My Dad Was a Mortician

I remember a friend of mine tell me that thunder was clouds bumping together, he was proud when he told me that; he was also twenty-six. It’s amazing what we believe when told at such a young age.

When I was thirteen, my dad said I was old enough to help him out. My dad was a mortician. I remembered the sleepless nights in the week leading up to it. The nightmares were horrific, and they never stopped. Before I didn’t know exactly what he did, but I knew it involved dead bodies. I cried, but he said I was a man now, and this was something a man does, I believed him.

I worked that *job* for three years until I was sixteen and left home. To say it scarred me would be an understatement, but I did my best to get on with life. And I am proud to say I did okay, no lasting side effects to all that death.

I hadn’t seen my dad since, until today, and now I am forty. I looked down at his body.

“Yeah, that’s him,” I said to the man in the lab coat.

He thanked me and pulled the sheet over my father’s face.

“That’s my dad alright. He was a mortician too, you know?”

The man ignored me and filled out his paperwork.

“This place is so quiet? How do you keep it so silent?”

He looked up from his clipboard and smiled, “Well the residents here don’t talk much.”

“But what about all the ones still alive, where do you keep them?”

He gave me a strange look.

“Well if they are living, they hardly belong here do they…” he said trailing off.

That’s when it hit me, I don’t think my dad was a mortician after all.

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