During my 22 years as a practicing embalmer and funeral director, I had many unusual experiences. To date, I haven't written much about dealing with fat and morbidly obese people. This is your lucky day. As always, some of this content is from stories that were removed long ago from Kaotic.

I began working in mortuaries during my senior year in High School. I worked nights and would often drag ass to my first class at school, still in my suit. One night, another poor soul and I responded to a hospital to pick up a body. The nurses gave us the "poor bastards" look as we entered the room our body was in. Under what appeared to be a 3 person tent was a dead man that hospital staff estimated weighed about 700 pounds. It took both of us, all the nurses on the floor and two security guards to wrestle the corpulent corpse onto our mortuary cot and get the cot into our "meat wagon."

When we arrived at the mortuary, the night embalmer nearly shit himself. To embalm a body, you need to access both veins and arteries by an incision. To get to the vessels, the embalmer was going to have to dig through a minimum of 4 inches of human lard. Before the embalmer started crying, we beat a hasty retreat. We found out later that he had to call in some dayshift embalmers to assist.

I learned early in my career that the fatter a person is, the further back in the single wide trailer they die. I can't count the number of times we had to flip an obese individual on their side and drag them down the hall in a trailer or other narrow confines. They simply would not fit on our cot.

The only thing worse than morbidly obese individuals is DECOMPOSED morbidly obese individuals. I wrote about a couple that lived in their car and lived primarily on a diet of Mountain Dew and canned beans. They were found after three days of 90+ degree weather, wedged in the front seat of their car. They were not only obese and decomposed, but having gassed themselves to death, managed to vomit all over the THREE LAYERS OF CLOTHING they were wearing. I wrote about a similar couple that lived in an elevator service area on top of an apartment building.

Probably the most bizarre experience was in Phoenix, Arizona. I walked into a mortuary that had the SALT RIVER PIMA INDIAN RESERVATION contract. A Pima Indian and his wife lived "on the Rez". Dad, as it turned out, weighed OVER 1200 pounds. I say over, because the scale at the Maricopa County Coroner's Office, only went up to 1200 pounds. His grieving widow weighed a tiny 700 pounds, neither of them had left the house in years. Other tribe members brought them food and snacks on a 24 hour basis. They sat on padded 4X8 plywood planks, sitting on saw horses with cutout areas so they could use the toilet buckets provided on the floor. The tribal fire department had to remove BOTH sliding glass doors to remove him from the house.

When the deceased arrived at the mortuary, they had to use a borrowed fork lift to place his body on TWO EMBALMING TABLES. The body could not fit in a standard morgue tray and some verification from a crematory indicated the body would not fit in a cremation oven.

The Tribal Elders didn't want to pay for a 5X size casket or the 2-3 graves that would be needed for burial. The undertaker was in a world of shit. When I walked through his front door, I could smell decomposition. The Mortician greeted me like a long lost brother. He gave me a blow by blow description of the situation and begged me for help. After some serious discussion, out in the parking lot, I suggested he push cremation to the Tribal Elders and get them to convince the tiny new widow that to cremate her husband, he would need to be "Anatomically Altered" and leave it at that. The fewer details the better. The Elders were good with saving lots of money and persuaded the widow to sign a carefully worded release that we put together.

After the widow and Elders signed off on the project, my undertaker buddy took a carving knife in hand and did some social surgery on the departed and fit the hunks into the cremation oven in TWO LOADS. I called him a few days later, after safely returning to California. He was delighted with the outcome and offered to buy me dinner the next time I was in town.

If you want to buy me dinner or have questions about embalming, coroner's investigations, police or executive protection work, throw something in my Kaotic in box. CT