World's Worst Job? Meet the Couple Who Clean Up After Messy Deaths

By Liz Langley, Orlando Weekly. Posted January 3, 2009.

Carmen knocks bloody baseboards away from the wall with a hammer and assesses the stains by the front door. Some of the floor will have to be taken out. With no electricity to power the tile remover and no generator available today, they will have to come back tomorrow. That's OK; there's plenty of cleaning to do right now.

The blood on the floor has been softened up with brushes, but it's a machine that looks like an industrial buffer that will really take it up, pumping 200-degree water at a pressure of 99 pounds per square inch onto the floor. The fingerprint dust is washed off the walls wet, so we won't breathe it in. Carmen and Michael talk to me while they work. "There was a person laying there," Carmen says, pointing at the mess in the hallway, and in another room Michael jokes about how on TV they always have people doing jobs like this while they're eating. They talk to me, but I notice, not to each other. They are so in synch in this process that they barely need to confer.

They also never need to use the bathroom; they've sweated so much it's not necessary.

Throughout the day, curious passers-by have stopped to ask questions, so I'm not surprised when, on my millionth break outside, a woman stops to chat. She's holding a toddler by the hand, the sweetest I've ever seen (and I'm not a kid person, not by miles). The woman and I talk and suddenly my legs buckle. In one second the impact of all this bloodshed comes down on me and I realize that I can't even guess at the ripple effect of this, at how many people, to echo the words of Sheri Blanton of the ME's office, will never be able to wash away the event. This is what Carmen has been trying to get through to me: Once I get it, it's like being hit in the chest with a shovel.

I thought I had seen the most haunting face I ever would, but now there is another and it's not just the face; it's what goes on behind it, what the kids -- and adults -- who live around here will remember and how they'll grow with it -- that's the haunting part. People must be at least as absorbent as kitchen cabinets.

I realize that while I could handle the mess, I don't know if I can handle the unfairness of tragedy. The reason I have a hard time with it is the reason Carmen has taken it on.

"Before I do the cleaning, I talk to the family," she says. "Sometimes you see the love in a house. Sometimes you see the loneliness." Sometimes she sees where people have gone through things. "They take all the stuff and they leave all the pictures." Because of her spiritual nature she prays for the victims.

There is a blend of warmth and coolness required to come and meet death on a regular basis. "You have to find that balance," Carmen says, and "not just in this business." It is, she says, about keeping in touch with reality.

The reality of death is not something most of us gravitate to. We may feast on it in fiction or live for what we believe happens after it, but most of us prefer to keep death a great mystery, while ignoring that, ironically, it's also our greatest certainty. Thankfully not everyone feels that way. People like Carmen and Dr. G., who can handle the necessities of death, might not be there for us in the end, but they will be there for us after it, to take care of things after the accident or the illness, the gruesome find or the great disaster.

You know -- the one that's never going to happen to you.

See more stories tagged with: health, murder, cleaning

Liz Langley is a freelance writer in Orlando, FL.

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