'He Has Embalmed So Many Eminent Persons'

Over the years I wrote thousands of pieces – hard news stories, features, columns, obituaries, reviews of books, movies and music – for the newspapers where I worked in Ohio, Indiana and New York. They’re clipped and saved in a chaotic file cabinet. Most, I, like the rest of the world, have forgotten. An exception is my 1995 profile of Roy Bordeau, a freelance embalmer in Schenectady, N.Y., which remains vivid in memory, both the reporting and the completed story. Michael, my middle son, has disinterred it for me from the digital morgue. (The story jumps from page H1 to page H2. Just scroll down.) 

Bordeau confounded my expectations. There was nothing morbid or funereal about him, nothing stereotypically “weird.” He was funny, articulate and realistic about what he did for a living and how others reacted to it. Twenty-nine years ago, he had already embalmed some 7,500 bodies, and I see that he’s still in the business.

 

“To remember a client,” he told me, “it has to be something really special. If you got emotionally involved with every case, you couldn’t go on. You’ve got to divide that emotion from what you’re doing. It’s mechanical. You’re not even thinking about this being somebody’s mother or father.”

 

I’ve heard doctors, police officers and journalists say similar things, and I admired Bordeau’s coolness and professionalism. My photographer, Aimee Wiles, took a picture of him working out in the gym. His t-shirt reads “Eat Right. Exercise. Die Anyway.”

 

I’ve always enjoyed writing and reading about procedures, whether painting watercolors or investigating a murder. One goal of my story about Bordeau was to explain exactly what an embalmer does, so I could understand it and in turn explain it to readers. To their credit, my editors didn’t try to euphemize anything I wrote. After the story was published, we received a few phone calls and letters protesting the explicitness of some anatomical details. One elderly woman telephoned me directly, outraged that Bordeau had permitted his eleven-year-old daughter to be present in the embalming room and even help with the procedure. I took my time soothing her and she didn’t cancel her subscription.

 

While writing the story I became sensitized to the word embalm, making notes whenever I encountered it. You’ll find it in Chaucer, the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Milton and Edmund Burke. You’ll pardon me for finding Keats’ sonnet “To Sleep” inadvertently comical, from its opening line, “O soft embalmer of the still midnight . . .,”  to its closing line, “And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.” The word is often used figuratively. On the first page of his great biography, in the second sentence, Boswell writes:

 

“Had Dr. Johnson written his own Life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”