For someone who spends most of his waking life involved with death, Motty Elbaum seems remarkably cheerful. He took over the job at the tender age of 30 and today, at 43, is still young and robust, an incongruous figure among the clusters of mourning families and scenes of inconsolable grief that characterize funerals.
Every death is heartbreaking, every family's suffering is hard.
Tears are things that affect the one who cries and the one who watches him cry. Even today, I cry with them. For Elbaum, who is on call 24 hours a day, and connected by cellphone to his office from the minute it closes at 3 p.m. till it opens the next morning at 8, the job means making all the arrangements for the funeral and explaining what needs to be done by the family. His staff will take care of other arrangements, like removal of the body to cold storage to await burial. Every bereavement is a tragedy, but for him, the two hardest cases he had to deal with involved small children.