4/13/12 12:32 pm
60: Business of Death (Originally aired 04.18.1997)
Ira Glass: When we think about death, we stare at the two images in our head over and over. The person we knew alive, breathing and talking, and the thought of them dead. And we take these two pictures and we turn them around and around, shuffle one on top of the other, trying to understand. How did this living person become that dead one?
Act One. The Undertaking.
Ira Glass: 'When researching today's show, one of our producers talked with a funeral director who said at one point, well, you know, all funeral directors are either alcoholics or born-agains. He says that the ones who stay with this work believe that they actually are helping the living in some way by burying their dead.
A man that I work with, named Wesley Rice, once spent all of one day and all night carefully piecing together the parts of a girl's cranium. She'd been murdered by a madman with a baseball bat after he'd abducted and raped her. The morning of the day it all happened, she'd left for school dressed for picture day. A school girl, dressed to the nines, waving at her mother, ready for the photographer.
The picture was never taken. She was abducted from the bus stop and found a day later in a stand of trees just off the road, a township south of here. The details were reported dispassionately in the local media, along with the speculations as to which of the wounds was the fatal one, the choking, the knife, or the baseball bat. No doubt, these speculations were the focus of the double postmortem the medical examiner performed on her body before signing the death certificate, multiple injuries.
Most embalmers, faced with what Wesley Rice was faced with after we'd opened the pouch from the morgue, would have simply said, closed casket, treated the remains enough to control the odor, zipped the pouch, and gone home for cocktails. It would've been easier. The pay was the same. Instead, he started working. 18 hours later, the girl's mother, who had pleaded to see her, saw her.
She was dead, to be sure, and damaged. But her face was hers again, not the madman's version. The hair was hers, not his. The body was hers, not his. Wesley Rice had not raised her from the dead nor hidden the hard facts, but he had retrieved her death from the one who had killed her. He had closed her eyes, her mouth. He'd washed her wounds, sutured her lacerations, pieced her beaten skull together, stitched the incisions from the autopsy, cleaned the dirt from under her fingernails, scrubbed the fingerprint ink from her fingertips, washed her hair, dressed her in jeans and a blue turtleneck, and laid her in a casket beside which her mother stood for two days and sobbed as if something had been pulled from her by force.
It was then, and always will be, awful, horrible, unappeasably sad. But the outrage, the horror, the heartbreak belonged not to the murderer, or the media, or the morgue, each of whom had staked their claims to it. It belonged to the girl and to her mother. Wesley had given them the body back. What Wesley Rice did was a kindness. It served the living by caring for the dead.'