Some days things happen and they really are without explanation. Like today.
(Note: this post does not need viewer discretion, although it may seem that way at first. Just bear with me....)
One of my "other job duties as assigned" is releasing bodies out of the hospital morgue to funeral homes. It sounds worse than it is, really, other than the fact that the funeral home folks always - and I mean always - show up at lunchtime.
Most of the funeral homes will send big guys in black suits to do the job. Historically known as undertakers or morticians, they have fancy names now like Funeral Home Directors and Death Care Coordinators. Whatever they're called, they get paid to bring a skinny little gurney with a red velvet zip-up bag, package up the deceased, and roll him/her out the loading dock and into their hearse.
At this point I think to myself what a weird place I work in. I mean, think about it. Where else can you work where dead bodies get rolled out the back door on a regular occasion? Maybe a Las Vegas casino....but nowhere else I can think of.
But I digress.
At any rate, they're always extremely dignified and respectful and I truly stand in admiration of these people who have made it their living to deal with dead people. I'm thinking I'd be a little freaked out by that, but they don't seem to mind it.
...what's a girl to do?...
One of our local funeral homes has a tradition that probably originally seemed like a good idea but it has trouble in the execution. They send the pick-up guy with the traditional accessories (zip-up bag and gurney) but they also send him with a long-stemmed red rose. My thinking on this is that someone back at the funeral home thought it would be a really nice gesture to do this but there needs to be an inservice or something because the guys in the suits that come get the body never have any idea what to do with it. Usually, they get the body all packaged up then they remember the rose. They pick it up, look at it, then (with a shrug) toss it on top of the red zip-up bag and out the door they go.
Today, that particular funeral home showed up to pick up a body. We got everything taken care of then, as usual, the big guy in the black suit remembers the red rose. He picks it up, looks at it, then holds it out to me and says, "Here. This is for you."
Ummmmmm.......
What's a girl to do? I couldn't NOT take it, so I graciously accepted it, gushing "oh, that's so sweet....thank you!". Oh, gosh. Now that I'm remembering it in detail I feel like such an idiot. I wonder if he looked at my reaction, then thought how pitiful this poor woman must be. And it wasn't even a real rose. It was a fake one.
So, I took the rose back to my office and pondered what in the world I should do with this fake flower, intended to, in some fashion, ride out of the hospital with a deceased person, and presented to me as a gift across a dead body while standing in a morgue.
You'll be glad to know that I threw it away. I couldn't keep it. It had too many memories attached to it.
So, I've been laughing at myself ever since. It used to be that cute guys who were truly interested in me gave me REAL flowers. Now my romance consists of being handed a fake rose by a weird undertaker in the ambience of a morgue.
If I said it was better than nothing, you'd really start worrying, now wouldn't you?
