Better work stories

For the last 2 nights, I have spent time with dead bodies.

A few weeks ago I decided I wanted better work stories.
I currently work in an office. I do invoices. I write emails. I reconcile credit cards.
My recent highlight at work was that I did a stocktake and all the stock was correct and I didn't need to make adjustments.

I wanted better work stories.

So to fast forward through a strange few weeks. But I now have a part-time position as a funeral directors assistant.

I don't know how I managed to talk my way into this, or how it happened so quickly. Or even why I chose this industry.
But here we are.

In the last 48ish hours I have been on call after hours.
I have met my first 2 ...corpses? Bodies? I guess I will work out the terminology as I go...

I have to be honest, corpses are very confronting.
I am "lucky" enough that my first encounters have been minimally "offensive" in that there hasn't been trauma or emergency situations.

My first was a middle-aged gentleman who passed away in the bathroom of a local pub.
The second was an elderly lady who passed away at home in her bathroom.
(bathroom theme? Cool)

The gentleman had partially open eyes and I found it confronting to look him in the face, I ensured his face was covered with any moving of him I had to do.

Rigor Mortis had set in on the elderly woman so her hand was sticking up at an awkward angle.  Fortunately for my unseasoned self, her eyes were closed. I still found her face confronting, but slightly less so.

Doing the on-call work is likely to be the least strenuous part in this industry. We have a police contract and are working on behalf of the coroner during those hours, so technically we are not representing or doing the work of the funeral home at those times.

Essentially the entire job is, pick up the deceased, take them to the mortuary, book them, put them into the fridge. There's no preparation or preservation. The body is in the hands of the coroner.

Despite only being on my second run with the elderly lady, my mentor stood back and let me do the majority (if not all) of the job by myself.
What better way to learn to swim than to be thrown into the deep end, I guess.

It wasn't difficult per se, but my penchant for self-doubt is always strong.
Despite my anxieties, I managed to complete the whole process myself under my mentor's supervision.

I had an interesting weekend on call, but I'm going to write about that in its own post.

The final job I had of the week was an elderly Samoan gentleman.
There were many family members present at this mans home. The family were kind and helpful. There were strong grandsons that lifted and moved his body with ease. 
One aspect that I truly had great respect for, was that the family let me know they had washed him and changed him into clean clothes.

I think a lot of people are scared of not just death itself, but the dead. For completely unexplainable reasons. What threat could a dead person have to you? Have you been watching too many horror movies maybe? Logically we all know nothing is going to "happen". They are dead, there is nothing more they can do. Unless they died of infectious disease, there is no medical risk of being near or touching a dead person.

So it was truly beautiful that this family had been involved once their loved one had passed. They cared for him as they had in life. It was a comforting and pleasant experience for my last job of the shift.

One thing I am quickly learning is that my stiletto nails are deeply impractical for this job.
More specifically it is any time I have to grab the sheet the body is in as a makeshift handle.
Come next week we will be saying goodbye to my much-adored claws.

Maybe slightly irrelevant to anyone reading, but I suppose now is a good time to explain the purpose of this blog.

I want to remember my experiences.
I have a deeply shocking memory and I feel that I will be grateful for a record of this journey in later years.
I want to be able to reflect and hopefully, I will be able to come back and see a progression of skills.

This post has been sitting here unposted for about 4 weeks now. So clearly this venture is going great.