Mortician’s note:
Sarah Wambold is the thing. THE. THING. I spent a day with her in Austin this month and we are morticianly kindred spirits of the highest order. Sarah shares many of my views on the industry, made all the more interesting by her background as an embalmer. We also had a killer conversation on the industry vis-à-vis sex, love, porn, etc., some of which she shares her ideas on here. I’m bloody thrilled to have her writing for the Order.
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Before my embalming manager arrives, I arrange my tools and set up the body for injection. I’ve propped it up on blocks so the feet are slightly inclined toward the torso and shoulders, with the arms bent at the elbows. Between the metal table and the elbows, I’ve lodged curved blocks to keep the elbows from unbending; the fingers rest on another block set on the middle of the body’s still chest. Directly above the collarbone, I slice a short, thin line over a bulge in the skin. With metal hooks, I dig through the tissue and find that bulge — the carotid artery — hook it and pull it up through the hole I’ve cut. I thread two waxy pieces of string — known as ligature in our language — under the artery and wait. The blank florescence of the prep-room lighting exposes everything on the dead naked body before me. I glance at myself in the mirror and realize it does the same to me. My manager arrives, eyes the body, then me, and asks, “You got ’em ready?”
I nod.
“You put green eye shadow on — very nice,” he adds. I look away, embarrassed but not defeated.
“I guess you’ve got an eye for makeup,” I respond.
“That’s why they say I’m the best,” he says, his chin raised high with confidence. Turning away from the table, he flicks on the radio and shouts, “Let’s do it!” Obliging, I insert the canula into the carotid artery in the neck and clamp it tight to keep it in place. The neon chemicals swirl in the machine behind me and I flip the switch “on.” I watch as the body slowly fills up with the fluid and the blood rapidly leaves the body, as though it’s being chased out through a sliced vein in the neck that I’ve forced open with forceps.
“So,” my manager says, as he begins to shampoo the corpse’s hair, “What’d you do last night?”
“I was on call,” I say, pointing to the body. I know he knows this, but he wants me to ask him about his night, so I do. “What did you do?”
“Got drunk,” he says matter-of-factly, “Got drunk and watched some fucked-up porn.”
On a glowing TV screen at my embalming manager’s house, an actress lies prone on a metal table like the one in our prep room. Blocks are placed behind her knees and elbows, bending them backwards so she’s in an upside-down crawling position. A gag is placed in her mouth. Clamps are tightened onto the skin of her back, pinching it into a grid-like pattern. From behind, a metal rod is rotating on a staff. A man turns around and switches the machine “on.” The metal rod swirls into the genitals of the girl fastened to the table while she moans and jerks against her bindings.
“You’re into that kind of stuff?” I ask, as I begin to massage the limbs of the body, starting out rather rough to ensure that the chemicals are distributed quickly and evenly. At the neck, my manager pumps the forceps several times to remove any blood clots and increase the drainage.
“Eh,” he shrugs, “Sometimes. I’ve seen some crazy shit in my day.”
I turn the knobs of the machine to the right so that the pressure increases, forcing the fluid more quickly through the system. The skin turns from paper to rubber beneath my hands and the extremities stiffen into their proper position. There is a soothing hue to the skin now so that the face begins to appear relaxed, as though in a deep sleep.
“But, I mean, they had this chick completely restrained,” my manager says enthusiastically, “She could hardly even make any noise!” The graphic nature of this conversation is normal within the prep room, a place that allows us to manipulate bodies and feelings. This is why I am not at all shocked when my manager continues to describe the scene:
The girl’s muffled moan is ferocious as the man tightens the pressure of her bindings. He increases the speed at which the metal staff penetrates her. Tears run down her face and onto the metal table in heavy, sparkling drops, glossing down her face. The man stands beside her, massaging his dick and slapping her ass. All at once, her eyes open wide and her face goes white, and then sinks down between her shoulders. The man pulls the metal staff out from her behind and turns the machine off.
I nod, half listening, half watching the embalming machine as it empties the rest of its contents into the body.
“Sounds impressive,” I say, as I pull the canula out of the artery.
In an interview at the end of the video, the girl — now fully clothed — is asked why she allows herself to be tied up like that. She explains that she enjoys pushing her body’s limits during sex and that what she’d just done was cathartic. She says she gets asked all the time how she got started in this kind of acting. “I realized I could do it better than the people I was watching could do it,” she explains.
At dinner that evening, with a friend and her friends, I’m asked what I do for work. When I tell them, the familiar cross of confusion and surprise furrows their brows and I anticipate the next question. Yes, I say, I do work with the bodies. I have to embalm them when the family requests it. I explain, without too much emotion, why I chose to become a funeral director and that touching dead people doesn’t really bother me. They ask how I got myself into this, and I say it is something I have always been interested in. I say I know that I can do something not many people can and I do it pretty well, so I should do it. “Sort of like being in porn,” I add. Her friends nod along, contemplating. A few even seem to understand.
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This essay originally appeared in Womanzine.