DELIVERING THE DEPARTED

Sixty thousand people die in a given year
in New York City. Morticians like Concepcion Gonzalez take it from there.

Since he was 13, Concepcion Gonzalez has been in the business of death. So when it comes to cadavers,
he has seen everything from two boys mauled by a polar bear to a family that threw rocks at a casket. And then there was the dead chicken stuck in a client's coffin...

Everything about the diminutive Gonzalez suggests peace. He sits in his white-walled office surrounded by licenses that give him the right to embalm the dead. A small bouquet of flowers sits atop a chest next to a stack of files, arranged neatly on his desk, next to the forms for shipping dead bodies abroad. As the director of Funeraria San Andres funeral home on 107th street and Amsterdam, a Hispanic neighborhood south of Harlem, Gonzalez ships bodies worldwide, especially to the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Haiti.

New York residents, a mosiac of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, require different services and Gonzalez, 37, has learned to master them all. He counsels the bereaved in both English and Spanish. Gonzalez, who lives alone but for his dog in the Flushing section of Queens, works long hours preparing the dead physically and the living emotionally. He says he's embalmed 10,000 bodies in his career. Having been at it since he was a kid, the dead bodies don't faze him. "After so many years, it does not bother me at all anymore," he says. "It only takes me a couple of minutes to embalm a body." When he looks at a body, he doesn't see a person, he sees a case number. Some days, he is so busy he wakes up at four a.m. to embalm the bodies waiting in the basement of his office building.

And there are enough wacky occurrences to keep his mind on other things. "You don't want to know all the things that go on here," he says. "Believe me, you don't want to experience it."

He has found everything from drugs to knives in people's coffins, placed there by grieving relatives. One time he found a dead chicken, which he later learned was related to a voodoo rite. But he was taken aback when a family started pelting rocks at the coffin of a relative. He says they were trying to damage the coffin so no one would steal it.

Because he deals with many of New York's immigrant communities, Gonzalez ships bodies around the world. He fills out the paperwork and accompanies the body to Kennedy airport. He says he has heard stories of coffins ending up in the wrong country, but he says it has never happened to him. He also has to make sure there are no drugs in the coffin, a growing method of narcotics trafficking.

The most celebrated corpse he has handled was that of former Yankees manager Billy Martin. Thousands of people showed up for the funeral, he says. He has also dealt with sensitive deaths, such as that of the first female police officer killed in the line of duty. President Reagan called his office on that one to offer condolences to the family. "In New York, there are always surprises," he says. "Everyday you learn something new."

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