaky. He did say that he didn’t want any of that done to him when he dies. His last words about it were, “Poor old man.” as he shook his head with a grieved and pained look on his face.

This was a hell of a lot for a sixteen year old boy to process, but I wonder if seeing something like this might put the fear of god into the people who are daily making decisions that result in the deaths of many thousands of people everyday in this world. The mortician whose videos I have been watching told the story of how she chose that profession for herself. Her father was a mortician so she grew up in the business of death. She described how her father was on call 24 hours a day in the job being called at all hours of the day and night to pick up the deceased from different places. She also said that her father would cry every time that the body was that of a child.

Every week day I watch a program on the Democracy Now, YouTube channel called The War and Peace Report. The program always begins with a tally of the deaths that have occurred over the last 24 hours in whatever country they are reporting on with an emphasis of how many children have died that day. Many of these children have been shot, or have died as a result of not being able to receive proper medical care, or have died from starvation. As terrible as it is to hear that this is happening in a war zone it is just as terrible to know that these things are happening in countries that are not at war. Mass shootings, domestic violence, starvation due to a lack of adequate resources to sustain life in far too many families, inadequate or nonexistent healthcare, and just pure apathy toward the poor in this world insures that every day will bring with it the loss of more human beings who are not deserving of such a fate. A great many of the victims will be children. If their lives are not lost on this particular day their lives may be emotionally destroyed by the loss of their parents. Would it make a difference if those whose policies and decisions cause far too many of these problems had to go out in the middle of the night to pick up the bodies of these casualties and then clean them up and try to make them look like a tragedy did not happen to them and try to make them look like they are just peacefully sleeping? If a mortician who deals with the disposition of death services every single day is moved to tears every time he sees a child victim of death I would like to believe that people having to look at the cold hard reality of what uncaring and selfish decisions made in this life have brought us to might help them see their actions differently.

Taking responsibility for the consequences of our own actions is the one true verification that we have grown up and not just grown older. Our world is not in a constant state of turmoil worldwide by accident. It is by ignorant and negligent design. When the mortician cries, we are no longer human if we aren’t crying, too.