Gurneys and Pantry Shelves
Date: May 4th, 2004 6:44:13 am - Subscribe
When I was a small kid my mother used to help lay-out dead bodies in a hospital morgue. She'd point out specimen jars containing an assortment of preserved body parts, organs and fetuses as inanely as if she were showing me a selection of conserves on a pantry shelf.
Playing hide-and-seek amongst white, sheet-draped, steel gurneys and memory games with toe-tags, (trying to match up unidentified John and Jane Doe's), were familiar childhood games.
During the three years I frequented the morgue with my mother, there had been only one time when I'd been afraid. A new body had been wheeled in, a silvery haired man aged anywhere from 50 - 100, when I was a kid there was no real concept of 'age', people were either young or old.
The man lay on his back, his eyes were still open, looking very much like the fog-glazed eyes of a dead fish. I recall being slightly surprised at a couple of pink blotches that marked his cheeks, the patches looked like blusher hurriedly applied by an amateur. Most bodies I witnessed had been dead for at least an hour and their complexion had turned a grey/white pallor. It wasn't often I saw a 'fresh' one.
I recall putting two fingers into my mouth and wetting them with saliva, I reached over to wipe at the man's face, thinking that perhaps, the pinkish blotches would wash off. To my horror, as I leant over the man's chest, a sudden gush of air expelled from his lungs and one arm involuntarily shot up in the air, almost knocking me off my feet.
I ran to the other side of the room, colliding into my mother who was checking a toe-tag.
"He's alive!" I hollered.
To this day I can still remember the sound of my mother's laughter, chiming against stainless steel, as she lifted me up and carried me back to the silver-haired man. She pulled my arm away from around her neck and placed it on the old man's chest.
"No silly." She explained, "He just had some air left over in his lungs. He died breathing in."
"It's not the dead you need to be frightened of ", she cautioned me, "but those who are still alive..."
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