A morgue worker from New York shares “bikes from an antiseptic crypt”

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When I learned that there was a certain Igor on Facebook, an employee of the morgue and a forensic expert who, with many regular subscribers, who regularly read Friday's “tales from an antiseptic crypt”, was curious to talk to “a messenger from the realm of the dead,” the journalist writes Elegant new york Olga Smagarinsky.

He is, indeed, on first terms with Death, and spends his working hours every day in the place where we all will someday find ourselves for the first and last time. He is also a perfume maniac, an artist and a big art lover. How it all fits together in him, why he is not afraid of the dead, what the aroma of death is associated with, we talked about God, faith, science and much more over a cup of coffee.

- Igor, I know that your mother worked for many years as a pathologist. Probably, this somehow influenced the choice of your profession.

- In early childhood I lived in Samara, and when I was 13 years old, we moved to America. My mother worked in Russia as a pathologist and a teacher of pathological anatomy at a state medical school. I often visited her at work, my most vivid childhood memories are connected with the situation of the pathoanatomical departments. When all the other children read the adventure literature, I looked through the medical encyclopedias and anatomy textbooks with interest, looked at the alcohol-containing organs in the closets that stood in their corridors.

My dad was a musician in a famous Soviet ensemble. But all my life I renounced myself to be someone like my parents.

I always wanted to do something related to cosmetic chemistry, perfumery, and graduated from the biochemistry department at the University of Boston, and later on a business school.

Getting into the perfume business is not so easy without the necessary connections, and after university I started working in a company engaged in oncology research.

In time, I decided to move to New York and try my luck in the cosmetics industry, but ... I signed an agreement for the position of mortuary manager and expert in the field of forensic expertise just a week before I was invited to work in my dream in one perfume company.

It was already too late to break the contract, I later bit my elbows, but two years ago I ended up in this unusual place. In two morgues, I lead the entire operational process, from autopsies to budgeting, doing various laboratory tests and also doing forensic medicine.

- Why did you still agree on this job, how did she attract you?

- She is very interesting. I like what I do. Firstly, as the saying goes, “the dead do not sweat and do not complain,” I could not work as a doctor, I even went to medical school, but I decided not to go there in time, I could not work with living and sick people. This is not mine, I am an introvert, and just by its nature it does not suit me. Plus, I always rotated in laboratories with people who are engaged in science at a high level. I like backstage medicine, its scientific side, I like to work in a team of professionals. I spend a lot of time with papers, doing statistics, budget, I don’t sit in one place.

I walk from the morgue to the morgue, from one laboratory to another, from the office to meetings, conferences, even to “dead farm”. This is a testing ground where future forensic experts and judicial anthropologists study different types of decomposition. Both on dead animals, and on people who have bequeathed their bodies to science.

Since the morgue is at the hospital when I have free time, I often go to the emergency room, I sit, I look, with what diagnoses patients are brought. Very often people come there with unusual accidents. My mother always says that 49% of all such incidents begin with the phrase: “look how I can”, and the rest with the words: “look how to do it”. I completely agree with her: human stupidity is simply limitless.

- Do you feel that this work has influenced your personality? What would you call the worst in this profession?

- I have become more calm. Not because this work is leisurely, but it is structured, this work is calming, it is very analytical.

The terrible thing in it is anger and human stupidity, which leads to very sad consequences. It is especially hard when children are brought to the hospital, and during research it turns out that the child was tortured, raped, and systematically.

We are not robots, after such cases I leave to sit outside for a few minutes 20, to drain my brains. This, of course, unflattering work, not office-glam. We see the inside of human society.

The biggest imprint it imposes is frustration in people. Knowing now what a person is capable of, you are suspicious of others, because someone else’s soul is dark, because what’s in your head is unknown. In such a way, alas, adjusts this work.

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- When and why did you start writing your own bikes and posting them on Facebook? And why do you think people show so much interest in them?

- I write about funny and scary cases from my practice, and it struck me how much this, in general, “chernukha” is interesting to people. People don't face it all daily. Everyone, of course, knows that death is always somewhere nearby, and there are morgues in every city, but everything connected with death is both unusual and ordinary, interesting and scary. Always curious about what you do not know.

Actually, I had never before been distinguished by the talent of a writer. I'm just trying in everyday situations to find humor, these stories are like a vent for me. My Odessa roots probably affected me, my grandmother was from there on my mother’s side, they often tell me that I have a good sense of humor, I don’t hear myself, I write as I say, I’m not Dostoevsky.

- In your work a lot of sad and ridiculous cases. Do you find in it a certain positive?

- I think it can be found in any profession. Someone makes tattoos and thinks that it brings beauty to the world, someone deals with finances and believes that his work is very important. Yes, the hospital is a huge conveyor belt, but doctors treat, benefit, diagnose, and in our case, in forensic medicine, we help to find and punish people who commit crimes. Any crime must be punished.

- Are there any funny cases in your work?

- We have a lot of these. Religious people always surprise me, I don’t understand how to believe in something blindly. I admit that for someone, religion is a mental anchor, hope, an outlet, but it leads to resentment when religion begins to interfere in other areas of life, threatening life and health.

And it is precisely this that often happens in our sphere on the basis of religious problems, and regardless of the confessions: Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Those can not be opened, this can not be removed, others can not shed blood.

Sometimes it comes to the ridiculous: “Do you have a kosher scalpel?”, They ask. Once, the Chinese tried to steal the placenta to eat it.

The most problematic cases are often associated with religion. Once a young girl was brought to the hospital, who was already at the last stage of childbirth, but she didn’t even know about it, because the pastor of her denomination explained it to a young man that she cannot become pregnant while having sex while standing.

There are terrible cases when, under the guise of a religious ban, relatives are not allowed to inspect a child, alive or already dead, and then it turns out that the child was subjected to violence, and death was caused by internal bleeding.

— Over the years of your work, I’m sure there have been many terrible cases, but there were probably funny ones too. Tell us about the scariest and funniest things.

- We don't get bored. And the worst case was when the homeless brought us two bags of “human minced meat,” which they found in a big garbage dump. As it turned out later, after killing a man, they were plugged into a tree shredder, and the corpse just turned into mincemeat. We had to restore the skeleton, to identify the identity of the victim, and thereby help to get on the trail of the killer. My 3 techniques took almost weeks to do this, separated pieces of bone from meat, then glued it all together like a puzzle, and ultimately the investigation managed to identify the killer and his victim.

The most unusual and shocking case, one might even say ridiculous, but after the fact, is “the resurrection from the dead”. This in the morgue rarely happens.

One day, literally among the dead silence of our underground crypt, there was a cough coming from one of the corpses. Do we need to tell how we all got scared, and some of them actually put them in their pants, and the largest technician with a scream, like a schoolgirl, flew out of the door of the morgue with a bullet? It turned out that the man had a clinical death, but everyone, including his wife and doctors, was sure that he was dead. And he take and wake up on our table!

The result of human stupidity is ridiculous. Often on Fridays, when people seem to be bored and want to have fun, they happen to be entertaining. Namely, there are a lot of fans to check what non-traditional objects are able to crawl into their anus. In the case, you will not believe, go, and bottles of champagne, and the robot from Toy Story, which in addition moves hands, and a liquid for cleaning glasses. There was one eccentric lady who managed to wind a python on her arm and could not get rid of him later, we called a specialist from the zoo who did a snake injection so that she would fall asleep.

- In your notes about the work of the morgue, you often write about suicides and tell you that during holidays, the number of people who try to take their own lives increases.

— On Thanksgiving Day, Christmas and New Year's days, on Valentine's Day, in general, on all family and romantic dates on the calendar, indeed, suicides most often occur. At this time, many people have an intensified feeling of loneliness, worthlessness, and restlessness; they see happy couples or families and do not know where to go from despair.

I can joke around gloomily, saying that in many cases suicide attempts do not end well, because people simply do not know how to do it correctly.

Of course, I will not conduct an educational program on this topic, but we often receive victims of failed suicides that remain crippled for the rest of their lives. Of course, I understand that this is only my emotional urge, but I would really like to bring potential suicides to the morgue, so that they can see what death looks like, and that there is nothing romantic about it.

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-What does death mean to you? Can a man of science believe in God?

— Death is often explained as a process in which the soul leaves the physical body and goes into another world. At one time I was interested in all sorts of teachings about life after death, reincarnation, but when I witnessed the death of my relatives, I realized that there was none of this. That after death there is simply a place where the remains were buried.

As a man of science, I, by definition, cannot believe in God, in that which I cannot measure, touch, or explain. How could people who did not know where the sun was going at night to know something about the origin of the universe or about God? For me, the Bible is just a mythology, along with the legends and myths of ancient Greece, for example. It was the first and necessary set of laws and an attempt to explain some natural processes that could not be explained without having scientific knowledge.

There is a medical explanation for death - it is a complete stop of the biological and physiological processes of vital activity of the organism. After death, I see a shell that has outlived its shape, a framework that later becomes a natural fertilizer. It was before us and will be after, everyone has their own life cycle.

I believe that a person remains in the thoughts and memories of others, in his affairs - this is the very reincarnation, life after death - I believe in that.

One day, even the bones are washed into dust, nothing remains, a person becomes a platform for a new life. I will bequeath my body after death to science. Most often, cancer patients do this, maybe another awareness of being already comes to them, and, of course, some doctors and other representatives of medicine.

In conversations with friends, I often hear the phrase that death is a punishment. In my opinion, death is partly liberation from the burden of being. Each is given exactly as much as he can bear. Interestingly, some die long in hellish agony, wriggling from pain. And someone is given an easy death. I can not explain it.

- Who are the dead for you in the morgue, just a routine job, or do you feel pity towards them?

- Of course, I feel pity for children or for those who left too early. One forensic anthropologist once told me: “You need to learn to move away from these people mentally, otherwise you will not be able to work.”

This may sound terrible, but for us the dead are “cases” (cases), each person is a “case”. Otherwise you might go crazy. Of course, I leave work with a heavy feeling when I know that someone did not die a natural death, I always think why this happened, what I had to do to deserve it. Especially if the deceased ran into a maniac or idiot.

- It seems to me that this kind of work is conducive to becoming a philosopher.

- This is, of course, loudly said, but more and more you begin to understand that you need to enjoy life and appreciate what you have. It's just that you are alive, your legs and arms are working, there are living parents, people who love and support you, friends, music, art, have the opportunity to enjoy it every day. I used to live with the expectations of events, but this long-awaited moment comes, and new problems and new expectations begin. That's how life runs through them. And now I try to get more pleasure from ordinary things, from good weather, from coffee, songs, from pleasant society. I paint pictures, I love perfumery.

— If you were asked to create the scent of death, what notes would it contain?

— By the way, there are quite a lot of fragrances on this gothic theme. U demeter For example, there is the “Smell of the funeral home”, Amouage There is a scent of withered roses with dust, Anna Zvorykina, an independent Russian perfumer, there are several scents on the subject of death. For me, he somehow smelled Black Orchid from Tom Ford. This is a rather gothic scent that tunes in certain thoughts, I would make it even harder, sugary, sweeter, more luxurious. Velvet curtains and black satin - so he gives rise to the image. My favorite flower is tuberose, it smells very unusual. It combines sweet and bitter notes at the same time, as in death. After all, it is scary to die, but, on the other hand, it is like release from the shackles, death has two faces, like this flower.

— You can ask any specialist and professional for some useful advice. Which ones can you give?

— Think about your actions, try to calculate your actions, because they will affect your life and the lives of those around you.

The biggest lesson I learned is that a person needs to find himself, and not his soul mate, who happens to have a bum or a pill, to do something that brings pleasure, to receive pleasure from simple everyday things.

Nobody will arrange a holiday for you, except for you, you should have small anchors that take you out of routine and depression, and cling to life. A person must be busy, idleness and laziness - these are terrible vices, vicious and stupid thoughts arise in their heads.

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