I SECOND THAT EMOTION: Feelings and dealing with the dead

This does not apply to cops. Cops have to deal with the victim’s grieving families; cops know the frustration of listening to a suspect and knowing he’s lying. Don’t ask me what cops feel.

So what DO we feel? We feel underpaid and overworked. We feel that our supervisor is pushing for results while ignoring our realities. We feel that cops are unreasonable, families are neurotic, and attorneys are from another planet. Most of all we feel how tenuous life can be. There’s nothing like death to straighten out your priorities.

In other words, working at morgue does not make you depressed. It DOES make you paranoid. Just as you tend to lock your doors more carefully after a scary movie, the things we see every day can have lingering effects. I had only been at the morgue for a month when, shortly before Christmas, a family of five was brought in. An animal nest in their furnace pipe flooded the house with carbon monoxide. I stopped at KMart on the way home, not only buying a detector for myself but one for my parents. I check my smoke detector batteries religiously. One pathologist examined a baby dead of SIDS and spent the night next to his child’s crib. I felt a vibration in my mother’s car and had it in the shop the next day. I didn’t get any email from my sister for a few days and was ready to send her local police over on a welfare check. Paranoid.

Unfortunately this newfound respect for danger does not, similar to the medical profession, apply to smoking and drinking. That continues unabated no matter how many blackened lungs and DUI crashes we see. Nobody said we were smart.

But we DO feel.

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