Still life
Death is not the end. There's an entirely confronting process of preservation that prepares the dead for a little more time above ground.
By Will Storr
See the incredible pictures Will Storr took of the embalming process.
Warning: Some people may find the contents disturbing or offensive
One thing you don't expect to feel in the presence of a dead man is socially awkward. You might think you'd experience a grinding nausea or, perhaps, that spinny, suck-faced faintness that often accompanies scenes of distress that are so alarming that your brain catches fright and shits all its blood out. But, no. For some reason, to be suddenly confronted by this great yellowy lump of deceased human is to be gripped by an adolescent shyness. You don't know where to look. You don't know what to say. You feel embarrassed. Maybe it's because it's 8 o'clock on a Monday morning - a disagreeable time, under any circumstances, to be meeting three new people. Maybe it's the fact that one of these new people has a bloody hole at the base of his neck that has tubes and clamps and red-soaked bits of string coming out of it. Maybe it's his gigantic cock and balls.
"That's your jugular vein," Gary Taylor, head embalmer and owner of Squizzy's Embalming Service is saying to me. He's pointing to a springy white pipe that's sticking out of the wound. "This one here, that's your carotid artery. That over there," he says, motioning to a contraption that has a glass container filled with scarlet fluid attached to it, "is our Portiboy embalming machine."
I've come to witness the temporary preservation of an elderly Sydney ex-resident. Gary's been in the death business since 1972 and with the help of his 30-year-old assistant Leanne, he carries out roughly 15 embalmings a week in funeral homes all over the city. The purpose of the process is threefold: to preserve, sanitise and restore the cadaver either for viewing by the family or to make possible the shipping of the corpse for burial overseas.
Right now, the body is naked, the head's dropped back, the eyes are closed and mouth slumped open. Its nails need trimming; its jaw has an abrasive black coating of fresh stubble. It's lying on a steel table that has a plug hole at the bottom of it, underneath which hangs a clear rubber tube that's running scarlet with pints and pints of dead blood that are gurgling and swirling straight into the drain. Gary and Leanne, wearing disposable rubber gloves and plastic aprons, work quietly under the blank, angelically white light that casts down from the fluorescent tubes and bounces off the tiles and metal surfaces that make up this cold back room in an anonymous suburban mortuary.
A couple of metres away is a walk-in fridge that's used for the storing of humans. A few metres beyond that is a station platform crammed with oblivious commuters, all of whom, with every beat of their ever-weakening hearts, are shuffling towards life's devastatingly unfair climax - to end up just like this spent and politely rotting vessel.
But it's the rotting we're here to stop. And, to this end, Gary's Portiboy embalming machine is currently pumping formaldehyde-based fluid into the carotid artery. The Portiboy acts like a heart, flooding the preservative right through the arterial system and pushing the blood out of the other end, through the severed jugular vein. The life-juice spurts out of his neck and washes down the table, between his gaping legs, in a vivid scarlet sheet, carrying clots and clumpy, fatty strings of cholesterol with it.
"If you don't embalm," says Gary, "they look deceased and they might purge out of their mouth or any orifice. We're here to stop all that."
"It rehydrates the body as well," adds Leanne. "You can tell by the texture of the skin that it's working. You know how when you're dehydrated, you pinch the skin and it doesn't fall back? When this is done, you'll be able to pick it up and it'll drop back down again." She pinches the skin to demonstrate, before pointing to his ears, which are rimmed with purple blotches. "That's congealed blood," she says. "You can see there's purple in the hands too. The embalming fluid will shift all that."
Once Gary gets his orange Bic razor out and begins shaving the jaw, Leanne puts her gloved finger under the spouting jugular. While still red, the emerging juice has taken on a plasticky, translucent quality.
"That's more chemical than blood, now," she says. "That means we're about finished injecting." She glances over at the Portiboy. "That's about 12 litres of embalming fluid."
It's roughly at this point that the awkwardness subsides. Actually, no - it doesn't subside. It's engulfed, very suddenly, under a monstrous sluice of unctuous, green, grotty nausea. This happens after I hear a gurgling sound coming from inside the dead man's face and decide to investigate. I peer into the dark cavity behind his teeth. His mouth is half-filled with liquid. It's emerging from out of his throat. And it's bubbling.
"What's that in his mouth?" I ask, faintly.
"Just a bit of fluid," Leanne shrugs. "Can you see his eyes beginning to come up?"
"His eyes are actually swelling up now?" I ask, just to make myself absolutely sure of the full horror of what's taking place in front of me.
"Yes," she says. "Just to get them back to normal. We've got to match them up."
I decide to distract myself by asking questions. Attempting to lean casually on a sink, I ask Gary and Leanne about the legendary ‘smell of death'. "There's all different types," says Leanne. "You can tell someone's who's died of cancer. They have a different smell."
"We've done a lot of cases where they're totally decomposed. Like, they might have been left in 30-degree heat for a week," says Leanne.
"What does that smell like?"
"Rotten meat," she replies. "People can smell it on you. You absorb it. Gary can handle more smells than I can."
The worst odour of all, they tell me, occurs only under certain horrific circumstances. Gary - one of Australia's most experienced deathmen - has only sniffed it once or twice. He calls it "the embalmer's worst nightmare" and it happens when the process which is taking place now goes wrong.
Using a scalpel, Gary has cut a small incision into the man's stomach. Leanne has taken a ‘trocar' - a long hollow metal spike, whose pointy end is full of holes and which is attached to a sucking tube - and rammed it into the corpse and kept on ramming, up inside the torso, in every different direction. A glossy, gloopy yellow-brown soup is vacuumed down the trocar's transparent tube.
"This is called aspiration," Leanne says. "We're removing body fluid, urine, blood, stomach contents, gas. The idea is to perforate the bowel, to make channels so the fluid can work its way in properly."
"You and I can release gas naturally," Gary explains. "They can't. So if you don't aspirate properly, it builds up and builds up and eventually it pops."
This is the nightmare. Embalmers are frequently called to deal with popped corpses when they're stored over-ground, in the zinc-sealed coffins that are used for family vaults. "There'll be an explosion from the abdominal area," Gary explains. "The zinc lining - which is welded down to stop air getting in - actually buckles. We have to reopen and repair."
"What does it look like when you reopen?" I ask.
"Your body is 90 per cent water, so it does break down. But if it's embalmed, it won't decompose, it just breaks down into water."
"So it's mush?"
"Yes."
"What about the bones?"
"The bones stay there."
"So it's mush and bones?"
"Yes."
"What does it smell like?"
"Like something you'll never forget."
Having scrubbed and trimmed the fingernails, Gary ties off the penis with string to ensure that there are no embarrassing leaks during the viewing. Then they lift the body and stitch up the anus. Despite the fact that I'm currently experiencing a nausea that I can only describe as akin to having two tonnes of panicking eels in the place your guts are supposed to be, this has been a relatively straightforward embalming of a man who, apart from being dead, is impressively healthy.
More difficult are the anorexics. "Their features are sunken in, you see," Gary sighs. "It's hard to present a proper mouth closure and to keep the eyes closed. Obese people can be very difficult. We're doing more of those."
"We've had them up to 180 kilos," Leanne adds.
"We have to make multiple incisions because of the pressure, the gravity. All the fat pushing down on the body closes off the blood vessels. We have to do the arms, the legs, the face separately," says Gary.
Then, of course, there are the murder victims. "We've done shootings," says Gary. "That's the city we live in today."
"And stabbings," Leanne says. "Stabbings done in a frenzy. They can have 30 wounds or more. We have to stitch every one up, otherwise the embalming fluid will come out."
Gary takes a long, curved needle, threads some string through it and pushes it through the corpse's septum. It emerges from under the top lip and is then pushed under the gum of the lower jaw, before making the same journey back up to the nose, where it's pulled taught and the mouth is closed. He rubs moisturiser over the eyeballs, before slipping a small, ridged plastic cap under the lids to keep them shut.
It's not surprising, given the psychedelic levels of grisly weirdness he has to endure, that Gary has strange dreams. "I've embalmed myself, I've done autopsies on myself, I've looked down and been able to see inside my body," Gary says.
In common with many in the death trade, Gary doesn't need to be unconscious to have bizarre experiences. Asked if he's ever encountered anything spooky, he replies, "Hundreds of times. Once I was sitting down to lunch in a morgue, there was nobody else in the building and - to this day I swear - somebody walked past me. I went cold and every hair on my body went up like that. I actually had to leave the premises."
"I've had very similar situations," says Leanne. "I've seen lights going on and off in funeral homes. One time, I was walking down the stairs and the stereo switched itself on. So I switched it off and by the time I got back to the stairs it was on again and this kept on happening again and again and again. You talk to a lot of people in this industry and they'll say they've seen things."
As the body is doused in its preferred aftershave and dressed in its favourite jumper, Gary tells me he's was drawn to the trade as a result of a lifelong fascination with the human body. The decades he's spent draining corpses of the pongs and slimes of life and replacing them with the chemicals of death has had a profound effect on him.
"We're so fragile," he says. "Life can be taken so easily. I have eyes in the back of my head when I'm driving. I avoid fights. It's amazing what people can do to each other; the causes of death. I used to be surprised about it. I'm not anymore. As far as I'm concerned, society's going backwards."
The dead man, now freshly groomed and blushed with the pink fluid that'll keep him perky for at least six weeks, is lifted into a coffin and wheeled back into the fridge. Leanne begins cleaning her implements and mopping the floor before they leave for the second of today's four appointments, each one of which they'll charge between $300-$400, depending on the amount of chemicals used.
"It's made me do a lot of soul searching, this job," she says. "And I really believe, now, that this isn't the end. We keep going on."
See the incredible pictures Will Storr took of the embalming process.
Warning: Some people may find the contents disturbing or offensive