Mary Jumbelic Shares Her Tale of Death … and Life

Former Onondaga County medical examiner pens book about career, life

By Mary Beth Roach

“I speak for the dead; they speak for me.”

This is the heart of the memoir penned by former Onondaga County Medical Examiner Mary Jumbelic.

In “Here, Where Death Delights,” published this past fall, Jumbelic tells her story, beginning at the age of 13 through to the COVID-19 pandemic, through some cases she worked on during her 25-year career in forensic pathology, as well as a collection of personal experiences.

“I feel that I spent my career speaking for the dead and I feel that now, as an author, they speak for me. And it has really helped me see the whole arc of my life to actually write it as a memoir,” she said.

Jumbelic said that the cases she featured were those that stayed in her mind.

“I cannot forget the dead. They’re there in my mind. Those people that, for whatever reason, decided they’re going to hang around in my psyche, came out on the pages,” she explained.

The cases are divided into chapters that represent significant times in her life — her early life, including the death of her father, Stephen Jumbelic, when he was only 69 and she was 13; her time in Cook County, Illinois, and Syracuse, where Jumbelic, now 67, served as the medical examiner from 1995 to 2009; her work on various mass disasters; and the years following her retirement.

Among the thousands of cases she worked on throughout her career are those that led to the warning labels placed on buckets that alert parents to the potential of infants and toddlers drowning; those of children who died as a result of physical or sexual abuse; sudden, unexpected or suspicious deaths; and homicides.

Of those cases involving children, Jumbelic, a mother of three sons, now in their late-20s to mid-30s, wrote that “nightmares were embodied in a child’s corpse.”

She also worked on mass disasters and served on the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team. One of those disasters was 9-11 and the experience haunted her for years afterward. She likened it to a war zone, with the ever-present sense of chaos, destruction and tension. She said that for a while, the sound of helicopters would trigger thoughts and she couldn’t hear bagpipes for some time without crying.

She explained that if those working at the triage station recognized a casualty as a member of service, they would alert the New York medical examiner’s office and the corpse would be moved to the ME’s office, amid the playing of bagpipes. And she said that she would tear up when singing the National Anthem.

The nature of her work, the trauma associated with some of those cases — being called at all hours of the day and night and handling mass disasters — can all become emotionally and physically taxing. But she said she found solace in her family, which includes her husband, Marc Safran; her sons, Joshua, David and Martin; and her mother, Esther, who had lived with them for many years, until she died in 1997.

“I think I’m a master of compartmentalization, just like many others in my field. I think if you can’t do that and if it all bleeds together, it can be destructive,” she said. “I found a lot of relief in the security and comfort of my family.”

 

Sharing her story

What propelled her to white this book, she said, was a near-death experience in Europe.

Visiting Europe in 2012 with Safran and her son, Martin, Jumbelic had tripped on a street in Munich. By the next day, as the three were in Prague, she became seriously ill. It was determined that she had a bacterial infection that led to sepsis. She spent weeks in a hospital in Prague in 2012 and even upon her return to her home in Fayetteville; it was still a long recovery.

The experience provided her, she said, with “another reminder that life is precious” and it was the impetus to begin writing in earnest.

Although she had chosen a profession in the medical field, she had always been interested in writing. She’d had a journal since she was 13 and even while working at mass disaster sites, she would have a journal with her. She became known among some colleagues as “the woman with the book.” She had also taken writing classes in college.

She wrote about the Prague experience and her work in forensic pathology and submitted the piece to an AARP-Huffington Post Contest in 2104. She came within the top 10 in the contest. She went on to submit the rest of her memoir. While that didn’t win, it made her realize that she had something that was intriguing and would interest people, but she needed to hone her craft.

She began taking classes with the Downtown Writers Center in Syracuse, where she started writing sample stories about her life as an ME. She had 29 stories published in journals, she said. And with more classes, mentoring and a great deal of feedback, she was able to put the book together.

She is currently co-authoring a book with Spencer Gordon on the Neulander case. Physician Robert Neulander is serving prison time for the murder of his wife, Leslie.

Her work as a forensic pathologist and ME has led her to be a bit reflective.

“I do think the job strips away illusion of naiveté. You get to the grit and the underbelly of what can happen in the universe,” she said. “You can see the horror of what happens to someone at their death. But you also see the incredible nature of the love that their family had for them and you feel it in real time when you’re talking to families. You get to feel it at the moment of its depth and that’s very powerful.”