Krasnostein Sarah - The trauma cleaner: one womans extraordinary life in the business of death, decay, and disaster

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Some namesalong with details of character, incident, and placehave been changed. Those changes were kept to the minimum required to protect the privacy of certain individuals in this book.

The challenges posed by Sandras memory loss mean that parts of her biographical story have required imaginative reconstruction. All dialogue and characters are, however, based on what she does remember and, where possible, interviews with third parties or historical records.

Nothing has been exaggerated.

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observationthe test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD , THE CRACK-UP

This is what it says on the back of Sandra Pankhursts business card:

Excellence Is No Accident

Hoarding and Pet Hoarding Cleanup * Squalor/Trashed

Properties * Preparing the Home for

Home-Help Agencies to Attend * Odor Control *

Homicide, Suicide, and Death Scenes *

Deceased Estates * Mold, Flood, and Fire

Remediation * Methamphetamine Lab Cleanup *

Industrial Accidents * Cell Cleaning

I first saw Sandra at a conference for forensic support services. A gaggle of public servants, lawyers, and academics had just emerged from a session on offenders with acquired brain injuries to descend on urns of crappy coffee and plates of sweating cheese. I passed a card table in the lobby, where brochures were spread out next to a sign inviting you to drop your business card into an ice bucket for a chance to win a bottle of shiraz. Next to the ice bucketsilver, with a stags head on either sidea tiny TV played scenes of before and after trauma-cleaning jobs (which brought to mind the words feces and explosion ).

Sitting behind the table, a very tall woman, perfectly coiffed and tethered to an oxygen tank, fanned her hand out and invited me to enter my card. Hypnotized by her smile and her large blue eyes and the oxygen mask she wore like jewelry and the images on her TV, I haltingly explained that I dont have business cards. I did, however, pick up one of her brochures, which I read compulsively for the remainder of the day.

Sandra is the founder of Specialized Trauma Cleaning (STC) Services Pty. Ltd. Each day for the past twenty years, her job has led her into dark homes where death, sickness, and madness have suddenly abbreviated the lives inside.

Most people will never turn their minds to the notion of trauma cleaning , but once they realize that it existsthat it obviously has tothey will probably be surprised to learn that the police do not do trauma cleanup. Neither do firefighters or ambulances or other emergency services. This is why Sandras trauma work is varied and includes crime scenes, floods, and fires. In addition, government housing and mental health agencies, real estate agents, community organizations, executors of deceased estates, and private individuals all call on Sandra to deal with unattended deaths, suicides, or cases of long-term property neglect where homes have, in her words, fallen into disrepute due to the occupiers mental illness, aging, or physical disability. Grieving families also hire Sandra to help them sort, disperse, and dispose of their loved ones belongings.

Her work, in short, is a catalog of the ways we die physically and emotionally, and the strength and delicacy needed to lift the things we leave behind.

We specialize in the unpleasant tasks that you need to have taken care of. Performing a public service as vital as it is gruesome, Sandra is one of the worlds unofficial experts on the living aspects of death. So much is clear from her brochure, which also showcases her intense practicality. Quoth the Brochure of Pankhurst:

People do not understand about body fluids. Body fluids are like acids. They have all the same enzymes that break down our food. When these powerful enzymes come into contact with furnishings and the like, deterioration is rapid. I have known enzymes to soak through a sofa and to eat at the springs, mold growing throughout a piece of furniture, and I have witnessed the rapid deterioration of a contaminated mattress.

Most of us will never realize how many of these places there are or that they can be found in every neighborhood, regardless of socioeconomics. We will never see them or smell them or touch them. We will not know these places or lament them. But this is the milieu in which Sandra spends much of her time; it is where she works and takes phone calls and sends emails, where she laughs and makes the office small talk most of the rest of us roll out in the office elevator; it is where she passed into early and then late middle age.

STC Services have the compassion to deal with the residents, a very underestimated and valued requirement by its customers. Her advertising materials emphasize compassion, but that goes far deeper than the emotional-intelligence equivalent of her technical skill in neutralizing blood-borne pathogens. Sandra knows her clients as well as they know themselves; she airs out their smells, throws out their weird porn, their photos, their letters, the last traces of their DNA entombed in soaps and toothbrushes. She does not, however, erase these people. She couldnt. She has experienced their same sorrows.

* * *

Hi, Sarah, its Sandra. I believe you contacted me for an interview. If you could call me back on [number] it would be appreciated, but possibly not today, as Im just inundated at the moment and Im on my way to a suicide. So if you could just call me back tomorrow, maybe, on [number], thank you. Bye for now.

When I return her call, I learn that Sandra has a warm laugh and that she needs a lung transplant. She asks me when I would like to meet. I tell her that I can work around her schedule. So she says, Okeydokey, and flips open her diary. How about the caf at the Alfred Hospital? she suggests, explaining parenthetically that she has a couple of hours next week before she sees her lung specialist. It struck me then that, for Sandra Pankhurst, death and sickness are a part of life. Not in a Buddhist koan sort of way but in a voice mail and lunch-meeting sort of way. Over the next few years, she would reveal to me how this unrelenting forward orientation, fundamental to her character, has saved her life.

During my time with Sandra, I met a bookbinder, a sex offender, a puppeteer, a cookbook hoarder, a cat hoarder, a wood hoarder, and a silent woman whose home was unfit for her many rabbits and whose skin was so swollen that I thought at any moment it would burst like a water balloon. I heard Sandra bend and flex language into words and idioms she made her own: supposably , sposmatically , hands down pat! I had the rapturous experience, many times, of simply listening to her swear. I saw wonders of the dark world, as true of our collective human life as radio stations and birthday cards: walls that had turned soft from mold, food that had liquefied, drinks that had solidified, flies raised on human blood, the pink soap of the recently deceased and eighteen-year-old chicken bones lying like runes at the bottom of a pot.