"Remember This..."

A few days ago we got a call from a hotel. 

I get to help a young husband deal with his estranged 24 year old wife’s remains after her boyfriend decided to beat her to a pulp then blow her brains out. 

Let’s just say I’m having a hard keeping my dirty mouth clean.

Fucking shit man, seriously.

About a month ago I was called out to a storage shelter. A 26 year old guy blew his pretty little brains out all over his family’s stored belongings. He had a great job, a beautiful, sweet, timid, little wife, and three children. So young to be such a dickhead.

Meanwhile, I get to put the dickhead back together so his ever-loving family can say goodbye while trying to “keep face” to their neighbors. What a dick.

The only thing I’m thankful for is that he used a small caliber… gee thanks.

I dealt with a lady and her boyfriend who came in because they wanted their stillborn baby cremated. The baby was still in the mother’s belly and they were “taking it out” the next day. I felt horrible for this woman; she had two weeks left in her pregnancy.

Then when the day came for me to pick up the stillborn I read the death certificate. (Stillborns DO get death certificates but they’re different than normal death certificates in many way. For instance the doctor or coroner will fill it out right there, meaning I don’t have to track doctors down, then coroners, then find out “correct” vital statistics, etc.) On her death certificate it had listed that the mother smoked “at least a pack and a half of cigarettes” every single day of her pregnancy.

Are you fucking kidding me?! 

Yesterday I had to drive an hour out into the middle of nowhere to a family’s house. When I got there they didn’t want to give up the body, they wanted me to bring my “equipment” and stuff her so she can stay on the couch. It took over an hour to work with them on 1: why that’s not possible and 2: how to let go. Eventually they let me take her. 

*side note: she had the coolest tattoo, it was bars of music that wrapped around her whole body like ivy. I wish I could have taken a picture.

At the funeral tomorrow we are expecting to have over 150 bikers, this is for the little 2 month old. 

Also, we are expecting police to be waiting for the funeral to end. I guess they’re expecting their guy to come to the funeral so they’re gonna get him when he leaves. 

Life is never boring.

On Monday we got a 2 month old little girl who asphyxiated… the parents want her embalmed. I will never understand some people. 

On another note of this, my mom was showing me photos of my new little niece who is almost one month old. In the photos where she was sleeping I just couldn’t look at it the same way anymore. Watching people sleep just won’t be the same.

Asshole Status

I was meeting with a (mildly middle-aged) man yesterday about his upcoming daughters funeral. The man was in a horrible state. Obviously. Who wouldn’t look, smell, and feel like shit when your young daughter is about to die in a few days. I’m helping this man talk about things he doesn’t feel ready to accept but some mysterious force is making him face such utter crap. So yeah, it’s pretty serious stuff and I felt like I was handling it really well. Really professional and sincere because I DO honestly care.

Then as I’m walking away I say, “Alright, see ya soon.”… I swear to shit I heard him groan a little. It’s such a normal thing to say! Only me, of all assholes, would slip it up. Asshole=Me.

Note to self:

Don’t wear a “flowy” dress to a graveside service. Fuck wind.

CHANGE OF PACE: An Introduction To My Apprenticeship

I’m going to change the pace of this particular tumblr. I originally started it to try to put down things from my past, tidbits, stories, etc from my past life as a model/actress/fucking etc etc. But I have a hard time actually sitting down and relating stories like that. I’m much better suited to those kind of things when I’ve been drinking with friends. Not when I’m trying to be clever sitting by myself in front of a computer screen.

So in change I’m going to document things that happen in my job. I originally hadn’t wanted to write about my job because of the potential of somehow ruining whatever it was that makes my job feel somehow pure and sacred. But then I was talking with my mentor and he said he wished he’d written down all the things that have happened throughout his career, from the little things (like grandma fights at wakes) to the bigger things (like a 350lb man breaking his prep room table then bursting his autopsy stitches and basically spilling himself all over the floor… and the new secretary). I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about writing it down blog-style, but that’s how I’m taking it. It IS a new age… and all that. Too many times have I wished I would have had a record of all the little and big things that I’ve lived through in my modeling/acting/singing career. I don’t want to make the same mistake with this career.

I want to be able to look back one day and see a record of all the families that I’ve help, and not just the big things, but the little things too. So that’s what this tumblr will become.

(To tell the truth, most of it will contain entirely embarrassing things on my behalf.)

Steven Clark, my uncle

So I feel like if I don’t post about my uncle passing away tonight it’ll be like a missed chance. I’m sort of having mixed emotions about his passing. I’ve lost a lot… geesh… a lot of people in my life. But most of those people were so close to me in a way that my uncle never was. He was always just Uncle Steve, always there.

Maybe I should explain a bit. When Steve was growing up he was completely normal. He has girlfriends. He dated, drove cars, joked with friends and my dad. He was my father’s older brother. Then he went into the Navy where his job was to paint the planes and other shit that needed to be painted. This was also way back when it wasn’t known that being around paint and all those toxic fumes were bad for a person. Well, it sure affected him. He went into a psych home. He was discharged for mental reasons. When my parents started running the mental home in Idaho Steve came there to live. By that time he wasn’t really a normal guy. He was function-able, sure. He was given a daily allowance which he’d use to go to the gas station every day to buy Coke or coffee and his cigarettes. His medication, to me anyway, seemed to make him an even more awkward individual. It gave him all these tics. The mechanical way he’d smoke, take a drink, smoke, take a drink, smoke, take a drink… that’s really all he did all day. Pick up the cigarette take a puff, pick up the Coke take a drink, pick up the cigarette take a puff, pick up the Coke take a drink… always always always letting the cigarette or can just barely touch the ashtray or table before it was picked up again. This was Steve. This is how I’d always known my uncle. As a child I would make a perfect impression of him doing these things to make my friends laugh. It’s horrible to admit, but it’s also how I coped with things, making them into funny things to tell later. Years later my other Uncle Dana (my mother’s brother) lived on our property when we moved out of town and he watched over my Uncle Steve. They’ve lived there together for many years now.

Tonight, my Uncle Dana was making dinner and he thought Steve was getting ready and went to go check on him. He was unresponsive so he called my dad at the main house. They called my mother (a nurse) and on her way out to the house she called me to tell me that she thought my Uncle Steve was dead. Dana and my father had called an ambulance with hopes that he was still able to be revived. But my mother got there first and knew right away that he was gone and there was nothing to be done. She looked around his room and bathroom and noticed that he’d obviously been throwing up straight blood (meaning he had internal bleeding that had been going on for awhile). He must have been suffering for awhile without telling anyone. Which seems about right because you see - my Uncle Steve NEVER talked. Only sometimes you could get an awkwardly loud, “YES” or “NO”, but really nothing.

The only time I remember hearing of Steve actually speaking more than that was when he had found Ron’s body at the bottom of our staircase. Ron was my dad’s best friend from the Navy days, who had been staying with us for awhile and was a severe alcoholic. He had been having seizures pretty regularly if he didn’t have alcohol in his system. (One time I had to get him from the hospital and as I was bringing him out he had a Grand Mal seizure right in front of me which knocked me on my ass.) Well, Ron had another Grand Mal seizure at the top of our stairs and fell all the way down breaking his neck in the process. Steve found him and actually called my grandfather cause no one was home saying simply, “Ron is not moving.”

My Uncle Steve scarred the crap out of me and enthralled me at the same time. He was a very foreboding figure and quick and sharp with his movements. His not speaking (or rather when he did) was even more intimidating. But I would watch him for hours as a child wondering about his mind and how our brains could make us do the things his brain was making him do. I never had a close relationship with him, not many people really did. But he still was my Uncle Steve, and he was always there, and now he’s not, and he will be a missed presence for sure.