For most of us, recalling our wonder years will bring back waves of fond memories, such as times spent with family members and friends. For me, it was packing up the family and the camper and heading out to Deep Creek Campground for a rustic weekend of nature, campfires, and insect repellent. For Graham Hetrick, Dauphin County Coroner, these memories would include participating in the embalming of recently departed corpses and then making them up in order to present them at a viewing. Hetrick adds, “When a body is displayed in a box with makeup on their face, they don’t look natural. You’re creating a stage to make death look recognizable, but moreover, acceptable. When someone goes up to the casket, what they are seeing makes things more acceptable to people. This allows them to acknowledge the person and to start to grieve the loss.”

Hetrick grew up the son of a funeral home director and learned many lessons about life and death that most people never confront until much later in life. For Hetrick, growing up around death meant that sadness was commonplace. “It’s actually quite odd because you have a family who is dictated by serving other families in need, so your family schedule was always interrupted by what your father was doing professionally.” As far as the life lesson learned from this, Hetrick explains, “I think of death as a part of life, not an ending. Death is harder for people to accept as a natural process. As long as you’re honest about death, it’s very therapeutic to everyone, including kids.”

“As a child, you always look at Christmas as being the greatest holiday. I remember my dad was called on Christmas morning. This family had prepared the tree for their first child, and the child was dead when they went up to wake it in the morning to celebrate. That really sunk into my brain that death comes at any time.” One observation Hetrick is quick to point out regarding death and dying is “that we still don’t have answers as to what happens to the energy that keeps us going, how much of it is spirit and what is spirit. I will say this though, I look at life differently and live life to its fullest because I know death is such a reality.”

Everyone has formulated beliefs as to what the meaning of life is through life experiences and lessons learned. Most of us rarely try to tackle the meaning of death because we don’t have to. Why would we? We’re alive and healthy. When the time does come, it’s too late to question anyway. What happens to the soul? Is there life after death? How many people can say they actually know someone who has had a near death experience and can tell of their delayed journey beyond? Why, Graham Hetrick, of course. “My father went in for surgery and technically died on the table. When I walked in, I could tell that the surgery had not gone particularly well due to the plate marks from trying to revive him several times. When he came to, he described exactly what I had been studying at the time regarding out of body experiences and parapsychology. He said he was floating above the table and that he was watching them revive him. He continued to say how he was pulled back into his body. The surgeons were baffled by his accounts of the surgery due to the accuracy of his account.”

As Coroner, Hetrick has seen death in many faces. “I’ve seen every conceivable type of death there is. I get to see death in its natural state. I get to retrieve a body that’s been dead for a week prior to us finding them. People have no concept of what death looks like at that stage of the game. It was an undulating mass of deterioration and maggots. The odor is profound. I often marvel at myself and at my deputies as to how we can go through this. I have to look at it from a technical process. This way I can gauge the time and place of the death and formulate answers. It isn’t until the next day that the horrendous nature of it all hits me.”

One particular instance that eluded his ability to approach a case in a technical manner and made its way to profoundly affect Hetrick was the death of a small child. Apparently, the mother was a drug addict who could not afford to feed her child. The end result was death by starvation. “I’ll never forget the site of this child’s face and body. It’s something that has stuck in my mind more than anything else.”

According to Hetrick, The most difficult deaths to investigate are suicides. This is because the family is usually unwilling to believe they could commit the act and therefore assume that the forensic evidence is wrong and a possible homicide has been covered up. Because of this, the grieving process takes much longer.

Generally, the easiest way to approach a death from an investigator’s standpoint is to assume that everything’s a homicide and then go from there. “I pretty much work independently. I speak for the forensic evidence since the person who is now deceased cannot tell his or her own story. Sometimes I do cooperate with the district attorney, so it’s my evidence that can prove someone innocent or guilty.” It’s interesting to note that Hetrick is also a forensic sculptor, which among other things means that he’s tasked to determine the logistics of a death. Whether the person was standing or sitting, if there was a beating, how many times they were hit, where the incident started … this coupled with the testimonies of witnesses to the crime contribute to creating an overall picture. In this day and age, the death trend seems to be younger and more violent. “A lot of times I’m zippering up a body bag of a 14 year old trying to be a bad guy selling drugs.”

Another aspect of forensic sculpting includes the recreation of features in order to be able to identify the body. Hetrick jokes, “It does make an odd way to live. Someone sends me a head, and I have to clean it up and put clay on it to try and make out an identity.” Hetrick also adds that with forensic sculpting, you get so involved in the process that you can almost feel the presence of the individual. One such experience not only helped him to identify a person, it also brought him to believe that the dead could in fact communicate. “There once was a drowning case in the Susquehanna. On drowning cases, you lose the hair, so you have no idea what the person is supposed to look like. I looked at his face for a bit and went up and did a very distinct receding hairline. We sent the photos to who we thought the man’s family might be. They called back and said it was their uncle and asked how we knew his hair was like that. Evidently, I got the hairline exactly. It was like the guy was telling me that this is what I look like and I want my family to know.”