Dear Fellow Elk Grove Citizen:

As all of you know, we lost one of our own with the death of Sgt. Bryan Hall who was killed in Iraq.  CCSD Fire Chief Steve Foster is coordinating a tribute as Sgt. Hall comes home and has asked that we help him get the message out into the community.

The CCSD Fire Department will transport Sgt. Hall on a fire engine from executive airport on Sunday morning. Chief Foster is asking that, we as fellow citizens, line Elk Grove Blvd. to pay tribute to Sgt. Hall. The procession will on the Elk Grove Blvd. near the fire station by 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, April 19th with a 50 vehicle procession. Chief Foster will be also be coordinating the flags that morning.

Please forward this email on to everyone on your email list and let’s do what we do best in Elk Grove, come together to honor one of our own.

Sincerely,
Connie Conley

If you are in Elk Grove or the greater Sacramento area, please join us tomorrow morning at 11:30 on EGB near Elk Grove-Florin Road for the procession to the Elk Grove Mortuary. This family has expressed an interest in having their son’s sacrifice acknowledged publicly and would be comforted by the hero’s welcome that both they and SSG Hall deserve.

Since that time, however, I’ve noticed that I rarely write about my experiences in school.

For instance, before the end of last semester I was granted the opportunity to participate in an embalming at the coroner’s office. Now, while the experience was fascinating and I’ll admit that I very much appreciated and enjoyed the opportunity, it brought to the fore an ethical dilemma:

Where is the line between “acceptable disclosure” and “encroaching on the privacy of the deceased and their family”?

On the one hand, it seems apparent that a discussion of embalming should be limited only by the public’s tolerance for details of something that most find frightening and unsavory. On the other hand, morticians don’t practice in a vacuum. The subjects on which they learn and exercise their talents were at one time real, live people deserving of discretion. Also, lest we forget, the deceased will most often be survived by friends and family members whose pain would only be exacerbated by a lack of discretion regarding the treatment and care of their loved one’s remains.

So, when I was asked to join one of my professors and a few other students at the coroner’s office last semester I found myself on shaky ground blog-wise. Obviously, there are many details that simply should not be shared. Period. In the event of a cataclysmic lack of judgment, each of us were given a packet of information that explicitly stated as much.

However, while discussing specifics was out of the question there were more general facets that I personally find fascinating and believe worth sharing.  I had a grey area.

In the end, I decided so long as I had even the smallest doubt about sharing an experience I would refrain from doing so. After all, when a person dies they are no longer capable of speaking for themselves, defending themselves or voicing a preference. They are completely vulnerable, and the last thing I want to do is exploit that vulnerability. So I censor myself now and will continue to do so in instances where I have doubts.

These doubts are not helped at all by the constant blurring between the “real world” and the atmosphere created at school in which my classmates routinely discuss things that would send most people scurrying for a barf bag. You don’t have to be a super-genius to be aware of the fact that what is normal and mundane inside the funeral industry has the potential to be regarded as macabre and disgusting by people outside of it.

Hopefully that will clear up the questions I’ve been receiving from folks who e-mail me to find out what is going on in school and to ask that I write more about it. I will definitely make an effort to return to my former focus on school – because really? It is a very fascinating field to go into with a lot of very cool stuff the share. I just ask for a little patience in return as I negotiate my way through a potential blogging minefield…

So you can imagine his absolute delight last night when, after he’d shown up looking a little shaggy, the dean of our college gave a local news station full access to our classroom for a story they were doing on jobs in the healthcare sector:

I find myself grateful for the fact that the chief mourners are so young; anyone more sophisticated would be quick to recognize that I’m playing fast and loose with the term “wake”.

“Mom, what’s Bailey’s and why are you drinking it by the gallon?”

“Shut up kids, we’re in mourning.”

Anyway. I was prepared for the Find-A-Box-Small-Enough-To-Bury-A-Small-Rodent-In Thing, the When-Can-I-Get-Another-Hamster Thing and No-Mom-YOU-Pick-It-Up-Because-My-Eight-Year-Old-Brain-Can’t-Quite-Wrap-Itself-Around-Eating-Brussel-Sprouts-Much-Less-Touching-Dead-Things Thing.

What I was not prepared for, however, was the overwhelming show of grief by my eight-year-old, who has spent much of the last year catering to the needs of what had to have been the most spoiled hamster in the continental U.S.

For a solid hour after discovering her lifeless little carcass my son sobbed inconsolably in my lap. His pajamas were sopping, my sweatshirt was soaked and the bedding – if it were to have been wrung out – could have yielded several gallons more of “wet”. This wasn’t just a polite shedding of a few tears… this was the real deal.

So I did what any self-respecting mother would do: I told him to suck it up and stop crying like some damned pansy.

Ok, I kid. I rubbed his back and hugged him and tried to refrain from saying something stupid like “Dude, it’s just a hamster.” But honestly? It is just a hamster and when we brought the critter home I – like a million parents before me – figured that there would come a day when it would die and my son would be allowed to experience death firsthand in a way that didn’t overwhelm him. Kind of like death with training wheels.

After about an hour, the boy stopped crying quite as much and that’s when I told him I was sorry his hamster had died.

“Don’t say that.”

“Don’t say what?”

“That she’s dead. Don’t say that.”

“But she is dead sweetie. That’s the word we use when we describe what happened to Isabelle.”

“Can’t we say she’s asleep?”

“No because that would be lying. Isabelle is dead.”

This of course touched off another round of sobbing. Was this cruel? I thought about it briefly and decided that it was not. Death was real. Eternal sleep was just a bit of brain-play used to avoid that fact. The hamster is dead and my son is better off for having to cope with that reality. Even if by forcing the issue I have now qualified myself as the meanest mother in the history of humankind.

Better Left Off Twitter: The Funeral of a 3-Year-Old Boy

For those who don’t have the time to click the link, the basic gist of the article describes a reporter from the aforementioned paper attending the funeral with Blackberry in hand. Throughout the service and burial the reporter issued “tweets” – updates issued to Twitter users who subscribe to a particular user’s feed – detailing the progression of events down to such details as “people again are sobbing”.

…which brings me to my point. While a funeral director’s job is to coordinate everything in such a way as to achieve a desired level of fluidity – they may, in these instances, also be able to provide a much-desired public service.

Enter the ball peen hammer.

I mean think about it: if you are the parent of a small child who was killed in a tragic accident and you discovered that some jackass reporter was exploiting your public show of grief to further his career, wouldn’t you want to see the FD you hired wrestle the Blackberry from the boor and smash it to pieces in front of everyone?

I sure as hell would.

This question, which really is a very good one, was not done justice by the fact that it came up at 8:30PM - roughly half an hour after which all of us had begun to drool on ourselves.

“Well?”

Blank stares.

“Not really, right? Joe Public can call a florist, talk to clergy, get stuff, right? Check costco’s website, you can buy a casket online. They can dress up their dead, put ‘em in a casket. Throw a funeral. So what does the public need from us that they can’t get for themselves?”

Blank stares.

At this point the instructor questions aloud our ability to find our way home at night much less identify and properly dispose of a dead human being.

“How about an EDRS number? They probably won’t have that. They’ll need us to file a death certificate for them. What else?”

Confused murmuring from the class.

“How about embalming? Your average person isn’t going to know how to embalm. So they’ll need us to do that if they want it. Anything else?”

Finally, someone in the back of the class threw out the word cremation, to which the instructor responded:

“Oh please, anyone can build a fire.”

Among last night’s topics:

- How does one get a bale’s worth of hay in one’s hair in the course of an automobile accident? And how can only the top half of someone’s head become completely caved in while the rest of the body is pristine? (A conundrum faced by the apprentice embalmer I sit next to)

- Pathological issues that cause the male scrotum to swell over 200 times its original size and what can be done to drain and embalm said organ.

- How to move 350 pounds of dead woman when you are an 85 pound gal armed only with a gurney and a dream.

Stay tuned. I have class again on Thursday.

Last night my grandfather, one of my aunts and I sat with her until way too late in the evening. Someone, a member of the hospice staff I imagine, had dimmed the lights so the room had taken on a warmish glow that for some strange reason reminded me of a lit-up Christmas tree. Another someone, my aunt I think, had suggested opening the french doors next to my grandmother’s bed. It had been a wonderful idea; yesterday there had been a break in the heat and the overcast skies blew over us in dramatic shades of grey, blue, and black as mild breezes wafted in with a light rain.

The three of us sat with my grandmother and talked for several hours. There is no way I can convey how incredible this was. For the sake of not kicking a man when he’s down I will simply posit here that over the years my grandfather has become rather, uh, pointed in his criticism of his children, grandchildren, neighbors, fellow Californians, the Modesto city council, NASA, Democrats, Muslims, Sikhs, Mexicans, and just about anybody who is not a registered Republican over the age of sixty. So being able to sit with him last night and simply enjoy his company was somewhat of a new experience and one that both my aunt and I took great pleasure in.

…but yeah, I will concede here that the Fox news channel was on throughout the evening and I was forced to sit through an episode of The O’Reilly Factor and Hannity & Colmes before my aunt and I succeeded in permanently muting the television when my grandfather turned his back.

For her part my grandmother lay hammocked between my aunt and my grandfather, who each held one of her hands under a light sheet. I sat on a roll away bed provided by the hospice in case someone needed a little shut eye during the vigil. My grandmother’s breathing had become quick, shallow, and labored. She was working far too hard to get air. She was changing colors. Her eyes had literally fogged over. It had been days since she had responded to anything in a meaningful way.

The slack-jawed struggle for breath and deadened eyes were reminiscent of the death of my other maternal grandmother, the biological one who had been divorced from my grandfather for over forty years at the time of her death in 1995. I had been with her too when she died and the commonality caused me to revisit a question I’d had then: When someone has reached a point at which their entire body has abandoned the extremities and most major organs in favor of simply keeping the lungs inflated, what happens to their ability to perceive their current situation? Are they aware of what is going on? Can they hear us? Is our presence a comfort to them? Can they feel pain? Are the scared? If so, how can we ease their pain and reassure them?
I’m embarrassed to admit now that curiosity got a good finger-hold in me throughout the night and that I ended up seizing every opportunity I could to ask the doctor about the physical changes my grandmother was enduring. At one point I think he sensed that I don’t freak easily and he became more candid. He lifted the sheet at the end of the bed to reveal her legs and feet.
“See that discoloration? Circulation has nearly ceased. That will get worse as her body continues to shut down.” He lifted a foot gently and pointed to blotches of brown under the legs. “Blood is pooling there right now. That will get worse after she expires.” The doctor then put her foot back onto the bed and tucked it gently into the sheets. I continued to ask questions; was she oxygen starved and is it possible she could be panicking? Her eyes stopped blinking hours prior and were drying rapidly, should we do something about that? She was sweating profusely but her temperature is plummeting, was this normal? Why did it happen? She had Alzheimer’s, did he think she was capable of comprehending anything we had been talking to her about? Was she cognizant of anything at all?

To his credit, the doctor answered each question patiently and with sensitivity to the fact that I didn’t want my aunt or grandfather to hear. Whenever my aunt or grandfather returned to the room during my ghastly interrogations, the doctor would simply switch the subject, give my grandmother a pat on the legs, and focus on my grandfather. He was intuitive to a fault.

Still, he couldn’t answer the most pressing questions I had because nobody can. Like, when a person reaches this point are they still alive in the spiritual sense of the word? What happens to their essence, the spark that individuates each of us from one another? Is it still there or has it fled? Is their soul trapped within their body? Has it been released? Does the soul really exist? Is the glint that animates each of us a simple cosmic mishap or part of a divine plan? Where is the thing that made her, her? Has she been reunited with God?

Why am I in a state of perpetual spiritual crisis and why do I project that onto others? Somebody please shut me up. I’m so sick of my own crap.

“I dunno. The map says something like five miles out or blah, blah, blah.”

“Five miles or blah, blah, blah? I’ve been driving forever. Where is this place, Death Valley?”

“Lemme check.”

“Yeah, check to see if it’s in Death Valley because that’s where we’re headed.”

“Just keep driving and let me check the map.”

My brother, one of my sisters and I were all headed due east and had been for quite some time. One of my other sisters and her husband were following behind in their car and I could see twin expressions of consternation in my rearview mirror as they contemplated the same question I was at that moment; Where the hell are we going?

We were looking for Euclid Avenue and driving through some of the worst shit holes in the Central Valley to find it. Not that “shit hole” really differentiates between where we were and a good chunk of the rest of the Central Valley, but trust me… these neighborhoods were especially nasty. I never thought I would see strip malls that a check cashing place would have been too good for.

Anyway.

We were looking for the turn off to the hospice my grandmother was dying in (still is in fact. No, she’s not gone yet. Did you know that once an Alzheimer’s patient starts refusing to eat or drink any more it can take them up to two weeks to starve to death? I didn’t. I figured once she started refusing water she would pass within days if not hours and that, would mercifully be that. No dice. On top of the minor indignities of chronic confusion, getting lost in her own home and forgetting how to operate a light switch my grandmother gets to experience gut-wrenching hunger pangs and severe dehydration as her organs fail one by one in a total system shut down that is undoubtedly agonizing to experience and can take up to ten to fourteen days. That’s what is happening right now. My grandmother is still alive, but barely, and suffering and just thinking about it makes me wonder why chimps and gorillas are considered “lesser” primates. I mean hell people, even Koko would have had the good sense to give doctors the finger and pull the plug by now. Us? The ones who have mastered verbal communication and can drive a car? We let our loved ones suffer horribly until the end and then pat ourselves on the back for picking out an urn in their favorite color.)

“There it is!” My brother threw his arm across me and pointed to a crumbling side road as we flew past doing about seventy-five.

Shit. I pulled my truck around. My sister and brother-in-law were still behind me wondering why they had given me the map in the first place. We had not spent five seconds on Euclid before the conversation in our vehicle went to hell in the proverbial hand basket.

“What’s this place called?” My sister asked from the back. “Alexander Cohen? Co-HEN? Co-HUN? What kind of name is that?”

“Cohen, like the ‘h’ is a ‘w’. It’s Jewish I believe.”

“There are Jews in Modesto?”

“No Annie, Modesto has no Jews because they’re all in the government and Hollywood. They just built synagogues to give the rednecks a place to spraypaint swastikas.”

“Whatever Steph.” My sister said. Supposedly she loves me but it wouldn’t be a horribly big surprise if she were secretly plotting to kill me for being such a sarcastic bitch to her. Like now. “Whatever Mr. Co-WEN was, his hospice house was on the left back there.”

Shit. Pull the truck around again. That’s when we came face to face with the single largest senior complex I ever hope to see in this lifetime. Several buildings. Walkways. Pools. Apartments. A shuttle was picking a bunch of people up for a trip to a local Indian casino. It was like a geriatric Mecca.

“Ok…” My brother said and started riffing through a mess of papers. “We’re supposed to go to the Alexander Cohen House. Not Samaritan Village.”

“Alright. So Alexander Cohen House is the hospice building?” I pulled through the gate and futilely started looking for signs pointing the way. It had occurred to me that putting up an arrow pointing to the hospice would be like building a glue factory next to Churchill Downs. “I have no idea where we’re going.”

“Yeah, let’s ask for directions.” My sister piped up helpfully from the back. “There’s someone. Right there. Stop.”

“Him?” I looked at a guy that my sister was pointing at. He was barely upright and was badly contorted. “Holy crap he’s convulsing. Quick. Matt. Get out and help him.”

“He’s just practicing his golf swing. See? He’s holding a club.”

“Are you sure? It looks like he’s trying to commit suicide with it. Maybe we should ask him if he wants a ride to the Alexander Cohen House.” I said, but my brother had already jumped out of the vehicle and was talking to the man in question. This guy seriously looked like he could have voted for Abraham Lincoln. After a short conversation my brother came bounding back and leapt into the truck.

“He says it’s just over there.” He pointed and I drove ‘over there’ where we found the place within fifteen seconds. “Check it out, employee of the month gets their own parking space.”

“Huh. Yeah. I wonder what you have to do to become employee of the month at a hospice.”

“You know what Employee of the Month’s car needs?”

“What?”

“An ‘I heart Kevorkian’ sticker.”

“Very nice. Oh hey! There’s the parking spot for ‘Patient of the Month’”

“Really? Where?”

“Right there.”

“How can you tell?”

“There’s a hearse. Duh.”

“You’re an asshole.”

I wish I could say that my brother and I make these jokes because we’re nervous and uncomfortable and that we really don’t find anything funny about death at all but that would be a lie. When this type of shit happens my brother and I crack each other up like a couple of stoners watching the carpet grow. We exhaust ourselves laughing because we’re insensitive, callous, and probably a lot of other adjectives that have previously only been applied to people like Stalin and Idi Amin.

I have no idea why. I mean, I really do love my grandmother. I hate seeing her in pain. I don’t find dying funny at all. I don’t like to see her or anybody suffer. I especially don’t like seeing my grandfather’s heart is broken into a million pieces several times a day when my grandmother wakes up just long enough to fix him with a blank expression that betrays not a hint of recognition. I don’t think it’s funny at all to watch my grandfather cry and cry because his heart is weighted with regret about his chronic infidelity or the fact that the only opportunity he has now to make it up to my grandmother involves changing adult diapers and sponging her mouth while we all hold our breath and hope she passes peacefully. It’s not funny in the least. In fact, it’s really fucking horrible.

Yet for some reason my brother and I laughed like a couple of jackasses anyway. At least until we got inside. That’s when we shut up because even though we are a couple of sick idiots who haven’t mastered the art of “grieving appropriately” we aren’t completely stupid.

***You have been warned.***

***So don’t bitch.***

Last Friday was our class field trip to Tupper Hall, home of the UC Davis donated bodies program. When we arrived we were greeted by the lovely and scary-smart Charlotte (who happens to be acquainted with Travis) who then facilitated a meet and greet of the program’s current “residents”.

Ok, so first off? I will never, ever, be able to eat meat again. Once you see that we are only so much animated steak the thought of sitting down and eating one loses its appeal. It’s not that I found the bodies disgusting or disturbing. It’s just that several of them had been parted-out for distribution to various programs and seeing people reduced to what you find behind the counter in a butcher shop makes eating meat… well, I’m just never eating meat again.

At any rate, Charlotte brought out a whole cadaver that had been dissected by medical students. I have to admit a slight squeamishness while she unzipped the body bag, but happily it went away as soon as we came face to face with the person. After a brief introduction, we were allowed to to examine the heart, lungs, and brain, and by “examine” I mean we were given gloves as these organs were passed around for intimate exploration.

The mess of tendons, muscle and bones is so complex, yet it is wholly contained in a compact network beneath the skin that can walk, talk, think and breathe. It was incredible.

In addition to the whole cadaver, we were also given permission to examine the pro sections of various people that lay on steel tables about the lab. There were torsos, heads, arms, and various other body parts that had been neatly sawed to pieces and packaged for delivery to other departments. It was strange to see a torso, headless and divided into two pieces, with tattoos all over the arms. It was easy to see the body parts as simple teaching tools headed off to dissection labs. The tattoos made it more personal. They were a reminder that this was once somebody’s son, brother, or maybe a husband.

In two other bags were the divided parts of a single head that had been sawed lengthwise. Another bag held an entire head, which sat on the table in a position that caused the skin on the back of it to wrinkle up toward the scalp.

On one table sat an intact head with a portion of the shoulders. It had been sawed off just above the breastbone and lay face up. Or what I assume was face up, since someone had covered the face with a cloth prior to wrapping it in plastic.

This is the part where my readers who have made it this far will throw up a red flag and say: Alright, I give up, you’re a freak!

Have I mentioned that I am scared of death? I’m terrified of it. The whole “not breathing” part just freaks me out. I keep picturing myself being declared dead, and I’m not breathing, and I’m in agony because I’m dead and not breathing and all I really want to do is breathe. But I’m dead, so now I’m sentenced to an eternity of agony because I can’t breathe! And, I am also prone to debilitating anxiety attacks! So you can imagine how this fear of dying and not being able to breathe provides fodder for my mind to turn over and over! My poor husband!

Anyway, so all of us are in this room and there are all these parts of bodies, and an entire body in the middle, skeletons, and on and on, and everything is dead. As in not breathing.

So I’m wandering about and I find myself talking to the bodies. But not out loud, because you know, that would be silly. So I’m talking to them inside my head and I asking them things like Where are you now? Where is what made you “you” now? Does being dead hurt? Are you feeling as peaceful as you look? Did you just wink out or is there a soul that persists after physical death?

Needless to say, none of the bodies answered me. I mean, I may be weird but I’m not crazy.