Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Black Eyes and Dead Guys

Back in college, I worked as a temp on the summer breaks. I had some pretty interesting assignments, one of which placed me at a cemetery for most of the summer before my junior year. I learned about the business side of death and burials, and acquired a dark sense of humor about it all. PLEASE STOP READING IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED. Thank you, Mgmt.

My boss was an overweight woman in her 30s who wore long fake fingernails usually painted a garish neon orange. Her hair was caught in scrunchies or hair clips--the kind with a satin bouffant attached. She looked older than her age and her off-the-phone voice was a quick-witted nasal cackle. She smoked cigarettes and drank coffee as though she were an air traffic controller in a past life. She was very kind if you were on her good side; you were at the mercy of her temper if you were not. You would probably dismiss her as poor white trash, and well, you might be half right.

My parents, who know everyone for six counties, knew, or knew of, her family; they were also prominent local business owners. She managed to take up with some guy from the projects, who held her family hostage and kidnapped her (astute readers from "back home" will probably be able to figure out who I'm talking about). This really has nothing to do with anything other than to give you some background color and for me to do some pointless reminiscing about my youth.

So, anyway, my job entailed researching cemetery records...It seems that friends and loved ones would turn up to plant somebody, but there would already be someone taking a dirt nap in that spot, so my job was to go through every contract the cemetery had on record back to the 1920s and determine whether the client was now living in a pine condo in the marble city, if he'd bought any adjacent units for their spouse and progeny, and check whether those folks were resident. And I learned that, in the 20s, death was not the great equalizer. Old cemetery contracts do, in fact, prohibit you from transferring plots to colored folk or members of the Tribe. This is, of course, an unenforceable term of the contract today. I often wondered if there were high-velocity gyrations in the tombs because there were negroes! and Jews! decomposing nearby.

There was this sort of geeky guy who worked in sales at the cemetery. Of course he sold plots--hell, the graveyard practically gave those away--but the real money was in selling caskets and vaults. For instance, they might advertise a buy one-get one free special on plots and perpetual care contracts (yes, I'm being completely serious), but the real goal was to get you in there to pick out the accoutrements of death. One day, I asked about why you had to have a vault. The answer is because bodies drip fluids and you can't have embalming fluid and everything else leeching into the water table. Your skin is actually the first thing to decompose, so your body fluids drain to your underside, out onto that pillow you lay on, down into a drip pan right under that (it's pretty gross...I wouldn't go checking this out at your next wake), and so on.

Now, five paragraphs later, you're probably wondering why I'm telling you all this.

You'll remember that, after my surgery, my eyes were all bruised and puffy. When I came back to the office, a lady I work with told me about how she had jaw surgery and her eyes were bruised as well, and we wondered why it was always the eyes that had bruises.

If you know the answer from what I've told you, congratulations, you're much smarter than I am.

I finally got around to asking Doc about this last week when I was in his office and then I immediately felt stupid. The skin around your eyes is very thin. The blood from an operation has to drain somewhere, so it's going to go where there's the least resistance, so gravity pulls it down from someplace high and slanted, like your nose, and then pools around the relatively empty space around your eyes. The same thing happens when you snuff it--your body fluids, no longer actively pumping around, pool on your underside (which is why dead people are pale).

One last thing about the cemetery before I go: the cemetery would market itself by sending brochures and offers like the buy-one-get-one-free plots to every house on a block where someone had just died with a note saying that if you'd received this notice during a time of grieving, they were deeply sorry for your loss. As a matter of professional courtesy, if you've read this blog post during a time of grieving, I'm very sorry for your loss.

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