SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET

SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET

I just remembered something that I forgot for years, or at least that wasn't on my mind for years. The Los Angeles Coroners office has a gift shop.

Let that sink in for a moment

The place where you have to only go when you need to identify a body or get copies of a death certificate has a gift shop.

But it's for a great cause. The store runs to help support special programs and more than anything else, it's a goddamn gift shop in the coroners office. How fucking cool is that all around? I first heard about it over a decade ago and apparently the place has been in operation for far longer than that. It's really a strange and morbid concept, but you can buy some really unique stuff there, such as a body bag suite/dress carrier. toe tags, shirts, crime scene novelty stuff.

I'm not sure if it makes me a morbid person to enjoy the fact that you can go to the coroners office and buy stuff, but I think it provides something more important than capitalism to a dark subject -  it promotes the conversation of death. So anything that helps move forward a death positive agenda is good.

My father died 5 years ago after a year long battle with cancer. In that year he never wanted to talk about the potential of his death even though the type of cancer he had only offered him the time essentially for a couple years at best. He didn't write a will. He didn't even include me or my siblings in the conversations he had with his father and siblings on matters of finances and it really fucked me over when I was the one that took over and tried to make sense of the estate.

Why? Because the topic of your own death is a scary one. It's one that you don't even want to talk about when it's pretty clear that death is coming knocking at your door. It is also something that is very important. I want to have control in as much as possible for my own demise. I have expressed what I want to happen to my body when I die. It's nothing taboo, but if I land on that metal bed under this gift store in the near future, I would like my wishes to be known long before. So the topic of death positive conversation is something that is very important to me. Step one is normalizing the fact that I will die. I do not know when, but I will die and that is very much apart of life and should be considered just as important and known as what I want to eat or what I threw up on the gram today.

On that note, I'm not sure I can encourage you to buy a Coroner's t-shirt all that much because the last time I did and I wore it to visit my grandmother in her retirement home, I think I inadvertently scared half the community there in wondering which one of their friends needs replacing from the weekly bingo circle. I guess there's a time and place to wear those types of things. Another location not to  wear it - while hiking. You're going to freak every other hiker out about there being a dead body in Griffith Park.  Spoiler alert, the place is full of them.

So yeah, go check out the gift shop, it's a truly unique aspect of Los Angeles that most don't ever have any clue about.