In high school the guidance counselor inevitably comes up to one of your classes and makes you sit through a career advisement course. Somehow when you're fifteen, just figuring out puberty, and just starting to understand what in the world is going on in your own body, you're supposed to sit down and answer a test, that's not even worth a grade in the class, with enough competency to know what you're going to be when you grow up.
I sat through the test, did as great as I could because they were all weird questions about who I was, what I liked, and how I would react in certain situations, and waited for the results.
I can't remember my full list, I can't even remember the top five jobs that they thought that I'd be good at, but I do remember that somewhere on that long list of jobs that the test said that I would like, one of them was a mortician. Somewhere, somehow, the test got the idea that I would be a good person to host your funeral.
Don't get me wrong, I'd totally be down to host your funeral. I'd let you clown car an entire family into a casket, or whatever else pops up during weird funeral requests, and I'd sit there and say that I'm sorry for your loss, but honestly, because we all know that I run from a solid 4-6 and really don't care that much for people around me, let alone those people that I only see once, I wouldn't care.
This stuck in the back of my mind, knowing that I would never actually be a mortician (I always knew that I wanted to go further in my education than organizing your death) and then I met Brother Smith. Brother Smith was my Sunday school teacher, and also a forensic dentist (also the dean of UNLV dentistry school, but way more cool to say that he was a forensic dentist). Each Sunday he would come in to church and teach a group of 16-18 year old kids about Jesus, and the dead body of the week.
Any major missing persons or random body found in the deserts of Las Vegas would hit the headlines of the Las Vegas Review Journal . . . and then the Sunday dead body of the week in Brother Smith's class. Mother killed herself after drowning her kids in a bathtub? More details at 6 on channel 8 . . . or at 10 AM on Sunday three doors away from the bishop's office. Needless to say, we never missed a day in Sunday school because everyone, both the boys and the girls, loved dead body of the week. He never called it that, it was just what we loving referred to him talking about his job and sooner or later, with some well placed questions from the group of us that loved it, the pictures of the dead bodies, we'd always get the dead body story of the week from him.
This culminated in my senior year. I don't know why, and I don't know how I managed to get it arranged, but I do remember that one day, he came and picked me up in his car (an amazing car, easily the most expensive car that I have driven in ever). I think he was trying to recruit me, or at least sell me on science (the major I wanted to go into when English wasn't on the table. Long story short it came down to something that was easy that was boring, or something that was hard that I loved. I went with the latter). We made it to the campus of UNLV's dental school, he took me on the tour, and then mentioned that he needed to drop by his other work at the coroner's office.
For those that don't know, or at least think they know from CSI, in the real CSI Las Vegas, you don't just check dental records if you find someone's teeth to identify them, you called in Dr. Smith, the forensic dentist, and he would check the teeth to help people get a name. He took me on a tour of the coroner's office, and then, he took me to the cooler.
I've done some awesome things in my life, if I can say so myself, but hands down, without reservation, going to see a room full of freshly dead people still ranks up there pretty high on my list of awesome things. To this day I think about working at the coroner's office, even part time, even at the weird shifts that no one wants to work, just because of how awesome it was.
I don't know what it is about dead bodies, but they really don't freak me out. It was the weirdest feeling, but I had a painful urge to poke the toes of the feet sticking out of the sheets. I wasn't grossed out by the suicide victims, the row of gang violence, or anything else that was floating through the office, I was intrigued. I have always liked being by myself, even while in large crowds, and I mean spectacularly large crowds, I love them because it's only in large mobs of thousands of people that you can feel perfectly all by yourself, but in that room, even with the attendance of Dr. Smith right next to me, I saw my dream job.
A captive, dead audience, not able to run away from me, not able to make fun of me, stuck with me, and I could do whatever I wanted, talk about whatever I wanted, listen to whatever I wanted, and those lumps of meat would sit there. The best part? The lumps of meat that worked around me that were alive and had opinions, didn't like the cooler. It does have a unique smell that takes a while to get used to, and also sort of sticks with you if you're in there for too long, but they don't like it. A job in the morgue would allow me silence from the people that are living, and yet give me meat puppets to talk to, interact with, and have on constant rotation. I don't need to make friends, a new person is going to get ran over in a few days and then I'll meet them.
I'm weird.
I know.
I mean, come on, I've even shown you guys the plans and rules for my funeral. I'm not black and dark gothy, but I'm real good friends with death and for some reason it does not scare me. Dead bodies, being surrounded by death, and everything that would be involved in that job are not things that scare me, they are things that I see and really start to consider aspects of a dream job.
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