Embalming Is Not A Sport
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However, there are no fields, no cotton and no slaves. There is just me, Dean Matthews, the owner and Director of this enormous Mausoleum that has been converted into a Funeral Home. I am not alone. There are the remains of two dead humans in my embalming room. One is a recently deceased, 87 year old female, laying on a preparation table, her hands folded over her abdomen and her body covered from her neck to her feet with a freshly laundered white sheet. She just received an Arterial embalming, and was unwittingly waiting for her abdominal cavity to be embalmed so that the rest of her could undergo the final preparations for viewing. The other is a badly decomposed male, laying in a metal container, his body entirely wrapped in a sheet of padded aluminum foil that was saturated with pure undiluted formaldehyde. His decomposition so was so far advanced, that preparation for viewing would be impossible. The embalming room, which is situated on the northeast side of this colonial monstrosity, with its white tiled floor and spacious tiled walls, always gave the impression that it is much cooler than the rest of the Funeral Home. I have been grateful on many occasions for this coolness, especially when I receive a body that has been dead for an extended period of time. This port city, located in Southern California, approximately twenty miles south of Los Angles proper, is the site of one of the largest harbors in the United States. The preponderance of the local population wholly depend upon the ability to earn a living by working as stevedores, loading and unloading the many merchant ships that arrive here daily from many ports of call all over the world. Only a handful of the laborers are offered full-time employment. The remainder show up at the docks early each morning with hopeful expectations of being selected to work that day. Hundreds are turned away everyday. As a result of this consistent frustration of the many that are denied the ability to be able to provide for self and family, leads to overspending at the local liquor stores and bars, spending what few dollars they do have, on liquor, instead of on rent and food.
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About the Book
This is the story of an embalmer. In the course of telling the story the reader is allowed into the never seen embalming room. The reader gets first hand knowledge of what an embalmer has to do and endure in order to prepare a dead human body for viewing and burial. The story teller lets the reader into his personal life on a day-to-day basis, and his falling in love with a female embalmer, and his tour of duty as an embalmer in Viet Nam. Although this novel is not intended to be a text book on embalming, the reader will feel that he or she will almost have the training to embalm a dead human body. The actual intent of this novel is to allow the public to understand that even though an embalmer has chosen to seek a career that most people would consider gruesome, an embalmer is indeed just as human as the average person in an average profession. This embalmer wrote this novel as an attempt to show the public, that as macabre as most would think of an embalmer, he has chosen this profession even if it did not provide for his living.
About the Author
The author was born in Houston, Texas in 1940 and was raised in Southern California until he entered the Army at the age of 17. He retired from the US Army after serving twenty-two years of active duty, which included two tours of duty in Vietnam. He served his apprenticeship as an embalmer in a Funeral Home in Southern California and lived in Maryland writing short stories, until his demise on August 1, 2004. This was his first attempt at writing a novel length story.