Cadaver Stories

There's a guy in the office who used to work for a funeral home. His job was to pick up dead bodies and bring them to the home, then embalm them. There was the time he slipped while carrying a young woman who had just died of cancer. She slid off the stretcher and ended up straddling his neck with her legs. "She was still warm," he said.

Or the time he and two others were sent to pick up a woman who weighed 520 lbs. The problem was that they literally couldn't pick her up without great difficulty.

Or the time he had to pick up "the Jumper," a guy who threw himself off a building in San Jose. His family kept his body until they notified the mother, who was in jail in the Phillipines. By the time my co-worker was called to fetch the body, the Jumper had been dead for nearly a month.