- [Announcer] By the River is brought to you in part by the University of South Carolina Beaufort, learning in action, discovered.

The ETV Endowment of South Carolina.

Community Foundation of the Lowcountry, strengthening community.

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB.

The Pat Conroy Literary Center.

(upbeat music) - Ryan Copeland is a newspaper columnist and a high school media specialist.

His book, 'Waking Up Dead' is a humorous collection of stories about growing up as the son of a local funeral director and coroner in Beaufort, South Carolina.

- I'm Holly Jackson.

Join us as we bring you powerful stories from both new and established Southern authors as we sit By the River.

(upbeat music) ♪ Hi there, it's another beautiful day here in our waterfront studio in beautiful Beaufort, South Carolina.

You're watching By the River, I'm Holly Jackson.

Thanks so much for joining us.

You know, this is our love letter to Southern writing.

It's a show where we invite South Carolina and Southern authors to tell us a little more about their books and today we're lucky to have Ryan Copeland right here from Beaufort, South Carolina, and his book is, 'Waking Up Dead.'

Ryan, this is a book like none other I've ever read.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and just why the 'Waking Up Dead?'

- I hope it being something like you've never read is a good thing and I'm a Beaufort native and I'm a writer.

I've had a newspaper column for six or seven years and I've done some non-fiction books.

This was my first attempt at a memoir and I really have had these stories that are in the book in my head for years, just needed the time to get them out and what better way to do that than during quarantine last year in 2020.

Thought that I would at least make productive use of my time and once I started the book, it flowed relatively easily and what really started the notion was being the son of a funeral director and Coroner, when you reach adulthood, especially if you're not in that line of work yourself, you don't tend to meet a whole lot of people like you and anytime I was in a room and I would say, "how many of you grew up the same way I did?"

Nobody would raise their hand, of course but I did meet, through my work I met the spouse of a work colleague who had a very similar situation as did I and we kind of talked a little bit about it and I said, "You know, it's such a unique situation that maybe people would like to hear about it."

So that's why I wrote the book.

- There's no doubt that you had a different kind of childhood happening upon pictures that you probably shouldn't have seen at that age, walking and falling into a grave that was quite a story.

Tell us some of those stories that we'll read about and hear that stood out to you and you just kinda had to put down.

- The falling into the grave, well, jumping into the grave and not being able to get back out was the first thing that I, kinda the first thing that I do remember and then finding I can still remember the day I found the pictures that were my dad's roll of film which he had to document cases, accidents, murder investigations, as in his role as coroner and I remember coming in and my parents had a roll top desk in their den and my mom also liked to take a lot of pictures.

So I thought, oh great, it's a fun new photo album.

I'm gonna flip through these really quick and see myself, what did she get?

And it was obvious very early that it was not me and it was not anyone living and once you see those things, you can't really unsee them and I don't think too many people, unless they were the children of a film developer who took work home, grew up seeing that kind of thing.

So that was a mistake that I did not make again for a long time and you know, some of my earliest memories at the funeral home, my dad tried to put me out on the tractor and allow me to cut the grass at the cemetery and that, once you hit a couple of you doing a couple of gravestones, that goes away pretty quickly.

- Yeah, you got fired from that job pretty fast.

What was your role?

You were handing out programs at times and.

- I was, he tried to involve me very early in different aspects of the business and there were plenty of unfortunate times where it would be as simple as being in the car with him, whether he was picking us up from school or taking us to a baseball game or whatever it was my sister and I, if we were in the car and he got a call on his radio, we just went with him and I can remember sitting in his car in the back seat and he got a call from a house fire on Lady's Island and people died inside the house and he had to go there and I remember him pulling up into the yard.

There were already ambulances, police, everyone's already there at that point and the last thing he said was, you know, just sit here and don't look if you don't have to and when you tell a child to not look, they're gonna look- - [Holly] They're gonna look, right.

- So I remember peeking around the front seat and saw them carrying people out on stretchers and I noticed, as I looked around that there were no other children on the scene.

It was adults and I remember thinking to myself, I probably shouldn't be here, but I am.

So how am I gonna deal with that?

How I dealt with it was writing a book, it's much cheaper than therapy.

- And you happen to, upon, you know, the reality of, you know, the end of a lot of people's bad choices and a lot of, you know, children, hear stories about that from their parents, warnings and everything but you really saw what can happen.

Do you feel like you conducted your life differently because of those things that you saw and those stories you heard from your dad?

- Absolutely.

It's absolutely impacted how I view life as a whole and the relative duration of it and I think that you can choose to be morbid about it and you can think, gosh, life could end at any time and you can walk around with that knowledge or you can choose to say, I'm going to find the humor in things because life is short and there's no use not laughing and that's what I've tried to do.

Now, there were still times when the reality hit home, obviously, I grew up a little bit differently.

I've got friends now who, they're the same age as me and they say, "Well, I've got a funeral to go to this week, I don't know what to do, I don't know what to tell my son, how do I handle it?

It's only my second or third funeral in my entire life.

It's my child's first, he's 11.

What do I tell him?"

And I think back, and I realize that by the time I was 11 I'd probably been to six or seven, eight funerals between family members or just being at the funeral home when it was going on.

So it definitely does impact your outlook but at the same time, I think you've got to find the humor.

- And you noted that, you know, in towns you would see that there were only a few funeral directors.

So this had to be some sort of calling.

Why do you feel like your dad had that calling?

And how did he make you make you realize that?

- There's two sides to being a funeral director and a corner.

There's the scientific aspect which he went to college for mortuary science.

Obviously he was skilled in that area.

I think he liked as coroner to think like a detective, he was sort of an armchair detective, how did this happen and why?

But the other side of it is the emotional component and he was very good at dealing with people.

He enjoyed being around them and even though most of his interactions in relation to his job had to do with people who are grieving and not at their best moments.

I think that he felt that that was when he was at his best.

So an example, I think I was probably in my early twenties and locally, there was a small child who drowned and it was tragic as anything like that is but he had young parents who had been left in charge of him and it was one of those freak accidents.

It was no fault of their own and my, you know, my dad did not know them previously.

Didn't know the child, didn't know the parents, didn't know the grandparents but he saw a grieving family with no place else to turn and he, for a while, got them involved in church.

He brought them with him to church.

He made regular followup visits to their house.

His time was already short with all the many businesses that he had.

I don't know that he had extra time to do that kind of thing but he truly felt the need to connect with them and I think that that's where his strength emotionally came through.

I think that he felt he was helping in the way that he knew best.

- I love the part where you're talking about the files that he took and that he kept, he had a lot of people, he had a lot of fans, but he had people who didn't like him and he seemed to be kind of okay with that and he took records of that.

Talk a little bit about that and some of those correspondence that he kept.

- He did.

He was the kind of dynamic personality that people really loved him.

I don't know that he had any bigger fan than my grandmother and who was not even his own mother.

It was my mom's mom who lived here, she was his biggest defender and even at 88 years old, she would scrap for a fight if you said anything about him but there was the other side, his personality was loud and it could get confrontational and of course, people react differently to that and he did kind of embrace it because he always had a notion in his head, a confidence that he was right and I can remember one instance where I realized he and I were so different.

I was in his car again with him and as coroner, you have a siren and you have blue lights.

I don't really know that there's an emergency situation where you ever have to use it but occasionally he liked to pull people over if they thought that they were speeding and he pulled someone over- - Did he have the authority to do this or he just thought he did?

- [Ryan] It's little dicey.

- Okay.

- He would pull them over and go up to them and ask them, you know, if they realize why he had pulled them over and he would say it was a great line, he would say, "I wanna stop you now before I have to come when you're driving this recklessly and the situation is different, I come in my professional role."

- [Holly] Uh-huh.

- But he stopped a guy one time outside the Broad River Bridge and as dad went to exit his car, the man also exited his and he stood up and looked like he played in the NBA.

He was about seven feet tall it felt like and I can remember being in the backseat just kind of sliding down, thinking this is gonna get ugly pretty quick and there was a shouting match and my dad called for backup but he was absolutely positive that he was right.

This man was driving too fast for conditions and he just had that confidence in himself.

Witnessing that, the most non-confrontational person you can meet, I'm not itching for any kind of fight but he did embrace it, you're right.

- And he would even write letters if he had to stand in line too long at the post office.

- Oh, he loved to write letters and yes, sometimes people would make comments.

People would get on his nerves and rather than always just address it at the time, he would go and fire off a letter and rather than feeling good after you wrote that letter, addressing the issue and putting it in the fireplace, he'd send it, no qualms about that.

He was a pretty forceful writer himself.

- Well, that's something that you all have in common, you kinda had to get this out it seems.

- That's true, that's true.

That is one thing I get from him and, you know, again, the fruitfulness of writing and firing off an angry letter, I don't know, it's not for me, but he did, he kept a record of it.

- Now, you know, as a former local news reporter, I would sometimes have to deal with your father and I told you this story before when we went on air and I did get your okay to say this.

So one of my memories of him is down the road at a local sandwich shop.

He walks in and immediately someone behind the counter says, "oh no, what's gone wrong?"

He walks in and he got really upset so much that the restaurant owner had to go out into the parking lot and try to calm him down.

That didn't surprise you at all?

- No, no, I've been with him on occasions where that happened, it even happened at church which is not the place you would think something like that would happen.

- What kind of jokes would come and how often would it happen and what was his reaction?

- If he came into a business and someone made the comment, "oh, who who's dead now?

am I alive?"

And you know, those jokes may be funny for the first 10 to 15 years, but after that, I'm sure that it grates on you and he would very forcefully explain that just like anyone else he was using that business, at Alvin Ord's, he just wanted to get a sandwich.

He didn't want jokes.

- Right.

- So I think very quickly people would backpedal and try to calm him down but he was very sensitive to that.

He wanted to be seen as more than just the guy that comes when there's, you know, when there's bad news.

- When there's Tragedy, right.

And you talk about how he loved the camera, he would MC things and so he was very active in the community.

Through writing this book, I imagine you've had to go different places, maybe even did some research about your dad.

What are some things that through the book you've learned about your dad and have you met some people and heard a lot of stories?

- People have come forward.

People came forward immediately after his death and told me things that I didn't know.

I had some people approach me and say that, you know, your dad bought gifts for my children for years at Christmas time and this was a clerk at a convenience store where he went and got coffee every morning.

Those were things I just, I never knew about and I think probably the greatest realization for me as his son for years, I was a witness to, there was a camera, he was gonna jump in front of it.

There was a microphone he was gonna get behind it.

It was off-putting to me, I'm very different in that regard and I thought for a long time that he was just doing it, you know, maybe he had some kind of outsized ego.

I realize that I don't really think he did.

I think he genuinely just enjoyed people.

He enjoyed being around people and responding to people and making people feel good about themselves.

He had a real talent for that and whether it was through a service club, whether it was at the water festival, he went through a time where he was an auctioneer, I think he just wanted people to have a good time.

He understood that life could be short as well and anytime there were large gatherings of people, might as well go have a good time and he found himself with an active role in that.

- And including school assemblies, he was often a guest speaker there.

This got kind of a strange.

- Those are things that I still have school classmates that I grew up with- - They still talk about that but it made an impact I imagine.

- I hope it did.

I don't know many, I don't know of any offhand who died in car accidents and it was probably because of those very graphic slide shows that he used to have, I can remember- - You said, he was a believer of the seatbelt long before it was such a big campaign and it was the the law.

- There was a very, and this was something I uncovered in research and files that my mom kept.

There was a very active anti-seatbelt campaign.

I think that a lot of people thought that it, at the time that it was an infringement on personal liberty, I don't have to wear a seatbelt.

You can't tell me.

- [Holly] Right, right.

- And he knew very clearly what happened when you did not wear a seatbelt and very early, he was a proponent of that law and pushed for legislation in South Carolina in his role.

Nowadays it's common.

You can't get in without a seatbelt without the alarm going off.

So again, I think that was just his idea to save lives.

He saw the role as coroner, as one of being an active voice for, let's make my job easier.

- I imagine those who are watching who don't know who you are are probably wondering if you followed in his footsteps and the answer is no.

Tell a little bit about what you do now and why you chose not to follow this footsteps.

- I struggled for a long time in early adulthood with not following in his footsteps.

I did spend some time as an adult sort of helping him out when I could.

He went through times where he would be short on employees and who are you gonna call that you don't have to pay, but family and it increased my exposure to the business when he had a natural death, happened at home and he needed someone to help him pick them up, there was a very dignified way to do things and I'm not sure that I always met those expectations for him but at the same time, it gave me enough exposure to know that it's not what I wanted to do.

It is a 24 hour a day job.

He spent a lot of time at work and it was because he enjoyed it but I knew that I could spend that same amount of time if I had taken over and not enjoy it.

So it does take a very special type.

I know for a fact, he wanted that for me and there was a time when my sister was looking at getting involved as well.

We both ended up in education just like my mom.

So we followed her footsteps more than my dad's.

- [Holly] Right.

- And I went back to school when I was in my early thirties, got my master's in library and information science and I have been a high school librarian for the last six years at Battery Creek High School.

- Okay, and as far as this book goes, you did write this during quarantine about how long did it take you?

- From start to finish, including the editing process.

I started writing in April or May and I was done by July.

So it flowed relatively easily.

- And I'm interested in all the different stories I hear of what people did during quarantine, make reference on the show a lot about how many slides of banana bread I saw through my Facebook feed.

Everybody was baking all of a sudden true but did you always, after your dad passed away, did you say, I wanna write this down or was it something during that extra time and kind of, we all just had this different kind of feeling, you know, this was such a, we've never experienced and we're all kind of having these different kinds of feelings.

Do you think that's what brought it on to say I need to get this out?

- That was absolutely what brought it on and I would find myself in quarantine walking out into my yard and doing absolutely nothing and spending two hours staring at grass and coming back inside and saying, what did I just do for the last two hours?

Let me be more productive.

So the kids are running around.

I've got two boys.

My wife would sit at the dining room table in the evenings and she got back into sewing which was not something that she had done for a long time and I think there's a natural tendency when times are bad and during the first few months of COVID in quarantine, people were searching all around for comfort and I think a natural thing to do as a southerner is think about old times and old stories and tell them and I had told enough to my wife that she said, if you tell me that story one more time I'm gonna walk out of here and take my sewing machine with me.

So she said, get it down on paper and then that very same week, my eldest niece, I told a story that I'm sure my wife had heard a thousand times but my niece had not heard and she said, that's great.

You need to write that down, collect all this.

So that's what I did.

- Very good.

Time is out.

I have really enjoyed talking to you and I wanna say, I love this book and anybody who loves Beaufort, knew your dad, knows your family or wants to hold their own in a conversation about Beaufort, I think this is a good one.

- Thank you.

- Ryan, thank you.

And thank you everybody for joining us here on By the River.

We do love having you around.

We're gonna leave you now with a look at our Lowcountry Poet's Corner.

I'm Holly Jackson, we'll see you next time By the River.

- My name is Jazmine Vivas Young and I will be reading 'Break, Break, Break' by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy that he shouts with his sister at play!

O, well for the sailor lad that he sings in his boat on the bay and the stately ships go on to their haven under the hill but O for the touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still.

Break, break, break at the foot of thy crags, O sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to me.

- You can either end up being just like a parent or you could subconsciously or overtly end up being the complete opposite.

I chose the latter.

Though I'm still not sure if I was aware of my efforts, I'm built physically and temperamentally, like my grandfather, my mom's dad, his influence on me was immense, but that's a story for another book.

I just knew that the limelight that my dad never shied from and sometimes sought was not something I want it to ever be in the room with in case it ever actually caught me too, still, he always cast a large figurative and literal shadow that I could never quite escape.

It wasn't that he didn't try.

He absolutely did.

He escaped to an outdoor carpentry and woodworking shop as often as he could and often invited me to join him but I'm no Bob Vila.

He liked music and recognized that I did too.

So he bought me my first electric guitar, though his own music preference was more of the piano and light saxophone variety.

(upbeat music) ♪ - [Announcer] By the River is brought to you in part by the University of South Carolina Beaufort, learning in action, discovered.

The ETV Endowment of South Carolina.

Community Foundation of the Lowcountry, strengthening community.

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at USCB.

The Pat Conroy Literary Center.