Sorry!... Keep posting! Just went down my local Sainsbury's and there was a dead person there! Seen a few in my time, but not as many as our Military friends I bet! Seen too many myself! One or two have been completely fucked up!
Its when you see them as a result of a motorbike accident that it brings a few things home. Came across several in the far east.
In 1973-74 I lived at Hackney Mortuary, Mare Street, Hackney for a year, in the mortuary keeper's lodge. If it got busy, sometimes I would help out the keeper with the customers. It's not a big deal - when you've seen one you've seen them all, and they never complain. But when the keeper offered me a dish of trifle he had been keeping in the big fridge, I decided against it. One has to draw the line somewhere.
Not sure. Didn't have a uniform on and don't think they were being paid... I wouldn't have paid the lazy bitch! Lying around don't bring home the bacon! (Even though that's what I went there for!)
Mare Street....that takes me back.........I used to work out of Hackney Road, Bethnal Green, just before Diss Street.
I see dead people quite a lot..... .....well, when you live in Suffolk, most of them are standing upright at bus-stops or sitting in cars which seem to be driving themselves.
I'm a qualified nurse. I used to manage an Intensive Care unit - I could tell you a few funny (and not so funny) stories about dead people and my experiences of laying them out (that's what you do with a corpse before you remove it from the ward and take it to the mortuary) - but my worse experience was just a few months after I had qualified (I was 21 years old with fuck all experience of life, as you'd expect from a 21 year old) - I was in charge of the ITU (don't listen to what you hear about short staffing levels being the fault of the current government - I'm talking close to 30 years ago and the problems were just as bad then as they are now!) and an RTA came in - it was a man in his mid 30's who'd had the top of his head sliced off by the spare wheel cradle of a lorry whilst on his push bike. He wasn't dead at the time - it took another three or four hours before his brain finally packed up and he was declared brain dead. Anyway, he was a father of a young family, his wife and two young daughters, six and two years old if I remember - anyway, the wife had been called and asked to come in. Don't forget, I was in charge. just qualified about three or four months. He was pronounced dead just before 14:00hrs and it fell on me to break the news to the wife at 14:10hrs. I had never told a young person with a young family such tragic news before - anyway I did. On my own with no support and with some of his blood on my uniform. Not a pleasant experience. But I do remember after a few minutes of my best empathetic deliberations, sitting in the side room with her, holding her hand and offering meaningless platitudes....after about 15 minutes (surprising how long they take to pass) humming to myself Clouds Across the Moon by the Rah Band which was in the charts at the time....funny how these things happen....
I don't do it anymore - Christ! I couldn't afford my toys in the garage if I was still a nurse! hahaha!
I used to work for the Co-op, and had to visit around 70 funeral homes on a regular basis. At one funeral, the council gravediggers at the cemetery excavated an existing family grave, carefully placing the heavy granite headstone on top of the bank of soil at the side of the grave. The widow led the procession to the grave and our bearers carried the deceased husbands coffin, carefully lowering it into the grave. It was a miserable wet day, and as the mourners gathered around to pay their last respects, one of them stood on the horizontal headstone balanced on the excavated earth, causing it to slide down and disappear into the grave. As you probably know, coffins are made of fairly thin plywood (made to look very expensive by coats of stain and lacquer), and as the headstone hit the coffin lid, smashing it to smithereens, it went into the coffin and hit the poor husband in the middle of his chest, causing his upper torso and head to rise upwards. The unfortunate widow, on seeing this, fainted with shock, believing that her deceased husband had come back to life, and she was eventually taken away in an ambulance for medical treatment. She sued the council, and when it went to court, some three years later, she was awarded £15000 for the distress and trauma, and the claim that she had suffered recurring nightmares ever since the incident, mainly about her husband coming back to life.
Not that you're interested, but at another funeral, the council gravediggers dug four graves in preparation for the following day, and covered three with boards and plastic grass. They ran out of boards, so just draped plastic grass over the fourth grave. Yep, you guessed it - as the Co-op bearers carried the coffin to the grave, the front left bearer stood on the open grave covered by plastic grass, falling into an empty grave and breaking his leg in the process. So, in the middle of a funeral, there was an ambulance with paramedics giving gas/pain relief to the elderly bearer as they extricated him from the hole. Another claim resulted from the deceased's nearest and dearest, and it was settled quietly for £2500
