The Mortician's Daughter

On the day I lost my virginity, my partner, a beautiful young man named Josh, had been dead for 12 hours. I guess that sounds kind of weird to you, right? And I guess it is kind of weird, too. But, well, when you grow up in a funeral parlour, it’s the kind of thing that can end up happening. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me start at the beginning, where all good stories should begin. My father’s name was Hubert Johnson. He passed on a couple of years back, but for all his working life he was the mortician in the town of Rapid Falls, a small, no-account kind of place in Oregon, in the forests of the Western United States. There are a lot of places like Rapid Falls in Oregon.

Everyone says that my Dad kind of looked like an ageing George Clooney, which makes me laugh now to think about it, but I guess it was kind of true. But when we were growing up, there was no George Clooney around and my Dad was just my Dad. He always was a looker, though. My Mom used to say, 'Hubert was the best-looking mortician in town' (I guessed there were no others). Then she would say, “Honey, if you’re gonna marry a man who embalms the dead, there’s got to be some perks, right?” My Mom was always saying things like that. And then she would let out a big, brassy, dirty laugh and my Dad would roll his eyes and say, 'God help me! I married a woman who looks like Judy Garland but sounds like Ethel Merman.' The first time I heard him say that I said something dumb like, 'Who is Ethel Mermaid, Dad?' And he would say, "Merman honey, Ethel Merman, but don’t you worry, it’s before your time. Now go fetch me another bottle of formaldehyde, won’t you?"

"Now go fetch me another bottle of formaldehyde, won’t you?"

It was always like that when I was growing up. Humour and sadness, the familiar and the strange, the living and the dead, always together. But to me it never seemed creepy or weird. It was just home.

My Dad had these little sponges which he would dip into white spirit to clean the cadavers with. Some days, when he was in one of his better moods, I would sit and watch and keep him company, and would pull his leg. He’d say things like, 'Hey, if you don’t watch it…', and he’d make as if he was about to throw one of the little sponges at me, and sometimes, if I was really naughty, he’d even let one fly, and I would run screaming from the room and say, 'Oh Daddy, gross, that’s got dead person on it', and he would shout after me, 'And stay out of here, or I’ll pickle you in formaldehyde!'

My Dad would do stuff like talk to the cadavers whilst he was preparing them. He would be concentrating on his work, and all the time chatting away to them or muttering something to himself. I would stand and listen to him. One day I said.

'Why are you talking to Mrs Broadstone, Dad?'

Without looking up from his work he said, 'I’m just keeping Mrs Broadstone company, honey'.

'But Mrs Broadstone is dead.'

And my Dad would stop working and looked at me over the top of his spectacles — which he always did when he wanted to make out as if I were, like, the dumbest person in the world or something — and he said, “Exactly.”

Sometimes, when he thought I wasn’t listening, he would say rude things to some of the clients, as he called them. I remember this one guy, Mr Jennings; he’d been a teacher at the local High, and one day just dropped dead right in the middle of umpiring a softball game. Anyway, he ended up — as they tended to do in Rapid Falls — on my Dad’s slab. I had worked out a place, just outside the mortuary on the stairs up to our house, where I could listen in on my Dad without him knowing. There he was, chatting away to Mr Jennings, with whom my Dad had kind of grown up and liked. “Well, how’s things today, Walt, not so good I guess? Sorry to hear that. Anyway we’ll get you cleaned up good. My oh my, Walt, that is one big penis, I never realised. Oh well, no use to you anymore…” and so he would go on, chatting away happily. I nearly got caught many times, because I’d had to stifle a laugh over something he’d said and then hold my breath in silence. I could hear him stop working and he would say, “Alicia? Is that you?” But then he would go back to his work, satisfied that he was just hearing things.

“Yes, Daddy. We all deserve equal respect in death and life.”

But for all his joking around, my father took pride in his work and respected each client. He always used to say, “In death, as in life, we all deserve equal respect. I want you to remember that, Alicia.”

“Yes, Daddy,” I would say absently, only half-paying attention. And then there would be this long silence, and I knew he was waiting for me to look at him and pay what he called ‘proper attention’. Eventually, guiltily, I would look up to find him looking back calmly.

“Alicia?” he would say, with a warning tone in his voice.

“Yes, Daddy. We all deserve equal respect in death and life.”

“That’s right, honey. Now go fetch me some more cadaver make-up, will you?”

“…Before you pickle me in formaldehyde too!” I’d say, and stick out my tongue at him and run out of the room before he had a chance to catch me with a flying dead-person sponge.

My Dad always used to refer to himself and his clients as ‘we’, as if they were his colleagues or something. “We had a real tough one today, hey Mr Benjamin?” he would shout over dinner towards the mortuary, to no reply. My Mom would take it upon herself to reply on the client’s behalf. “I don’t think Mr Benjamin can hear you, honey”, she would say, reaching over to pick up my Dad’s dinner plate. And then, with this kind of scary cold smile, she’d add pointedly, “More meatloaf with those potatoes, dear?”

The only time my father worked in silence was when he was preparing a dead child. When there were dead kids, I knew that it wasn’t the time to play the usual jokes on my Dad, or chat with him as he worked. He would always be very quiet on those days, even after work, eating his dinner in silence before hiding behind his newspaper. My Mom would chat away happily to him, never getting more than a grunt, but she knew not to rile him the way she usually did.

One day I asked him, “Dad, why do you never talk to the dead kids when you’re preparing them?” And I remember how he got this sad look on his face and said, “Because I don’t know what to say to them, honey”. And it wasn’t so much the words he said, as the way he said them, that made me burst into tears. He gave me a big hug, and told me everything was going to be okay, but the sadness in his voice didn’t go away.

But I could never stop messing with my Dad. One day, a day that changed my life, I had it in mind to play a trick on him by hiding one of the bodies. I never got round to it though, because the guy I chose — the dead guy — was kind of, well, there’s no easy way to say this, kind of cute. He was in his early 20s, an out-of-town guy with chiselled good looks, who had been killed in a hit-and-run accident. Normally, my Dad would never let me see what they called ‘John Does’ when they were first brought in. ‘John or Jane Does’ were clients who had been killed in circumstances that had later required the involvement of the authorities — cops, mostly — because they suspected the person had been killed unlawfully. The Does would get taken to the hospital where they would be identified and cleaned up. Then the family would be called, and the hospital would recommend a local mortician to handle the funeral. The client would then be sent to my Dad for ‘prettying up’ as he put it. Dad hated these jobs, mostly because he didn’t trust the hospital morticians to have done even the basic clean-up properly.

“God knows what their poor families must think”

“Goddamn hospital hacks, they send me in all kinds of road-kill without even bothering to wipe their asses!” he shouted on one occasion, causing even my cheerfully profane mother to cover my ears with her hands. “God knows what their poor families must think,” I would hear him mutter.

Anyhow, I was strictly forbidden to bother my Dad on these occasions, at least until the prettying-up had been complete, and even then sometimes not. “These people don’t look so good Alicia, now go to your room and read a book.”

“You want me to get you some formaldehyde?”

“You want me to get you some formaldehyde?” I would ask, craning my neck round the corner of the balustrade.

“Alicia, go to your…”

“I know, I know, my room, I’m going. Jesus.”

So that one fateful night, when this guy had come in, I was pretty pissed at my Dad for no particular reason. Sitting in my room sulking, I resolved, with the spite that only a teenage girl can summon, to get my revenge. At the right time for bed, I clicked the light switch and stomped around in my room and made the appropriate noises, so that my Dad could hear me ‘getting ready for bed’. He was still working on the young guy about an hour later, because the guy’s family were arriving at the parlour first thing to make arrangements and view the body of their dead son. I opened my door just a chink and, even at way gone midnight, could hear my Dad muttering away to himself and the dead guy. Finally they were done, and I crept downstairs into the mortuary that formed the annexe to our funeral parlour and house.

Once I got into the parlour, the rest was kind of easy. Or maybe ‘natural’ is the right word. The body, Josh’s body, was laid out on a slab, under a sheet. Very slowly, I approached the slab and looked at the covered body that lay before me. Outside of a vague notion of hiding the body or something, I had no idea what I would do next. But my heart was racing ten to the dozen and I felt I needed to go to the toilet, all at the same time. Another feeling crept through me too. In the stillness of the mortuary — with no sense of creepiness to a girl who had been brought up in those surroundings — I felt something new: a tingling, exciting feeling that crept up through my legs and into my stomach and just kept going. I had never felt like that before, and it was hard to explain to myself, but somehow it just felt very right.

And so, without thinking further, I drew back the sheet and looked at the body, at Josh, for the first time.

My Dad had done a fine job. In death, the body of the young man seemed perfected: the marble stillness of him, the sharp definition of his muscles and body lines, the blue-ish pallor to his entire body. He seemed to me the most beautiful person I had ever seen. I remember how my fingers trembled slightly as I ran them over his cheeks, nose and jaw, and down on to his chest and stomach, and in my heart I knew that this was the beginning of something beautiful. What happened next is, of course, private and I am a modest girl. But, needless to say, it was a night that Josh cannot remember, but that I will never forget.

“Just because someone is dead, honey, it doesn’t mean you can’t still love them”

Because I remember one day, when I was very young, my Dad sat me down with a very serious expression on his face, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Just because someone is dead, honey, it doesn’t mean you can’t still love them,” which was a very true and beautiful thing to say. If you fear that I may have taken his advice a little too literally since that day, well that’s your opinion and you may be right. But it still doesn’t disguise the truth of the sentiment: that just because someone is dead, it doesn’t mean they’re no longer worthy of our love.

And that, in terms of how I live my life, is where it all began, and where it continues. I have decided to go into the family business. My Dad cried when I told him that this was what I wanted to do and, before he died, he proudly re-named the business ‘Hubert Johnson and Daughter, Morticians’. And when he passed on, I inherited everything and in ways that no-one had bargained for.

Of course, people may say that I only went into the mortician trade in order to, well, to facilitate my peculiar lifestyle choice. And they may be right, up to a point. But my Dad always said that we are all entitled to a life of our own, so long as we don’t hurt anyone else along the way. And, to paraphrase my Mom, if you’re gonna be born to a man who embalms the dead, there’s got to be some perks.

Nick Jordan