Riga Crematorium Clerk: There Is Nothing Supernatural About Working With Death
Ilze Verpakovska, office manager at the Riga crematorium, has worked for more than 20 years in a setting where death is part of daily conversation. In an interview she explains how she sees her job.
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Ilze Verpakovska, the office manager of the Riga crematorium, talks about her work at a place where the deceased are cremated every day. The interview was published in the TVNET series "Death Notes", which is devoted to the subject of death. A crematorium is a facility where bodies are burned in special furnaces. The headline of the piece notes that at 1,000 degrees everything burns, including a person.
Verpakovska has dealt with the words "death", "crematorium" and "coffin" for more than 20 years. She is described as direct and plain-spoken on these subjects.
She compares her job with medicine. By her own account, she could not work in a hospital where people suffer and cannot be helped.
The deceased are cremated in the company's furnaces every day. Verpakovska sees nothing supernatural in this. In her view, people are born and people die, and that is simply life.
