![]() ![]() But sometimes I'm simply not able to do what they ask, whether it's because it violates their budget, the law, or the fundamental nature of reality. So, we've changed directors in charge of arrangements because of some imagined insult to the family, and I've been pulled off funerals because some fundamentalist religions forbid women from performing mortuary duties. She immediately began sliding down the stairs, and when I wasn't able to stop her by myself, I abandoned ship and began running down the stairs with this poor woman tobogganing after me like I was Indiana Jones. I was backing slowly down the stairs, holding the woman's feet, when one of the two guys carrying her upper body stumbled and caused them both to drop her. I was designated as part of the three-person team to carry her down, while the other two FDs waited with the stretcher below. Because our stretcher doesn't do narrow stairs very well, we decided to carry her down to the first floor. I once went on a removal for a very large woman who had died in the second story of her house. Again, funny when Rob Schneider does it in a movie, not so funny when the family is standing around wailing in grief. He would have wanted them that way."Īnother reason is that. "Make sure you leave Grandpa's marbles on the floor, next to his banana peel collection. Even if it is just for the family, those 10 minutes matter. There is a reason humans have been doing this for thousands of years. It matters to people to be able to see their loved one a final time, as they remembered them. And that's why we go through all of this. When we were done, he was able to have an open casket. I sutured his abdomen back together, sewing around his genitalia and buttocks, while my co-worker held his legs up so I could get a good look. The next morning, my co-worker and I spent half a day piecing this gentleman back together, stitch by stitch. We had to embalm the sections of him separately using a technique called sectional injection and let him sit overnight until everything was firm and dry. He was torn in half below his midsection, with multiple puncture wounds and mangled legs, on top of abrasions and injuries to his face. One of the most difficult clients I ever had was a guy who had been run over by a forklift and dragged several yards. Remember, the body just has to lay there you don't need your fixes to hold up for a wide range of Weekend at Bernie's shenanigans. And in cases where we can't fully repair everything, sometimes simple tricks like tilting their head a certain way, putting a hat on them, or just dimming the lights is enough to conceal the problem. ![]() With a little wax and cosmetics, they can even wear a normal shirt or dress. So for instance, to fix a decapitation, you use a wooden dowel to rejoin the head and body, then suture the neck back together. We can reattach severed limbs using special materials to rebuild the damaged bone and muscle. If the person had heavy injuries to their head, we can rebuild large portions of their skull using a special type of putty, wax, or plaster of Paris. Some of the stuff is pretty basic, like covering bruises and cuts with wax and cosmetics. We have a wide range of tools at our disposal, depending on what needs to be done. Restoration is as much an art form as it is a science, and with a good mortician, there's very little that can't be fixed. While that would be considered hilarious in, say, an Adam Sandler movie, it's really the kind of thing we try to avoid.Īnd even a couple of marionette funerals! Or they could have been, if anyone ever picked that option. The caps also have little plastic ridges that dig into your eyelids to keep them from popping open during the viewing. Since your eyes have a tendency to recess into your head postmortem, we put in little plastic cups called eye caps to avoid that sunken look. After that, we disinfect the body and begin a process called setting the features, where we pose and manipulate the person's face to give them that "just sleeping" appearance. The first step to embalming someone is to check the paperwork, to make sure the person we have on the table is in fact the person we're supposed to embalm - it is surprisingly common for the hospital or nursing home to give us the wrong body. ![]() "Whatcha got in there? Blood? Yeeeeeeah, that's gonna have to go." But ultimately, the process of getting a body ready for viewing is something most normal people would call "nightmarish." First of all, we really do try to be as gentle and respectful with the bodies as possible. ![]()
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