It’s a warm late spring evening. I’m wearing a blue sundress patterned with flowers and doves. My legs are freshly shaved, and my lips are painted a shade that’s much too bright for my complexion. I squint against the golden hour sun as it gleams through the van’s windshield and push up my glasses as they begin to slide down my nose. My boyfriend, Alan, is driving. We’re on a date—a rare occasion, since I live on the other side of the state and only get to see him every six weeks or so.
There’s also a dead body in the back seat.
In the little mountain town where I grew up, two family-owned funeral parlors serve the majority of residents in the area. When someone passes away at home of natural causes, one of their hearses will inevitably turn up a few hours later to collect the body. I have childhood memories of watching through my great-grandmother’s windows as a pair of men in black suits wheeled her neighbor out on a white-sheeted stretcher and loaded her into their hearse.
It doesn’t work like that everywhere, though. Alan lives in a busier part of the state, where seven cities meld together into a major metropolitan area that boasts several hospitals, dozens of funeral homes, and a much higher rate of homicides and traffic fatalities. The funeral homes here don’t have the resources to send out a crew every time they need to retrieve a new client. Nor does the medical examiner’s office, which has its hands full autopsying the bodies it already has on-site. Instead, they employ a private contractor to collect bodies from hospitals, homes, and crime scenes—a removal service. Alan is one of their drivers.
Corpse removal is the kind of profession that typically prompts a double take from people when they ask what you do for a living, followed by an incredulous Why? The answer, in Alan’s case, is that he wants to be a mortician, and this line of work seemed like a good way to gain experience until he can find an apprenticeship. At his company, things work like this: (1) he’s on call 24/7, rain or shine; (2) he needs to respond to death calls in an hour or less; and (3) because of that constraint, any time he leaves the house he dresses in his funeral suit and drives the corpse wagon—a standard minivan modified to accommodate two stretchers in the back—so he can head out at a moment’s notice. The amount of work he does in a given day depends on how many people die. Sometimes I visit and he only goes on one call the whole weekend. Others, I barely see him at all. It’s macabre, but it becomes normal faster than you’d think. With that being said, I still have a fight-or-flight response to hearing the iPhone’s Church Bells alarm, having been startled out of my sleep by a death call on so many occasions.
This inevitably leads to some quirks. One of those is that any time we go to a sit-down restaurant, Alan asks for the check as soon as we order so we can leave right away if we need to. This practice usually confuses the wait staff, but it is efficient—even if it means I never get to order dessert. Tonight, I’m halfway through my salad when a call comes in, and I wince at him with my fork poised halfway between my plate and my mouth.
“It’s pretty close this time,” he says after he hangs up and plugs the address into his phone. “Want to ride along?
The first of my great-grandfathers died when I was six. That was my earliest experience with human death, and I remember listening in as kids do while my parents dithered over whether or not to allow me to attend his visitation. He was being cremated, so his body wasn’t going to be made up the same way an embalmed one would be. They were worried that I would be frightened of him without the glasses and dentures and hearing aids I was accustomed to seeing him wear. Ultimately, they decided to bring me along. My memories of that hour are deeply shadowed. I can picture him on the dais, unadorned but recognizable. He remained my great-grandfather, only still and quiet.
Things had changed by the time my great-grandmother passed away five years later. She had been embalmed, and at some point during the intervening years, I had acquired the notion that I was supposed to be terrified of dead people. Indeed, as other mourners were seated for the service, my sister and I worked ourselves into hysterics at the thought of going near the open casket. I loved my great-grandmother, but I didn’t want to look at her. I especially didn’t want to touch her. From the far end of the chapel, I was convinced that I could see her breathing. In the end, my mother had to ask the funeral home staff to lead us to our seats via a different entrance so we wouldn’t have to walk past her while the lid was open.
“If you hold their hand, it’s like touching a table,” I remember her trying to explain to me later. “They’re not in there anymore. It’s not scary, and it doesn’t have to be sad, either. A body’s just a thing.”
I ride along with Alan, mostly because I don’t want to seem uncool, and partly because I’m studying to be a nurse. I know that I’m going to encounter my fair share of dead people in the future. We park outside an unassuming brick house on a quiet street. He pulls a stretcher out of the back of the van, and I fiddle with my phone in the passenger seat while I wait. Ten minutes later, he returns with a shrouded body and loads it into the vehicle. I eye it warily in the rearview mirror. It isn’t moving. Its nose and knees make little peaks in the sheet. I can’t smell anything weird yet.
He starts the van, and we head for the family’s preferred funeral home.
Church Bells.
He looks at me apologetically. “This one’s further out.”
I shrug, although my skin is crawling, and we make a U-turn into heavy traffic.
The NICU I worked in after graduating from nursing school had an exceptionally high mortality rate. There were several reasons for this, but the biggest contributing factor was that we were the highest level of care in the region, which meant that the patients we admitted were frequently born to mothers from our high-risk obstetrics program, fell just shy of the hazy line we refer to as the “point of viability,” or had already significantly deteriorated at an outlying facility before being transferred to us for end-of-life care. It wasn’t uncommon for our unit to witness a dozen deaths in a week.
Death in the NICU is never a happy occasion. No one checks in to the hospital to welcome their baby expecting to go home with empty arms. Even a standard NICU admission is typically a chaotic, unplanned, and traumatic experience for parents, whether it’s their first child or their eighth. “I could never do what you do,” nurses from other units frequently said when we crossed paths. “It’s too sad.” Funnily enough, I felt the same way about their specialties.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when our hospital was feeling the strain of the nursing shortage and an unprecedented surge in patients, our leadership began floating pediatric nurses to adult floors as “helping hands” for the staff there. On one occasion I was sent to the trauma ICU, where I shadowed a nurse named Madeline, dual-signing on medications and assisting with patient care. Although we had been nurses for the same length of time, I felt deeply inadequate when faced with her intricate understanding of brain pathology and the ease with which she flitted from complex task to complex task. I, too, possessed a wealth of highly specialized knowledge, but none of it was applicable to caring for adult patients. The TICU was an alien environment to me, just as I’m sure my unit would have been to her. Indeed, I had once been asked to cross-train a pediatric nurse to take low-acuity neonatal patients, and she had been so disturbed by the minuscule size of the babies we cared for that after a few hours she clocked out for lunch and never came back.
When I returned from my afternoon break, Madeline was hanging up the phone. “Mr. J’s family is coming in to take him off support,” she said. “Can you help me set up?”
Planned withdrawals of care were also rare on my unit—that decision was usually made in the moment, and only after a series of increasingly aggressive interventions had failed. But in the case of Mr. J, we had plenty of time to prepare. His family had requested as little medical equipment as possible be present in the room, so we got to work removing the fall mats, sequential compression devices, and extra IV pumps before they arrived. Having spotted us rushing around, another nurse asked what was going on. Looking up from the pump she was wrestling with, Madeline said brightly: “We’re going to give my patient the most beautiful death.”
When the family arrived, I met them at the elevator and kept them company in the waiting room while the TICU staff removed Mr. J’s breathing tube and disconnected him from the monitors. He died an hour later as the afternoon sun shone in through his windows, surrounded by his children and grandchildren, free of tubes and wires. It was the smoothest and most peaceful end of life I had ever seen—a far cry from the chaotic and anguished circumstances under which I was used to deaths occurring.
And although there were tears, it was indeed beautiful.
We arrive at the second house and Alan stalks off, pulling the other stretcher behind him. I’m alone in the van with a corpse, and since he took the key with him, there’s no AC. I also can’t roll the windows down. As the temperature rises, I can’t be sure if I’m starting to smell the body, or if it’s just my imagination.
I watch it in the mirror. I can’t help but feel like I’m intruding. A psychopomp doesn’t usually bring spectators.
The silence is unbearable.
“Um, hi,” I say, at a loss. “I’m RJ, and I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to be here? I’m…I’m really sorry about that.”
The body, predictably, does not answer. My hands are sweaty, and I wipe them on my dress, feeling foolish.
It feels like an eternity before Alan returns, sliding the second stretcher into place beside the first. “They’re going to separate funeral homes, so it’ll be another hour or two before we’re done,” he says as he starts the van and the AC mercifully starts to blow again.
“That’s fine,” I reply, although it wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t. We’re two cities away from his apartment right now, and I have no way of getting back without him. He sets the GPS and starts driving.
Church Bells.
“The van is full, though?” I say incredulously, gesturing at the two bodies supine in the back, as he pulls over to read the text. “Don’t we need to drop them off?”
“Yeah, but when it’s a police call they have to send two of us. This one’s going in Howard’s van, not ours. We’ll meet him there.”
I’ve been in the van for four hours. My dinner was a few bites of salad and half a glass of sweet tea. The sun’s going down, and I need to piss. I’m ready to scream.
“Okay,” I say, and we merge onto the highway.
Quite a few nurses who wouldn’t bat an eye at a gangrenous wound or rotting viscera are remarkably squeamish about corpses. Even the ones who are happy to do the aftercare—the last bath, taping the eyes closed, tying the hands with twill tape—balk at the idea of bringing the patient to the morgue afterward. I’ve never minded going, though. A room with a corpse in it is still just a room, and a person is no less worthy of dignity and respect after the life leaves their body. Alan felt strongly about providing that last kindness to those he transported, and although it’s been over a decade since we split, that’s something that stuck with me. I don’t enjoy being the one whose patient is dying—I can’t imagine many nurses do—but when there’s a death elsewhere on the unit, I’m always willing to do the cleanup and bring the patient downstairs afterward.
“I don’t know how you do it,” a coworker once said as we sat chatting in our pod on a slow night shift, waiting for it to be time to start collecting labs. “It’s spooky down there. It freaks me out.”
I shrugged. “It really doesn’t bother me. Now, if it was him”—I indicated my primary patient, for whom I had been caring every shift for the last eight months—“I’m not sure if I could bring myself to put him in the drawer.”
“But,” said another frequent morgue-goer, “if it was him, would you really want anyone else to do it?”
I chewed on that for a moment.
“No, I guess I wouldn’t.”
It’s 11:00 p.m. and we’re parked behind the medical examiner’s office, waiting for someone to come unlock the door so Howard can drop off his passenger. It’s taking a while, and my legs are cramping from being trapped in the van for so long, so I get out to stretch. I hadn’t planned on being out so late, and my stupid sundress is proving woefully inadequate against the chill that’s blowing in from the bay. Howard leans against his van and lights a cigarette, the smoke drifting in lazy clouds under the fluorescent glow of the loading dock lights. I’m considering bumming one off him, just for the hell of it.
Church Bells.
I wrap my arms around myself and shiver. Alan, more resigned than apologetic at this point, takes off his suit jacket and places it around my shoulders.
It’s at this point that the medical examiner’s staff finally arrive to take custody of the body in Howard’s van, so I climb back into the passenger seat and wait while the two of them complete their paperwork and wheel the stretcher inside. My phone is at 5% power. I’m resigned to sleeping in the van tonight, probably with a corpse or two for company.
Alan comes back alone, and I buckle my seat belt. “Where to?”
“Home.”
“I thought you had another call?”
“Howard felt bad for you.” He laughs. “Want to get McDonalds?”
Yes. Yes I do.
My last shift at my first NICU was a Thanksgiving, and as I clocked in and went to check the assignment board, a bereaved family was walking out. After I finished getting report on my own patients, I went to check on the nurse whose baby had died. She and one of our techs had just finished the bath and were in the process of labeling the body bag and wrapping it in a swaddling blanket—a practice we commonly employed to disguise what it was.
“I’ll take him down for you,” I offered. “You can go home.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I don’t mind.” I picked up the bundle and cradled it in my arms. Even through the layers of plastic and fabric, the baby was still warm. I sat with him in the rocking chair for a while, feeling the small heavy shape of him against my chest, closing my eyes and focusing on the quiet in that room—the darkness, the various equipment that would usually fill the space with beeps and hums now silent. I pressed a kiss to my fingertips and touched them to the sheet. When I was ready to leave, I called our unit secretary to stop traffic in the hallway so I could pass through discreetly.
One of the new hires approached me. “Can I come with you? I’m not really comfortable with all the death stuff, but I want to be.”
I nodded, and she took my hand.
And together, we carried him to the end.
RJ Aurand is a southern Appalachian writer, poet, and lover of the bizarre whose work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Blanket Gravity Magazine, Small Wonders, Solstitia, and Tales & Feathers. Connect on Bluesky @rjaurand.bsky.social or at rjaurand.com.