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William Lisman will retire as Luzerne County coroner next month after 43 years working in the office.
At 67, the Mountain Top resident feels fine and still has a passion for the work, but it’s the very nature of that work — dealing with death — that propelled him to act on plans to spend more time with his family.
As Lisman put it, he has signed off on cremation permits for a “whole lot of people” younger than himself.
His new mission: spending more time with his wife, Debbie, their three grandchildren and four grown children who reside in Mechanicsburg, Austin, Cleveland and London.
“I want to go do what I want to do while I can,” Lisman said.
Death as a constant
Death has been a constant in Lisman’s entire life because he and his four siblings grew up above the Lisman Funeral Home in Wilkes-Barre.
The youths had to be quiet during downstairs services, shovel sidewalks before viewings and pick up flowers and handle other errands.
Lisman was taken aback as he grew older when people expressed curiosity about the experience.
“You’re around it all the time, and you don’t think anything of it,” Lisman said. “I didn’t realize that anybody would question it.”
Lisman graduated from King’s College in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, but that was during a challenging job market.
He agreed to his father Walter’s recommendation to obtain a funeral home management degree and become the third-generation operator of the funeral home, while the elder Lisman served as the city’s mayor from 1976 to 1980.
During those years, Lisman married, started a family of his own and decided to stick with the family business.
He also started working as a per diem coroner deputy in 1975 and a full-time coroner field investigator in 1999, later working as chief deputy under coroners George Hudock, Jack Consalvo and John Corcoran.
‘A true public servant’
Lisman segued out of the family business in 2009 — his children all have master’s degrees and careers of their own — and has been overseeing the county coroner’s office since the county’s January 2012 switch to a home rule government structure, which changed the coroner post from elected to appointed.
Judicial Services and Records Division Head Joan Hoggarth, his boss, said Monday that Lisman has been “a true public servant to the people of Luzerne County” and a great coworker and manager.
Always “mindful of taxpayer dollars,” Lisman manages his office on a budget far less than those in other similarly sized third-class counties, Hoggarth said.
“His compassion and willingness to talk to families of the deceased for as long as they need him portrays the person Bill is,” Hoggarth said. “He will be greatly missed by staff, colleagues and law enforcement throughout the county.”
The coroner’s office budget is $550,455 this year. Lisman largely attributes his lower budget to non-staff deputies who handle routine cases throughout the county for $100 using their own vehicles and equipment, including calls in the middle of the night on a weekend in bad weather.
“Those are the guys and gals who make this system work, who save the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars a year,” Lisman said.
It’s a lifestyle
There’s also administrative assistant Mary Wallace — Lisman’s family affectionately calls her his “work wife” — who started working for the county in 1985.
“None of my deputies have the working knowledge of what goes on here that she does,” Lisman said. “The bigger loss to the county will be when Mary is gone.”
While he will miss interactions with staff and the pride of offering his expertise in investigations, Lisman looks forward to not having to snap to attention and race to death scenes in response to pagers and land line calls and, later, his ever-present cell phone.
He said his wife has described his work as “a lifestyle.” Callers sometimes question why he sounds so alert at 3 a.m.
“It’s in the training. You just wake right up,” Lisman said.
Lisman is most proud of a new county morgue at the county’s record storage facility in Hanover Township, which eliminated the need to rely on hospitals. The coroner’s office section of the building was funded by outside revenue, not local tax dollars, he said.
The overdose epidemic
Another change that deeply saddens Lisman is that drug overdose deaths have reached a new record high in the county for the fourth consecutive year. More than 550 people died of overdose deaths from 2015 to 2018 in the county.
“That’s the hardest thing for me to accept — the fact that it has become routine to myself, to my deputies, to the police departments,” Lisman said.
The county also set a record for unclaimed bodies that must be buried at the county’s expense. There were approximately 30 such cases in 2018, compared to 11 in 2017. Lisman said family members were identified in many of these cases but refused to accept responsibility, including a father who picked up the belongings of a child at the hospital but later did not respond to coroner’s office communications.
Lisman said he’s survived witnessing so much hopelessness, grief and violence by detaching himself, which could be misread as being cold.
“You’re not cold. You just can’t personalize it, especially coroner’s work dealing with kids and infants,” said Lisman, whose last day will be March 8. “You cannot take it home.”