I learned another valuable lesson once when removing a nude, deceased man from his second-floor bathroom: There are never enough linens on a mortuary cot. The man in question had just drawn a bath and was sitting on the toilet. He died while he was still on the commode.
My assistant and I draped a bed sheet across the bathroom floor, then placed the decedent on the sheet and wrapped it around him. We had left our mortuary cot at the foot of the stairs near the front door, since it was not possible to carry it up to the bathroom. We began to hoist the decedent to move him downstairs. My assistant’s left arm was under the nape of the man’s neck to support his head. His right arm was under the small of his back. I had placed my left arm there, too, with my right arm under his knees. As we made our descent down the stairs, I felt a warm sensation on my thigh, followed by more warmth on the top of my right foot, accompanied by a familiar odor. I strained against the weight in my arms in an attempt to discover the source. Just as I suspected, the decedent’s bowels had given way in a shower of feces that trailed all the way down the carpeted steps and all over our pants and feet.
After placing the decedent on the mortuary cot, I asked the family if I might use their telephone. I called several carpet-cleaning companies and ultimately reached one that would come to the residence right away. Of course, I paid the carpet cleaner myself, still resplendent in my odiferous attire. But from then on, I always made certain I brought an extra three or four sheets along with the cot. If we had wrapped the man in several sheets, rather than just one, the problem would have easily been contained within the linens. And in most situations, people normally are wearing some sort of clothing, at least pajamas or underwear.
A house call to remove a decedent from a private residence, as opposed to a medical facility, often involves entering the person’s bathroom. Such scenarios used to dumbfound me. However, an obvious case can be made in that the elderly sometimes experience difficulty with their bowel movements, and the inherent strain may be a contributing factor in their deaths. We call it “death by defecation.”
Many years ago, the county coroner summoned me to a residence. As I wrote down the street and house number, it sounded very familiar. Once I turned onto the street, I realized that I was on my way to the home of a kindly old minister friend. Over the years, I had driven to his house several times to take him to the funeral home to preside over services.
As I pulled in front, I noted an ambulance parked nearby. The EMTs and two police officers stood on the minister’s porch smoking cigarettes, waiting for me to arrive. Everybody smoked back then, so usually we all lit up and discussed our plan for removing the body. But the assembled group appeared to be sizing me up. I quickly discovered why. It seems that my friend had expired while perched on the commode, and he had subsequently slumped against the door of the tiny bathroom, his full weight pressing it closed.
We all ventured inside to allow me to survey the situation and offer my expert evaluation of possible procedures. The EMTs and police officers decided that, since I was the skinniest one present and familiar with the decedent, I should be the one to climb inside a small window, squeeze my way into the tiny bathroom, move the man away from the interior door, and thus allow for proper removal.
I took off my fairly new, double-knit suit coat and, with some assistance, delivered myself into the bathroom through a window never designed for a six-foot-three man. In those days, I was agile enough to stick my left leg into the room first, and then swing my right leg and stand upright without even banging my head on the upper window frame.
I was certainly saddened to see my friend deceased—but also to encounter him in such a state. He still held a Newsweek magazine, clutched in his motionless right hand. I have since removed many decedents from bathrooms, but more often they are lying on the floor. However, it is not uncommon to have to pluck a person from atop a commode and then place him on a mortuary cot.
Still, a house call (when death occurs at a private residence) tests the strength and sometimes the ingenuity of those doing the removal. A ranch-style home or any residence in which the deceased is located on the ground level is a huge plus. In at least half the cases I encounter, however, my hopes are dashed when I learn the person is on the second or third floor.
New home construction considers not the lowly funeral director. Wide doorways and high-ceilinged atria in the living areas often give way to narrow upstairs hallways and doorways barely wide enough for a mortuary cot, let alone an ambulance gurney. People should keep this in mind—they’re likely to need ambulances long before they need funeral directors.
Long ago, when I was a young and foolish teenager, I assisted my older brother, then also a budding funeral director, on several occasions to run ambulance calls and make removals. One morning we were called to the home of a wealthy family. The homeowner’s drunken black sheep of a brother had died on the mansion’s third floor. So we left our cot near the front door (it weighs nearly one hundred pounds and is difficult to maneuver to higher floors) and clambered up the steps to survey the situation. We had brought with us a collapsible device called a litter, which is basically three steel poles supporting a thick canvas sheet, and commonly used to traverse stairs.
On entering the room, we discovered the 350-pound decedent supine on the hardwood floor, clad only in jockey shorts and a T-shirt—which was thoroughly soaked in vomit. His stomach contents puddled around the entire body. I had never witnessed such a thing, and I was on the verge of involuntarily giving up the ham sandwich I had consumed only a half hour earlier.
We placed the litter on the floor next to the deceased, and my older, wiser brother began to rattle off the game plan: I was to simultaneously take hold of the thin T-shirt and the waistband of the jockey shorts and then turn his body toward myself as my brother pushed the litter beneath him. A good-sounding plan—except that I was barely able to budge him. Plan B entailed both of us lifting the man onto the litter by brute force. Again, I was to grasp the T-shirt and my brother, the waistband.
But this plan went awry as the thin, vomit-soaked shirt slipped from my grasp, and the deceased hit the hardwood floor with a resounding thud. Family members downstairs no doubt heard the commotion, but we hoped they thought we had knocked over a chair. Immaturity ruled as both my brother and I nearly collapsed in fits of muffled laughter, to the point that both of our young faces were red with shame.
On our second try, we were finally able to position the deceased on the litter, cover him, and make our lumbering way down the steps to the waiting cot. Our faces still red, we prayed that the family would assume that our strenuous trek down the stairs with a 350-pound man in tow was the source of our breathlessness.
These days family members are often present even when a death occurs outside the home, such as at a nursing facility or even a hospital. In the past, when I arrived at a nursing home at three o’clock in the morning, no one but the nurse on duty was available to help move the deceased out of the bed and onto the cot. Today the family is often waiting—I suppose because nursing home caregivers attend death education classes that stress that family members should be at a terminal patient’s bedside for end-of-life support. At hospitals this can be more complicated, because most hospitals still require that hospital personnel transport the deceased to the facility’s morgue, where the body is left in cold storage until the funeral director arrives.