I was 25 years old and by that point had been to maybe one open-casket funeral, bringing the number of times I had been in a room with a dead body to a grand total of, let’s see here… one.
Maybe I was lucky or maybe I was sheltered, I don’t know. As much as death is a part of life it was something pretty foreign, at least to me. It wasn’t like I didn’t understand the concept, I just didn’t have much experience with death outside of stepping on a spider or roasting an ant with a magnifying glass, which, admittedly, was not the same thing. And, in my defense, I haven’t roasted an ant since I was like 9.
But that’s where I found myself — in unfamiliar territory. Namely, in a room by myself, with a dead body.
Check Condition
Calls to check on people are a dime a dozen. Distant relatives, coworkers, or delivery drivers call all the time to have us check on people who don’t answer their phone, the door, or show up for work. Most of the time people don’t hear from someone is because that someone just wants to be left alone. Other times, it’s because they’re dead. Either way the task of getting to the bottom of it falls on our shoulders.
Why people call us to check on people in the middle of the night is beyond me. If you’ve been so worried for so long, why not call at, say 9:00 a.m., as opposed to midnight? It doesn’t make any sense, but I digress.
Into The Trailer
Anyway, the call came in on the midnight shift and it was my route so off I went. The address was in a fairly large trailer park — one that is probably exactly as you’d imagine a trailer park at midnight in New England would look like. Surrounded by woods, a crumbling, partially paved road looped through the park that was dotted by aluminum sided trailers from the 60’s and 70’s. The lots were small, cluttered with an assortment of rusted out spare car parts (some more car than parts), lawn furniture, beer cans, and overgrown patches of crabgrass.
The 50-something year old woman lived alone and mail had piled up, prompting the call. The shift sergeant and I arrived together and knocked. We gave it a couple minutes and then tried the door. Inside the trailer was laid out like most mobile homes with a narrow hallway running down one end from the kitchen, past a bathroom, to the master suite. There was so much clutter and junk and trash that it was hard to get around. Climbing over and around the most random objects we made our way down the hall. When we got to the door at the end we heard a faint humming or whirring noise coming from behind the bedroom door.
The Noise
We called out to the cluttered emptiness that it was the police, but got no response. Standing at the door we stopped and listened. The sound was a steady hum, almost like a loud fan or a vacuum cleaner. I gently pushed the door open and, though there was some resistance, it gave way scraping along the shag carpet as I applied more and more pressure. Lying among years of clutter was a gray-haired woman, clad in a long cotton nightgown.
She lay face up with her head turned to one side, eyes wide open, staring into space. One arm was up by her head, the other down by her side. At her feet was the source of the noise — a hair dryer running on full blast. She had been dead for a couple of days, apparently kicking the bucket mid-hairdo. The hair dryer had fallen at her feet, coming to rest so that the hot air was directed at one of her feet, accelerating the decomposition process for that single appendage. The one foot was jet black, like it had been dipped in ink.
She’s Dead, Or Is She?
I stood by her feet a bit perplexed, looking down at the form of a person that just didn’t seem real. She looked more mannequin-like than anything. It was just weird.
My sergeant, who had been a cop forever and had a gigantic mustache to prove it, leaned in from behind me and looked over my shoulder. He just let out a single matter of fact, “Heh,” and then a, “Whelp, she’s dead. See ya, kid.” He turned on his heels and was out the door, off to go do whatever salty midnight sergeants do.
Not knowing what else to do, I bent down and turned off the hair dryer, leaving me and the dead body in an uncomfortable silence. I updated Dispatch and requested the medical examiner and then the waiting game started. It was going to be a while. For the next two and a half hours I stood in awkward silence, occasionally looking around the room I noticed a handheld mirror with a line of white powder on it resting on the nightstand, and then, of course, the endless clutter. At times my mind wandered, but suddenly snapped back as some slight movement had caught my eye. Did she move? I couldn’t be sure. I stared down at her, staying extra still and extra quiet so she wouldn’t think I was looking. But as long as I stood still and stared at her I saw no such movement. I could have sworn…
Then And Now
This went on for the duration of my stay in that trailer, both my mind and my eyes playing tricks on me. When the medical examiner finally showed up I acted as if I had seen hundreds of bodies, shrugging off the past several hours like I had been waiting at the DMV. And then I had to touch it — the body — in order to help the M.E. get it into the bag and zipper it up. You never realize how warm a live human body actually is until you touch a dead one. You wouldn’t think it’s that much different, but oh, let me tell you, it’s a lot different. It was weird and unsettling, I’m not going to lie.
And now, 20 years and hundreds of actual bodies later, it’s a whole lot more normal in an abnormal kind of way. You get used to it. And though all the ones between then and now have in a way blurred together, you never forget your first.
__________________________
- Do you remember your first dead body?
- What was that experience like for you?
- What’s it like now?
- What advice would you give the old you if you could?
__________________________
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