The Final Care Workers
The last responders who give dignity to the dead
This Thursday, I’ll share highlights from your comments on “What Can You Pour from an Empty Cup.” This week I want to talk about the final kind of care work we can receive from others.
The coronavirus pandemic has turned our attention to places and people we usually overlooked. (I wrote a piece on this theme for Comment). It’s been a time where it’s much clearer how much we all depend on care work, waged or unwaged. Care for the elderly, care for children, care for workers—care work is what lubricates the gears of our society. And it’s easy to ignore until, suddenly, it’s not there when you need it.
One form of care work has stood out in sharper relief to me: care for the dead. A few years ago, I read Judy Melinek’s memoir of her time as a NYC medical examiner, Working Stiff. I was caught off guard by her chapter on working in the emergency morgues on 9/11 to reconstruct and identify victims. I started crying on the subway.
The pandemic has made care for the dead newsworthy again, and I’m struck by the tenderness inherent to the work. I can’t forget the detail from one early article about the refrigerated morgue trucks in NYC that mentioned that one of the workers bought flowers so she could lay a bright, yellow bloom on each body bag.
Washingtonian had a feature on D.C.’s covid morgue, which has done its work in silence and secrecy:
Almost no one in the city will have any idea the Covid morgue exists. The work is carried out in strict secrecy; staffers are instructed not to disclose the site’s location or tell anyone what takes place there, not even their own family members. A mistake—such as a body being released to the wrong family—would be humiliating for the mayor and the city. News footage of workers moving the dead could upset victims’ families, opening new wounds, or lure gawkers to the site. As much as anything else, though, the silence reflects the professional ethos of those who perform this work for a living. While they’re dispatched to every hurricane and school shooting, their efforts take place entirely behind the scenes. They are the first responders you never see.
“There’s not going to be a parade for you guys,” Harvin tells each new set of workers to arrive at the Covid morgue. “You’re not going to get discounts or big [thank-you] signs. The work we do, we do in silence. Not even the family members of the victims will know what we do. There’s a pride in that. There’s a silent pride in that,” he says. “You’re taking care of someone’s grandmother, grandfather, husband, daughter, son, and that’s a higher calling.” When it’s all over, they’ll return to their previous jobs or assignments and no one will ever know what they’ve done here.
A few years ago, I had to think a little more concretely about what I wanted done if I passed away (I’m fine now). As much as I appreciated the work of morticians, I wanted to be cared for by my husband. I’d read about home funerals and more traditional approaches to preparing a body for burial.
For the most part, washing and dressing a body for burial has become professionalized. It’s an unusual and countercultural choice to do what people have done for most of history—to have the last hands to handle you belong to someone who knew you.
Have you ever taken on this form of care work, tending to a loved one after death?
Have you made choices about who you want to care for you?
On a different covid-related topic, I’ve written a piece for The Week on the way our pandemic response has focused too much on individual choice, and not enough on systemic solutions.
When my life partner died, it was just before midnight. For the past several days, family and friends had visited her, knowing she was near the end (from ovarian cancer, that sneaky thing.)
I called the hospice, and the nurse on duty said she'd drive up from the city. After she examined Marge and pronounced the time of death (into the next date, by the time she arrived), she said she'd phone the funeral home to come pick up the body. My daughter and I said "No, absolutely not! We want to keep her here till we're ready for the funeral home to take her."
The nurse insisted that legally that was not permitted, but of course I stood her down because I knew it was indeed, permitted. It turned out that the nurse had only dealt with deaths in the hospital, not in the home.
I talked with the mortuary we had prearranged long before, through our state's branch of the Memorial Society that limits costs and last-minute decisions. (https://memorialsocietyofgeorgia.org/) Of course it was fine; they'd wait for me to call before they came to get the body. I've often wondered, since that night, how many people are bullied into letting the body of a loved one be taken away because an "expert" said it had to be that way.
Our Episcopal priest brought us hugs and prayers, and holy water and sprigs of evergreen with which she sprinkled and blessed Marge's body. All day long, people came to say goodbye and to place something on Marge's body that symbolized their appreciation for her. Eventually her face and heart and hands were completely covered.
This took all day. It was very slow...ceremonial...and it felt exactly right.
It wasn't till sunset that it felt like time to let her body go. A close friend brought her big frame drum and two more drums for us. As the two men from the mortuary tenderly lifted Marge's body onto their stretcher, my friend and daughter and I began to drum, in a slow, steady rhythm that the drums themselves seemed to choose.
And so, crying, we drummed her out as the sun began to drop below the hills. My feeling was then, and remains unchanged, that I couldn't have borne to let her body go without the drumming. In days after, other people drummed in her memory. She was well and deeply loved.
I have long wanted the most environmentally friendly final arrangements possible: a plain, untreated pine box, for example (rented, ideally, although I don't know if you can be buried without a coffin).
I have recently learned from Caitlin Doughty's YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/OrderoftheGoodDeath that one can opt out of embalming, which is terrible for the environment, and creates an overall unnatural final experience. I do understand that things need to move more quickly when one is not using embalming fluid, and I'm ok with that. I learn a great deal from Caitlin.
I don't want death to be this mysterious, unspoken-of, far-away, scary thing. I want to know about it, be part of it. To not cast away the dead to be someone else's "problem". I love Catherine's story above as it reflects this understanding. It actually reminds me of my ideal birth, which it took me four babies to get - I didn't want anyone telling me when to push or counting in my face while I did. My body knew when to push. I didn't even have to consciously choose it. Two pushes was all it took to deliver him this way. I like the parallels here between lower-intervention birth and lower-intervention death.
Thank you for writing about this, and for hosting the conversation. <3