I hang out more with the dead than with the living. Every day, I spend embalming bodies, each holding their own unique story. I had never found a challenge in bringing a body back to its former glory, mostly because the elderly had a tendency to look dead years before they actually were, but today happened to be a different story.

I stood by the double doors in the back as the stocky men in scrubs wheeled the gurney up the ramp. Generally, the first thing I did would be to look through pictures of the person, provided by the family, to get a better perspective of what I am going for, but for some reason, today, I went right to the body. Once the gurney was moved into the embalming room the bag was transported to the table I began to slowly pull down the zipper of the thick black plastic body bag, peeling apart, each cold tooth falling from the last one like shards of ice. I began pulling back the sides of the bag exposing the face. It was not your typical 80-year-old has-been-dead-for-years-but was-somehow-still breathing face, this was a young face, someone who was not meant to be on my table.

The first thing I noticed were his eyes. They were a glassy bluish gray, very intense, but that's not what caught my attention. What caught me off guard was the fact that they were wide open. It almost looked as though there was still something alive within them. I studied his pale white face, with skin so smooth and youthful. I immediately knew this would be my biggest challenge, bringing life back to the face of someone who had so much left to live. He had soft dirty blonde hair swept to the side that shined like a freshly polished sports car and a neatly shaped chin strap that perfectly framed his square jawline. Such a handsome boy, he couldn't have been more than eighteen years old. He was a man, but still somebody’s baby. I looked into his eyes one last time before pushing his eyelids shut, never to see again.

I began the process of embalming the body. I had done this probably over a hundred times before but this time it just didn't feel the same. With every cut of the scalpel or poke of a needle, I felt for him. "He is dead," I kept telling myself, "it's just a body". Once I finished flushing the fluids through him and the pink color had been restored to his skin I again began studying his face. Looking at him made me think of my own son, who was probably a bit older than the boy in front of me. I hadn't seen my boy in over nine years since he had been living with his mother in New York. She had divorced me years back, she could never handle having so many corpses in and out of the house.

After a few hours I decided to take a break, I walked toward the hallway and found the phone mounted on the wall. I began dialing a number that had not been dialed in far too long, my son's. Once my trembling fingers steadied themselves, I hesitated. Staring at the numbers across the little glowing screen, I built up enough courage to push the green call button on the right side of the phone. It began to ring, over and over again; it seemed like it had rung 30 times before I heard his voice.

“Hello, this is Brandon speaking…”

I interrupted, “Hey buddy, what's up?”

But when Brandon continued with “I can't receive your call right now, please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as possible”. My heart sank. I was talking to an answering machine. I didn’t leave a message.

As I walked back down the hallway to the room where the boy lay, tears came to my eyes. “It's just you and me kid,” I said. He didn't answer. I returned to my work, sewing his mouth shut, flexing his muscles, and finally, I began to dress him in the suit that was brought in with him by the morgue workers. Dressing a body is almost as hard as dressing a six-month-old baby, though bodies don't squirm and fight back, putting stiff limbs into sleeves is no carousel ride either. I saved his shirt and jacket for later because he still needed his face made up.

I pulled over my makeup cart and began laying out my brushes. Before beginning I let out a long sigh, knowing that this would be one of the longest hardest tasks I would take on. In the thirty years I had owned The Ellsey funeral home I had prepared very few young people. The two other kids under the age of twenty that had been on my table previously had lost their lives in automobile accidents meaning the caskets were kept shut. In those situations, there is a whole different process.

After neatening up and shaping his facial hair, I began to apply a base makeup, coating the boy's face and neck like acrylic paint on a clean canvas. That's what it is, painting a mask on a corpse to disguise the effects of death, creating an illusion to fool the family. I continued smoothing the peach colored makeup over and over again, each time I take a step back to view my work I find flaws, the smooth youthful skin was just not there anymore. It was still my job to bring back as much as I possibly could. I wasn’t satisfied with my work but I knew I never would be, so I had to move on. I began adding a rose color to his cheeks and coloring his thin lips, when I finished I took a step back to admire my work. Though it could have been better and the skin didn't look as alive as I wanted it to, I had to tell myself that it wasn't alive and I had done the best work that I could have. I combed his hair and began to get the casket ready for the boy to be placed inside it.

I remembered that I had never looked in the boy's file, I didn't even know his name, and I hadn’t seen any of the pictures. I went back into the main room where the cream colored folder lay on a round table next to the double door where the boy had been brought in. I picked up the folder in my old hands and flipped it open, before reading any documents that the folder contained, I picked up the stack of pictures tucked in the pocket. I began to flip through the more recent pictures of the boy, one of him in a graduation cap and gown, one of him with a girl at the beach. I took a step back and the pile slipped out of my grasp. The stack of pictures spread itself out across the polished hardwood flooring. I bent over to pick them up when one picture caught my eye. It felt like my heart stopped beating as I held the picture of a three-year-old kid sitting on the leg of a man in a big leather recliner chair. I studied the familiar face of the child and then of the man. My shaky hands couldn't hold it much longer and the picture, of myself holding my son floated gracefully to the floor like the first leaf to fall in October and gently lands right next to the open folder with a neatly printed label reading the name “Brandon Ellsey.”