Episode #55. Mortician Weldon I Met at a Hospice

Dr. Jedidiah’s Diary

Dr. Jedidiah is a psychiatrist who loves traveling, meeting new people, and exploring different cultures. As a single father who lost his wife to drug overdose 10 years ago, he has not been his old perky self for the last decade. During those hard years, he has met hundreds of, thousands of people from various walks of life around all over the world. Meeting new people and listening to their stories outside his office have given him different feelings from the ones through the formal encounter groups or support groups for therapy. These people he has accidentally come across were the paths through which Dr. Jedidiah could look back on his own life, being truly honest with himself. Here is Dr. Jedidiah’s monologue that has left him with some food for thoughts in life….or a fodder to justify his own mistakes in the past.

 

Episode 55. Mortician Weldon I Met at a Hospice

When I first met Weldon in my monthly volunteer at the hospice, I wasn’t able to imagine how hard his life had treated the old man. He always looked calm, peaceful, poised, and unperturbed unlike most other people I saw there who were in a tizzy. When I cautiously asked what he did for a living before he stayed in this hospice, Weldon gave me a quiet smile and said “I used to help people leave. I was a mortician. Now I am here waiting for someone to help me leave.” Weldon was reticent most of the time, but each time he was asked to tell me about his lifetime work as a mortician, he never stopped letting his stories unfurl. Sometimes I had a feeling that he must be enjoying or even suffering from his own confabulation. I just thought that he was so lonely and fearful of the upcoming end of his life that he could not help but cook up stories to tell. Let me share some of the most obscure and the eeriest parts that I heard from Weldon. 

 

For 30 something years in Weldon’s life since he was 27 years old, not a day had passed without taking an hour for a small talk with the deceased. He called this time “sacred album of life stories”. I didn’t understand how he managed to lead the small talks with the deceased in his funeral home, but he went on to say that he had a vivid memory of those who shared their stories in silent but powerful ways. He said I’d hardly see how it worked, and that was true. His description of the ritual he did for all those years sounded way too strange to me. Even as a psychiatrist, I had to try hard to visualize his emotionally charged ritual in my mind, which must have been an important time for Weldon to establish and promote a good rapport with the deceased. I wondered if it was Weldon’s strong work ethics or his warmhearted disposition that made it possible to pay tribute to each and every client who left for Heaven. Before he started the process of preparing the body of the deceased, Weldon would take a silent moment of pray, holding the cold, lifeless hands. He said he could hear the deceased person’s soul telling him about his or her life before death during the embalming process. I started to feel somewhat uncomfortable and confused when he said “Patience is needed in my job. I’ve never secured their jaws by sewing to keep their mouth in the right position before I felt they told me everything they desired to express.”

 

Quite oftentimes, Weldon was able to feel all the ups and downs, twists and turns, big or small dust-ups throughout the lives of those people right there waiting to be prepared for a wake. He even hired a professional nail artist to do manicure for the ladies in the coffins. Weldon helped the nail technicians do their art work to the utmost of their ability by holding or propping the stiff hands of the deceased for over an hour. Also, the make-up artist Jill, who’s Weldon’s cousin, was one of the major staff in his funeral home team that enhances the final look of the deceased. Weldon always wanted to make sure that Jill would create the most lively and peaceful make up creation on the pale canvas. That way, he believed that the deceased would truly rest in peace, leaving their final look that’s perfectly beautiful.

 

Weldon said he was not delirious or delusional when he was talking about the voices he heard from each dead client in his funeral home. Listening to his life and philosophy as a mortician, I tried to reminisce the time when I was taking the anatomy course in medical school. ‘What did I do to pay respect to all those cadavers?’ ‘Did I ever earnestly pray for them before I slit open their body for my study?’ I wished that I had gotten Weldon’s sincerity and integrity to save people from their emotional swamp and despair. The hospice must not have been a hopeless place for mortician Weldon to end his life, but rather a quiet layover to recollect and celebrate his past before leaving for the permanent resting place. He believed that he’d have a cheerful rendez-vous in Heaven with all those clients he wholeheartedly saw off at his funeral home.

Expressions

    1.  to be in a tizzy: to be worried or nervous about something

 

    2.  mortician: undertaker/ funeral director

 

 

    3.  reticent: not revealing one’s thoughts or feelings readily

 

    4.  to unfurl: make or become spread out from a rolled or folded state

 

    5.  confabulation: conversation or discussion

 

    6.  to cook up: to invent/ to come up with something (such as an idea, excuse, etc.) to deal with a particular situation

    

    7.  rapport: a close and harmonious relationship in which the people or groups concerned understand each other's feelings or ideas and communicate well

 

    8.  to embalm: preserve (a corpse) from decay, originally with spices and now usually by arterial injection of a preservative

    

    9.  dust-up: a fight or quarrel

 

    10.  wake: essentially a chance for mourners to come together before the funeral takes place.

    11.  delirious: in an acutely disturbed state of mind resulting from illness or intoxication and characterized by restlessness, illusions, and incoherence of thought and speech