Car wrecks, fake toe tags and dozens of funerals: How a Beaufort boy grew up among the dead
During the quarantine for the Covid-19 pandemic, long-time “Only in Beaufort” columnist Ryan Copeland began writing about his experiences as the son of local funeral director and former Beaufort County Coroner Curt Copeland. What began as a simple project morphed into a book called “Waking Up Dead.” The book ts available on Amazon and in select local bookstores. Below is an excerpt from that book.
Career Day is always great when you get to hear from a classmate whose dad is, let’s say, a firefighter who runs with blazing speed into a burning building. Or maybe one of your classmates has a mom who is a nurse, and you can almost feel the pulse of the heart she’s massaging back into rhythm as she recounts the story of her emergency room bravery.
But suddenly the lights in the cafeteria go down and a projector screen comes out.
Popcorn! Reel-to-reel films! Walt Disney!
But it’s none of those things. It’s your dad, with a microphone.
“Good morning, boys and girls!” he says, and you can’t slide down your seat fast enough. “I wanted to take a few minutes to talk to you about the importance of wearing your seatbelt … .”
Out came picture after picture of car accidents. Minivans crushed to random scraps of metal. Motorcycles wrapped around trees. The backs of EMS workers with the familiar Star of Life logo lifting stretchers with fully-covered sheets into the ambulance. The kids in the cafeteria wouldn’t so much gasp as scream, the way kids presented with blood and gore at 8:30 in the morning would do.
The photos were so iconic that kids at my school would talk about it years later, bringing up its impact.
“Remember those slide shows your dad would do?” they’d say, as if he were a juggling clown who showed up at the world’s saddest birthday parties.
“That messed me up for years!”
Still, what my dad did was a very different calling, even if someone had to do it. As I grew I also started to realize that people saw me as different just by extension of what my dad did for a living.
It doesn’t mean I didn’t have my fun.
The fourth home I lived in had a basement in the garage, and when I had two friends over one day who asked what was down there I told them it was where we kept the bodies because it was darker and cooler down there.
“You’re lying,” the smarter of the two said.
“Let’s go take a look,” said the dummy.
“Here, if you’re going down there now take a couple of these with you,” I said, reaching for a small paper with string on it my dad used for identifying the roses in his garden.
“Are those toe tags?!” said the brainiac.
“Yep - there’s a couple bodies down there right now without them,” I said.
They took the tags and then a couple of tentative steps towards the basement door. As soon as they were in a few steps I shut off the lights and closed the door behind them.
They never asked again about my dad bringing work home with him.
Even when he wasn’t bringing work home, which in the form of an actual body he never did, he was finding his work even on family vacations. We never went anywhere without visiting a major cemetery (Hollywood Forever in L.A., Arlington National in D.C.) or simply stopping by a funeral home if it was just visible off the interstate. We literally did this more than once - Charlotte, Las Vegas, Boston ... they all had funeral homes where my dad would just “pop in” to see how they ran things.
I guess I sort of understand that notion now because I spent hours just casing out the New York Public Library in Manhattan, to the detriment and despair of my wife and kids.
But Dad also went with us to every family funeral we ever attended. In Beaufort, my mom’s family alone encompassed my grandparents, my grandmother’s three sisters and two brothers, all their children and most of their grandchildren. In addition, most of the rest of my extended family was not far in various places in South Carolina like Greer, Union, Edgefield and Rains. That’s a lot of elderly family members who were dying at the rate of basically one or two per year at one point. I’m not going to say Dad got “excited” by funerals, but he definitely kept a watchful eye on the proceedings when he wasn’t in charge, ready to jump in and lead a family out of a church pew during a recessional.
My dad was of the opinion that children should be exposed to death at funerals at an early age, so I’ve been attending them since I could talk. At a service at a Methodist church in Edgefield for one of my mom’s uncles, I remember staring at the stained-glass window behind the altar for what felt like hours, secretly hoping Jesus would drop the lamb He was holding and ask the minister to move the service on along.
I didn’t realize until later how strange it was to have been at so many funerals by the time I was 20. I’m not sure if, like my school friends, it ever messed me up completely, but those early incidents in my own life - seeing the result of what happens when breathing ceases - started to at least give me indication that my dad’s job was a little different from others. Most of my friends had dads who were real estate agents and veterinarians and chemists and teachers.
The stories they had to tell were generally much less colorful.