Read Online The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 by Jeffrey Toobin - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jeffrey Toobin
Tags: General, True Crime
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committed upon the families who trusted the funeral directors to render the agreed-upon services. But also, implicitly, theft upon the dead, the very pilfering of their parts. Such thinking, though, not only places the dead, strangely, at the center of the victimization; it also ignores the underlying basis of what funeral directors do, which is, after all, to traffic in death.
We have given them that. Until the Civil War—when sons died far from home and needed to be preserved for transport, and when hundreds of thousands of Americans were exposed for the first time to an embalmed body vis-à-vis Abraham Lincoln’s epic train journey from Washington to Philadelphia to New York to Illinois—there was no such thing as embalming here, or funeral directors. Americans took care of their dead. They stood by them when they died, washed them, built them wooden coffins, laidthem out in front parlors (hence “funeral parlor”), and then buried them themselves, paying more than lip service to the axiom of “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Now we hand off our loved ones’ bodies before they’ve even appreciably cooled to funeral directors charged with transforming corpses into what’s called, in funerary parlance, “a memory picture,” to drain them of blood, pump them full of dye and formaldehyde, glue their eyes and wire their mouths shut; to jab a metal instrument through their abdomens and pierce their vital organs, vacuuming up their discharge; to paint them with makeup and position them in coffins in mimicry of peaceful sleep. Or, in cases of cremation, to introduce their bodies into ovens heated to 1,600 degrees, and stoke their bones during an hours-long combustion. This is their job.
Yes, the dead may have been victims of a sort, but beyond them, there was what the funeral directors and cutters did to the living, and not just to the families of the dead. For once their work was finished, the cutters packed the flesh and bones into picnic coolers and headed back north with them. BTS then forwarded the bones and tissue to its client processing companies, which cleaned, handled and supposedly sterilized the parts. Next they were repacked and shipped to doctors and hospitals around the world, including Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where on the morning of May 12, 2005, 65-year-old Betty Pfaff lay unconscious in an operating room as her surgeon tore open a plastic package containing AlloDerm—a white freeze-dried substance, derived from cadaver skin, that dissolves into a wound and stimulates rapid tissue regeneration—which he lowered into the opening stretching across the woman’s abdomen.
L YING IN THE RECOVERY ROOM, draped in covers and her mind foggy, Betty Pfaff was informed that her surgery—a somewhat complicated one, due to the fact that her abdomen had beenopened so many times before—had been a success. Everything went well. You’re going to be fine, she was told. At this moment, these sentences were not only accurate as far as anyone knew, but provided Pfaff with great solace.
Pfaff, a sweet, plump widow who lived alone in a tiny white house across the street from a picturesque cemetery in Jenkintown, had had surgery for abdominal hernias twice before. She’d become susceptible to them as a result of having undergone two cesarean sections within one year. (After her first child, a daughter, died at three months, in 1976, she’d quickly become pregnant with a son, Philip.) Another hernia had cropped up the previous winter; she scheduled the operation for the spring, when the weather would be better. She was unaware before her surgery that she’d be receiving human tissue—she didn’t recall her doctor explicitly telling her, and hadn’t read the consent forms carefully—and remained unaware after, which isn’t unusual, given how routinely it’s used.
She was wheeled back to her room. Her wound, about eight inches long, was to remain open so that accumulating fluids could drain,
We have given them that. Until the Civil War—when sons died far from home and needed to be preserved for transport, and when hundreds of thousands of Americans were exposed for the first time to an embalmed body vis-à-vis Abraham Lincoln’s epic train journey from Washington to Philadelphia to New York to Illinois—there was no such thing as embalming here, or funeral directors. Americans took care of their dead. They stood by them when they died, washed them, built them wooden coffins, laidthem out in front parlors (hence “funeral parlor”), and then buried them themselves, paying more than lip service to the axiom of “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Now we hand off our loved ones’ bodies before they’ve even appreciably cooled to funeral directors charged with transforming corpses into what’s called, in funerary parlance, “a memory picture,” to drain them of blood, pump them full of dye and formaldehyde, glue their eyes and wire their mouths shut; to jab a metal instrument through their abdomens and pierce their vital organs, vacuuming up their discharge; to paint them with makeup and position them in coffins in mimicry of peaceful sleep. Or, in cases of cremation, to introduce their bodies into ovens heated to 1,600 degrees, and stoke their bones during an hours-long combustion. This is their job.
Yes, the dead may have been victims of a sort, but beyond them, there was what the funeral directors and cutters did to the living, and not just to the families of the dead. For once their work was finished, the cutters packed the flesh and bones into picnic coolers and headed back north with them. BTS then forwarded the bones and tissue to its client processing companies, which cleaned, handled and supposedly sterilized the parts. Next they were repacked and shipped to doctors and hospitals around the world, including Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where on the morning of May 12, 2005, 65-year-old Betty Pfaff lay unconscious in an operating room as her surgeon tore open a plastic package containing AlloDerm—a white freeze-dried substance, derived from cadaver skin, that dissolves into a wound and stimulates rapid tissue regeneration—which he lowered into the opening stretching across the woman’s abdomen.
L YING IN THE RECOVERY ROOM, draped in covers and her mind foggy, Betty Pfaff was informed that her surgery—a somewhat complicated one, due to the fact that her abdomen had beenopened so many times before—had been a success. Everything went well. You’re going to be fine, she was told. At this moment, these sentences were not only accurate as far as anyone knew, but provided Pfaff with great solace.
Pfaff, a sweet, plump widow who lived alone in a tiny white house across the street from a picturesque cemetery in Jenkintown, had had surgery for abdominal hernias twice before. She’d become susceptible to them as a result of having undergone two cesarean sections within one year. (After her first child, a daughter, died at three months, in 1976, she’d quickly become pregnant with a son, Philip.) Another hernia had cropped up the previous winter; she scheduled the operation for the spring, when the weather would be better. She was unaware before her surgery that she’d be receiving human tissue—she didn’t recall her doctor explicitly telling her, and hadn’t read the consent forms carefully—and remained unaware after, which isn’t unusual, given how routinely it’s used.
She was wheeled back to her room. Her wound, about eight inches long, was to remain open so that accumulating fluids could drain,
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