My First Time

 

 

One of the times that I will always remember, if not cherish, was when I assisted my first embalming.

Several months ago, a woman, youngish in her sixties, had died of natural causes and left her body to the university. She lay nude on a gurney, her arms raised and her legs spread, her head twisted to the side as if to hide her pained expression. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her mouth formed a dark, purple O. Blood had begun to pool under her skin around where she lay, leaving the top of her body pale and her backside an angry, blotchy purple.

her body was in rigor mortis but beginning to soften. Her position inspired the embalmer to joke that she would make a perfect specimen for a gynecologist.

We rolled her to the embalming table and hoisted her onto the cold metal slab. Washing her body down with soap and warm water, we cleaned her body head to toe while massaging the stiffness from her joints. The embalmer clamped his large hands around her skull and twisted her head around so that it faced forward.

After washing her and rinsing her off and relaxing her body so that she was laying relatively normally, the embalmer turned on his machines. He then took a scalpel and opened up her neck, pulling her jugular out with a hook instrument. He then sliced it and stuck a tube into the vein. I was still massaging her legs but stopped to watch as he began pumping fluid into her body. Blood poured out of her vein onto the slab. It was black and putrid looking. I was shocked at how much was coming out and fundamentally disturbed to watch blood flowfrom a corpse. After a moment the color of her body began to change...the blotchy purple disappeared and she turned white, and then as more fluid was pumped in, she began to turn pink. For a few minutes she looked almost happy and alive, like she could just stand up, get dressed, smile and drive herself home.

The embalmer pumped more and more fluid into her until she began to expand. Dirty fluid began to bubble from her mouth and nose as the contents of her stomach were forced out of her mouth. A low groan escaped her gurgling lips. Shocked, I felt cold all over as I stared at her pink bloated face. The embalmer smirked and assured me that it was just air from her stomach escaping her mouth. he said that I was lucky that stomach contents only came out of her mouth, and that often bodies getting this kind of industrial embalming will urinate and defecate due to the pressure of the fluid.

By the time he was finished with her, she had nearly tripled in size! Even her breasts had grown a cup size, but mainly her belly had expanded to shocking proportions. The woman, who originally was only slightly flabby now looked fat and pregnant. We covered her with a sheet and left her there to sit overnight.

I don't know what happened to her after that, but I assume that she is hanging from a harness in the meatlocker now, silent and anonymous in the morbidly frozen crowd.