It feels weird to call him my uncle, so I’m gonna just call him Jim. “Guy married to my aunt” is too many words to explain the relation. It was always first name basis with this guy anyway, even as a little kid. Every other set of relatives were “Aunt Who and Uncle Whoever.” In this case it was always “Aunt Donna and Jim.” I never really asked why that was, but I always assumed it was because he was her second husband. Now, as an adult, I think it was because our family didn’t like him much. Jim was a weird guy. Not a bad guy, but weird.
Jim passed away recently. We weren’t super close or anything, but I can’t stop thinking about something he told me a few years ago. Truly, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since he said it. I figured I would write it out and see if that could finally organize my thoughts. Put the thing to rest, as it were.
First let me tell you about Jim. Jim was a mortician. Jim was a guy who, when you found out he was a mortician, you would go “yeah, that makes sense.” Jim liked bad 80s sci fi. He liked pausing movies mid-watch to point to where you could see flaws in the special effects being done and explain how they worked. Jim could turn a two hour movie into a five hour Event this way. Jim had a deeply irritating speaking voice. This did not endear him further to his wife’s family in the 90s. Jim did not pass well for The Average Person.
I didn’t see a lot of Donna and Jim as a kid. The whole rest of the family has spent the last 100 years or so in the same general area, so when they moved hours away out of state they disincluded themselves from a lot of family gatherings. This was another point against Jim— they moved for his job, so it was his fault they weren’t around. I was in the same room as these two maybe twice before the age of 25. Not much of a relationship there.
In 2019, they moved back to the area, so they were at the Christmas party for the first time in about 20 years. The family Christmas party is a big deal. Its the only one we’re all almost guaranteed to show up for. The crazy drama happens at the summer block party, the drunken hilarity happens at Christmas. In the course of the evening, both a few beers down at this point, I had my first and only one-to-one conversation with Jim. I think we were both avoiding the chaos. Sometimes you just need a moment of quiet, so we ended up alone in the same corner of the house. Jim announced himself by stubbing his toe on a table, swearing, and then apologizing to the table. Jim was wearing a bow tie with zero irony.
It was then that I discovered: Jim was cool as fuck.
He used to have a geocities website where he used his dead stuff expertise to autopsy horror movie victims for precise cause of death and explain what exactly happens in your body as you are getting chainsawed to death.. He was also very into taxidermy, and considered it an art form. This is a thing he knew how to do. His job did not show him enough dead stuff for any given day, he also had a dead stuff hobby. Honestly, I get why he might make some people uncomfortable. He didn’t seem to have any aversion to a lot of subject matter that most of us would find disturbing, and didn’t seem to grasp why anyone would. He also didn’t take hints easily. I found pretty quickly that getting him off of something that was too much for me was largely a matter of steering him toward something else. Like I said, not bad, just weird.
I asked about his job. He had a lot to say about it. A lot of it was too technical for me to retain, but it was all very passionate. For context, there’s one more thing you need to know about Jim: he used to talk out loud to himself pretty often. Or, more accurately, he would talk to inanimate things around him. That apology to the table for kicking it accidentally was not a one-off thing. For bumping furniture at a party, a casual “ah shit, sorry.” For prepping taxidermy, a quiet and gentle tone, like he was talking to a scared animal. They could go on display or be sold until they were properly “tamed,” which was his description not mine.
And for his “patients?” The utmost professionalism, or at least as much as someone like Jim could ever muster. He would talk to the corpses. He would introduce himself, explain what he was going to do and why, and explain why they had died, if he could. He always did this, and the reason, he said, was because he wanted to be kind in case it turned out people were still conscious to some extent after death.
This is the thing that would help fuck up the next couple of years for me.
He figured that realizing you were dead and not being able to do anything about it must be, while a fascinating idea to him, pretty upsetting for most other people. In that situation, they wouldn’t want to be manhandled by some stranger with a scalpel and not even be given the dignity of an explanation. So, he maintained his bedside manner.
He did not seem to recognize that this had left me reeling. To be honest, I had never given a huge amount of thought to what happens after you die. The thought was a squeamish one on a few different levels. I was a little relieved by his assertion that this probably was not possible physically. I was less relieved when he said that he was glad he’s done it for years anyway, because he’d found out it was true.
I asked him to explain. This was a mistake. I might have been able to let it go as an eccentricity if I had backed off the subject at this point, just a single crazy thing Jim said once. But no, he had my curiosity too firmly now. He had dropped this concept so casually I knew it was impossible for him to be messing with me. Jim didn’t have the poker face for such an elaborate joke. He believed this. He didn’t think it was true, he KNEW it was. I needed to know where that conviction came from.
This is what he told me. At one point in his career, Jim was doing forensic autopsies. When I heard this I was absolutely sure that I was about to hear about some kind of ax murder in addition to the existential missile strike he had just hit me with, but it started out as something far more routine. A woman in her mid 50s had been found dead in her apartment, and he was contacted to find out how it happened.
No foul play was suspected. This woman had a lot of problems. She was obese. She had very poorly controlled diabetes. She had experienced intermittent bouts of homelessness. She was in and out of the ER. She had serious mental health problems. She’d been in jail a few times. She was dead in her apartment for three days before anyone noticed, and once they did no one was surprised. She was someone the cops and the EMTs at the scene had met before and recognized.
So, Jim gets her on the table and does his whole ritual of introducing himself and explaining what is going to happen. Gave his assurances that it would not hurt because her nerves system was no longer functioning. What he was going to do. The queasiness came back around this point in the story. In the context of his strange belief, what struck Jim as a polite and comforting manner struck me as merely describing a torture before it was delivered. Still, something about how little anyone seemed to care about her struck him, and he felt compelled to be extra kind in his narration on this occasion. No one would even claim her body. He felt like someone had to care at least once before she was cremated by the state.
The exam found nothing surprising. She bore all the hallmarks of a life that had been very hard for a very long time. He determined that, in the end, cause of death was related to her diabetes. He explained it to her, exactly what had happened and why. And, he apologized. Her death was preventable, he said. It shouldn’t have happened this way, and he was sorry that it did. He said she deserved better. It seemed like there were a lot of times when she deserved better.
He covered her body, and started to clean up. At one point his back was to her for a moment.
When he turned around again, she was sitting up on the table, looking at him.
He said there was a long beat, a couple of seconds that felt like eternity. They stared at each other in total silence. He wracked his brain for explanations. There were none. She couldn’t be alive. She’d had multiple organs taken out, examined, and put back. She was decomposing. She was dead too long to be in rigor mortis, or having muscle spasms. No one was nearby who could have moved her. This was absolutely impossible.
“No one,” said the dead woman, breaking the silence in a voice filled with gravel by decades of cigarettes, “has ever called me ‘ma’am’ before and meant it. Nobody, not once. Only drugstore cashiers, and only ‘cause they have to. They don’t ever mean it.”
She gave a sigh that strained the stitches running down her torso. “I always knew it would be the diabetes,” she said. “There was just nothing I could do. Well. Thanks for being decent.”
And she just laid back down on the table as if absolutely nothing had happened.
Jim stood there, stunned, trying to process what he had just seen. His own fastidiousness and the way the sheet over her had fallen away was making it difficult to convince himself she hadn’t really moved. The clarity in which he’d heard her voice despite having never met her in life was making it hard to convince himself she hadn’t spoken. Eventually, he found himself clocking out for the night, surprised to see how much time had passed. He could not process it and had finished his work for the night on autopilot, totally numb.
He said never checked the security cameras. Neither of us knew what would have felt worse—seeing nothing, knowing it hadn’t been real, or having proof that it had been. He used up most of his leave after that, giving no explanation for why. He couldn’t face his “patients” again until enough time had passed to convince himself it wasn’t real. The idea that they were listening was much worse when it was no longer hypothetical. But of course, he could never totally leave it behind. And eventually, he said, he came to a conclusion—it had been real. And he was very glad it had happened.
I never got the chance to ask why he would be glad about this. Someone else broke in at that point, and the subject shifted, and so there ended by only solo talk with Jim. I ended up thinking about that last statement straight into Christmas morning, I don’t think I slept at all. Something about that one-two punch of Jim’s theory and his story about the dead woman sitting up just didn’t mesh together in any satisfying way, and certainly not one that explained his conclusion on the matter. Why would he be glad?
I started losing sleep over this. It wasn’t all the time at first, but it was more and more often. Understand this—in 2020, I think we all had some weird thoughts about our own mortality, and this was a bad one to be trapped in an apartment with. I would be laying in bed, in the dark, and the ceiling would become the lid of a casket, or the shiny upper of a metal drawer in a mortuary freezer. I would get up, and suddenly the woman would be around every corner, sitting up on my counter, or my coffee table, looking at me with a rueful melancholy and picking at the stitches on her chest.
I started having these nightmares where I was walking around my apartment, slowly, room to room, gradually rotting and falling apart. In those dreams I was mortally terrified of passing by any reflective surfaces, because being able to see myself decomposing would make it real. This is what death was-just being trapped with yourself, rotting, forever. That fear eventually carried into real life. There was a period in 2020 where I literally had a beach towel duct taped over my bathroom mirror so that I could not continue to scare the shit out of myself every time I had to go to the bathroom in the morning. If I started looking like hell because of it it didn’t matter—it’s not like I had anywhere to be.
I was the most hung up on why Jim was glad about it. Really, I knew I could just text him and ask him what the hell he meant. I could somehow feel that he would answer no matter when I hit send, that he would be working late into the night on some macabre side project that he would gladly interrupt to talk about his horrific vison of the afterlife and how it could possibly bring him such joy and satisfaction. I could not bring myself to do it. So many times I wrote something out only to delete it a minute later. Four in the morning, “hey man you gave me your dead people consciousness disease, please tell me what the fuck you were talking about.” I knew he would answer, but I couldn’t shake the thought that the answer might make it even worse.
Now, eventually I did start to crawl out of the weird pit I was in. The lockdowns easing up really did a lot for my mental health. But, I never really shook that nagging fear that death might involve that type of continued consciousness. It wasn’t something I dwelled on anymore, but it was something in the back of my mind now. Genuinely, what possibility could be worse? But as the grip of the horror slackened, the curiosity came back. Jim could see some kind of good in that whole situation. I was creeping closer and closer to finally asking what it was. He learned the secret somehow. I finally wanted to know what it was.
Except, then I lost my chance, because then Jim went and died himself.
It wasn’t COVID related. Jim had some kind of recurrent health problem related to exposure to embalming chemicals. He, as they say, found what he loved and let it kill him. It felt terribly unfair. We should have had more time. I regret not taking the leap to just send him a text at some point the last couple years. That part is my own fault. Maybe a it’s little his too, but still. I should have had time to process all this, and then talk to him about it, and then finally actually get to know him. In spite of all the sleepless nights his story had cost me, he was genuinely pretty cool underneath his awkward demeanor.
The flood of “he’s in a better place” has never rung so hollow. I got it in my head that I could still ask him the question, and that he might still answer, but the funeral was mercifully free of such incidents. The dreams came back, though. They now star Jim, narrating exactly what is happening to him underground, day by day. I keep trying to ask him the question, but it’s like he can’t hear me. He just carries on, in his droning voice. Every day he comes back, more rotten. Every day he comes back, more excited.
Writing this all out worked. I just figured out what he was glad about. It doesn’t prove his theory. Not at all. It all still might not be true. But I figured out what Jim knew.
I have to explain one final piece of Jim Lore. There is an infamous Jim Incident that gets talked about in the family. When Jim and my aunt were dating, her cat —whom she will to this day loudly tell anyone who will listen, single handedly got her through divorce—got cancer and passed away. Jim taxidermied the cat. He posed it laying on its bed like it was asleep, so my aunt could pet it and pretend that her cat wasn’t dead. My aunt thought this was the most romantic thing in the world. Everyone else thought it was horrifying. I was like six, I thought it was cool. I thought Jim was a wizard. I was a weird kid.
The cat that sealed the deal for Jim and Donna was on display in their house for a few years, and then, in time, my aunt decided it was time to put it away. The stuffed cat went into in a nice cedar box so it wouldn’t be damaged, neither by moths nor by the new cat she and Jim got together. In the telling of it, there had always been an unkind implication made that he did it for fun, and my aunt was too blinded by grief to see that. Totally untrue, but no one else got it.
I understand now why the dead cat was romantic. It was an awkward gesture, a pat on the should with a clumsy hand, but it was a sincere one that must have made her feel really seen, heard, and accepted for the first time in a long time. She hadn’t been ready to let go of her friend, so he did the only thing he could think of to make sure she didn’t have to. He hadn’t given her a dead cat—he had given her a chance to say goodbye on her own terms. It was the same with the woman in the autopsy. It must have been. How many decades was Jim a mortician? It only happened once. It wasn’t everybody. It wasn’t just because she was there, it was because that was the where and when she still had something to say. He met her where she was, and so she did the same. Because someone had to care, just once, before she could let go.
he woman sat up on the table. She laid back down on her own. What then? Who knows? But she stopped, that’s the thing. When she was finished, it was over. She didn’t seem to have to stay. Maybe she went somewhere after that—or maybe it’s just nothing. Like going to sleep. But, it can’t have been the same kind of wakefulness. I can’t prove any of that, but it’s a satisfying answer. I don’t think that she’ll haunt me anymore. Jim might, but I don’t think the dreams will be nightmares anymore. I’ll just listen. He wouldn’t get why he would be scaring me. These are just memories, not ghosts, and for Jim it’s a fitting one.
Of course, that “better place” stuff is still platitude. For Jim, there is no better place than a very literal one. For a man fascinated by death and entranced by the idea of living through his own decay, laying in a casket was already the very image of heaven. “A better place.” It has nothing to do with Jim as a human being. A better place? Maybe, maybe not. So, same as it ever was, then. No one really knows. Wherever we go, I hope Jim gets there eventually.
But, I hope he isn’t there yet. I hope he’s still right where we left him, six feet under, buried with his knowledge, buzzing with enthusiasm for the final satisfaction of a lifelong obsession. I hope he’s pointing to the worms and beetles like the greatest film he’s ever seen, paused seventeen times for explanation. It’s not the better place people think of, but it’s the best place for him.
Jim, buddy, here’s to you. I’m finally saying goodbye.
I hope that shit is the ride of your life.