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If you could call death worknormal.
Bethany went to mortuary school and got her funeral director’s license, eventually buying the huge, white Victorian-era mortuary the three Smythe siblings, George, Gus, and Soula, had grown up in.
Bethany was born for funeral service. She could deal with horrific gore. She could handle emotional devastation. But she was exceptionally skilled when it came to comforting living, breathing humans. She was comfortable in her own skin, warm, compassionate, and generally made everyone else feel cared for.
Eventually, that even included George, her grumpy, misanthropic, buttoned-up co-owner who hated the very air she breathed—until she managed to send him into shock over his real feelings for her.
Now she and Soula were sisters. Officially.
That left me out there alone, digging up the bones and solving the unsolvable cases for the state of Tennessee.
I finished my Ph.D, worked one hot and miserable postdoc year in Gainesville, Florida, and then began my career, traveling backand forth across the state, from the mountains, where my people came from, to Memphis, and back.
Eventually, the three of us reconvened here in Franklin. Soula and Bethany started putting down roots. Settled into their careers and their families.
But I was still a nomad.
I couldn’t establish roots while this job involved tearing them back out again and again. But there was one perk. No one noticed I didn’t have a life of my own—especially me.
Then my granny died—the woman who raised me—and I absorbed even more obligations. More root ripping.
With a heavy (guilty) heart, I took over her role in the community as a death doula.
Whenever my state caseload was light, I sat in bedside vigils. I prayed with loved ones. I helped people atone for their “sins” and right their wrongs before death so they could leave the weight of their earthly shackles behind.
Of course, I didn’t love watching people die. But I did come to appreciate the challenge of helping them find a way to ease their minds as they transitioned. I watched them pass in peace. Sometimes people needed to do some hard work to feel okay leaving this plane of existence, and I was the right kind of outside-the-box thinker who could be of use in that arena.
When needed, I led DMORT, or Disaster Mortuary Operations Response Teams. That was the worst of it. The picking up tiny pieces of people who’d been blown apart in senseless acts of violence or high-casualty accidents. Sorting through tissue in refrigerated trucks after airline crashes or jobsite explosions.
One thing was true for all of us last responders. We were all willing to do the awful, painful shit normal peoplecouldn’t handle.
But it was more than that. We put our own mental health at risk so no one had to know jobs like mine existed.
No one knew when I was in my lab for months, putting aside my fury and tears to identify the skull of a Baby Doe, dug up from under a highway overpass. No one knew that my friend Chris, a dentist with a forensics background would be called in to take molds of baby teeth, determining age—between 24-36 months—but finding no records of dental care, or any medical care, even after a broken and poorly healed mandible. No one knew that my brilliant artist friend, with paintings and sculptures in world-class galleries was also working tirelessly to help me analyze tissue depth thickness in order to sculpt the child’s likeness in the hopes that a family member could come forth with an identification.
No one should have to remember our jobs existed.
My old mentor used to say: if youcanwork with the dead; you should. You owe it to the world, because there aren’t many who are built like us. With stomachs strong as steel and nerves smooth as glass.
Those people were why I continued.
Even on the DMORT ops, I always managed to find some spark of joy. I worked with the funniest, brightest, best people. People with big laughs and even bigger hearts. The kind of people whocared immensely, but didn’t do it for show.
I went into the field of deathcare because I told myself I couldn’t stand the living, but it was the living, breathing people of deathcare who’d made my own life something spectacular.
Now, I was tired. Tired of the gore. Tired of the schedule. Tired of being alone.
Bethany had Sofia and now George. Soula had Waylon and Athena, plus a new little life in her belly.
I wanted someone to come home to. I wanted someone to worry if I was late. I wanted someone to ask if I remembered to eat real food and not just protein bars, and who’d reach for the aspirin when I got headaches from the LED lights in my lab.
It didn’t have to be love. Not love like the movies. That was often toxic anyway. Definitely not suited to the real world.
I didn’t want that. I wanted companionable silence, respectful theological debates, inside jokes and an easy partnership.
I wanted… Gus.
Decca, Flower Moon in May
