Free The Removers: A Memoir by Andrew Meredith Page A

guys.”
    “How did she let it get so bad?” I said. “Five guys just because she couldn’t stop eating.” I was fascinated by how powerless she must’ve felt. That’s when you really understand that the self is not a single entity, when one part feels constant dread at what the other keeps doing, at how much pain the impulsive self visits on the observant one.
    “Let’s go wait outside,” Dad said to me.
    “She’s imposing on people,” I said. I had become a fanatic about imposition. “Even in death.”
    A half dozen streets die at the east side of JFK Hospital. Standing on the loading dock we could see the brick walls of the ends of these rows of two-story homes.
    “Ever think we’d be doing this?” I said.
    “Hauling bodies?” My father looked up at the sky. “No.”
    Here was an opening for a question like “Then how did you picture us turning out?” Maybe I needed to say “One two three” to get the real weight in our lives moving. Instead I said, “I guess it’s not the worst thing in the world.”
    It was these kinds of moments that were our family specialty. We spent so much time within five feet of each other—none of us ever went anywhere—and yet every sitting at the dinner table together, every ride to the Acme together, nearly any and every opportunity to talk about something deeper than sports and the weather and the pertinent details of the day, anything deeper than “What time do you need to be picked up?” we defused.
    Two other guys showed up, and it took the four of us plus whatever effort the security guard contributed to get this woman over. She was half again wider than the stretcher, so moving her out of the morgue and down the hall meant gripping fat and going slow. We got her out onto the loading dock, and then slowly down the ramp, with four of us backing down alongside and ahead of her, with Dad steering at the head end. Next we got the foot end of the stretcher up over the hearse’s back-door lip.
    There’s a moment when the remover has to squeeze the twohandles in the stretcher’s undercarriage to release the wheeled legs, leaving nearly all the deceased’s weight in his hands. With a one-hundred-pound body this means a nearly imperceptible exertion, an unremarkable moment. A two-hundred-pounder, I would come to learn, elicits a grunt and a mild strain in the face that lasts less than a second before the momentum of the back wheels sliding into the hearse takes over. With a two-hundred-and-fifty-pounder the remover might let some of the weight rest on the tops of his thighs. By three hundred pounds, he wants help. He might not get it or need it necessarily, but it’s probably best to have someone there, a spotter, to avoid tipping, or in case of some kind of failure of his muscles or the stretcher’s legs. A five-hundred-pound body, like Susan’s, demands a team: extra hands for stability and extra muscle for that moment when all the weight belongs to the removers. On this night, Dad was in charge of the head-end weight. He counted “One, two, three” again at the moment he was going to release the legs. The other four of us stood two on each side of the stretcher, holding it like we would to slide a casket into the hearse. When he released the legs there was a second before the forward momentum of her slide into the dark car began, when the five of us shared the five hundred pounds, but Dad, standing at Susan’s head, held the most weight, and he was the one with the best leverage for driving her forward. He exhaled coolly, and put her away.
    Once she was in, there was a laugh of relief that even the security guard shared. The four of us then drove to the funeral home in our separate cars. We got Susan up the rampinto the morgue, then had to finagle four heavy nylon straps under her body. Once this was done we hooked the straps to a hydraulic hoist mounted in one of the ceiling beams. Now she was out of our hands. I remember the whine of the hoist’s motor