The first day playing with death

At the mortuary the preproom (as we called it) was full of a mix mash of characters.  On my first day I met Ben out front of the preproom.  My heart was pounding not knowing what to expect when I walked through the front door.  It took all my muster to follow him into the unknown.  When I stepped over the threshold there was a large room with a washer and dryer, a scale, two sets of doors at the far end, a few gurneys standing in a line against the wall like parked cars and among them closed caskets.  This was the waiting area for items moving on to somewhere else.  I followed Ben through the set of doors on the left-hand wall into an office with two desks.  One was Brad's and the other was for a woman we shall call Candy.  Candy was a "death certificate coordinator."  For every death that we dealt with she gathered all of the vital statistics that the funeral director gathered from the family and typed up the hard copy of the death certificate for the "DC runners" to take to the doctors and get signed.  This was a feat all on it's own.  When I started there were 2 DC runners, John and Alan.  I got to act out their days a couple times and I have to say, they had the life.  Yeah, some doctors are real dicks but OMG! Their entire day included driving around in a Neon with a/c, calling doctors or their offices to see when they can meet them and taking death certificates out and picking them up, taking them to the coroners office if they were involved and then finalizing them at the county health department. That's it. Ok, sometimes they had a rush one and had to meet a doctor at target or a restaurant or wherever to get it signs but hey, that was easy! It was the best job at the mortuary. As we walked through another door at the other end of this room there was another large room where dressing and casketing happened. If you looked to the left there was a casket storage room and to the right there were two "refers" (refrigerators) and a door leading to the embalming room. There were three bodies laying on wooden tables that were used for dressing and cosmatizing. Looking at a deceased body dressed, casketed and cosmatized is like looking at a wax figure. They are cold, hard and appear fake. The essence of the human that occupied the body is gone and it really is just an empty shell. I tried to keep my cool but I was totally mesmerized. I couldn't get over how the process of death left this wax figure behind. Trying to get past my excitement I was introduced to four more people in this room. Doug was Brad's right hand man if the preproom. He made sure bodies were where they were suppose to be when they were suppose to be. Cheryl was the cosmetician who was making these bodies look so lovely and there were two "removal" men, Ted and Chad. Then I was led to the embalming room where I met Kurt and Helen. In front of them there were three stainless steel tables. Two of which had naked bodies on them. I was completely unsure at that point if I could handle this...