Caleb Wilde
(218 comments, 980 posts)
Posts by Caleb Wilde
10 Things Embalmers CAN Fix
Picture is Public Domain from 1905
Trigger Warning: This post contains descriptive language about suicide. it also contains topics that might cause a loss of appetite for foods such as spaghetti or sushi.
One. WEIGHT LOSS. You’ve tried for 50 years to lose weight, you finally got it off, but your terminal cancer took this weight loss thing a little too far, and it took your life too. Embalmers can’t give you your life back, but we can put some pounds back on. By adding large volumes of embalming fluid and using restricted drainage, we can give you back some weight back AND with some restorative art magic, we can make your weight look healthy. It’s cases like this that embalmers can prove their worth. I don’t believe in embalming is for every body — like many funeral directors do — but when a family says, with tears rolling down their cheeks, “Mom hasn’t looked this good for a year” you know you’re doing something right.
Two. BAD GAS. If you die after a huge meal at Taco Bell, and you’re full of horrific gas, our trocar can fix that.
Three. AUTOPSIES. Usually, the people that are autopsied are people that have died suddenly without their family and friends being able to say “good-bye”. Autopsies are usually performed when there isn’t an apparent cause of death, or the death seems suspicious. Autopsies are invasive. Most involve a cranial autopsy, where the skull cap is cut off, and the brain is examined. The internal organs are examined, which involves the “Y” incision we see on forensic TV shows like CSI. Autopsied bodies are not pretty. But embalmers can put the skull back together, embalm the face and the body, and make an autopsied body like normal again (although, this isn’t always the case. Sometimes autopsied bodies present difficulties that make a body look less than normal).
Four. EYE ENUCLEATION. If the person dies, and they’re relatively young, in good health and registered as an organ donor, there’s a good chance that their eyes could be removed to help someone living who needs a part of an eye. This, as you can imagine, leaves the deceased looking rather different. BUT HAVE NOT FEAR, EYE REPLACING EMBALMERS ARE HERE!
Five. DEATH BY GUILLOTINE. The last recorded death by guillotine happened in France in 1977 to one Hamida Djandoubi who killed his girlfriend. It’s very unlikely that you’ll be killed by a guillotine, but if you are, we can probably put you back together (although you’ll still be dead when we’re done with you. Which brings me to a very important question: If they could have put Humpty Dumpty back together, wouldn’t he still have been dead? So what’s the point?).
Six. EDEMA. Sometimes dying persons are pumped full of fluids. Sometimes dying people are pumped full of drugs that cause water retention, making the deceased look like Violet Beauregarde from Willy Wonka. Most of the time, embalmers use Edema Fluid as a co-injection to help heal the giant blueberry Beauregarde swelling problems.
Seven. GUNSHOT WOUNDS TO THE HEAD. Our ability to fix this depends on where and how. If the gunshot wound exits in the back of the head, and/or isn’t caused by a shotgun or a high caliber gun, we can generally cover up the entry wound and use the trusty atomizer to spray tan the filler and make everything look decent. Many suicide cases are, to some degree or another, fixable.
Eight. LACERATIONS. For the most part, we can fix these.
Nine. JAUNDICE. Word of the day is “Bilirubin.” Bilirubin is a yellow waste product that is usually filtered out by our liver. When the liver starts to fail, bilirubin flows freely throughout the body causing us to turn an ugly yellow. Embalmers can fix yellow (although we can’t always fix the green caused by biliverdin) with our magical jaundice juice that we pump as a co-injection through your arteries.
Ten. SKIN TONE. You haven’t been to the tanning salon because you’ve been stuck in your hospice bed? Embalmers can fix that. There are dyes in embalming fluid that can create different skin tones. We can make you darker, and sometimes we can make you lighter. We can also use the atomizer/airbrush to give you that California sun-kissed skin you’ve always wanted.
If you like my writing, please consider buying my book. If you don’t like it, my mom will buy it back.
A Morgue Miracle
A morgue miracle occurred today. I was doing deeds that are done in prep rooms, deeds that shall not be described in detail in this forum. Unlike many embalmers, we use an old school electric aspirator instead of a hydro-aspirator. One of the disadvantages to the electric aspirator is that the aspirated contents go into a little container (shown above) that has to be removed from the vacuum tubing when full so that the contents can be dumped down the drain. Another miracle that I’d like to see is this book in your hands. If you like funeral stories, you’ll like this:
10 Situations that Make Funeral Directors Feel Awkward
Author: Scary Side of Earth
Author URL: https://www.flickr.com/people/143513894@N04/
One. When you go to pick up the deceased at their home and it’s more than obvious that he/she died during coitus, and you try really hard not to blurt out, “Well, looks like he went out on top.”
Two. When a somebody dies on the third floor of an apartment building the very same day that the only elevator is “Closed for Repair.” So you have to slowly move the deceased down each step while more than twenty people scooch past you on the stairs with a this-is-not-happening look on their faces.
Three. When the deceased has genital jewelry and you have to ask the family if they want it back. “So, mom has jewelry on some of her … lady parts. Do you want that back?”
Four. When the wife and the side-chick of the deceased show up to make funeral arrangements. “Wait, so which one of you is his legal wife?” And they both say, “I am.”
Five. When the long lost son that nobody knew about shows up at the funeral and the widower demands a DNA test right then and there.
Six. When the family wants great grandma dressed in a really revealing dress for her viewing. “Just to be clear, it’s okay that grandma’s cleavage will be showing for her viewing?”
Seven. When the family tells you they have no money for the funeral but they’re only willing to buy the very best casket and the very best vault because “Dad only gets the best”. “Tell me again how you plan on paying for this?” And when they respond, “Oh, we have a GoFundMe account” you have to remind them that GoFundMe accounts aren’t magical money trees, and neither will they provide enough to pay for that Mercedes-Benz of caskets.
Eight. When the deceased wanted Eminem played at her viewing and all the older people are standing in the viewing line with a “what the H-E-Double Hockey Sticks did I get myself into” look on their faces.
Nine. When the drunk friend of the deceased takes advantage of the “open mic” time during the funeral service and starts telling all the horror stories and you have to shut him down with a, “This was really fun, but it looks like your time is up my friend.”
Ten. When the dead body farts during the preview and you take the blame because you know if you blamed it on the dead guy no one would ever believe you.
My book has gobs of stories about death and life. Preorder today!
10 Things That Keep Funeral Directors Up at Night
One. Did I bury that wedding ring?
I know the family wanted the ring taken off before their mom was buried. They told me how important that ring is to them. And I’m almost certain I took the ring off after the service was over. But did I? It was all such a blur.
This question keeps me up for about an hour.
Two. Did I cut that pacemaker out?
We don’t own our own crematory. In our area, there are only about two funeral homes out of approximately 50 funerals that have their own oven. When someone we’re serving wants their family cremated, we send the deceased to a lovely family owned retort that does most of the cremations in a 20 mile radius.
If I leave the pacemaker in, it will explode during the cremation process, potentially causing damage that can have a $10,000 price tag. Sometimes I forget. Although rarely.
Keeps me up 20 minutes.
Three. Is that family gonna beat us?
We pride ourselves on being one of the lowest priced funeral homes in our area. And while this helps us sleep at night, the word has gotten around that not only are the Wildes inexpensive, but they don’t require payment up front. Many funeral homes, in an effort to protect themselves from crooked customers who have no intention of paying their funeral bill, require the funeral payment — or a guarantee of payment by an insurance agency — at the end of funeral arrangements. We give a 30 day payment period and we get swindled by about 10 to 15 families a year.
For the most part, we’ve become wise to the crooked families. But every once in a while there’s a family that is so good at working us, it’s only afterward that we see the signs and we lay awake at night realizing that we’ve been hustled.
10 minutes. It’s just money.
Four. I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT FAMILY BEAT US!!!
And then there are the families we’ve known for ages. The families who went to school with us. Who lived next to us. Who we played with as kids. The families we trust. Families that we never question. Months and months go by and finally, we’re laying in bed and we realize: THEY’RE NOT GOING TO PAY THEIR BILL!
This can be upsetting, especially if we know the family. It’s the broken trust part that can keep you up for two hours.
Five. Is that body going to stink?
Sometimes bodies smell. Sometimes embalming doesn’t stop the stink. And even though we do everything we can to cover up the smell, we can’t help laying in bed at night and wondering, “Is John Smith going to smell up the funeral tomorrow?”
Try to go to sleep as fast as I can so I can wake up early, get to the funeral home and double check John’s b.o.
Six. Twisted Visuals
I’ve been doing this for over a decade and I still see visuals that keep me up at night.
These kinds of visuals can keep me up AND find their way into my nightmares.
Seven. Night Calls
Night calls obviously keep us up at night. If someone dies at a nursing home or at their home in the middle of the night, we get up, suit ourselves up and off we go. This is what I look like the day after a night call:
Eight. How Long Can I Keep Doing this?
Career-doubt is a real thing. For me, the pace and the drain of death care undergirds a good amount of career-doubt. There are many times I miss my son’s life because I’m out at all hours of the day dealing with death. Night calls, night viewings, and the like make me less the father I want to be. I lay awake thinking about this.
This can keep me up for hours.
Nine. Was That Joke Too Awkward?
Okay. Maybe this is only me. I’m the king of awkward jokes. Sometimes the jokes are so awkward, I lay awake at night and repeatedly tell myself, “Caleb, you must never joke again. Caleb, you must never joke again ….”
Ten. What Did I Forget to Do?
Some days the funeral home feels like the floor of NYSE in that it’s all crazy and hectic and movement. The phone’s ringing with requests for reordered death certificates, the door bells ringing and there’s someone there who needs help with insurance policies, some of us are out picking up from a hospital, others are running around getting death certificates, and there’s a couple families are coming into the funeral home to make arrangements. After a hectic day where your brain felt like a Gallagher watermelon, you’re laying in bed at night and remember, “there was that phone call where the family wanted me to add the deceased’s cat ‘Jinx’ to the obituary … damn it.”
*****
If you like my writing, consider buying my 2017 Nautilus Book Award Gold Winner, Confession of a Funeral Director (click the image to go to the Amazon page):
And the Pastor said, “Cremation is a sin and anyone who is involved with cremation is a sinner.”
Creative Common License
This is what I was recently told by a Pastor who was scolding me for offering cremation to our customers. He was dead serious. I — as per my usual self — attempted to lighten the somber mood with a witty joke by saying that all the bodies I burn are dead, unlike the bodies of the heretics that the Church burned back in the day. The pastor didn’t appreciate my wit.
In a roundabout way, he may have been hoping he’d find me sympathetic to his anti-cremation stance. There’s a number of funeral directors who conveniently, albeit privately, believe that cremation is wrong. Those private beliefs become public when their customers ask. See, cremation is much cheaper than embalming and cuts into the funeral home’s bottom line and therefore the funeral director’s pocket; couple that ulterior motive with the folk belief that cremation destroys God’s creation and you have a recipe for an anti-cremation funeral director.
This pastor, though, didn’t find a sympathizer in me. So the pastor and I sat in silence for what felt like a couple minutes until I took a different approach to the conversation.
The view that cremation is wrong isn’t uncommon among pastors. I’ve had more than a handful of pastors tell me cremation is a no-no. But it’s not only pastors who take this stance; two of the major world religions and some branches of Christianity also disallow cremation.
For instance, Jewish law is unequivocal that a body must be buried. Those of us who aren’t Jewish have a lot to learn from Jewish burial practices, specifically as it relates to home funerals and green burials, but most of us, like myself, simply don’t believe that burning a body is violating G-d’s creation. The heart of this prohibition against cremation is that humans are created in the image of G-d and so we shouldn’t intentionally harm the body, dead or alive.
Islam too believes that cremation is wrong, but for different reasons and with a much higher level of “no-no”. Islam believes cremation to be haram, which is something that is expressly forbidden by Allah and entirely sinful. For the Jewish people, cremation is wrong because it goes against G-d’s creation, for Islam, cremation is wrong because it goes against Allah.
Christians, like my pastor friend, are a mixed bag when it comes to cremation. Eastern Orthodoxy believes that cremation is wrong for the same reason Jewish law forbids it.
The Catholic Church was anti-cremation up until about fifty-years ago. Now, the official position of the Catholic Church is this:
“The Church earnestly recommends that the pious custom of burying the bodies of the deceased be observed; nevertheless, the Church does not prohibit cremation unless it was chosen for reasons contrary to Christian doctrine.”
And that “nevertheless” was only added in the mid-1960s during Vatican II. Before that, cremation was a seen an abandonment of the hope of resurrection, and, like Judaism and Orthodoxy, abuse of the creation of God.
After the pastor and I sat in silence for a couple minutes, the Pastor piped back up:, “I feel so strongly about this topic that I’ve preached a sermon series on it.”
At this point, I realized that my witty joke had probably done more harm than good. I love pastors because I’ve seen how much good they do during death and dying. For the most part, pastors are generous and loving during death, and this pastor was no different. I honestly didn’t want to ridicule his beliefs and I didn’t want to say something that would jeopardize our friendship.
So, here’s what I said with as much good will as I could: “Pastor, for most people in our area, cremation isn’t a theological issue, it’s a practical issue. People who choose cremation aren’t attempting to disrespect God, nor are they denying the resurrection, nor do they believe that our bodies are toys that we can abuse. Most people choose the less expensive cremation because embalming, buying a casket, buying a grave, buying a vault and paying us funeral directors to organize the whole thing isn’t in their budget.”
He sat in silence, so I continued.
“I’m not a pastor, so I’m not going to share my views on God, but I know a lot of folks without insurance or an irrevocable burial reserve who would have to take out a loan to pay for something other than cremation.”
I stopped there because I didn’t want to sound like I was lecturing him. But, if I had kept going, and I would have shared my views on God, I would have mentioned that my belief is that God values everything in life, but God seems to specifically value love and community … that death creates community, whether it be an embalmed body or a cremated body. And that God doesn’t’ want us to mortgage the house for a full burial and that God certainly doesn’t want us to feel guilty when choosing cremation.
And this, my friends, is the bottom line: funerals are to bring us together, not tear us apart. If we guilt and shame cremation, I don’t believe that helps us, nor does it help to create community. Community, love, and shared grief is what makes a good death, not your method of disposition.
*****
If you like my writing, consider buying my 2017 Nautilus Book Award Gold Winner, Confession of a Funeral Director (click the image to go to the Amazon page):
