Late one afternoon, Joseph Scott Morgan squeezed into a booth at the Bullpen Rib House near Turner Field, where he picked at a barbecue sandwich with one hand and patted the cover of his new book with the other.
"I hate the theatrics of it, but this book has been all about facing fear," Morgan said. Then his voice trailed off, his eyes teared up, and he paused to stare out into the empty restaurant. "It's the first time I've been in here since 2004," he said.
In 2004, Morgan was a senior investigator working at the Fulton County medical examiner's office on Pryor Street, a few blocks from the Bullpen. After enjoying what he described as a "normal lunch" with his longtime friend, Atlanta police Sgt. Scott Kreher, Morgan returned to his desk and suddenly started sweating and shaking uncontrollably.
He thought he was having a heart attack. It turned out he was having a breakdown, later diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.
"They said, 'You don't need a cardiologist, you need a psychiatrist,' " Morgan recalled.
In "Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator" (Feral Press), Morgan tells all sorts of gruesome tales from over 20 years of being "Death's interpreter" in New Orleans and Atlanta, and the toll it took on his psyche.
That day in 2004 when he took an ambulance ride from the medical examiner's office to Crawford Long hospital marked the end of his career. But it led him to a new way of life.
"They put me on medication and I just slept for three or four days," Morgan said. "When I woke up, I woke to the reality that I was never going to be a death investigator again.
"I thought I was strong. I could go sit in a room filled with decomposing bodies and have flies landing on my face and still do my work. But in reality, it really did bother me."
Nowadays, Morgan lives in a cabin in Dahlonega, with his wife, Kim, and their two children. He teaches at North Georgia College and State University, where he instructs his undergrad students in the ways of forensic science and tries his best to dispel glamorous notions gleaned from TV shows like "CSI."
"Blood Beneath My Feet" is Morgan's first book. Call it a therapeutic memoir. The terse, earthy tone and black humor read like hard-boiled fiction. And there's a Southern man sensibility, as Morgan explains his life in reference to evangelical religion, Jerry Lee Lewis and LSU football. Agonizing memories of growing up in Griffin with an abusive stepfather recall the Tobias Wolff memoir, "This Boy's Life."
Writing the book was a cathartic experience, Morgan concluded. But it dredged up all of the stuff he struggles to forget. Thousands of autopsies and next-of-kin notifications. Hundreds of horrible death scenes. Retreating to the shadows of an Atlanta interstate underpass with a dead man's burnt arm in his grip. Venturing into a dark house near the Atlanta airport to find what a uniformed officer described as "worst."
"There were a lot of tears shed," Morgan said. "My wife cried a lot. But there were a lot of times for laughter, too. In every bit of training I ever went through as a death investigator, they said, 'Morgue humor will not be tolerated.' Let me tell you something, morgue humor is the way you survive."
There are a small number of people who spend their lives dealing with death full-time the way Morgan did — about 680 nationwide, he said — and he is concerned for their mental health as they contend with isolation and a resistance to show emotion for fear of seeming weak. Right now, the victims of the Colorado shooting are on Morgan's mind.
"In death investigation, you're always viewing the abnormal within the context of the seemingly normal," Morgan said. "You go to a mass shooting, and you see it, and you try to make sense of it, and it's very, very difficult. It's a hard thing to explain.
"This very day, I know that there are people in Colorado that are going have to deal with things now that they are still going to have to deal with for years to come. You'll never hear much about the investigators who went out to deal with that scene," he said. "But they are victims, or at least collateral damage, too."
Excerpt from "Blood Beneath My Feet: The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator" by Joseph Scott Morgan:
Death is like the slobbering drunk at the office Christmas party. You hope he doesn't see you, but then he does and makes a beeline for you, throwing his arm around your shoulder and blowing his foul breath in your face. He tells you his sickening story and you've heard it before. It may feel pointless to listen, but it's not so easy to get away. Enduring each retelling again and again had become too much for me. For over twenty years I had been the Reaper's first audience and interpreter, recounting his tale in fine detail to anyone who wanted to hear it. But it had become my own eventual death that appeared in every repeated interpretation.
Author appearances
Joseph Scott Morgan. 4 p.m. July 27, Books-A-Million, 150 Pearl Nix Parkway, Gainesville, 770-503-7732, www.booksamillion.com. 1 p.m. July 28, Books-A-Million, 5900 Sugarloaf Parkway, Lawrenceville, 678-847-5115, www.booksamillion.com. 1 p.m. Aug. 18, Eagle Eye Bookshop, 2076 N. Decatur Road, Decatur, 404-486-0307, eagleeyebooks.com. 4 p.m. Sept. 2, Decatur Book Festival, Local Prose Stage, Decatur, www.decaturbookfestival.com.
About the Author
