On call for body collection

Students help transport corpses to funeral home at all hours of the night in exchange for a free place to live

By: Liz Essley

Posted: 4/23/09

Junior Sam Heisman gets out of bed, puts on a suit and collects two things: a body bag and a stretcher.

It is very early in the morning, around 2 a.m. Just a few minutes ago Heisman received a phone call.

"Sam, I got a body call for you," the voice said.

Heisman loads the stretcher and bag into the van. At that time, his boss, John Barrett of Van Horn Eagle funeral home, arrives. They depart to the home of the deceased.

Thus begins a typical body call for Heisman. In winter he went on about three a week, he said. Now that spring has come, they are not as frequent.

Heisman and senior Matthew Taylor work for the funeral home in exchange for free rent in the upstairs apartment. They do custodial work, keep the business' vehicles clean, shovel snow and stay on call from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. on alternating nights to assist in collecting bodies to prepare them for burial.

Taylor said the strangest aspects of body calls are the locations. A body call can mean a long drive down a country dirt road to a trailer with strange baubles hanging outside, forming eerie shadows. The inside of houses can be crowded and smelly.

Once they enter, Heisman said, Barrett speaks with the family. Both Taylor and Heisman have each picked up a middle-aged corpse, but many of the deceased are elderly, so their families had expected the death. The experience is usually somber.

Both Heisman and Taylor said they usually let Barrett speak, while they remain respectfully silent.

"We try to do what we can to be sympathetic and empathetic," Heisman said. Though he comes for the purpose of manual labor, he added, it is hard not to grieve.

Taylor emphasized the professional distance necessary.

"It would be impossible to do the job if I were to feel for those people," Taylor said.

The situation at the home sometimes catches Heisman off guard.

"I think it's more unsettling when everybody's already accepted everything. You go in there and everything's all giggles and jokes," Heisman said. "It should be a breath of fresh air, but it's really unsettling."

Taylor said they usually ask the family to leave the room as they lift the corpse onto the stretcher. What it feels like to touch a corpse, Heisman said, depends on the body.

"The whole thing is so quick, you don't have time to dwell on the texture or the weight. My boss goes about it so business-like," Heisman said.

If the person died recently, the corpse feels as if it is just asleep, Heisman said; others have stiff-ened with rigor mortis.

After they give the family time to pay respects to the body, they drive it back to the funeral home.

Heisman said his hardest body call was for a deceased man who was "supposed to die of old age," but instead died from other causes.

His eyes glistened as he recalled the scene.

"The granddaughter found him. She was pretty shaken up," he said.

John Reist, professor of Christianity and literature, worked in a funeral home as a seminary stu-dent. He said the job taught him that he doesn't want to die and doesn't want to be embalmed.

But he learned another lesson, too: "Living at the funeral home also reminded me that what you have, you must savor and relish."

His coworker George once told him about how everybody goes out "toes up."

"To think that in 40 or 50 or 70 years, you're all going to be going toes up, it's quite moving, isn't it?" Reist mused.

Heisman said the job has forced him to reflect upon the unfairness of death.

"I guess I don't think death was meant to be part of life at first, but it definitely is now," Heis-man said. "It's unfair, yes, but a lot of human experience is unfair. It's something that's hard to make sense of. In some ways it's a human experience and in some ways it's not."