Throw me a Bone

“So... they're expecting you between 9 and 11 a.m.”. Henry chirped at me as he gathered up all his stuff that was scattered around the county truck. Coffee-cup, notebook, jump-bag... his best attempt at a casually preoccupied affect was failing miserably. He didn't make eye contact and his voice had that brittle brightness to it, the kind that people tend to manifest when they are doing their damnedest to act like everything is fine... when they know damn well it isn't...

 

...when they know damn well that they've totally fucked you.

 

I stared hard at Henry, daring him to look up and meet my gaze. We were just finishing shift change when he had decided to spring this little chore on me. He could have mentioned it at any time during the course of our baton-passing ritual. But he had waited until the very last moment to let me know that yesterday, when he had gotten the call to take care of this incredibly inane duty, he had passed the buck and told everyone that I would do it today. THEN he went ahead and booked the appointment for me, and THEN waited until the last minute to let me know that my arrival was not only expected... it had been promised.

 

”So... um... anyway...” Henry shuffled his feet, first staring at the ground, then peering into the sky. “Have a, um... good shift.” He turned around abruptly and scurried to the door of his apartment, doubtless trying to make it to safety before I had a chance to slam our extended-cab, F450 body-hauler into gear and ram him from behind. Instead, I sighed and checked the clock. It was already after 10:00, meaning I had less than an hour to resign myself to my fate and drive across town to present a flawlessly poised and benevolently accommodating face to the people of Oswald County.

I had known for a while that this task really needed to be accomplished. 

Henry and I had last discussed it over a year ago, agreeing then that one us us really needed to get this business done... and soon. But, like most non-urgent errands around our office, we had shelved any intention of actually DOING it until someone had called our supervisor and complained. And, to be honest, I couldn't blame Henry for surreptitiously sticking me with this nuisance. More than anything, I was just pissed that I hadn't thought of doing it to him first. This little act of community service was a pain in the ass and had the potential to blossom into an untold amount of extra work.

 

As I drove to my destination, I ran through all the possible scenarios that I might encounter, along with the appropriate responses and algorithms for each one. I pulled into the massive parking lot and did my best to park the truck in an inconspicuous location. It's not easy to do, but I hoped to minimize the angles from which anyone passing by could see the words, “COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER” printed on the doors in 6 inch-tall Helvetica. It wasn't that I was ashamed of my job, I just didn't want to have to answer any questions about what I was doing there. Getting out, I heaved another big sigh and set out towards the gigantic concrete warehouse. As I neared the doors, the sign above the double-glass doors loomed larger and larger- the smiley face was almost maniacally menacing in it's cheerful proclamation: WELCOME TO THE GOODWILL OUTLET STORE AND DONATION CENTER.

The doors sucked open with a hiss, as though the building was trying to inhale me. I glanced around, suddenly chilled by the wave of cold, sour air that washed over me as I entered... a combination of swamp cooler, old perfume, long-stale cigarettes and mold. I spotted a small window in the wall behind the cash-registers, positioned beneath a sign that read, “customer service” along with that same, creepy smiley half-face that made up the Goodwill emblem. I've never liked that face I thought to myself as I headed for the blank-eyed employee seated at that counter, I think because it looks like he's hiding behind something- like he's a mugger lurking in your closet, waiting for the perfect moment to jump out and gleefully stab you.

“Hello” I called to the customer service drone, “Is it possible to see a manager?”

She gave me a once-over glance, smacked her lips a couple of times and drawled, “Whatcha want a manager for?”

Fuck! I thought to myself, I had really wanted to avoid announcing my intentions here until the last possible moment. “I have an appointment, someone should be expecting me” I said, before taking my third deep breath of the morning and adding “I'm the county medical examiner, I'm here to pick up all of your donated human remains.”

She disappeared in a pretty big hurry. I guess it was news to her that there were dead people in the building.

People and other people's remains have a very complex relationship.

On an anthropological level, I know it wasn't always like this. It couldn't have been. Years and years ago, I suspect the customs and expectations regarding death were a little more clear. When a viking died, everyone knew that he was going to be placed on a boat and set on fire. When an Egyptian pharaoh died, everyone knew that he was going to be mummified and placed in a tomb with all of his stuff. Each, specific group of people had a socially accepted method for dealing with dead bodies. I doubt anyone ever really thought to stray from their methods because it likely never occurred to them that there was any other way to do it. But in modern America, there are so many different cultures, religions and traditions all mixed together... funerals, burial and the disposition of dead bodies has pretty much turned into a massive, macabre free-for-all. It's anything goes in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh sure, there are laws that regulate certain behaviors regarding the handling of the dead, but even within those parameters, people still manage to do some pretty wacky shit.  After all... I mean... Goodwill? Really?

I didn't have to wait long before the manager appeared from around a corner and asked me to follow him into the back room. He invited me through a small door nearby and I found myself in a long hallway which led to yet another door. Passing through this, second door, “the back room” actually turned out to be the other half of the warehouse: a crooked concrete-floored maze of rickety metal shelves that were packed with every item imaginable. As he led the way, we passed rows and rows of glassware, sports equipment, suitcases and even a little parking lot for wheel-chairs. We walked deeper and deeper into the catacombs of rejected belongings and expired styles, finally stopping before a single rack of shelves, marked with the dubious title “Miscellaneous”. And there, wedged between a motorized Elvis statue and a 4-foot tall scale model of the Taj Mahal... was my box of body bits.

“We've been sitting on these for over a year now,” the manager was saying as he wrestled the box loose from it's position and presented it to me. “People just keep dropping this stuff off...” As he spoke, another employee approached with a small cart which was piled high with vases and boxes. It took me a moment to realize that this guy was actually joining us and the “vases” on the cart were not actually vases at all. They were urns.

I plopped the box down on a nearby counter-top and began my assessment. I could have just taken the box and left. But I had absolutely no intention of simply taking the box and thereby giving the Goodwill employees the idea that the medical examiner could be a viable method for getting rid of any unpleasant item that may or may not have had a pulse at some point. We would likely end up getting called for mannequins and bear-skin rugs if I wasn't didn't handle this event very carefully and make it unmistakably clear that I would take authentic human remains... but nothing else. I suspected that many of these “human remains” were either fake, or mis-identified animal bones that people had found in attics and basements. That's why I was surprised to note that the bones I was fishing out box were not only real, they were the real bones of real people.

“Well, whaddya know,” I murmured to myself as a femur, tibia, fibula, humerus and fully articulated forearm (radius & ulna) attached to a hand (carpals and metacarpals) all marched out for my inspection. Ultimately, the bones were no cause for alarm since they were clearly disintegrating with age and had been loosely wired together in a professional fashion, suggesting they had been part of a med-school skeleton. Furthermore, as I moved on through Goodwill's grotesque collection, the whole event became more and more anti-climactic. The urns were mostly empty, some of the bones were animal bones. Pretty much the only aspect of the experience that surprised me at all, was the sheer volume of teeth that were rattling around in the bottom of the box. There were easily a hundred of them or so, of all ages and conditions. And almost all of them were quite obviously human- as they clearly displayed the markers of modern dentistry... a filling here, a crown there. Some had gold caps.

I gathered up my grim treasures and headed out to the parking lot. Our office had a standing arrangement with a local funeral home that had agreed to dispose of old urns and other, random non-suspicious human remains, should the need arise. Empty urns and disembodied teeth were nothing new to them. Also, the state forensic pathologist would be delighted to get her hands on the old med-school bones. These days, human skeletons were difficult to come by. In years past, skeletons were shipped in from 3rd world countries with no questions asked; a practice that was discontinued in the 80's after it came to light that not all of these skeletons were exactly what one would call... voluntary. I have to admit, I hesitated to hand over the arm and hand to the state though. I kind of wanted them for myself. I imagined keeping it in the county truck and using it to wave at the cops when I arrived at a scene... or using it to flip people off in traffic. Or maybe I could use it as a jewelry-holder on my dresser... you know, hang necklaces off the fingers and rings off the thumb. I could even put it in a vase and use it as a dining-room table centerpiece during Halloween. However, my keenly honed professional-survival instincts won out and I released the skeletonized hand to the state anthropologist. My husband was already horrified that I stored blood and urine samples in the 'fridge next to his favorite ranch dressing. A dead guy's hand would probably land us in either marital counseling or divorce court.

In the end, my little public-service adventure wasn't as complicated or tedious as I had expected. It wasn't all that disturbing either. I actually understood the “donation” of the urns. When a loved one dies, people can be profoundly attached to those little containers of ashes. For example, I once had an employer who used to place her mother's ashes in an easy chair and turn on the TV for her before leaving for work. An old, beat-poet, friend of mine died and at his memorial some of my more “altered” friends decided to mix his ashes with their marijuana and smoke him. Family and friends think they're going to hold on to those remains forever. But ashes wind up being a little tricky. On the one hand, it's actual physical evidence that this beloved person DID, in fact, exist. Following THAT line of thought, cremains are initially regarded with the same reverence as a holy relic. On the other hand, as the pain of a death and the pangs of separation fade, an urn is ultimately just a box of soot that needs to be dusted along with the candlesticks and porcelain nick-knacks. By the time the cat knocks grandma's urn off the television a few times, people begin to realize they don't actually want a dead person's ashes in their house. They go to some emotionally significant place, scatter the ashes and then donate the urn to Goodwill, perhaps forgetting that Grandma's name, birth-date and death-date are all indelibly engraved on the side.

I also understood the donation of the skeletal pieces. A broken, incomplete skeleton isn't good for much, academically speaking. But all the same, just throwing the pieces away probably seemed kind of wasteful... and it would have been, all things considered.

But I have to say... the box-full of teeth... that was just gross.

Of course, Goodwill donation was actually one of the more benign methods of body disposal that Oswald County had come across in the last few years. My co-worker, Scott's, experience was considerably more disconcerting than my own.

It was a lovely Saturday morning in September when Scott got the call.   A couple of confused police officers were requesting the medical examiner's presence at the scene of a massive...

… garage sale.

Apparently, someone in the community had coordinated this second-hand extravaganza in order to raise funds for a family member's cancer treatments... or something like that. The entire neighborhood had been asked to come by and donate any unwanted items in the name of helping out their fellow man. The town had mounted an epic response and within a single week, the requesting coordinator had amassed 3 basements full of crap... all sorts of crap... every kind of crap you can imagine... including... a human skull.

The skull had been discovered in a cardboard box beneath a ceiling-high pile of other cardboard boxes. No one had taken any note of the skull-containing-box at first. No one had any idea who had donated it or when it had arrived. The box had simply been added to the growing pile of junk and remained un-opened until the morning of the sale. To their credit, the garage sale-ers had the presence of mind to call the police rather than simply slap a sticker labeled “50 cents” on someone's head and then leave it on the sale table. Even better, the police had the presence of mind to keep the whole situation low-key rather than rope off the entire rummage sale with crime-scene tape and dispatch a gaggle of self-important detectives. When Scott arrived, the skull in question was cooling it's heels in the back of a police cruiser while the officers themselves indulged in some complimentary lemonade and hot-dogs... since it was a garage sale, after all.

To hear Scott tell the story, the officers hadn't really given the skull much more than a cursory glance before calling for him. So when they handed Scott the box, they couldn't say much more than to simply state that it was a skull and it was, most definitely, that of a human. As Scott examined it he concurred with the assessment that the skull was human. He also observed that the morphology of the skull indicated that it was most likely the head of a female.

Scott was also astute enough to note that the skull had a big-ass bullet hole in it.

I'm not sure what I would have done in Scott's position. The original owner of the skull (The person whose head it was, obviously, not the knuckle-head who decided to donate it to a garage sale) had clearly parted with their life under duress, and had probably parted with their head quite unwillingly. But the question for Scott and the police officers was ultimately this: What the hell could they do about it?

“So...” I asked Scott as he told me this story over our morning coffee. “What did you do?” I couldn't imagine the logistical nightmare that must have ensued. I imagined a neighborhood-wide, door-to-door interrogation. We would have to search homes and cars. We would have to comb through the national databases, hunting for missing women of the appropriate age and demographic. Then, I couldn't help but notice that Scott looked remarkably un-ruffled for someone who had just headed-up such a fiasco (pardon the pun). Also, it occurred to me that I didn't remember hearing anything about this event on the news. And our little jurisdiction was generally so quiet that the local media should have lost their minds over the headline: “Unidentified Woman's Skull Discovered at Garage Sale!”

“Meh,” Scott shrugged. “This happens every now and then. A lot of men keep trophies from going to war. They've got collections of fingers or toes, whatever. It's no big deal. We just write a report and ship it off to the state forensic anthropologist. It looked pretty old anyway.”

“Um, oh.” was all I could think of to say. 

Writing off a random, “female-skull-with-a-bullet-hole-in-it” as a war souvenir seemed a little... flimsy to me. Especially since I could easily imagine whole host of other, criminal scenarios to explain the skull's discovery. But Scott seemed perfectly at ease with his assessment of the situation, and he had been doing this job for a good decade longer than I. It would be severely frowned upon for me to question his judgment, methods and experience. And maybe all those horror movies were putting crazy ideas in my head. But I still couldn't help but reflect on how easy it would be to commit and then conceal a murder while Scott was on shift. I filed that little insight into the box in the corner of my brain labeled, “just in case.”

Ultimately, though, Henry's story really took the cake. Henry always takes the cake. Henry's stories are reliably the weirdest stomach turners one imaginable. The guy is a total shit-magnet, which is probably why he turfed the Goodwill pick-up to me. If he had been there, he probably would have found a mummified baby.

As it was, Henry found a frozen baby.

Ok, ok... it wasn't a baby so much as it was a fetus- depending on your religious and political leanings... but either way, it was pretty damn strange. The call came in from a funeral home, which was no big surprise. Funeral homes often have the privilege of being the first to discover something completely off kilter about a death. For some reason, folks don't seem to comprehend that when they find that cousin Earl has collapsed and died in the bathroom during the night, they can't just call the funeral home and have cousin Earl's body picked up and disposed of like a bag of recyclables. Funeral home staff often have people call to report a death who then become confused, or even downright indignant when they're told they have to call the police first.

“Why should we call the police,” these people ask. “It's totally okay- nobody murdered him or anything... I swear.”  

In this case, nobody called the funeral home. The woman in question had, instead, walked in with a small canvas bag under her arm. She had asked to see a funeral director and when one such gentleman was presented to her, she reached in her bag, pulled out a small plastic container and handed it to him. She then went on to explain that the plastic container housed the recently-thawed remains of her unborn child. Apparently, this woman had miscarried over a year ago but didn't feel as though she was ready to part with the... um... individual... er... product at that time. So rather than call an ambulance or go to a hospital or do anything that could be construed as even REMOTELY sane, she popped the little guy into a Tupperware box and stowed him in her kitchen freezer. And there he stayed until just a couple of days ago. And the driving force behind her sudden need to cremate the body had nothing to do with her coming to terms with the death or reaching a place of enlightenment within herself. She was simply moving to a new apartment and had been cleaning out her freezer. She happened upon the make-shift “casket” and figured this was as good a time as any to unload it's contents. So she hopped into her car and here she was.

Wanting to avoid an even more unpleasant situation that that in which he currently found himself, the funeral director took the Tupperware box, tucked it into his 'fridge (the one where he's legally, state licensed to keep human remains- not the one where he keeps his leftover pot-roast) and called Henry. Now technically, Henry found himself in a serious gray area. A lot of different factors play into whether or not this woman actually did anything illegal; so many, in fact, that its impossible to delve into all of them. Suffice to say that, ultimately, Henry had to go to the funeral home, peel back the lid of that container and take a look.

I've seen a few miscarriages in my day. They're not a fun sight, and I can only imagine what a miscarriage looked like that had been in a freezer for over 12 months. Henry didn't say much about it. He just said that there was no way the fetus could have been viable at the time it exited it's mother's uterus. That fact made things considerably easier, because it eliminated the possibility that the kid-sicle was actually a homicide. Never one to leave a stone un-turned though, Henry took his investigation a step further and called the woman's OB-GYN to see if the doctor could shed any light on the whole mess.

"Oh, yeah! I remember her," the doctor had said when Henry got him on the phone. "She came in for a check-up and there was no heart-beat. I told her that she had miscarried and that we were going to have to take steps to remove the fetus. She said she'd make an appointment, then we never saw her again. I figured she ended up in an ER somewhere. What happened?"

Henry told the doctor about the funeral home, the Tupperware container and the freezer, and then asked the doctor if there was any concern for drug abuse or other behaviors for which the mother could be prosecuted. The doctor had sighed heavily in response.

"It's really unfortunate, and no, she wasn't engaged in any high-risk behaviors or anything that I could surmise. She just has a lot of trouble carrying pregnancies to term. This happened last time too-"

Henry choked on his coffee. "What do you mean this happened last time? What, exactly, happened last time?"

"Well, all of it," the doctor had shrugged. "Her last miscarriage was about 5 years ago... and it was exactly the same: the home delivery, the fetus in the freezer... all of it. I mean, I would think someone would have told her that she couldn't do this AGAIN. But it's not the sort of thing you ever expect someone to do once.. let alone TWICE, you know? I mean... it's just weird."

Henry agreed that it was, in point of fact, "just weird" and then called the funeral home and told them they were clear to dispose of the fetus in whatever fashion they saw fit. Then Henry had a very brief, pointed conversation with the defunct mother that essentially could be summarized in a single phrase: You just don't DO that.

The local statutes clearly state that a death needs to be thoroughly investigated when the body appears to have been disposed of in an “offensive” or “inappropriate” manner. But who, exactly, needs to be offended? What's “appropriate” and what's not. America is a young county, comparatively speaking and I think any behavior needs a few centuries to settle in before we can stand together on the mountain of our communal traditions and say, “This is how we do it!”. All the same, I feel as though some, profound disconnect has occurred when a woman can drift in and out of a pregnancy as quietly as tip-toeing through a dark room and no one notices but the appliances. What has happened when Goodwill has a box-full of teeth and people can't stand the sight of their loved one's ashes anymore? Who killed that woman, and what shrouded journey brought her skull into someone's home? How long was she there and when did they decide it was time for her to go? Death is so... ambiguous, so everything and nothing. It leaves us so perplexed and confused, shameful and relieved. Perhaps a beginning, perhaps an ending, Death is as private as a whisper and as public as a sunrise. It's hidden, it's flaunted, it's glorified, it's feared. This unmoving journey, this universal solitude, everyday I know less and less what I actually believe about Death. Despite the fact that, in my life these days, Death is as common as a paperclip I'm still not going to claim that I know how to deal with it better than anyone else. 

But I know Death is too much to hide, and too relentless to hide from. It's a shame when people try.

We shouldn't.

We can't.