Den Mother to the Dead
Roberta Geiselhart’s job is to investigate unexplained deaths. But her passion is to transform how the living deal with dying.
By Beth Hawkins
Photo by Jonathan Chapman
(page 3 of 4)
Geiselhart’s team of investigators is a typically mixed lot. Jackie Soucek, a senior investigator, took a job as an autopsy assistant while studying microbiology. “Bertie kept saying, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to be an investigator? You’re such a people person. I can see you out talking to families,’” says Soucek. She spent two years helping perform autopsies before concluding Geiselhart was right.Until recently, there wasn’t even consensus as to what investigators should know or how they should do their jobs. But in 1994, Jentzen put together a task force to create consistent standards for the field. He invited Geiselhart and a few other top investigators from around the country to Milwaukee. The task force met periodically over the course of a year. At the end, the National Institutes of Justice, a federal agency, threw its support behind the effort in 1997, and the first set of national standards for death investigators was issued and a profession formally born. The following year, Geiselhart passed the test developed by the brand-new American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators. Today, she’s the group’s president.
Her exposure to how other death investigators around the country work has had an effect at home. In 1991, Geiselhart help with the aftermath of the Sioux City plane crash. When she got home, she looked into Minnesota’s plan for handling mass casualties. The idea was to set up a temporary morgue in an ice arena, which Geiselhart knew right away wouldn’t work. Instead, she got the Hennepin County ME’s office and the Metropolitan Airports Commission to develop a plan for a temporary morgue in the building where snow-removal equipment is kept at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Before the current facility was remodeled eight years ago, the Hennepin County morgue was located in the basement of the Hennepin County Medical Center. Investigators had to unload bodies on Chicago Avenue and wheel them into the building past whomever was there, whether it be unsuspecting pedestrians, Vikings fans, or angry family members who had followed the investigators back from a crime scene.
The setup was terrible, but the antiquated building was only one of the barriers Geiselhart was determined to overcome. She wanted to make the facility more accommodating to the living. But many of those who work closely with the dead find the living—whom they usually encounter in grief and despair—problematic.
For years, the ME’s staff routinely told next of kin not to come to the office when a body was delivered. There was no private place to show families the remains, they explained. In those rare cases where an exception was made, the staff taped a “Do Not Use” sign on the elevator, rolled the body into the car, and opened the doors when the family was ready to take a look.
Geiselhart suspected many of her co-workers were secretly relieved to have the shoddy facility as an excuse to keep families of the deceased at bay. “Pathologists did not want to deal with the emotions, with the tears, the heartbreak,” says Janis Amatuzio, the medical examiner for eight Minnesota counties, including Anoka. “It’s easier to let the funeral director handle the grief. It’s much easier to concentrate on the science.”
Such attitudes were hardly unusual. Even today, many ME staffs simply show photos of the deceased to survivors, sometimes on a computer screen. This is not without reason: Some cases can be gruesome, and many people prefer to wait to see the remains until a funeral home has taken care of the blood or other visible signs of a violent or premature death. But there are exceptions, and Geiselhart feels strongly that some people—parents who’ve lost a child, in particular—deserve a dignified space to see and touch the loved one they had lost. When the county started planning the new facility, Geiselhart asked for a viewing room. “I kept saying, ‘I need a family room,’” she recalls. “They kept saying, ‘Why, why, why?’”
Geiselhart was too stubborn and opinionated to give up easily, though. She invited Linda Cherek, a St. Paul grief counselor, to talk to the staff about her experience. In September 1993, Cherek’s daughter Kristen died unexpectedly of a heart condition in her dorm at Marquette University in Wisconsin. As a professional who regularly dealt with death and grief, Cherek felt that it was important for her to see Kristen’s body.
Despite Cherek’s qualifications (not to mention the fact that her husband is a cemetery director), the ME’s staff in Milwaukee was reluctant to provide access. Finally, a cousin who worked for the county wangled an exception. When Cherek put her hand on Kristen’s cheek, it finally made her daughter’s death real. “I needed to physically touch her,” she says. “She was still soft, but she was cold.”
Cherek told the Hennepin County ME staff that discouraging people from viewing a body sends an unhealthy signal. It says, in effect, “This is too awful to actually acknowledge. This is too much for you to handle.” And that, Cherek says, isn’t fair to families.
The lobbying proved persuasive. Geiselhart eventually got her family room. It’s located on the first floor of the office, adjacent to the lobby. Because families can’t have physical contact with remains that contain evidence of a crime, however, there’s a second room where a family can view the body through a window.
Getting the room was only the first battle for Geiselhart, though. She also wanted a door next to the window so people could enter and touch the body if they wanted. That was followed by a fight over a curtain that hangs on a U-shaped track on the other side of the window that allows staffers to show someone’s head while screening off the rest of the body, in case it’s disfigured. Geiselhart still thinks the second curtain is stupid: It comes down from the ceiling only halfway but it’s still too long; worse, unlike the neutral drapery covering the window (or the sheet that could be used to drape a torso), it’s funereal red velvet. She’s equally offended by the box of rubber gloves mounted on the wall. “You don’t touch your husband with gloves on,” she says. “You don’t touch your baby with gloves.”
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