“I, Myself, Am Strange and Unusual”, The Beetlejuice Dilemma

By Deanna Maria R.

In the movie, Beetlejuice, the characters, the live ones, find themselves thrust into a whacky adventure, where the decision to accept the dead or run takes on a whole new meaning. So, what happens when the strange and unusual, actually knocks at your door to borrow a cup of sugar, do you A. pretend you are not home, B. tell them to wait a minute while you check their car for dead bodies or C. give them the sugar, embrace the strange and unusual and just do not let them borrow your car? Of course, I did none of those things, and basically ran.

Before deciding that my cheese has permanently slid off my cracker to be gobbled up by my 8 lb. Apple head Chiweenie that thinks humans owe dogs a cheese tax, here is the 411, the skinny, the info, on my Beetlejuice dilemma. Hold on to your hat folks because I am about to knock it off.

Recently a new couple came to reside in my ‘neighborhood’. A couple, down on their luck, having to endure living in a tent in this Godawful heat. Before you assign them the label of ‘homeless’, which although true, you should know, I live in an RV park (yes by choice). The RV Park and campground allow typical tent campers of the weekend variety to set their tents alongside us permanent RV residents. Sometimes we get those that come in having nowhere else to go, like this couple. However, long term tent camping is not allowed so, yes, they are essentially homeless.

Onto the meat of it, shall we? We were sitting up at the pavilion just ‘shooting the shit’ so to speak, when she proceeds to tell me about the daughter she lost when the baby was 7 months old. She was a twin and her sister had passed a couple hours after birth. After a short, no quality of life, time spent in the hospital, the precious baby died. Horrible right? Just wait, it does not get any better for that poor child even in death if her mother is to be believed.

‘Mom’ then proceeds to tell me that the hospital, after having to fill out a mound of paperwork, releases the body of the child to her to transport in her car to the funeral home on the promise that she is ‘definitely’ cremating the body. At this point, the red flag that lives in my head, stands straight up, magically develops a mouth, and proceeds to scream in my head, ‘run Forest run’. Maybe I ignored it because curiosity caught my attention, and a bit of me thought, ‘bullshit’. She probably should have ended her story there, but she didn’t. Then, she says, ‘I put her in her car seat and took her to the funeral home’.

Well then of course, my mouth decides to override the state of shock my brain was in and proceeded to blurt, “you put a dead baby in a car seat?”. Yes folks, I sure did. She then says, “It healed me, it was like carrying her home”. I stood up, said, “I’m going in the house now”, and started walking away. I hear, “did I freak you out?”. I just made a mumble noise and my Forrest Gump magic shoes carried me home rather quickly.

A few things I have decided since after putting it together with what I already knew, and what I have researched on transporting dead bodies, she is full of shit, let me explain. Yes, it is legal for a hospital to release a body to you if you are the designated agent to handle that, or in her case, the parent of a deceased child. However, if a hospital is demanding the deceased be cremated right away, there usually is some question of a possible communicable disease or due to the shape the body is or was in, at the time of death.

This baby went through hell when she was alive. There is no way the hospital handed this child over to her not in a coffin or body bag (which legally the body has to be in some kind of ‘sealed container’) to be placed in a car seat and transported by her in her car. The deceased would have to be picked up by a funeral home in that case.

Then there is the paper work, mounds of it.

You not only have to fill out release forms from the hospital but you also have to get a permit to transport the body, and it takes near a week to get all the paper work together. Then it may be longer if an autopsy has to be performed because you would need those documents as well. So, you are looking at a somewhere in the range of 14 days before the body is released to a typical person. In the meantime, the body is in the hospital morgue in a freezer. So, someone please tell me, with the body being frozen, and the fact that it is illegal to do, ‘a weekend at Bernie’s’, scenario where they buckle a corpse in the front seat, how she transported the frozen body of her deceased child in a car seat? Strange and unusual, or full of shit?

Check out Deanna’s art work which can be purchased HERE.

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