This happened to me

Nothing’s Worse Than a Dead Fart — The Dead Body Washing Committee — Horrors Included in Honors

Traumatic memories locked in an olfactory nightmare.

My teenage years were filled with many thrills and new experiences. But, nothing prepared me for my first experience with the dead. Grandmother recently sold her old home, now on a busy commercial avenue, to a mortician. The mortician erected a Jewish funeral home.

We were a conservative Jewish family, and I attended religious services every Shabat. The Saturday morning congregations consisted of chanting, singing, and sweet snacks after the closing prayers. Close to two hours of traditional meditation didn’t prepare me for the Jewish practice concerning the ceremonial washing of bodies.

In fact, I never heard of the Chevra Kadisha( sounds like — Kevrah Kaheeshah) before my grandmother sold the old house on Kaley Avenue to the mortician. My dad asked me if I wanted to be on the committee. The mitzvah, good deed or honor, of participating in the Chevra Kadisha(Jewish burial society or holy society in Aramaic) intrigued and excited me.

I wondered what qualifications I needed. Do you need a certificate to be a body washer? Do you need a license? Do you get a trophy or a plaque signifying your contribution?

Dad told me, “Just show up.”

Showing up, being there, and helping out is the ‘BIG’ qualification for Chevra Kadisha’s membership. ‘Showing up’ is probably the biggest qualification and determination for every kind of success.

We met every other Wednesday. There were always bodies to wash. My training began, but it was no more than a few simple tasks. The Hebrew I learned and practiced at Shabat services paid off because the other men of the dead-body-washing-committee chose me to read all of the prayers preceding and following a body washing.

Each step of my first day was at once terrifying and then anticlimactic. We removed the body from the funeral home’s huge walk-in freezer. The hydraulic lift on the stretcher and moving shelves assisted in retrieving each corpse. Each movement required little effort on our part until we slid the man on to the steel washboard.

The washboard was rounded into a very shallow long bowl and its surface angled down to a drain at the end where the corpse’s feet lay. The head of the Chevra Kaddisha prepared a bucket of warm, soapy water and three of us washed the man’s face-up body.

The first time it happened, I thought I might be hallucinating. The dead man jerked. My dad noticed and explained that sometimes when a body is decomposing, it can move as if it’s somehow animated. Instead of being frightened, I was intrigued.

Could this be where imaginations have dreamt up the dead coming alive?

There was little to no conversation out of respect for the departed or tradition; I’m not sure. Then the time came to move the body to wash its back. My dad did not warn me. Nobody warned me. It was sadistic and cruel to let me enter this ritual without due diligence. I was but a teenager, still innocent in some ways.

Two of us turned the body and lifted its back. My dad began to use his damp cloth and wiped down the corpse, and then I heard an eerie squeaking.

(Could this be where ghost stories were first fantasized?)

Where did this unworldly sound originate?

Before I could ask if anyone else heard the noise, a horrid smell assaulted my senses. The attack went much further than only my olfactory senses. My brain tried to recoil in my skull. My skin may have been coated with acid.

The room filled with a noxious balm of sulfur resembling a concentrated rotten egg scent forever embedded into my teenage memories. Holding the body in position, I only hoped this was the end of the dead farts I would experience while washing my first body. But, as we returned the body to the table, it let loose another nose-death, butt-bomb.

(When moved, dead bodies can express trapped gas from any orifice. Trapped gas accumulates in bodies due to bacteria building up in a process of self-digestion called autolysis.)

The mortician knew of our woes and turned the air conditioning on turbo. He added a standing fan near to where we finished our duties. Soon our ceremonial washing concluded, and I read a Kaddish giving thanks for the life once inhabiting the recently departed.

I never received a plaque or any other certificate for my Chevra Kadisha duties. The honor and mitzvah rested in caring for an individual or what was an individual. And I learned. I acquired a kind of knowledge and understanding of death, the most natural part of life.

But, I gained the wisdom of perhaps one of the only absolutes in all the universe:

There’s nothing that smells worse than a dead fart.