The back of Sandra Pankhurst’s business card reads:
“Excellence is no Accident”
* Hoarding and Pet Hoarding Clean up * 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 Clean Up * Industrial Accidents * Cell Cleaning
If the places we inhabit are like lungs, rhythmically drawing us in and breathing us out, Sandra Pankhurst’s job as founder of Specializing Trauma Cleaning (STC) Services Pty Ltd. leads her somewhere in between — homes with the lights still on where death, sickness and madness have abruptly abbreviated lives.
I first saw Sandra at a conference for forensic support services. Everyone had just poured out of a session on offenders with acquired brain injuries to descend on urns of watered-down coffee and plates of sweating cheese. On my way to the bathroom, I passed a table in the lobby where STC Services brochures were fanned out next to a sign inviting you to drop your business card into a fishbowl for a chance to win a bottle of Shiraz. A small TV played scenes of before-and-after trauma clean-up jobs. A very tall woman, perfectly coiffed and tethered to an oxygen tank, invited me to leave my business card. Hypnotized by the images on the TV (one of which brought to mind the words “feces” and “cartwheels”), I haltingly explained that I don’t have business cards. I did, however, pick up one of her brochures, which I read compulsively for the remainder of the day.
I was surprised to learn from the brochure that the police do not do trauma clean-up. Neither do firefighters or ambulance crews or emergency services. Instead, hired hands like Sandra handle the clean-up at crime scenes, deaths, floods and fires. Local and state governments, real estate agents, executors of deceased estates and charitable organizations all call on Sandra to deal with issues like long-term property neglect, where homes have “fallen into disrepute” due to the occupier’s drug or alcohol addiction, mental illness, aging or physical disability. Grieving families also hire Sandra to help them sort through their loved one’s belongings.
Performing a public service as vital as it is gruesome, Sandra is one of Australia’s unofficial experts on the living aspects of death.
“People do not understand about body fluids,” the brochure reads. “Bodily fluids are like acids. They have all the same enzymes that break down our food. When these powerful enzymes come into contact with furnishing and the like, deterioration is rapid.
“I have known enzymes to soak through a sofa and to eat at the springs, mould growing throughout a piece of furniture and I have witnessed the rapid deterioration of a contaminated mattress.”
The Shiraz and the oxygen tank and the coiffure were gone by the time the last conference session finished. But I still had the brochure, which, by then, had grabbed me by the neck and was dragging me in search of the woman herself.
“Hi Sarah, it’s Sandra. I believe you contacted me for an interview. If you could call me back it would be appreciated, but possibly not today as I’m just inundated at the moment and I’m on my way to a suicide. So if you could just call me back tomorrow…”
When I return her call, I learn that Sandra has a warm laugh and that she needs a lung transplant. She asks me in a deep, rich voice when I would like to meet. I tell her I can work around her schedule. “Okey dokey,” she says, and I can hear her flip open her diary. “How about the cafe at the Alfred Hospital?” She has a couple of hours before she sees her lung doctor.
It struck me then that, for Sandra Pankhurst, death and sickness are part of life. Not in a quote book sort of way, but in a voicemail and lunch meeting sort of way. Over time, I learned that this outlook was fundamental to her character. My other first impression of this striking woman, however, would turn out to be wrong.
“I was an adopted child. At the age of seven, I was told that I would no longer be wanted by this family and I had to live in a room they’d built out the back,” says Pankhurst. “I weren’t [sic] allowed by the family to associate with them after 4:30 p.m. and I had to fend for myself and organize my own food.”
Sandra is telling me about growing up on the mean streets of Melbourne’s West Footscray while calmly fielding calls on her cell. We are in the cafe, a place where the sick and dying, and those attending to them, can grab a latte or a cheese sandwich. Everyone is eating except for us. Sandra has to fast for four hours before her doctor’s appointment.
In her sixties, Sandra is very tall and graceful and immaculately groomed. I feel short and frumpy next to her. “I used to suffer a lot with boils and things because I weren’t [sic] really nurtured and looked after,” she says, explaining that the way a starving seven-year-old feeds themselves, if they are smart, is by stealing cans of food from the house when their alcoholic adopted father isn’t looking. And that will work until – petrified of being “bashed with a cobbler stick” – they accidentally burn part of the house down.
“One of my jobs was to light the hot water service and I had forgotten and I panicked,” Sandra says. “I put some petrol mower fuel in and it went and burned down the laundry room.”
She didn’t get beaten for the fire. She got beaten for stealing the cans of food which were discovered – empty, crushed and hidden – when the walls burned down.
“It was like an imprisonment sort of lifestyle. So hence, now I have this need for compassion,” she says.
Kicked out at seventeen, she moved in with another family she found through her church. She could stay with them only for six months but they organized a job for her at a steel works under Melbourne’s West Gate Bridge, the second longest in Australia, which was then two years into construction.
“I was working there when the Bridge fell down,” she says before describing the 1970 collapse that killed thirty-five construction workers and could be heard from over twelve miles away. She explains how the light bulbs popped out of their sockets, how she felt the earth shudder, how her first sight of death was over the back fence, watching police throw body parts out of public view.
A doctor sits down at the table next to us and squirts ketchup on a hot dog. The café is noisy but Sandra’s voice is clear above the chaos. When she speaks, she is mostly professional and deliberate. But there is also a cheekiness, a playful flirtiness, which she is beginning to fan out like a peacock’s tail. When she does this, her eyes gleam and she is very beautiful.
She skips over her twenties (which I note is strange, given her candor about everything else) and slips into her thirties, when she became one of the first female funeral directors in the state of Victoria.
“I absolutely adored the job. I loved it with a passion. It was a chance to give back and help people when they needed it most.
“I used to make every member of the funeral party become involved in it so that they would become very emotional. To me, a funeral should be like a play: You get it up to a crescendo,” she says, her long red nail drawing a hill in the air.
“You get everyone’s emotions there,” she says while poking the top of the hill, “they bubble over, then they boil down, and they get on with their life. Otherwise they’re up and down trying to deal with it for years. So, it’s just like conducting a play and getting everyone involved in the scenario.”
Through that work, she realized there was a need for trauma cleaning. “You realize the fire brigade and ambulance really had no time to deal with this. But never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be doing it.”
The path to her new career began with her husband of fifteen years, who she met when Sandra, as she puts it “buried his wife.”
Sandra gave up work to travel with him on his business trips. “But I got restless and bored after a while. So I said to him, ‘We need to buy a business,’” Sandra tells me.
She was thinking a boutique. Instead, they bought a hardware store in Brighton, a moneyed seaside suburb, which eventually folded. When the store went under, “We lost everything. We didn’t know what to do, ’cause we’d both been quite independent and strong. We had to start again,” she says.
She started doing odd jobs – a bit of gardening and interior design and house cleaning. But there wasn’t enough money coming in. “So, I stressed over this, and I thought ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll just start trauma cleaning.’”
Their first job, cleaning up the rental property left by a deceased hoarder, came though her funeral industry contacts.
“It was a disaster. Seventy-two hours after two of us working nonstop, we were almost psychotic. We couldn’t believe that people could live like this. It was more of a squalor situation, even though the gentleman had died in the house. It was absolutely disgusting. It was just putrid. We had to take off three layers of flooring, and there was another contaminated layer of flooring underneath. But what happened was, the last layer was not only glued down, but it was stapled down. We’d slice the linoleum and put boiling water on it to try to break down the glue, and then we had to put spades underneath to get it up. Well, our hands swelled up like massive watermelons.”
“We completed it, and they were happy with the job, but we were severely depressed,” she says. “It took three months to come to terms with whether or not I could ever do this again. But as money was tight, and things were not good, I had to grin and bear it, and get up and go for it. And twenty years later, here I am. Still psychotic.”
In the context of talking about her husband, who passed away ten years ago, Pankhurst tells me in passing that she was not born female and that, finally, she’s not ashamed to talk about it.
She worked up the courage to tell him after they’d been dating for a little while.
“I’m transgender,” Sandra said, expecting a punch in the mouth.
“Does that mean you like women?” he said.
“It means…I wasn’t born Sandra. I had to make Sandra,” she said.
“Well,” he said, “I fell in love with Sandra.” And that was that.
“He gave me the confidence to be who I am,” Sandra says. Her story of grinning and bearing it, and getting up and going for it, suddenly becomes exponentially more meaningful. “And then he died and everything went to shit for a while.”
After his death, his two grown children had their fifteen-year marriage annulled in the process of contesting his will. Thus ended Sandra’s second marriage – erased because she had been born a man. Her first marriage, which she had entered into as a heterosexual, twenty-year-old male, had ended because her wife found out that she was a man who liked men. At that time, divorce on the grounds of homosexuality meant losing access to their two sons. For a lost decade, Christmas was too painful for Sandra to celebrate.
Two hours have gone past in the café and we need to wrap up. “My life is a movie,” Sandra says, promising to tell me about her twenties another time, if I’m still interested.
I am still interested.
As we leave the café, I ask if I could come along on some jobs and see her at work.
“I’ll call you when a trauma comes up,” she says, and tells me to get some Vicks to rub on my upper lip to help with “the smells.”
“Get ready to turn on a dime.”
I pull up in front of a complex of Soviet-style apartments and meet Sandra at her van, which is an immaculate traveling hardware store. I’m welcomed and handed a disposable white jumpsuit.
Four of her crew members are there. Jess is a cheery young woman in her early twenties. She stands next to a tall blond guy named Chris who may still be a teenager and who reminds me of a large teddy bear. Jackie and Sharon, both of whom are older, appear sullen and say nothing to me and little to each other. Everyone has been reduced to a small face sticking out of a disposable white hood. Chris hands me two flat white things that I think are chef’s hats but that can’t be right.
“What are these?” I whisper, embarrassed that I don’t know.
“Shoe covers,” he smiles. I sneak a glance at the others to figure out how to put them on.
With our hoods up and our blue gloves on, we all stand there looking like something in between Smurfs and astronauts. Sandra is wearing a slimline purple parka, jeans and white canvas sneakers. She looks like she should be enjoying a Pimm’s after a walk around the park. Instead she leads us through the gates, into an elevator and up one floor to an apartment where a 34-year-old woman died of a heroin overdose and lay undiscovered for two and a half weeks.
Sandra will collect the deceased’s personal items for the family and appraise what needs to be done to rent out the apartment again.
A man on the ground floor looks up at us, asks what we are doing.
“Just some maintenance, darl,” Sandra reassures him, which, in its way, is the truth.
One of the Smurfs unlocks the door. Sandra has a quick look inside.
“Ugh. Stinks,” she says coming back out.
“Right. Masks on, breathe through your mouth!” she says, warning us to look out for syringes while she helps Jess tighten her face mask. “You may never breathe again, but don’t worry about it, “ she says to her wryly.
I tighten my own, forcing myself to learn how to do it.
Jackie takes out a small jar of tiger balm and rubs it into each nostril before slipping on her mask.
“Been doing it for so long, I don’t bother…Grin and bear it!” Sandra sings.
“Is it beer o’clock yet?” someone asks.
“Yes” is the general consensus.
Sandra tells them that she can’t drink because she needs a lung transplant. Jess asks if it is because of smoking. Sandra tells her it’s from this work, early on, breathing in the cleaning chemicals in the days before they knew better.
“But I can’t sue myself!” she chirps as we follow her into the apartment. “Breathe through your mouth! Concentrate on it!”
The first thing I notice is the flies. Black mounds of dead flies are pooled in the light fixtures. Their papery corpses are scattered over the floor. I wouldn’t say that the place is carpeted with flies, but there is a pretty consistent cover of them on the tiles.
Instantly everyone goes to work and I am alone getting my bearings. Small apartment. Laundry cupboard in the tiny foyer, the dryer door opened wide. I walk past the bathroom, two bedrooms and into a living room/kitchen area with a nook for the woman’s bookshelf. There is a balcony off the living room. The TV is on Channel 11, playing cartoons. A breeze blows in through the open sliding door and over the sofa in front of the TV, which has been stripped of its cover but not the person-shaped brown blood stain spread across the seat nearest the window. The stain is gross and scary but not as scary as the tableau of life suddenly interrupted.
Sharon is in the bedroom guessing about the face of the woman whose underwear drawer she is emptying.
Jess is making an inventory of the kitchen. She opens drawers and cupboards and takes photos. The top drawer has the full complement of cooking utensils owned by high-functioning adults. The cupboard has a big box of cereal and a jar of Gatorade powder. A gray grocery bag of garbage is suspended from the handle of the cupboard below the sink.
“Everything has to go,” Sandra says, striding through.
“The fridge comes with the apartment,” Jackie says.
“Ah,” Sandra responds, dismayed. I can see her mind flipping through her library of disinfectants in the van. “What else comes with the apartment? We need to be clear or else we’ll throw everything else out.”
The lone magnet on the fridge reads: “If your doctor is closed, we’re open. After hours medical helpline…”
Jess is photographing a drawer full of grey plastic grocery bags.
The workers are efficient, they are quick and respectful. They remind me of nurses.
Next to the kitchen sink, on the counter, is a pile of clean syringes. On the other side is an unopened box of organic cotton tampons, tossed there like they were bought an hour ago and are waiting for the milk to go into the fridge before they are taken to the bathroom cupboard.
Sandra instructs them to take the clean syringes and seal up the yellow bottle of dirty ones on the coffee table for the police “as evidence of drug activity.”
Everyone has gathered around a framed photo of the deceased woman.
“What a waste,” someone says.
“Pretty girl,” another says. I wonder if that’s what she looked like when she died or if that’s what she looked like at the time in her life that she would forever try to return to.
I scan her bookshelf. “Narcotics Anonymous.” “The Secret of Attraction.” “Taking Care of Yourself and Your Family,” and also “When Everything Changes, Change Everything.” There are DVDs. “Bridesmaids.” I love that movie.
An ad for Big Hugs Elmo, the toy that hugs back, comes on the TV. I go to her bedroom. There are bottles of Ralph Lauren perfume and a pink salt lamp and an organic lip balm.
“Anything that’s personalized, anything that’s got her handwriting, her name…” Sharon reminds Jackie to set aside as they go through the desk at the foot of the bed. They are winding up her phone charger and putting her handbag near the door.
Sandra places a birthday card with a sassy cat on it into a plastic bag of personal items and tells Chris to look carefully through all the books to see if there are any photos kept between the pages. The family wants anything that’s personalized. It’s important.
I cross the hall. The bathroom cupboards are open. There are the usual assorted creams and appliances. Fake tan. The exfoliator I use.
I go back into the living room and force myself to look around slowly. I see two bed pillows covered with the same kind of brown blood stain on the couch. I see a viscous smear of human shit on the floor under the couch. I see a big bottle of Pepsi Max, still full, and a pack of cigarettes on the table.
The apartment is so full and so empty at the same time; absence is a presence like dark matter and black holes.
A few of us take the elevator down to the basement parking lot to the woman’s chain link storage cage. It is empty except for a saggy mattress and a mound of plastic baby toys lying on the gunmetal cement.
The four small rooms, plus basement storage cage, are an encyclopedia of striving and struggle. The basket of clean laundry. The elliptical machine painted thick with dust. The clean syringes. The smell of death unnoticed for two and a half weeks that is seeping in through my mask and into my mouth.
We step outside for a moment. Sharon is holding the camera. There is blood on her gloves.
Someone asks Sandra where the blood comes from if the house was locked up.
“Maggots,” Sandra says dryly. “Cycle of life. It’s quite amazing.”
Sandra directs Chris how to double-bag the personal items so that they don’t smell. How to wrap the tape around the top so that it is easy for the family to open.
I stare across into the windows of the other apartments surrounding us on all sides. This is how it ends, sometimes, with strangers in gloves looking at your blood and your too many bottles of shampoo and your ironic “Make Positive Changes” Krishna postcard and the last TV channel you flipped to on the night that you died and the way the sun hits the tree outside your bedroom window.
This is how it ends if you are unlucky but lucky enough to have someone like Sandra remember to flip through your books for pieces of you to save before strangers move their furniture into the spots where yours used to stand.
At our next meeting, I ask Sandra if some deaths are worse than others.
“There are a few jobs that stick in your mind. Like there was a guy, for example … it was more the way he went about killing himself. It was with tree cutters and bricks…And you surmise, ’cause you don’t know everything about the case, but you figure: Has he cut his toes off? Has he cut his cock off? ‘Cause you’ve got this slash of blood all over the room. And then he’s walked around the house as well.”
Male suicides are generally bigger jobs than females.
“It’s the way they do it…you’ll always find that men are dirty killers whereas the women are very tidy in the way they do it,” Sandra says.
“Like cooking,” I offer.
“Yeah,” Sandra says, and we are quiet for a moment.
“By the same token,” Sandra adds, “there was one guy who blew his head off, and he put plastic up in the bathroom, just so it’d keep it quite clean. It all went way over. But the thought was there.”
Speaking about her employees she says, “It can be quite transient. It’s a difficult job and I’m probably problematic to a degree because I’m anal. You know, like I say to them, “Look, I’m two or three times your age. I need glasses to read and I can spot a cobweb at a thousand paces. Why can’t you see what I can?”
I ask her what qualities the work requires.
“Compassion. Great compassion, great dignity and a good sense of humor ’cause you’re gonna need it. And a really good sense of not being able to take the smell in, cause they stink. Putrid.”
The next job I go on with her is the home of a hoarder. Glenda is in danger of being thrown out of her home, which was intended as temporary housing for women in crisis, after packing it full of debris during her five-year stay. Hired by the housing authority against Glenda’s wishes, Sandra and two other workers will clean it out, one day a week for six weeks.
“Slowly, slowly. Going through all her crap, sorting it out. What is rubbish, what is to be kept,” Sandra explains.
“First they’re embarrassed, the anxiety and everything,” she explains.
“We reconstruct the house so they’re living in a different situation, it’s cleaner, and they’re more amenable to continue that. You planted a seed for them, they thought it was insurmountable, then they’re going, ‘Ah, this isn’t so bad after all.’
“I do come home exhausted from a day of hoarding, I am absolutely wrung out,” Sandra admits. “Because there’s constant bartering and getting them to agree but trying to turn it so that it’s their idea.”
“So, it’s actually the people who are alive that are more problematic?” I ask.
“Bingo,” Sandra says “I’d rather a dead body any time.”
Glenda is short, maybe sixty. Her hair is white at the roots. The rest of it is the same neon pink as her T-shirt. She is welcoming and we shake hands.
Sandra is ostensibly on the enemy side. However, Glenda has willingly let her inside and is working with her. Kind of.
“If I cry, I’ll try not to upset you,’ Glenda tells Sandra.
“If you cry, I’m bound to cry. So don’t,” Sandra says. “But if you do, we’ll cry together.’
Glenda’s accent reminds me of one of my relatives, who smells like powder and greets our visits by stuffing me and my family full of cake. But instead, Glenda is alone and living in a house full of yellowed newspapers and cats and their shit, which she is unable to clean or unwilling to acknowledge, so she presses newspaper on top like a layer cake.
“Her name is Cleopatra,” Glenda tells me as we stare down at a cat carrier.
Behind us, on a busted navy sofa, four other carriers holding four other cats are lined up in a row.
After a quick negotiation with Glenda in which the laundry room and bathroom are deemed off-limits (photos will later show me that these areas were painted thick with cat feces), Sandra shows me the area they’re currently working on in the kitchen/living room. It’s full of books, office supplies, appliance boxes, newspapers and other miscellanea, such as a child’s polka dot suitcase. The room appears to be undulating; everything is floating on top of everything else like flotsam on a roiling sea. The smell of cat shit is so strong my eyes water.
At the threshold of Glenda’s dark bedroom I am immediately confronted by a wall of stuff that reaches to the ceiling. There is only room to peer around the door and down at Glenda’s nest: a tiny mattress on the floor not long enough for her to stretch out on. There is a stack of books and periodicals next to it, with a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles folded neatly on top. Everything is in danger of being subsumed, any minute, by the great wall of debris, which looks like it is swaying on failing foundations.
Sandra’s negotiations with Glenda continue. She walks up holding the latest basket full of Glenda’s debris: A shower cap. A free anti-virus CD. A contraption to give a dog a pill.
“I’ve made an executive decision,” Sandra announces. “This is shit.”
We all giggle.
“But some of them are not shit,” Glenda says, still laughing.
“Oh, tell me what!” says Sandra.
Glenda holds up the CD.
“Are you gonna use it, really?” Sandra coaxes.
Glenda nods. “Yes, tonight.”
“Oh, you liar,” Sandra says, causing Glenda to break out into giggles again. “This thing’s going to the shithouse. I’m telling you now, this is going to buggery.”
Glenda moved to Melbourne twenty years ago, leaving her husband behind. She didn’t explain why. But she returned to him when he was dying in the hospital. She tells me how for three months after his death she couldn’t cry. “I became wooden,” she says.
Eventually Glenda gave herself permission to grieve. “I got a little kitten, she’s twelve years now, and I put it next to me. I slept, I woke up, I started crying, I’d stretch out and there was her warm, purring body and I’d fall asleep again.”
That cat now has ten siblings, some of whom are in the carriers around us.
I learn that Glenda is a qualified dentist. That she has a psychology degree with honours. And worked for years as a grief counsellor.
In addition to a plethora of short courses and certificates, she has completed a professional writing and editing class and part of a Master’s in law. We know some of the same people, have gone to the same university.
In a dream I sometimes have, I’m always saving something from my childhood home before it is lost forever in a flood, maybe, or the urgency of war – photo albums, candlesticks, books. I cannot part with the dented pot that I remember my mother putting on the stove each week before she left us for good. Or a shopping list on an envelope in her handwriting. In a world that changes so quickly, and where everyone eventually leaves, our stuff is the one thing we can trust, and it testifies, through the mute medium of Things, that we were a part of something greater than ourselves. Glenda’s house is more than a question of homey clutter, of tiny shelves and the things we place there. Pain is a lunatic landscape, where every piece, however misshapen, fits perfectly. In the context of facing life alone, her fortress of shit makes sense.
Coming over to take a break, Sandra is panting from the strain that any walking places on her lungs. Hoarding doesn’t discriminate on the basis of income, she explains. It can happen to anyone.
“You look on the wall – “Director of the Hospital” or “Head of This Company” – and you think ‘What incident happened in your life? Or did someone leave you and leave you emotionally scarred, and you couldn’t deal with it?’ Like, there’s so many fragile things can just twist you and turn you. And I say, by the grace of God, it could be me. So I’m not going to judge anyone. None of us know what tomorrow’s got in store”
I nod, looking at the wall of garbage bags surrounding us on Glenda’s lawn.
“Like, I was supposed to have this lung transplant in 2011, but I had a series of things go wrong. I got sick and sick and sick and sick…I’m not ready to go out to die yet. And I’m definitely not going downstairs.”
I have a thought which is confirmed a couple of months later, when I am sitting in Sandra’s sun-drenched living room, looking at a framed photo of the two sons she last saw forty years ago, and listening to her calmly explain how she survived a violent rape, the killing of her fiancé at a nightclub in 1980, and what sex work was like in the isolated Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie in the years when she had to conceal the fact that she was a pre-op transsexual.
Life can break you like a wave on a prow. It seems to have broken Glenda. But that is not how Sandra is going out.
As Sandra walks me to my car, Chris hurries after her. Glenda has started opening the bags she agreed to throw out. The smell made Sharon vomit – Sharon, who was fine last week at the dead woman’s apartment. Glenda has started to get upset. Sandra returns to the necessary business of cauterizing.
“That’s what happens when you open the bags that you agreed to throw out,” she sighs.
The next time I speak to Sandra she is angry. It’s the week before Christmas, and a housing organization is pressuring her to work faster so that they can move their client, another hoarder, this time a schizophrenic young woman living alone, to new accommodation. Sandra finds the timing gratuitously cruel to the woman. In recounting her standoff with the organization (which she won), her use of expletives is beautiful; listening to her swear is like watching Michelangelo paint the Sistine Chapel.
You could say that Sandra knows her clients as well as they know themselves. She airs out their smells. She throws out their weird porn and the last of their DNA entombed in soaps. She does not, however, erase these people. She couldn’t, because she has experienced their same sorrows.
The distance between where Sandra grew up and where she lives now is about an hour’s drive but further than walking to the moon. She has arrived where she is now through an epic amount of internal fortitude, which she lavishes on those who have lost their own. Despite having experienced worse blows than many of her clients, Sandra is the one who steps in to make order out of their chaos.
“I feel quite successful in my life,” Sandra says. “I’m not financially successful, but I’m successful in my life. I’m not a prostitute or a drug addict…I have a healthy, normal lifestyle. I have fantastic neighbors who treat me like gold. You know, I’m very blessed in life. But it’s my attitude I think.”
Despite seeing the same old shit each day for the past twenty-one years, she treats each client as unique in their circumstance and equal in their dignity. The reason why she doesn’t get suited up like her workers is actually not because she has been doing the job for so long.
“It’s because I’m meeting someone there — quite often a family member — I don’t want them to go into shock, like this person from out of space has come here. I grin and bear it and I go in.”
I ask her how she maintains that level of compassion.
“Everyone deserves it — because I deserve it as well,” she says.
This is, for all of us, the importance of being Sandra Pankhurst.
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