WP Daily Prompt: Tell us about a time when you felt out of place.
When I was a Mortician’s Apprentice and the Funeral Directors I worked with had a rush on services to be provided, we would have embalming parties.
What that meant was we were going to be pulling in overtime and end up working through the night, but that was ok because we got PIZZA. The President of our Company tried to get us to call them ” Pizza Parties ” instead of embalming parties. but he also asked us to not play with our Nano Baby Keychains during staff meetings and that suggestion went nowhere too.
We explained that we couldn’t ignore our Nano Babies because our Nano Babies would die if we didn’t take care of them and he said if we couldn’t handle that, we needed to seek employment at one of the many fine dining establishments in the area- McDonalds and Burger King were always looking for highly motivated workers so we could start there.
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There was something a little odd that did happen at our embalming parties. It happened every single time.
After the Services for the day were done, our Embalming party would start. We would turn the music up loud and then we did something we didn’t normally do any other time.
We locked the door between the embalming and prep area and the CU.
As the night went on we told stupid jokes, had debates about who would win in a fight- Superman or Freddy Kruger, was microwave popcorn an actual food.
Nobody I worked with would ever confess to believing in ghosts, they didn’t believe that the Spirits of the dead were watching us as we prepared them to see their family and friends for the last time. But at around two in the morning we started to feel like we didn’t belong in the Funeral Home and that feeling made us feel nervous- and at that point we started to speak softly and move around quietly.
In other words, we acted the way Morticians acted in the movies and that was just creepy.
On Embalming Party Nights, way after midnight, I felt like I had over stayed my welcome and was being politely asked to leave- we all felt that way, but we would joke about that feeling and said we were tired and just acting silly.
But nobody ever teased anyone else when they mentioned that feeling. Nobody made fun of you or laughed when you brought it up out of nowhere.
Ever.
AI Art: Created by Cursejourney
I know that feeling. It happens every so often in different situations for me. Years ago we were looking at places to rent, and one was a former funeral home that had been turned into a house to rent. We went in, and talk about creepy feelings and not belonging there, especially in the room which used to be the embalming room! We didn’t rent it. I kind of wish we had just to see if weird things would happen.
I got the same feeling when we visited the concentration camp Dachau in Germany. All those poor souls who suffered and died there. I could feel their misery.
And a P.S. my daughter at one point had a job working with the coroner, and helped with autopsies. She knows that feeling, too.