Anubis Drives a Tan
Suzuki Week 8
Updates: Contacted another
Funeral Director Blogger to see if they would be interested in participating in
some sort of mutual promotion. I haven’t heard back from them yet. I sent the
E-mail on Saturday so I haven’t lost hope just yet.
Just did a Google search for Funeral Director blogs because I’d
realized I hadn’t yet done that very simple task. Found a few that I’ll check
out at some point when I have more time.
And speaking of not having enough time, I think I might have been
a little too ambitious last week when I promised the two segments in this week’s
blog. Quite a bit of time will have to be spent researching the contrast/compare
sanitary practices and requirements part, time that would be better spent on college
coursework. It’s already mid-terms and I can’t remember the last time I saw any
of my friends that I don’t work with or go to school with and I think it’s
having a real effect on my mood. How I survived for two years in St. Hell (what
I called St. Helens, OR. Clever, huh?) I will never know.
Oh, yeah. I forgot. I spent a lot of time getting drunk.
I will be at a Red Cross event at the TRAC in Pasco, WA on
Halloween at the Dvorak booth. Not sure what I’ll be doing other than handing
out candy, business cards and trying to get people to buy pre-need insurance. I’ll
do my best to take notes and will have a full, if probably very boring, report
in my next blog posting.
As promised (at least one of the things I promised), this week I
will be telling a tale of how working in the funeral industry has led to a
particularly awkward situation. I have plenty of stories like this, as do most
funeral directors.
Sometime in the fall of 2010 I’d come up with the idea of making
a quilt, or more accurately, a comforter out of Crown Royal bags. I had amassed
a large collection of them because my main preoccupation while living in St.
Helens, OR was drinking Crown Royal by the pint or by the fifth.
Before moving to St. Helens and starting college I’d always been
very crafty. I made curtains, pillow cases, cargo pants pockets, a lamp made
out of a mop and bucket, t-shirt quilts, I even made a dress once meant to look
like the one worn by Zelda in The Legend of Zelda series games for the wife of
a friend of mine.
Either because my brain was more than occupied with all of the
learning and with the regurgitating of what I had learned into papers, homework
and test scores, or because of all of the drinking I was doing, I hadn’t been
working on any crafts, doing any sewing or anything really creative that wasn’t
for school. Gathering the material for this quilt was an attempt to change all
that.
I started by going around to all of the bars and restaurants that
served alcohol in St. Helens and asking what they did with the bags that came
with the bottles of Crown Royal. I quickly learned which bars and restaurants
were the most fruitful in my quest and which ones were a waste of time. I also
learned that, instead of getting their liquor from distributors like businesses
do in Washington state, Oregon bars and restaurants got their liquor from privately
owned liquor stores. Usually the closest ones to their business, but they would
often shop around for the best prices.
Over time I developed a schedule for stopping by the best and
most receptive and generous bars, restaurants and liquor stores, while occasionally
finding new ones to check out. One place that I visited on a monthly basis was
this nice little sit-down restaurant in downtown St. Helens. By the way, if you
are ever planning on driving past St. Helens, OR on your way to somewhere else,
drive down Columbia Blvd. all the way down to the river and stop for a lunch or
dinner anywhere that serves food. Everywhere in downtown St. Helens that serves
food, serves great food, and now that the Plantation House is gone, it’s all at
a reasonable price.
One day while making my rounds, I went in to the little sit-down
place and the waitress behind the bar asked me what I was planning on doing
with all the bags. I told her about my idea and that I would need several
hundred. She then told me that she had a large box full of them in a storage shed
full of her and her boyfriend’s stuff. They had gotten the storage shed when
they moved to Oregon from Wyoming. She had been planning on going through it
soon and would just give me the whole box when she did. I thanked her for the
thought and told her that, if it was more convenient then leaving it at the
restaurant, she could just drop it off at the funeral home where I lived. She flinched
a bit when I told her that, but at this point I had lived there for at least a
year and a half so I was used to this reaction and thought nothing of it.
Later on, I dropped in at the same place several times hoping to
see her so I could give her a little nudge about going through her storage
shed. It was getting close to the time when I would graduate and move away and
I wanted to get the box from her if I could before I left. I asked the sweet
little blond girl behind the bar for the waitress by name to see if she was
there. She said she wasn’t and then said something apropos of nothing that took
a second to sink in, but nearly knocked me off my feet when it did.
She said “Isn’t it sad what happened to her boyfriend? And on Valentine’s
Day too,”
I remembered Valentine’s Day. Specifically, I remember going on
a first call on Valentine’s Day. At this point, going on first calls to Good Samaritan
hospital, or Good Sam as we called it, was routine. My boss would call with a
name, I’d suit up, get in the van, and head down Hwy 30 to Portland. This night
wasn’t any different. I went, got the face sheet (a form that hospitals have on
file with patient info like name, date of birth, date of death, next of kin,
etc. They give a copy to funeral home staff when we come for a body) from the
lobby, got the body from the hospital morgue, and headed back home to put the
person in the cooler. When I got the body downstairs I unzipped the bag and
stopped for a second. This guy was young, close to my age. This was unusual;
most of the people I pick up from Good Sam were elderly. I looked at the face
sheet and, sure enough, he was only a year older than me and the cause of death
was traumatic brain injury. He didn’t look too bad to me, so I slid him on to a
metal tray, set his features, and put him in the cooler.
Fast forward to the day the little blond hostess unwittingly
informed me of her co-worker’s unfortunate circumstances. I thought back to the
day I had told the waitress to drop the box off at the funeral home. The
waitress that I now knew was, at that point, still grieving her boyfriend who
she moved here all the way from Wyoming with, supposedly so he could take a
job, the job where the brain injury occurred, on Valentine’s Day of all days. I
had told her to drop them off at the place where she probably went to arrange
his funeral. When she flinched, it wasn’t the normal everyday ‘oh, yeah. I
forgot people actually did that as a job’ reaction, it was her reacting to the
specter of death walking in to her work, probably the one place she could distract
herself from the pain, and reminded her one more time of all that she had lost.
I never went back to that restaurant to ask for Crown Royal bags
and a box full of them never showed up at the funeral home, not that I ever
expected them to. I wish there was a more interesting post script to this
story, but there isn’t. Being in this industry requires you to interact with
the public and the fact that you’re going to run into people who’s families you’ve
served out in the larger world is unavoidable. The only thing you can do is
serve each family to the best of your abilities and help them to say goodbye to
their loved ones in a way that brings more joy than pain.
Wow. That got more sentimental than I planned. Oh, well.
That’s all for now.
If you want to know more about the event I’ll be at at the TRAC
here is the link: http://www.traconline.com/event-calendar-details.php?event_id=637
There’s not much info.
Like last time, if you have any questions, concerns,
suggestions, spelling or grammatical corrections (how will I ever learn if no
one ever says anything), words of support or encouragement, confessions of
love, hate-filled rantings of utter distain, or anything else for me, do not
hesitate to email me at funhomeambo@gmail.com.
I’ll post a new one of these every week. Feel free to e-mail me
and call me a loser if I don’t live up to my self-imposed deadline.
Hope you enjoyed it and I thank you for reading all of this or
skipping to the end, whichever is the case.
Johnathan Hove
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