rant · moment 12 of 14
Christmas at the Morgue: The Frozen Four-Year-Old
from Angry Gay Santa · #24
Audio-only archive episode — no video to seek.
6 minTim recalls working the morgue on Christmas, including a grim case of a four-year-old who froze to death in a freezer after witnessing his mother's murder, describing the mundane, clinical tools used to process bodies.
- 46:06Tim describes a four-year-old who thawed out after being frozen to death in a freezer while his mother was stabbed.
- 46:31Babies who died at the morgue were brought in containers like Costco deli pails.
- 47:16Tim explains he never shied away as a kid from knowing about bombing and killing around the world.
- 47:42At 18, drunk in a hammock eating lobster, Tim asked himself if it was possible that America were the good guys.
- 48:07Working at the morgue at 26 interested Tim because of how detached modern life is from death and nature.
- 48:33People don't witness accidental death—they don't see how a car accident tears apart a body or what it does to internal organs.
- 49:25The morgue taught Tim simultaneous appreciation for how resilient and how fragile the human body is.
- 49:51Things that kill people are often things that 99 times out of 100 wouldn't kill you, like hitting your head on a door frame.
- 50:41The morgue's fluorescent lighting and mundane approach to death makes everything clinical and matter-of-fact.
- 51:04Morgue workers use kitchen spatulas like pancake flippers to take slices of the brain during autopsies.