A quick tour of the embalming trade with your friendly neighborhood mortician
by Joe Tarr
Elvis Presley is dead.
Just ask Fred Adomat.
Fresh out of mortician school, Adomat was there in 1977 when they brought the King's body into a Memphis mortuary to be embalmed.
"I did not embalm Elvis Presley but I was there when they brought in his body," says Adomat, driving the green van with tinted windows that he uses to cart bodies around town in. "I just happened to be there when all that was going on."
Merging onto construction-addled Interstate 40, the friendly Adomat skips onto some other aspect of his job, which he clearly enjoys. He is dressed in a white shirt and blue tie. Traffic is thick, and with Adomat at your side and 18-wheelers maneuvering in the next lane, it's hard not to be a little more cognizant that death might snatch you at any moment, say in a wreck on the highway, leaving your body and car a crumpled mess for others to deal with, you never do know.
It seems a bizarre way to make a living—cleaning up and preparing the dead for burial—but somebody's got to do it, and to Adomat and others in the business, it's simply a job.
An embalmer for more than 20 years, the 52-year-old Adomat says handling dead bodies has never been hard for him. "I've never had a problem with anybody who was dead. It's the live people who cause problems," he says.
Adomat owns the East Tennessee Mortuary Service, a business he started about 10 years ago. While many funeral homes still do their own embalming, some contract with services like Adomat's to do it for them. Other funeral homes will turn to him when they're short-handed or it is simply convenient.
His job entails a variety of things (including a lot of paperwork), but the most graphic is the embalming—the process of temporarily preserving a body so that it is sanitary and suitable for open viewing by family and friends. The process involves replacing blood with formaldehyde and aspirating the blood and fluids from the body organs. Depending on the body, there also may be structural repairs needed—for example, sewing a head back onto a body, or reconstructing half of a face. The process generally takes Adomat an hour and 15 minutes.
"What my real craft is I guess putting people back together that have been in wrecks," he says.
Adomat does most of this work in what used to be a daycare center in West Knoxville.
In the middle of the embalming rooms sits a stainless steel table, slanted toward one end and with a gutter wrapping around it. The table is clean. It's hard to keep up with Adomat as he gives a tour of the little building, pulling out plastic sleeves (to hold broken arms together) and plastic corkscrews (pushed into the anus to prevent postmortem accidents) and the various chemical solutions he uses.
Though seemingly lighthearted, Adomat takes his job seriously. He's embalmed friends before, and says, "I am really honored to be asked to embalm someone I know."
"[When I embalm friends] I think a little bit about their life and history. And then sooner or later, I think I better do a good job or I'm going to hear about it. I've got to take care of the family."
Adomat says that he's got all kinds of stories from his work, but perhaps out of respect for the dead or his trade or his audience, is not too forthcoming.
An eerie experience that Adomat does share happened when he first moved to Knoxville in 1979. He was driving a '72 Subaru that had been in a wreck and was beat up. But Adomat didn't have money for another one. So he made do until finally the water pump gave out.
At the car dealer, they told him there were no water pumps for that model to be found—they'd probably have to order one from Japan.
Adomat went back to the office to embalm a body. Walking in the door, he said, "Old buddy, I've had a terrible day. But I'm going to make you look like a million dollars."
"I no sooner get those words out of my mouth and the phone rang."
It was the guy from the car dealership, who told him, "I have no idea what made me go back and look on that shelf but I found a water pump for a 1972 Subaru sitting there."
Coincidence perhaps, but Adomat was startled enough and respectful enough to take notice. "Ever since then, I quit talking to bodies," he says. "I just didn't think I should be doing anymore damage."
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