Diener: a Novella

JOB DESCRIPTIONS

Hi there, my name is Igor Stiffpounder, and I'm a diener. No, make that a senior assistant diener. I was promoted last month.

In other words, I work with the dead.

However, most of my deceased helpmates just lollygag around and are of no help whatsoever. Sometimes I almost feel as though I'm working solo. That's one of the reasons I've got two jobs, just to meet my corpse quotas.

My primary job is senior assistant diener in the morgue over at Our Lady of Uncounted Sorrows Hospital. In case you don't know, a diener is basically someone who wheels human cadavers around, gets them in and out of the autopsy drawers, and cleans them up so that they can properly greet their (oftentimes dissecting) public. The word is derived from the German word Leichendiener, which literally means "corpse servant." That's about where I stand on the totem pole of the dead. To me, Leichendiener sounds like "lunch and dinner," which is what you will generally lose when you try to cram a bloated six-day-old floater into one of these stiff drawers that are fit only for skinny-jean-wearing anorexics. For some reason, the manufacturers have not kept pace with the obesity epidemic here in the States. Probably trying to save on aluminum, the cheap bastards.

And they say they are trying to reduce healthcare costs. Go figure. Just make a wider drawer, I say, or at the very least a panel of extra-jumbo drawers for cases like these.

So when I get a floater like that, I typically have to get one of the chainsaws out of the supply closet and then go to town on their mammoth white rolls of blubbery flesh. First, I lift them in a fireman's carry, and plop them down on one of the size EEEE autopsy tables, no easy feat when you've got a waterlogged 320 pound floater. That's why I go through an exacting daily physical training routine. If I failed to be able to bench-press a 670-pound cadaver, even once, that son-of-a-bitch pathologist Dr. Ricky "Pluto" Yama would have my job in an instant or at the very least dock me a week's pay.

Some of our guests have bodies of such a magnitude they would easily be disqualified from the Biggest Loser TV show due to health concerns and simple aesthetics. Also it is difficult to visually assess weight loss progress when the contestant is roughly spherical, as even a large loss will only result in a small change in the contestant's radius. You could try to measure them with whole body calipers, but then there would be endless arguments about which folds of fat the caliper jaws should be inserted into in order to provide the most accurate estimate of the contestant's radius. Plus the audience wants to see the weight loss process with their own eyes rather imagining it from the readout of the caliper angle, which would be too abstract, given the increasing mathematical illiteracy of the American viewing audience.

But I digress.

Once I get the floater on the supersized examining table, I pull the chain on the chainsaw and bifurcate the stiff right down the middle. You'd be surprised how cleanly they split apart. You can see every organ in the two halves, most of them in cross-sectional view of course.

With an oversized bloated floater, putrid water generally pours out of their lungs and stomachs, and the smell is awful (or should I say "offal"), even to my well-inured nose. What in God's name are we doing to our oceans, lakes and streams?

You are sometimes are confronted with wildlife crawling and spilling out of the floater corpse. Such fauna include pinching crabs, blowfly maggots, and poisonous jellyfish that have taken up residence inside the stiff. Then there are the barnacles that coat their skin and will rip you palms apart unless you get just the right grip on them. This list is far from exhaustive. And who gets to mop all this up? None other than yours truly.

Then I would carry each half of our example floater and lift them into separate drawers. This isn't too bad, as their weight is only half that of the full corpus-a-mundo in Fonzie speak, and who wouldn't use Fonzie speak, when the only decent cinematic portrayal of a denier is Henry Winkler in Night Shift (unless you count Linda Fiorentino in "Men in Black," although she played a deputy medical examiner, not a diener).

But again I digress.

Getting back to the floater in our example, once I get her squeezed into into the two drawers, I label them both with the loved one's name, and mark them as Part A and Part B, sometimes with a notation such as "right side" and "left side," although this should be obvious even to a retarded autopsy technician. But who knows in a world where they now have to mark an X on a cancer patient's thigh so that the docs will not amputate the wrong leg? One shudders to think of all the perfectly healthy legs that were thrown into offal pits in the eons before the invention of felt-tip markers, although it must said that such mistakes are a Godsend to the workers in the prosthetics industry as well as to manufacturers of felt tip pens. They deserve every dollar they earn through their hard work and tireless fund-raising efforts.

You might think that such "retrofitting" of the corpse to fit the available drawer space would screw up the autopsies. But those autopsy guys would never be thrown off by something as mundane as a vertically-bifurcated cadaver. They are made of much more sterner stuff than that.

Hell, if you get a decent-sized natural disaster such as the explosion at the Better Living Through Chemistry plant last November, you often have to sort the body parts and personal effects into separate drawers marked Eyeballs, Teeth, Tongues, Ears, Digits, Skull Fragments, et cetera, et cetera.

You would think that would throw off the autopsy docs, but in fact they seem to enjoy it. They must all have been jigsaw puzzle freaks when they were kids. Some of them will even juggle up to 18 eyeballs at a time, inspecting them in flight and passing them (sometimes behind the back) to the correct autopsy techs who are standing guard over their respective corpses in the process of reassembly. They rarely make a mistake.

But again I digress.

In addition to my diener job, I literally moonlight as a funeral cosmetologist working the graveyard shift at the Shady Pines Funeral Parlor in Yorba Linda (although technically they are all graveyard shifts). I'm not licensed or anything like that, but they don't seem to care. With me, they know they have the right man on the job, not some bozo who may or may not have a beautician certificate from the Arthur Murray Dance Hall for the Dead.

I take on the most difficult cases. You wouldn't believe how many families want an open casket ceremony for their loved ones who had their head sheared off in a collision with a semi or who were burned to a crisp in a house fire or an explosion, such as the aforementioned mishap at the Better Living Through Chemistry plant. Many such families almost seem to relish (and indeed salivate at) the prospect of viewing their loved one's irretrievably disfigured corpse.

The very first thing we do is DNA-test each body fragment, no matter how small. Shady Pines' prudent financial motto is: "Wrong stiff and we go down the cliff." Of course there may still be body parts out there, but we make no claims regarding the completeness or proper permutation of the loved one's earthly remains. "Don't mind 'em if you can't find 'em," we tell our grieving customers in regard to missing body fragments. It seems to provide them with some degree of solace and closure.

You want to talk about a rat race. That's exactly what my job as a funeral cosmetologist is. Literally. (Although to their credit, Shady Pines management has repeatedly called the good people at Minnie and Mickey's Rodent Croak, Inc. to see if they can slow the rats down to, say, zero miles per hour to make it easier for us to grab their little gray asses). The rodent problem has become a pressing issue ever since those two foot-long Norway rats chewed off the better part of Mrs. Pearl Rabinowitz' nose, eyes, and cheeks. That posed a real makeup challenge for me. Luckily, Danny down in Stiff Flow Management came up with the idea of plugging fake eyeballs into her sockets and then putting a Lone Ranger mask on the old bitty and then telling the grieving family that the interment ceremony would be Halloween-themed so that Ms. Rabinowitz could enjoy her favorite holiday one last time. In fact, we could have presented just her skeleton just to get a rise out of the bereaved, but this idea was nixed by some squeamish humorless prig in the Mourners' Outreach and Fund Raising Extortion Department.

As it turned out, Danny Green's idea of a Halloween-themed funeral proved to be a great success. I had no idea how many different slutty widow, slutty undertaker, and slutty welcoming demon costumes were on offer at Halloween stores these days. As you might expect, many of the grieving multitude chose to stay through the hard cider, Manischewitz wine, and cheese and cracker cocktail party. Soon what should have been a sedate session of sitting Shiva devolved first into a drunken Irish wake and then into an orgy of Bacchanalian proportions. Needless to say, many of the coffins down in the storage room were soon filled with amorous couples. I saw the lid of one of our top-of-the-line teak silk-upholstered coffins bouncing up and down in rhythm with the vile thrusts of the fornicating couple prematurely defiling what could well prove to be their own final resting place. Little did I know that a similar fate would befall me within a fortnight (two weeks, for those of you who eschew the pretense of being English).

But I digress once again.

So how exactly does a funeral cosmetologist prepare a floater or a burnt marshmallow crispy for an open casket funeral? Let's continue with the simple example of the two-drawer bifurcated floater described above. The first thing you have to do is to check the casket and coffin supply down in the cellar. The average dimension of a casket is 84 inches in length, 24 inches in width, and 23 inches in height. Or at least it used to be 15 years ago. Due to the obesity epidemic, the average width has increased to 27-28 inches. Don't forget the clothes and the folded hands. They might run you another inch and a half in the vertical direction.

I'm sure you dear reader, if you're anything like me, already know the difference between a coffin and a casket, but if you don't, a casket is a rectangular box, whereas a coffin may have six or even eight sides. Thus, for a serious floater, you probably want a coffin, as they are flared at the middle and may more easily accommodate waterlogged, bloated, and super-expanded floaters.

Once in a while you run into a floater who has spent some serious water time in the head down position. This is often the case with mob stoolies who have been sent to sleep with the fishes wearing a concrete block for a necktie. For these floaters, you may want to go with a simple rectangular casket in order to get the loved one's watermelon-sized head successfully inserted into the box.

If you've got nothing big enough in the basement, just give the guys at www.oversizecasket.com a call. They'll get you what you need in two days, three days tops. Plus they can send you the casket by a drone disguised as a pair of heavenly angels. You can even make it part of the ceremony. The preachers love it. And why wouldn't they, as these drone deliveries inevitably generate a significant number of new converts?

As you can imagine, floaters are generally the most difficult remains to cram into a coffin designed for the non-waterlogged deceased. The first thing we usually try is to hoover the water out of the floater. In the case of the bifurcated individual discussed above, this would involve turning her bodily halves bloody-sides up. I would recommend starting with a with a standard 746 watt vacuum pump. That will pull most of the water out, without pulling out very much of the patient's (i.e., stiff's) guts and internal organs, in keeping with the tenets, principles, guidelines and best practices of corpse management.

Sometimes if you get a really nasty floater, you may want to go to a 1,000 watt machine. However, this runs the risk of pulling out large amounts of the deceased customer's tissues, bodily fluids, and other unmentionables (two of which were just mentioned). Some of these bodily components inevitability run down the drain in the course of the autopsy and water extraction process. However, as noted above, one of our main credos is: "Don't mind 'em if you can't find 'em." Another is: "Don't sweat the sweat."

If you question the professionalism of such practices, why don't you try to find these bodily parts and liquids after they're all mixed in with the effluvium of toxic waste that we and the good people at the revitalized Better Living Through Chemistry plant continually discharge into the Peaceful Valley River at a point approximately one mile downstream from our fair Shady Pines Funeral Parlor?

If that doesn't work, you can use our spanking new Medela Dominant 50 liposuction pump. However, that of course runs the risk of hoovering up many of the patient's lipids and other unpleasant liquefied organs and organ by-products. Of course you would then be ethically bound to separate out the water from the patient's liquidized tissues for the purpose of burial. (Recall Shady Pines' financial motto: "Wrong stiff and we go down the cliff.") If possible, we want the stiff, the whole stiff, and nothing but the stiff.

It is true that on more than one occasion, the DNA of some of our deceased clients has been detected in the drinking water of the good citizens of Happyville, which lies about two miles downstream from the effluvium discharge point. This can result in something of a sticky wicket if the feds or Happyville CSI literally conduct a dragnet of the Peaceful Valley River. I can't tell you how many times the feds have knocked on our doors because they have found the DNA of wanted killers or murdered citizens in the river itself in or the tap water supply for Happyville. God forbid that they exhume the corpse and find suspicious DNA suggesting that the coffin may harbor a runaway felon hoping to slip beneath the tectonic plates without being detected.

Thankfully, we can usually produce a death certificate, funeral guest book, and pictures of the deceased in the coffin to show the pigs that as far as we know it was a righteous burial, cremation, or pureeing of the deceased (see below). We sometimes tell them that we had no way of knowing that deceased was a perpetrator or a victim of mass murder. For all I know, the coppers' accusations that Our Lady of Uncounted Sorrows Hospital and Shady Pines Funeral Parlor comprise a mob-owned conglomerate enabling us to "launder" what Al Gore might term "inconvenient stiffs" might be true. I've already noted that I am a very low man on the totem pole of death, so I wouldn't know about such things.

If liposuction fails (and it generally does), we put the loved one into our spanking new eight-foot whole body centrifuge and crank 'er up to maximum (usually about 3000 RPM). When you do that, the water shoots out of them faster than off a dog doing the post-bath shimmy. It's kind of like giving the loved one a one last trip to a water-themed amusement park. I would have to say that they seem to enjoy it for the most part, as their eyes generally open wide, with the eyeballs protruding. They also get shit-eating grins on their faces while they're spinning past you. My colleagues think these phenomena are the results of centrifugal force on the vitreous humor of the patient's eyes, as well as the stretching of the facial tissues to such a degree that the face comes to resemble that of the hyper-Botoxed Bruce Jenner, who once won an Olympic gold medal in the decathlon but is now reduced to a semi-estranged member of the Kardashian family "reality" TV show. Jenner's face is now permanently frozen in a horrific rictus grin that would make even the headless horseman turn around and skedaddle back in the dark woods from whence he came.

However, my colleagues may be excused for their ignorance of science, as they are simple funeral directors and assistants, whereas I am now a senior assistant diener at the prestigious Our Lady of Uncounted Sorrows morgue. As we'll see in more detail below, the complexity of the diener job surpasses even that of the medical examiner, whose responsibilities rarely exceed the complexity of pronouncing the cause of death of a burnt crispie lying on the floor of the Better Living Through Chemistry plant or a human head dislodged from it shoulders by a clothesline tackle and rolling still encased in its Green Bay Packer helmet in the general direction of the thirty-yard line, as videotaped and witnessed by a stadium full of fans. Surely such a deliberate decapitation warrants something more than the 15 yards personal foul penalty assessed against the Seahawks by the perpetually incorrect but well-chiseled referee Ed Hochuli, whose bad call cost me $500 in this instance.

But I digress once again.

If you're lucky, the blood, bile and other precious bodily fluids will stay trapped in their various capillaries, ducts and other bodily containers throughout the centrifugation process. If they don't, it's not a total loss. Generally, the water, muck, slime and other environmental sediment and detritus can be easily siphoned off from the outer layer of the centrifuge, with only minimal loss of the loved one's precious bodily fluids.

The real problem with floaters is the sheer amount of liquefied flesh you have to deal with when you are preparing the loved one for his or her final open coffin joyride. Fortunately, you at least have the skeleton to work with. Most importantly, you generally have the whole skull. It's pretty easy to reconstruct the loved one's face from a fleshless skull.

The first thing you have to do is siphon off the liquids that are still hiding in the hollows of organs and other visceral pockets. I usually just lipo it all up into a single bucket (there is no hope separating the organs at this point, anyway). I then carefully pull the two halves of the skin off the surface of the residual slime. Did you know that your skin is generally considered to be a single organ? That's what makes it so easy to retrieve it from the bio-slime essentially intact, although only topologically, as the chainsaw process generally leaves pretty nasty tears in the torso, face, scalp and groin areas.

In the next step, you have to glue the two halves of the skeleton back together. I would recommend crazy glue for this purpose. Some people use staples, but in my view they can result in noticeable bumps on the loved one's body.

Then you insert the skeleton's arms and legs back into the onesie of human skin they wore in life, making sure to slide the finger bones and the toe bones into the right dermal grooves. But not to worry. It's as easy as putting on a sweater and leggings or putting a pair of Dr. Denton's pajamas on your kid. .

Then you carefully roll the waterlogged loved one into the prone position, being careful to maintain the proper positioning of front of the skeleton on its blanket of skin.

Next, you suture up the chainsaw-induced tear in the rear skin of the loved one.

Then you carefully roll the waterlogged loved one over into the supine position, being careful to maintain the proper positioning of the skeleton on the blanket of its soft silky, delicious skin. You then suture the front flaps of the skin. Generally, I would recommend beginning with the head. Just pull the skin as tightly around the skull and rib cage as you can. This may take great strength, which is another reason why dieners and funeral cosmetologists undergo a rigorous program of physical training and conditioning. We are also constantly lifting bodies in and out of caskets, and some of these (e.g., floaters) can be quite heavy due to waterlogging and total subsistence on fast food.