Things you can learn from a coroner (a.k.a. Scared Straight)

My husband struggles with my need for a higher level of house order and cleanliness than he considers "good enough". Bless him, he's a guy who once had to clean his room with a shovel. It's a foregone conclusion that we wouldn't share the same dirt threshold. No judgements here. I am a recovering room-shoveler myself. When life throws curve balls, housework is still the first thing to slip. Back in college, I'd actually throw out my fossilized dishes (ew) when they started getting REALLY smelly and hit the thrift store for more. I remember wearing "mostly clean" underpants with a ski parka and an old pair of clown pants as I trucked everything else I owned to the laundromat with about $100 in quarters. Then I was scared straight. One semester, the FBI called me. Turns out my grades and profile (yeah, that freaked me out too) fit some kind of standard and they wanted to know if I'd "considered a career in law enforcement". For an hour, I sat, dumsquizzled, listening to a pitch from 2 agents (1 black, 1 female - but THAT was just representative of the usual level of diversity in the FBI, right? RIGHT?). Hey, the closest I'd ever been to a gun was a can of Silly Putty at a frat party but heaven knows it was the ONE major I hadn't tried yet. So the next semester I took a Criminal Law class. It was taught by a former District Attorney and man, was it fascinating. He went through a couple of cases from begining to end. He brought in the police, the pictures, the people who'd been through it, the public case files. We got a taste of every viewpoint. The final exam was a paper. Pick any employee of the system and give an understanding of their job and its impact on society. Yeah, I picked the coroner. I don't know why. But I spent 2 days with the guy. I saw things that gross me out to this day. The coroner's favorite case had been one that had everyone stumped. A sweet older woman was found; her house ransacked and her body practically stuffed between the sofa and the fireplace. She had bruises on her head and defensive bruising on her arm and it appeared that whatever she'd seen had caused a fatal heart attack. The police get universal reports that this woman had no enemies and nothing worth stealing. The case is on the front of the local paper: big mystery. Then her daughter flies in to make arrangements and whatnot and the police ask her to look at the home and help figure out what's missing. The daughter does a thorough walkthrough and says "nothing". But how can she be so sure, with the house such a tip and everything spilled out everywhere? "Oh, Mom was a slob. This is how it always looked." With that knowledge they were able to determine that she had the heart attack and THEN fell. Case solved. The coroner was showing me the pictures (ew) and shaking his head sadly. "Can you imagine?" he said. I looked closely at the mess behind the (ew) body and realized: "OH CRAP. That looks JUST like my place." Uh, hun. That's what I'm saying. If you don't at least meet minimum cleanliness standards you run the risk of becoming a front-page murder mystery. Also? Ending up in your own fireplace because you trip on something trying to get to the phone. Turns out cleanliness saves LIVES. Scared straight? You betcha. If only we knew a friendly coroner for my husband to hang with....