Those paragraphs I loved so much

This is how I was planning on starting my magazine article. Since I feel really connected to these paragraphs, as they just flowed when I wrote them, I wanted to post them so that hopefully someone can appreciate them. Enjoy.

Travis McGovern, 19, was laying outstretched on a cold metal table, his shirt open in the back.

Travis waited quietly, as quietly as his formerly jubilant body could be, his brown eyes closed. He was waiting for Tyrone Muhammad to put on his suit.

Travis’ long sleeve white collared shirt probably was the nicest shirt he ever owned. Muhammad fiddles with the collar, adjusting it slightly ever few seconds, deciding whether at a 35 degree angle is minimizes the small remnants of the bullet in Travis’ cheek.

The small, clinical looking room that Travis and Muhammad occupied in the basement of the Peace and Glory Funeral Home in Newark, New Jersey, has white regulation tile, picked out because it is easy to clean when blood splatters on it, a regular occurrence in the funeral home. The room has a scent of body odor delicately dotted with formaldehyde looming in the air.

Travis had already had an autopsy done after he was shot four times earlier that week, so he has already been embalmed. But Tyrone Muhammad still needed to clean Travis up and make him as presentable as possible for Travis’ family. Muhammad took a breath, calculating the task before him, and got to work.

The first thing, the most major post-mortem blemish that Muhammad had to correct, were the sucres lining Travis’ head, which engineered a receding hairline. Muhammad took a tuft of hair from the back of Travis’ head and, using Vaseline, adhered it to Travis’ hair. Next, the cheek. Travis was shot four times; three of the bullets were lodged in his abdomen but one grazed his cheek. The abdomen, Muhammad knew, would be covered by the clothing, but the cheek would pose a problem. Muhammad delicately pulled the bullet, and some of its fragments, out of the created cavity in Travis’ cheek. There was a microscopic piece of bullet left, which Muhammad agonized over for 15 minutes, changing his position attempting to find a better place to remove the egregious fragment. After he’d shifted positions six times, Muhammad gave Travis the last once over, decided that he was pleased with his work and left the funeral parlor just a few hours before Travis’ viewing.

Before Muhammad starts making the final preparations, he likes to ask the family of the deceased to tell him a few things about the person. He takes those pieces of information to heart and remembers a lot of those details, making that death more personal than it would be otherwise.

Before beginning the embalming process, Muhammad, a convert to Islam, a religion that does not believe in any bodily mutilation (even after death), has to take a breath and block out his thoughts when he begins embalming a body.

But Muhammad gets over that initial hesitation against embalming because that is what the family wants and that is why Muhammad became a funeral director – to serve families. That is why Muhammad traded in his scrubs as a student studying to be a nurse for the scrubs of a funeral director, a smock, coveralls and paper-like shoe covers.

“The average time for a non post body, meaning there have not been no autopsy on it, can take about 45 minutes to one hour,“ Muhammad said. “An autopsy body about one to two hours. It varies and depends on the condition of the body.”

But Muhammad can spend a whole night working on one body; just when he thinks that he is done, Muhammad turns around, takes one more look at the body and finds some slight imperfection that needs to be remedied.

Muhammad meticulously combed every inch of Travis’ five foot, four inch, 19-year-old body looking over and over to find any death-caused flaws that his family wouldn’t want to see; everywhere from the middle of his torso to his forehead.

~ by anz203 on December 7, 2007.