How I was a tombstone

The author of Samizdat recorded a monologue of his friend Arsen, who, from the lack of money, got a job for several months to work as a tomb in a small city near Moscow. Why do some employees of the morgue go from work straight to fishing, how the bad funeral bureau differs from the “angelic” and how it happened that Arsen could not bury his own grandmother.

The only day of the year when not a single funeral bureau works is Easter. The rest of the time is 24/7. The work of the tomb is physically difficult, you need to have a lot of health. Always dig together. In the summer, the grave costs about five thousand, in winter twice as much, since it is more difficult to dig and a junk hammer is used for this. According to statistics, by the way, most people die on New Year's holidays. The costs of the funeral: the car, the coffin, the funeral service in the church, hold the dead in the morgue, wreaths, tables - about 50 thousand.

At first I went to work in the RC - the oldest company of our city. There and pain there: the owner fundamentally did not want to work with the police and buy information from them about the deceased. He has a position: "Everyone knows about us, and they will come to us." As a result, almost no one comes. This is a holiday if three corpses per week are buried. There is a salary of 10 thousand, and the rest is interest. I received only 15 thousand in three and a half weeks. The attitude towards employees is terrible, and the customers are good. This is logical: after all, the order can cost 50-60 thousand.

Once there were no orders in the “RC” for a long time, and then one appeared sharply in the night. I wrote to my friend "New corpse!" All this sounded joyful, and only a few days later I realized that it was abnormal: it seems that I am happy with death. No, no one is cheat, we don’t love death, but death is natural if it is. And she is in the air everywhere.

The chief called us subordinates. We swallowed everything because there was no point in rude. He did not allow us to go to a normal toilet. He himself only went there, and sent us a friend to the dog. The owner has also beer bars, plumbing shops, rental cars and a grocery store, under which he arranged a private morgue. One night for the deceased here is more expensive than guests - two thousand rubles.

Then I moved to “A”, there is a woman boss and all in Angelsky. On the first day when I came to the bureau, my legs got wet. The boss immediately gave me socks, offered coffee. Good active aunt. In the first funeral they knew that I had no experience, and still took it. In "A" I lied that I worked as a tomb in St. Petersburg. If I said that I worked in a local company, they would not have taken me, because they have enmity among themselves. “A”-the largest bureau in the city, the most orders are five to six people a day. They have a contract with the city morgue that allows themselves to take almost all the dead. But some people are afraid to take the dead to the city morgue, as there are rumors that they pull the insides for university research there.

In the city morgue, people lie in a row. Someone has a head opened, someone's guts stick out. The deceased lie naked next to each other on the couchs with wheels, they are only covered with a sheet. Basically there are dead people, whose relatives have no money. The wealthy people take their own to the private morgue. Also, “A” has their own burial goods store and the restaurant “Memorial dinners”. Previously, workers were allowed there, but now not, because everyone was getting drunk and stopped working.

Personnel

The person who burns the grave in the cemetery is a tow truck, or a minute. Combator, in simple words. One friend, when he buried, chewed chewing gum, choked and almost fell into the grave. “A bad sign,” he said, and stopped his work. He was patted on the shoulder. After a break, he continued to dig.

Everyone who will work for some time in the morgue become indifferent to death and dead. On the first day of work, I was bad, and then I got used to it.

One of the first days I met Zhenya, an employee of the RC, who back in 2008 went to earn money during the military conflict of Georgia and South Ossetia. He said that he buried the soldier in zinc coffins and then he woke up an interest in the dead. Now for more than ten years has been working in various funeral companies in our city. Eugene speaks little, loves fishing. Sometimes it takes a bait from a climbing corpse. “It pecks well,” says.

There was also a woman, nicknamed "wonderful" - she was engaged in upholstery of the coffins. She said that the gypsies bury people like Egyptian pharaohs: they dig a huge hole, cement the walls, make repairs, furnish them with furniture, television, gold, hung paintings and burn bonfires all week. The "wonderful" arranged for the bureaus to the bureaucrators of her two sons. The first month they dreamed of nightmares, it was hard, but then they got used to it and worked all summer.

I met employees of another company and realized that the tow trucks are different. I used to see convicts and former policemen - like our driver. He himself is from Moscow, but is not going to return there, as he will then sit in prison. He said that he was already sitting for the murder once and that he had many ill -wishers in the capital. And the guys that I met today were similar to the fans of the Barcelona club, and not to the coffin. They looked great, were in shirts. They seem to have a very good life.

They told me that behind all ritualists there is a roof that comes if the client is dissatisfied or if the employee behaves badly. What is bad, I personally do not know. They said that one worker was put in a trunk and taken away. Then he returned, but no one knows what was done to him.

The dead breathe

It is interesting to work in the funeral, and if I just searched for work, I would have stayed there. Because it delays: you see emotions, even if not the best, and reach for them. People like to look at different strange and stupid videos. And here - it would seem that not the most pleasant emotions begin to give pleasure. Recently, people fought at the funeral because of the property. The fight began on the bus where the corpse was transported. They defeated the icon. In general, everything happens.

Recently, for example, when the coffin was lowered into the dug grave, everyone traditionally threw the earth at it, and one of the relatives of the deceased threw a trifle. The rest began to shout: "Why are you throwing money?" He asked to lag behind him, with the words that it was personal. But there is a belief that, having thrown a trifle in the coffin, you buy the deceased the road to paradise. It's like a small bribe.

If you raise the dead man by the neck, then the snot and saliva can flow from him, and he can also make a sound like a living person. I recently raised my grandmother, and she crumbled as if woke up. This is all the air remaining in the lungs.

It’s hard to bend the deceased’s hands just like that. When a person dies, they themselves stretch up, so it is not without reason the palms are folded on the chest. Once we only raised the hands of the deceased - and they themselves automatically folded to the chest. It is convenient enough.

Somehow the elderly woman was buried. Her children were wealthy, they arrived in good cars, they put her grandmother in the largest and highest quality coffin - in general, the funeral was civilized. Only when they were driving in a cataphal at the cemetery, the driver decided to see a clip from Kazantip on the way. He has a dream of getting there. And he watched all this clip and complained that Kazantip was not the same.
Sometimes you feel very awkward at the procession, but when you look at experienced coffiners, you relax gradually. For example, we once drove up to the church by bus, in which there was a dead man. And while they were waiting for someone, they opened the coffin. A corpse lay next to us, and we calmly played cards. They say that over time you get used to everything and nothing surprises. I look at our employees and see that this is true. They are stable and calm.

And here is the release of the " bikes from the crypt " of our beloved podcast "Talking Head" from Glagolev FM

I was once told in the bureau that they liked me and they want to invite me tomorrow to the burial of the priest, where you need to be in a white shirt, white gloves, shoes and a black suit, because there will be some special procession.

It was the archpriest - the average rank between all the priests. He can be married, so his wife was at the funeral. While we were traveling in a limousine with another, living priest, the wife of the deceased and two small children, the wife said:

- Look, how beautiful we had a priest.

One of our employees answered:

- I do not specialize in men.
- And how can our nun?
-Now, if they were in mini-skirts!
- And so, on the contrary, more interesting, because you do not see what beauty ...

She also thought: “Regional priests have much less money than city. City is cooler and stiff. " Father stopped her with the words: "We are all equal before God."

Before the funeral, the priest defended one night at home, spent the second in the church, where everyone read a prayer. Other clergymen came to say goodbye to him. In general, it is customary to say goodbye to people in different ways. Drivers are alarmed on the road, doctors in the hospital do not say “goodbye”, and Popov is for a long time - from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon, no one else has. We, the coffiners, just stood and waited for all this time. Since we were elegant, in costumes, many decided that we were guards. For these funerals, we were given a bribe twice. During the funeral, we waited for three extra hours. Then the priest came up with the words: “Sorry, that happened. Here you have a thousand. " And he gave each of us a thousand. One guy from our brigade decided to be a little. He went to another priest and begged for more money.

At parting, after the funeral service, everyone kissed a closed coffin. After that he was taken to a special cemetery, where the clergy are buried. No one cried. These were the longest funeral, which lasted about nine hours. Usually they last three to four hours.

What should happen to each

When I was just starting, I represented the workers of the funeral bureau with strange people, informals, satanists or drunks. But, as it turned out, everyone can get there, the main question - whether a person can morally work with the dead or not.

And at the end of my work, my grandmother died with my work. If this happened at the moment when I was just settled, I would be very worried that a close relative died. But this happened when I almost quit, so I was treated to everything as the proper. Of course, it was a pity, but there is nothing to do with it. We buried in the same city where I worked, but the funeral bureau chose another, not mine. All because the agents of another bureau were the first to find my grandmother and managed to call and agree with her parents, uncle, grandmother's sisters. This is a business: who is the first to have time to agree on profitable funerals, he won.

I, leaving work, took the main thing for myself: death is what should happen to everyone. And it's not scary.