OSHA training sucks

I just got finished with two hours of OSHA training. Swear to god, another fifteen minutes of that shit and I would die. It was all done on a power point presentation, and I almost fell asleep. There was a funny slide though during the "Bloodborne Pathogen" section. The slide was on HIV and how not to get infected (there's something really wrong with hearing my co-worker say "semen and vaginal secretions") by a dead body, and the little clip-art next to the instructions read "Get Well Soon" which made me chuckle. Really? Get well soon? On the HIV/AIDS slide? I thought it was funny.

Also, I forgot to mention: a case we had last week was being embalmed by Jane and I was keeping her company in the prep room. She started injecting and after a little while these little bruises appeared on the deceased's breasts. They looked like bite marks. Why weren't they there before we started injecting, you might ask... Well, that means the bruises were made at the same time the person died usually. Interesting? Yes.

Crying babies

I'm at a funeral Mass right now. It's hot as hell, and I'm in a (super cute, but that's beside the point) skirt suit, nylons, and four inch heels, sweating my ass off. And to top it off I have a run in my pantyhose that looks like I was in an MMA fight in order to get one that big. There is a baby crying (like a little, fresh outta the chute baby) and I thought I'd text message my co-worker about it. What did I send, you ask? "Kill that baby," which before I hit send didn't seem that bad, and now I'm thinking about how I'm going to be tried for murder someday and the prosecutors will read that text to show my history of violence, even toward children. I did make my co-worker laugh out loud though, a couple of Mass attendees even turned around to glare at him. Unprofessional? Yes. Funny? Definitely. So, I just want to say, for the record, I don't really want to kill that baby.

Thoughts about dying

For some reason I was thinking this weekend about people my age and having our parents die. I’m almost thirty, as is my husband, and as are most of our friends, which puts most of our friends’ parents around 50 or 60. Now, that doesn’t really seem that old, but I work in a funeral home, and it is definitely not uncommon for people of that age range to die, which made me wonder: Which of our friends’ parents (or our own) are going to die soon? I mean, statistically some of us will be affected by the ‘early’ death of a parent, right? If not there wouldn’t be that many cases in the funeral home in that age range. Actually, back in November the mom of my best friend in Jr High died, and somehow they chose the funeral home I work in, not even knowing I worked here. She just dropped dead one day of a deep vein thrombosis or something, and was my dad’s age. I mean, people my parents’ ages have dead parents, so they have to die sometime, and I guess it is going to start soon, or has already. Does that make any sense? I’m not even sure why I’ve been thinking about it, but I have come to the conclusion that I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do when it happens. My friend whose mother died in November, well there really wasn’t much I could do. I just sorta cried on my friend while she cried on me. Looking back it seems selfish, or self-centered to have cried, but I figure I would have cried even having not been the funeral director handling the services, as this woman, for a few years, was like a second mother to me, and honestly, I didn’t know what else to do but cry. There are times when I realize something: No matter how good I am at my job I can’t do the one thing families wish I could, bring their dead relative/lover/friend back to life. It makes me feel a bit inadequate sometimes, even though I know that it’s silly to feel that way, I mean, I am doing the best I can to make everything okay, and I love doing that, it just seems strange a times, doing less than what people wish I could do, however unrealistic those wishes might be.

Weekend Recap

We went to my in-laws' house this weekend. One of my husband's cousins had a graduation party Friday night to celebrate her finishing college and moving back here (she went to school in Kansas, don't ask where, I'm not even sure I know which state Kansas is). We left shortly after we got home from work and were at the party around 8 Friday night. We had fun, and stayed until about 10 (the party was at my grandparent-in-laws'), and then headed over to the hubby's folks' so that we could watch season 3 of Dexter on Showtime on Demand. For some reason though, there were only the first 6 episodes of season 3. Does that mean that there were only 6 made? Please, someone, tell me that isn't the case...

Anyway, yesterday the in-laws were busy with work in the morning so the hubby, child and I went to get a new battery in the car (yay for warranties) and have lunch in our used-to-be home town. It was a nice afternoon and we sorta just relaxed the whole day. We left our daughter there for Saturday night, the in-laws are on their way here now with her, and husband and I went out last night with friends. We went to one of our favorite bars and sat out on the patio, I had ketel one (spelling?) martinis (and no offense to my good friends, the couple we hang with a lot, but these martinis were the best I'd ever had, the olives at the end bringing back fond memories of my grandpa giving me the vodka-infused ones from his martinis when I was younger) while the hubby had Vikodin, and we played dice with our friends til about 130 in the morning. It was effing great.

I rolled out of bed at about 9, made iced tea, and headed to the pool with my book, and laid out for an hour and a half, soaking up some much-needed vitamin D, and was only joined at the pool at the very end of my tanning session. It is up to at least 105 right now, and I knew that my only alone time would be this morning, and was lucky to get in a good hour of my book.

At 1130 the hubby and I went to one of our dice-playing bar buddies' house to watch the US score twice in the first half of the Brazil match, only to watch them loose in the second, and then I came home to swim a bit more. Swear, I love this place. It seems like summer has taken a while to get here, but she totally made up for it this weekend.

Funeral poems

Funeral poems are strange things. The poems we have at the mortuary for families to choose to have printed in the programs or Mass cards are nice, and families usually choose from the most popular 6 or 8, and those same ones always seem to have deep meaning to the family,which I suppose gets lost on me, as I read them and hear them a lot.

I had a funeral Mass yesterday that was very large, for a young guy that died of heart problems. The family was all really nice and the siblings of the deceased were my age, so it was easy to talk to them like normal people, not like elders. They were funny, laughing a bit during the arrangement conference which is always nice, and everything went smoothly. It helped too that the parents of the deceased were in fairly good spirits too considering. It really is crazy, the differences between grief reactions of families that are anticipating a death and those that have a family member die suddenly. Anyhoo, after the Eucharist, the Monsignor allowed one of the family members to say a eulogy, and at the end of the eulogy the gal read a poem from The Family Guy:

Oh squiggly line in my eye fluid. I see you lurking there on the peripheral of my vision.
But when I try to look at you, you scurry away.
Are you shy, squiggly line?
Why only when I ignore you, do you return to the center of my eye?
Oh, squiggly line, it's alright, you are forgiven.

It’s strange, but it really stuck with me. Hmmm…

If it's really true I might cry

Michael Jackson dead, age 50.

RIP, King of Pop.

Monica to the rescue

This is Monica’s third day here and she is really awesome. I got really busy this weekend, and had been very busy Friday, so there was a ton for her to do on Monday and she jumped right in. Yesterday I had a few cases to get dressed, made-up and in their caskets, as well as finishing up loose ends from Monday, so of course I was running around like a headless chicken, on the phone, in the back, on the phone again, family walks in to pay, go to the bathroom, on the phone again, etc. I forgot that I left one of the curling irons on in the body prep area and as soon as I remembered (like and hour or two later) I went back to actually curl hair, and Monica was finishing up on the case I had so long before started and forgotten when a call came in for me and interrupted my progress. So, not only had she done this gal’s hair, but her make-up was done and outfit was straightened out, and she had instructed my back-room boys to get her in the casket. Wtf? How did I get so lucky? I mean, it was like having someone hand over an hour of my time. She had even put the princess tiara that the family had brought in for their mom to wear (don’t ask- I have no idea). Kick ass, right?

So, that left me with time to work on some of the other cases, Mr. Unviewable for one, who, if I can just say, turned out awesome. I put back the patches of hair that were missing (just in case you are wondering where the hair I used came from, I took it from the back of his head, which sounds strange, but it’s much better to mess up his haircut in the back than have his family see that the accident was so bad that he’s missing patches of hair on his head). This is how hair is replaced: I paint stuff called “spirit gum” on the skin and I let it dry a bit so that it gets sticky. Then I take one hair at a time and start from what will be the underneath layer and place it in the tacky spirit gum. I do that over and over again, working my layers upward, and after a while it looks like the surrounding hair. It takes quite a while, but isn’t really hard. And replacing hairs on a head is a ton easier than eyebrows, eyelashes, and especially facial hair. Those are a bitch.