It started with a box of bones
Todays guest post is written by Patricia Fitchett and recounts a recent experience at Milwaukee Area Technical College Program of Funeral Service.
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It started with a box of bones.
Countless memorable events had taken place during my months at “funeral director college”, but the one that had the most impact on who I will be in my new profession began inauspiciously with a large cardboard box at the front of the classroom.
Accompanying the box was a lovely older gentleman in a three piece suit wearing a bow tie. (For my television watching friends, he had a remarkable resemblance to Mr. Burns on The Simpsons.) He quietly began to tell us the story of a man whom he identified only as DP.
Several years earlier, a body had been found in an out-of-use garage. It had been there for well over a year. The woman who owned the garage said that there was a man who sometimes slept in the garage during cold times, but he would often be gone for months at a time so she wasn’t too worried not to have seen him. She did not know the man’s name.
A funeral home in the area took possession of the remains. Law enforcement then started on the time consuming and painstaking efforts to properly identify the man. The remains (respectfully packed and shipped in the same way as a funeral home would ship the remains of any family’s loved one) made at least two cross country flights to different labs and DP was finally “circumstantially” identified.
There were no surviving family members, so one of the funeral directors (our dapper, bow-tie wearing friend) decided that the remains, now just bones these many years later, should still be given a proper burial. DP was found to be African American and the African American community as a whole tends to prefer burial over cremation, which is why he chose against the easier option of having the bones sent to a crematory.
Now it would have been perfectly acceptable for this funeral director to just bury the box in which the bones arrived. There was no family. No friends to care, and certainly no one to foot the bill. He could have just dumped the box with DP’s skeletal remains into a casket, sealed it up and called it an act of public service.
But what he did next is the life-changing part. He brought the box of bones and a casket to the students of mortuary science at Milwaukee Area Technical College. We split up into groups and each took a lovingly packed set of bones. (They were packed in groups; ribs with ribs, legs, spine, hands all in separate packages, but each limb carefully preserved down to the smallest bones at the ends of the fingers.) We spread them out with gloved hands on laboratory height tables that had been draped with sheeting so no small pieces would be left behind.
The casket was open at the front of the room and as we put the puzzle pieces together, we gently transferred them to their place in the casket. Our new mentor told us that he wanted DP to look like the man that he was, and not just a pile of parts.
When we were finished, it looked like the skeletal remains of a human being lying in repose. DP was at peace.
It is difficult to keep the thought about each life being unique and precious fresh in your mind when the vagaries of life are pelting you day by day. It is even harder for those in the funeral service profession; because we see so much that we sometimes become jaded. The experience of putting Mr. DP back together also made us more “whole” as future funeral directors.
Our Mr. Burns-ian friend thanked us for our help, but it was our group of smart-alecky mortuary students who owed him a debt of gratitude. He let us know that it matters who you are when no one is watching you (or paying you for that matter). And he let us in on the best advice we would ever receive as funeral directors: Do the right thing. Every life is a gift.
Patti Fitchett is currently completing her Funeral Service degree and works for Casey Family Options Funerals and Cremations in Kenosha Wisconsin. She writes a monthly column for the Kenosha News titled “Matters of Life & Death”.
