“It might take a little bit of force to break this up,\u201d says mortician Holly Williams, lifting John\u2019s arm and gently bending it at the fingers, elbow and wrist. \u201cUsually, the fresher a body is, the easier it is for me to work on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Williams speaks softly and has a happy-go-lucky demeanour that belies the nature of her work. Raised and now employed at a family-run funeral home in north Texas, she has seen and handled dead bodies on an almost daily basis since childhood. Now 28 years old, she estimates that she has worked on something like 1,000 bodies.<\/p>\n
Her work involves collecting recently deceased bodies from the Dallas\u2013Fort Worth area and preparing them for their funeral.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of the people we pick up die in nursing homes,\u201d says Williams, \u201cbut sometimes we get people who died of gunshot wounds or in a car wreck. We might get a call to pick up someone who died alone and wasn\u2019t found for days or weeks, and they\u2019ll already be decomposing, which makes my work much harder.\u201d<\/p>\n
John had been dead about four hours before his body was brought into the funeral home. He had been relatively healthy for most of his life. He had worked his whole life on the Texas oil fields, a job that kept him physically active and in pretty good shape. He had stopped smoking decades earlier and drank alcohol moderately. Then, one cold January morning, he suffered a massive heart attack at home (apparently triggered by other, unknown, complications), fell to the floor, and died almost immediately. He was just 57 years old.<\/p>\n
Now, John lay on Williams\u2019 metal table, his body wrapped in a white linen sheet, cold and stiff to the touch, his skin purplish-grey \u2013 telltale signs that the early stages of decomposition were well under way.<\/p>\n