About Time I Read It: The Removers by Andrew Meredith

One of the four books I picked up at the library the other day was Andrew Meredith’s 2014 memoir The Removers. A short book of just over 175 pages made it hard to resist, but I’d like to think there were other reasons I grabbed it. A memoir by a former “remover” entrusted with picking up deceased individuals and transporting them to funeral homes for embalming or cremation appealed to me. To risk coming off as a morbid, in the past I’ve enjoyed smart, well-written books about death and dying like Sherwin B. Nuland’s How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, Caitlin Doughty’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory and Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster. But I was also drawn to The Removers because of its author. A young man who managed to flunk out of not one but two colleges over the course of several years, who, out of a combination of desperation and lack of imagination follows his dad’s footsteps and retrieves corpses for a living sounds like the makings of an entertaining memoir. That’s because I have a fondness for individuals, even fictional ones who manage to succeed inspite of themselves. Mark Richard’s memoir House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer’s Journey Home and Thomas Glavinic’s novel Pull Yourself Together being just two examples. 

One afternoon 15 year old Meredith returns home from school and is surprised to see his dad, an English professor at Philadelphia’s La Salle, home early from work. Over the next few days he learns he’s been fired due to some vaguely-acknowledged impropriety involving a female student. Even though his father would go on to find employment a short time later at a local community college the family never fully recovered. His parents’ loving marriage begins to slowly unravel as his mother and father grow increasingly distant towards each other. Taking advantage of a promise of free tuition as part of dad’s negotiated severance deal he enrolled in La Salle but after a year or so of floundering he drops out. Flunking out again, this time at nearby Temple University he’s left broke, living at home and directionless in life. In the meantime his dad has taken a part-time job as a remover for a local funeral home. With no career goals, or even vague sense of purpose he asks his dad if there’s any openings. Before he knows it he’s wearing a low-key but presentable suit and traveling across town collecting corpses. 

Just like any job this one comes with its own set of occupational hazards. Collecting the newly deceased from hospitals can be surprisingly routine. But extracting the remains of some elderly loner from his/her former residence who’s been dead for a week or two requires both determination and a strong stomach to battle the horrors of bodily decomposition, especially its overpowering stench. Challenging configurations like narrow corridors, endless flights of stairs and tiny bedrooms can bedevil even the most competent of removers. Worse still are the corpses of the severely obese. One Friday evening, when most Philadelphians were starting their weekend festivities Meredith’s father was forced to call his son and two additional removers to assist him during a hospital pick-up after he discovered the body in question weighed over 500 pounds.

The Removers is not just one man’s testimony of bodily death but also the death of his own family. The mysterious firing of his father under scandalous circumstances hangs like a curse over the Meredith family, poisoning his parents’ marriage and sowing the seeds for both his, and his sister’s later struggles in life. But we also see his hometown of Philadelphia, like other Rust Belt towns experience a decline in livability as factories close, good-paying jobs evaporate and hopelessness and violent crime fill the void. Meredith and his friends during a game of pick-up basketball watch a middle age motorist almost beaten to death by a tire iron wielding young hot-head in the throes of road rage. Later, one of his friends would be shot dead by a perfect stranger over a noise complaint. Another friend would end up killing himself. 

Even though it won’t make my year-end list of Favorite Nonfiction, The Removers ain’t a half-bad memoir and well worth a read.