The Good Funeral Guide

Going through my stats, researching for a blog post, I saw that someone had clicked through a link I did not recognise. So I clicked through myself and found this wonderful account of embalming excellence at Harlem-based Owens Funeral Home “where beauty softens grief” . I used it in a blog post so long ago I’d forgotten. If you didn’t see it way back then, enjoy it now. If you recall it, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it again. The quality’s good enough to go full screen.

What a wonderful selling point this funeral home has: “I’m the guy who puts the smile on your face. Other places you just look dead.”

On a related theme, I’ve just stumbled on another article describing cosmetic treatments for the dead. While a certain amount of beautification goes on in UK funeral homes (it reflects well on an undertaker’s standards of care), we do not have over here the ritual (ordeal if you like) of the open casket visitation. So while, when thinking forward to our own funeral, we customarily conclude with the reflection that we won’t be there, Americans don’t. Because they will. And, of course, they want to look good and they’re bound to worry that they mightn’t. “People used to say, just throw me in a pine box and bury me in the back yard,” says Mark Duffey, president and CEO of Everest Funeral, a national funeral planning and concierge service. “But that’s all changing. Now people want to be remembered. A funeral is their last major event and they want to look good for it. I’ve even had people say, ‘I want you to get rid of my wrinkles and make me look younger’.”

“I’ve had people mention that they want their breasts to look perky when they’re dead,” says David Temrowski, funeral director of Temrowski & Sons Funeral Home in Warren, Mich. “Or they’ll say, ‘Can you get these wrinkles out?’ It’s all in humor, but I think people do think [more] about what they’re going to look like when they’re dead and lying in a casket.”

“My brother’s a plastic surgeon and I joke with him all the time that funeral directors were doing Botox long before any doctor thought of using it,” says John Vigliante, owner and manager of the Branch Funeral Home in Smithtown, N.Y. “Or at least we use a material that’s similar. We‘ll inject tissue fillers into the lips, the nose, the cheeks, above the eyebrows, the chin, and the hands. It’s the same concept as Botox and dermal filler.” … Lips are plumped, cheeks are filled and contoured, and hollowed hands are injected with filler to give them what Vigliante calls “a nice fuller appearance.”

Read the full article at newsvine.com here.

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Photo by Mel Evans

Denise Meletiche leans over to kiss her son, Army Spc. Pedro A. Millet Meletiche, 20, during a funeral service at the Christ Fellowship Church, in Elizabeth, Meletiche died Sunday, Aug. 22, 2010, during a combat operation in Afghanistan.

At the Dallas Morning News blog, photo editor Guy Reynolds considers the rightness of publishing the photo above. He says, “We often are hesitant to run photos showing the deceased in the paper. I think editors here (and at other papers I’ve worked at) are overly sensitive to publishing these. If the family has invited us to attend and document the event and freely chooses to have its loved one on display then why would we, in the gatekeeper role, disregard their wishes?”

Most newspaper editors would reject this photo in favour of something less direct—a photo in which the “casket is out of focus and in the background,” and he prints an example. Here’s his reflection on this practice: “Out of sight, out of mind? Are our readers’ sensibilities protected by us deciding that they don’t need to see the face of the dead?”

Here in the UK we do not have the tradition of the visitation where dead people are displayed for a final farewell. For that reason, we are much more easily shocked by photos of dead people—even if they’re out of focus and in the background. So I wonder what effect a photo like the one above would have on people in this country. And I wonder what its effects would be on attitudes to the war in Afghanistan.

Do read Guy Reynolds’ blog here.

Nobody I can think of would dispute the assertion that it’s good for the bereaved to spend time with their dead, contemplating their absence – what I like to call their very present absence.

There is a debate about how dead a person should look. Some people want to spend time with an embalmed, cosmetised body; others reject this with some force, the more so when they find out what embalming entails. In the funeral industry itself there are two camps, the routine embalmers and the default refrigerators. When routine embalmers seek to make embalming a condition of viewing, they often do so from the best possible motives. Many of them rank among the industry’s best and most dedicated funeral directors. But that doesn’t necessarily make them right. At the same time, any holier-than-thou blanket rejection of embalming is going to fail those who would benefit from it. As Maggie Brinklow says, you can only make good decisions on a case-by-case basis. It may be mutilation to those who reject it, but it is not to those who do not. It is certainly not mutilation in the eyes of the best embalmers, whose gentleness confounds any such condemnation.

In an interesting article on AlterNet, Frankie Colman quotes Gary Laderman on the very high value of embalming skills as a professional attribute: “Without this procedure, funeral directors would have had a difficult time claiming that they were part of a professional guild, and therefore justified as the primary mediators between the living and the dead from the moment of death to the final disposition.” It is observable that in the UK, where the whole embalming-casketing-visitation caboodle never took off, the status and prosperity of funeral directors does not ride half as high as it does in the States.

When the funeral reform movement in the States took off in the 60s, with Jesscia Mitford as its most vocal spokesperson, Laderman observes:  ”Funeral directors were arguing forcefully against charges that their mediation between the living and the dead translated into social obstruction that barred the stricken from facing death with maturity, realism and honesty.” But, Coleman asks funeral director Shaun Newburn, in what condition does the body need to be? “Newbern believes his clients don’t want any odor or leakage of body fluids during the wake and is concerned that it could happen if the deceased is kept at home.”

It is when funeral directors say things like that that you want to strangle them. It’s the sort of fright-thing some of them say in this country to clients interested in a cardboard coffin: “Oh, no, we can’t have one of those. Your Dad died of cancer, you see, there is likely to be considerable leakage…” leaving a picture in the mind’s eye of Dad falling through the sodden bottom.

Jerrigrace Lyons, the eminent US home funeralist, tackles this business of leakage and odours, and here I learned something I didn’t know about the properties of dry ice – and which you may well not know either: “For three-day wakes we generally use dry ice. It is extremely cold (minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit). We place it under the torso of the body and a small piece on top so it freezes the fluids in the lungs and stomach. We have rarely seen any fluids coming from the mouth or nose because of this. Even when the deceased has purged a little brownish fluid from the mouth (again rare) it has not upset anyone. Families often deal with far more fluids and other matter released from the body when their loved one is in the dying process.”

For Jerrigrace and her kind it’s the subtle changes that take place in a dead body over days that impart psychological and emotional value and underline the irrevocability of death. Others, though, are grateful for the unchangingness of the stabilised, embalmed body. It’s an effigy, if you like, a devotional object, and this is what they need.

Funeral directors are taught that they are the custodians of the bodies they look after. Actually, they are not: they are agents for the custodians, for the dead belong, by law, to their people. They can become very proprietorial about their role, act as gatekeepers to the body and forbiddingly dissuade people from spending time with their dead if they think they will be upset by what they see. These undertakers need to read the study Viewing the body after bereavement due to a traumatic death: qualitative study in the UK by A Chapple and S Ziegland, published on the BMJ website. Its conclusion is as follows:

Even after a traumatic death, relatives should have the opportunity to view the body, and time to decide which family member, if any, should identify remains. Officials should prepare relatives for what they might see, and explain any legal reasons why the body cannot be touched. Guidelines for professional practice must be sensitive to the needs and preferences of people bereaved by traumatic death. The way that relatives refer to the body can be a strong indication for professionals about whether the person who died retains a social identity for the bereaved.

Image from Dippy Designs

What happens to the minds of those who deal with death every day? How do they cope with the endless procession of grieving people and dead bodies? Is it emotionally healthy to specialise in death? Isn’t undertaking something best combined with a therapeutic something else – a little landscape gardening or, in the case of Jeremy Clutterbuck, undertaker to the good folk of Cam in Gloucestershire, ironmongery? It is difficult to see, on his website, any affiliation to any of the funeral industry trade bodies, but he is proud to proclaim his membership of the British Hardware Federation.

In his excellent book Curtains, Tom Jokinen quotes Alan Wolfelt on ‘funeral director fatigue syndrome’. He lists the following symptoms:

• Exhaustion and loss of energy
• Irritability and impatience
• Cynicism and detachment
• Feelings of omnipotence and indispensability

I wonder if any funeral director out there has any comment on this? How do you look after your emotional health?

Funeral directors apart, what happens to those at a less exalted level – the trade embalmers, those who work in mortuaries, especially hospital mortuaries? What coping skills are they taught? Anecdotally, we are aware that mortuary practice in some of Britain’s funeral homes is not always what it should be and can be deplorable.

Here are two recent stories which illustrate what I’m getting at. See what happened to these people:

Staff at a historic cemetery in Genoa are being investigated for allegedly stripping gold fillings, jewels and artificial limbs from corpses for resale.

Seven employees at the wooded Staglieno cemetery, built in 1851, are suspected of having secretly amassed their booty in a workroom where buyers purchased materials by the pound.

Zinc stripped from coffins, as well as wooden coffins themselves, stolen seconds before cremations, were also up for sale, reported Genoa daily Il Secolo XIX. Artificial limbs were prized for their titanium content.

Read it all here.  Hat-tip to Tony Piper.

Questions about staff turnover, working relationships with funeral homes and the treatment of bodies at the Snohomish County Medical Examiner’s Office merit a review by an independent, third party, County Council Chairman Dave Gossett said … The scrutiny comes after an anonymous, online complaint the county received in August 2009.

The writer claimed to help run one of the county’s largest funeral homes and said bodies the funeral home received from the medical examiner’s office were “in vile condition.”

Read it all here.

A touching and moving little film here which will appeal to home funeralists and those who want to reduce funeral costs. NOTE: It carries a four-star Squeam Warning. Don’t watch if you think it may upset you.

Clever guy, that Shakespeare. He foresaw the viral capability of the internet long before the invention of the penny post. Here’s Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “I’ll put a girdle around the Earth in 40 minutes!”

Which is as long as it took young gunshot victim David Morales Colón to travel around the world yesterday, cleverly posed by morticians astride a motorbike. A great many visitors to this blog will already have seen him.

What looks clever to the uninformed appears pretty perilous to a funeral insider. The embalmer must have done a thorough job of aspirating the stomach because, posed like this, Sr Colon could easily begin to misbehave from the inside out. It’d be good to have a fellow embalmer’s view of this.

The pose is a masterpiece because there is tension in the body (though lacking in the hands). How would you do that? How would you stop the body from slumping and sliding off? How would you achieve that attitude of the head?

Does it open your mind to possibilities closer to home ? The classic British nan-in-a-box style of body presentation is, arguably, not only unimaginative but also unrealistic. Who ever saw nan in a box before? She doesn’t look herself, does she? Couldn’t they have sat her in an armchair holding her knitting? Or eating chocolates, watching East Enders?

Is this an idea worth pursuing or a road not on any account to be travelled down? As with so many matters funereal, there’s such a very fine line between a helpful initiative and a hideously naff one.

Hat-tip to FuneralWise.com for this cheerful story:

In Guatemala City, morticians called skullmongers speed to murder scenes looking to snag customers. When rival firms meet on the street, price wars ensue. Some skullmongers offer combos: a coffin, a wake and a funeral for as little as $150. Some mongers even receive tips about murders from the police.

A Guatemala City man who goes by the nickname Don Carlos has transformed his mechanic shop into a funeral home, although the initial décor remains. Saw blades and drill bits hang on concrete walls and “in the back, among the old gaskets and engine blocks, the corpses are disemboweled, cleaned, embalmed and dressed for burial.”

In Mexico, with drug violence spiraling out of control, there is even more money to be made beautifying corpses, but more danger involved too. Funeral home operators from southern and central Mexico head for crime-ridden border towns like Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, looking to expand their businesses. Some border city funeral homes send agents into the streets to hand out promotional fliers.

“Gun battles and gangland mutilations are also boosting demand for facial reconstructions,” reads a 2008 Reuters article. “And because of the rise in decapitations in the city, undertakers offer to hold the body and wait for the head to be found before proceeding with the funeral.”

Read the full post here.