Death
21 Spectacular Examples of What Mortuary Students Do in Mortuary School
Most of us who attend mortuary school were required to take a class called “Restorative Art”. The Restorative Art and Science textbook states, “Restorative art is defined as the care of the deceased to recreate natural form and color. In our attempt as funeral service practitioners to restore the deceased human remains to its most natural appearance, we predicate our efforts on the scientific understanding of the human facial and cranial form.”
The culmination of our “scientific understanding of the human facial and cranial form” is the “wax head.” We are given a plastic skull (see below) and a bunch of wax (or clay). Our job is to make the wax head look like an actual face. Some of us aren’t too good at it (mine was a poor resemblance of my wife), and others are spectacular. 
On my Confessions of a Funeral Director Facebook page, I asked those who have completed a “Wax Head” to show their work. Out of the nearly 100 who responded, I took the ones that garnered the most likes (although the Worf and Spock ones were my personal favorites, so I added them too).
One.
By Morticia Addams
Two.
By Sydney Southard
Three.
By Cara Porco
Four.
By Dan Rosenburg
Five.
By Anabel Gilbert
Six.
By Heather Bressert
Seven.
By Morticia Addams
Eight.
By Matt Carter
Nine.
By Elizabeth Wehrum
Ten.
By Celia Peters
Eleven.
By Dionne Moore
Twelve.
By Rebekah Mann
Thirteen.
By Amber Hawkins
Fourteen.
By Taylor Rae
Fifteen.
By Alex Moran
Sixteen.
By Donna Garrido McAuley
Seventeen.
By Josh Martin
Eighteen.
By James Vanecko
Nineteen.
By Jen Partenheimer
Twenty.
By Catherine Lynch
Twenty One.
By Stefanie Crockett
If you’re interested in the life of a funeral director, you might be interested in my book!
The Break that Binds: The Central Paradox of Death Rituals
© 2006 David Goehring, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio
Today’s guest post is written by Isaac Pollak, head of a Jewish Chevrah Kadisha (Chevrah Kadisha is the “Holy Society” or organization of Jewish men and women who see to it that the bodies of Jews are prepared for burial according to Jewish tradition and are protected from desecration, willful or not, until burial)
Central to religious practice, rituals may often seem intentionally obtuse to the point of irrationality. This, in fact may be their very purpose. By devising rituals that at times seem to make little or no sense to the uninitiated, those who learn to perform the rituals, if not understand them, become part of a distinct community. The fact that rituals often don’t make practical or rational sense is exactly what makes them useful for social identification. The cognitive psychologist Christine LeGare has done a number of studies showing that rituals declare that you are a member of a particular social group. Lewis Mumford the social philosopher, historian and greatest urbanist of the 20th century, makes a clear case that what sets humans apart from other animals is not the use of tools but rather our use of language and rituals and that makes us “Community”. Sharing information and ideas among participants was the foundation of all societies and “community is the most precious collective invention”.
Although there are rituals designed for every aspect of the human life cycle, the rituals surrounding “DEATH” are often the least understood, yet the most often performed.. Even the irreligious may insist upon death rituals for themselves or their loved ones. Matthew Frank in his book Preparing the Ghost speaks about “our need to mythologize , ritualize and spin tails about that which we “fear.”
The greater the lack of comprehension the increased amount of the rituals with DEATH by far more ritualized than any other aspect of a society’s life cycle in every culture. The more the rituals the stronger the bonds of community and social identification. The life cycle events the least understood , emerge earlier and are more deeply rooted .
Witness the tragic murder of three young Israeli teenagers which bought every dimension of Judaism into a unified community-from Ultra Hassidic to Jews for Jesus. Everyone adopted and prayed for these young men ” kol Yisrael Arevim zeh l\L’zeh” all of us are responsible for one another. Death brought us community as nothing else ever could.
A life broken , an individual link lost, paradoxically strengthens the group unity and identity. Rituals give us a sense of control over an area where we have none. Mundane actions are suffused with arbitrary conventions and that makes it important to us and gives us a sense of “being in charge”. Rituals engage members of a community in the collective enterprise of building and sustaining a “PEOPLE.”
Jewish death rituals have a foundation that travels back in time 3000 years and has made us a community like none other. In fact, a new developing Jewish community, has an obligation to set aside ground for a cemetery before setting aside land for a synagogue. How wise were our Rabbis.
Let us preciously value these so vitally irrational traditions and hoary rituals that brings us together to pray, to improve ourselves and to elevate ourselves in response to mysteries we don’t comprehend.
Let me conclude by paraphrasing the German poet Rainer M. Rilke in his letters to a young Poet:
“I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign tongue. Don’t search for the answers , which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything . Live the questions now . Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
*****
Isaac Pollak is President and CEO of an International Marketing Concern for the past 4 decades. He holds graduate degrees in Marketing, Industrial Psychology, Art History, and Jewish Material Culture from City College, LIU, JTS, and Columbia University. He has been the Rosh/head of a Chevrah Kadisha on the upper East Side of Manhattan, NYC, for over 35 decades, and is an avid collector of Chevrah Kadisha mortuary material cultural items, having several hundred in his own collection. He serves as chairperson of the Acquisition Committee for Traditional Material Culture at the Jewish Museum in NYC. Born and raised in NYC, married, with 3 children and 3 grandchildren.
10 Ways the Funeral Industry Can Entrap an Undertaker’s Personal Life
Every business has its pitfalls … traps that can ensnare our lives and our relationships with ourselves, our family and our friends. Here are ten traps in the funeral industry that can hurt the personal lives of its workers.
One. Perfectionism
Mistakes are always magnified by a high level of emotional intensity. If you’re not a perfectionist when you enter the funeral industry, you will be when you leave it. There’s a thousand details involved in a funeral and every one has to be right. Perfectionism isn’t bad per se; in fact, it’s a good thing for the funeral practitioner. What I struggle with is when I bring that perfectionism home to my spouse, to my son, to my friends.
Two. Lack of Boundaries
Work has never hurt me. Good work is fuel to the body and soul. And the funeral business is good work. It’s easing an otherwise impossible task for the bereaved. In fact, it’s such good work that many directors marry this business. It’s easy to marry this business.
To commit to it as your first love. It’s easy to pledge your heart to this one thing and no other.
It’s easy to let your own family take second in your priority list.
It’s easy to allow your personal life to get swallowed up by the voracious appetite of death care.
As long as you’re on call (and many of us are on call 24/7), you’re tied to the business. That’s okay. We’re here to respond to both life needs and death needs; but, the fact that it’s nearly impossible to “leave” work at work, is why it’s easy to capitulate to the funeral industry’s proposal. And once you marry this business, it’s really hard to divorce it.
Three. Psychosis.
Psychologist Carl Rogers described how he “literally lost my “self”, lost the boundaries of myself…and I became convinced (and I think with some reason) that I was going insane”. When we in human service, and death service, become pulled into the whole narrative of death and dying, we can lose ourselves. When we can’t separate our personal lives from our business life, we’ve probably gone beyond the boundaries of normalcy and into psychosis.
Four. Money, money, money, MO – NEY.
You can make money in this business. Like every business, you can make honest money and dishonest money. Unfortunately, in this business, because of the confusion of grief and the lack of price standardization, there’s opportunity to make dishonest money. Don’t sell your soul. One of the greatest regrets dying people have on their deathbed is that they worked too hard and didn’t spend more time with their family and friends.
Five. Isolation by Profession.
Death makes us different … not necessarily unique, just different. This difference creates a chasm between us and those not immersed in death. Like police, doctors, psychologist, etc. have chasms created by their professions, ours creates us into something other. And when we’re isolated by our job, sometimes it’s easy to simply disconnect to those who don’t understand us.
Six. Codependency
Most people enter the funeral industry because they love to serve others. The desire to serve/help/love is a healthy response to bereaved persons. The unhealthy side is when those service oriented people of the funeral industry use the the grief buzz of the funeral industry to satisfy their own emotional needs. People who become codependent on the funeral industry place a lower priority on their own needs, while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others. Codependency is a trap.
Seven. Narcissism
Unfortunately, many funeral directors become narcissists (the funeral industry also has a tendency to harbor narcissists who gravitate towards the pomp and professionalism of funeral service). And while it would be easy to simply call these guys and girls “jerks”, the situation is usually more complex. For many, the tendency for funeral directors to become self-absorbed isn’t a product of nature, but of nurture. And when we give in to Narcissism, we’ll do anything to protect our image.
Eight. Pretentious Bosses and Coworkers
In addition to narcissistic funeral directors, there’s also a bunch of pretentious funeral directors (I suppose the two go hand in hand). Pretentiousness is so rampant in this industry it was even noted by FTC’s investigative report on funeral industry practices. That’s right, one of the reasons the funeral rule exists is because funeral directors pump up their image. We have a history of pretentiousness, as one of the main thrusts behind the rise of mortuary schools and the various associations at the turn of the twentieth century was to put us on the same plain as medical doctors, an attempt that is pretentious in itself.
The FTC writes, “the industry tends to promote the professional image and fight anything that would interfere with it or would … come between it and the consumer …. The more the public accepts the professional role, the less it will inquire, shop or bargain, and the greater the opportunity for high mark – ups.”
You’ll find many of the pompous “professionals” in the funeral industry and many of them can make your life a living hell.
Nine. Emotional Suppression.
We are paid to be the stable minds in the midst of unstable souls. We withhold and withhold and withhold and then … then the floodgates open, turning our normally stable personality into a blithering, sobbing mess, or creating a monster of seething anger and rage. During different occasions, I have become both the mess and the monster. The difficulty is only compounded by the fact that you just cannot make your spouse or best friend understand how raising the carotid artery of a nine-month old infant disturbs your mind.
Ten. Emotional Displacement
And we often displace our suppressed emotions on those closest to us with some kind of aggression. In an attempt to cope and find a sense of control in our uncontrolled and unpredictable world, we will often emotionally and verbally manipulate and control our family, co-workers, employees, associates and those closest to us, making us seem nearly bi-polar as we treat the grieving families that we serve with love and support and yet treat our staff and family with all the emotional turmoil that we’re feeling inside.
*****
If you’ve fallen into any of these traps (and believe me, I think we’ll all fall into at least one trap in our career), there’s always help and there’s always a way out.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve noticed that the funeral industry doesn’t offer a good support system when it comes to the personal mental and physical health of its workers. When one of us falls into one of these traps, there’s rarely someone there to council you.
And maybe it’s time to change that. Maybe it’s time we start recognizing the traps of this industry.
So, if you’re trapped right now, let me encourage you: seek help. If you’re robbing your family and friends, the people you serve and yourself, it’s time to make a change.
On Being Friends with an Undertaker: 10 Things You Should Know
One. We’ll Disappoint You
I suppose every friend will disappoint you once in a while; but funeral directors will probably do it more often. We might miss your birthday party, we might have to leave in the middle of dinner.
Death has this way of keeping an untimely schedule. And as death’s minions, we’re tied to that schedule. Whether it be in the middle of the night, or in the middle of your wedding, when death calls, we have to respond.
Two. We Might Ask You to Help Us on a Death Call or on a Funeral
Every once in a while, we need some help at work. And don’t be surprised if we end up calling you. Most of my friends have helped me once or twice on a death call. One specifically (ADAM!!!) refused to help, which is fine … even though I was willing to pay him. If you don’t want to go on a death call with your funeral friend, you can use Adam’s line, “No amount of money is enough to touch a dead body.” Fair enough 🙂
Three. The Conversation Starter “What did you do today?” Isn’t a Good Question to Ask a Funeral Director
Especially around dinner. We might make you lose your appetite. Or we could just make you depressed.
Four. Keep Pursuing Us
The schedule of our work can be very rigorous. And free time can be hard to come by. Sometimes we don’t get to see our families very often and the little free time we have, we want to spend it with our partner and children. And sometimes we just have to say “no” when you invite us out to dinner or a ball game. But don’t be hurt by our “no” and please keep asking us to visit with you. Funeral directors need friends too.
Five. We Tend to Party Hard
There’s a variety of reasons funeral directors like to have fun; but probably one of the main reasons is that death has made us realize the fleeting nature of life. And some of us (like myself) don’t naturally fit into the dress suit and tie persona; so when we’re out of the suit and tie, we let our hair down.
Six. Unicorns
Every single funeral director in the entire world loves unicorns. So if you don’t know what to get us for Christmas or our birthday, buy us a unicorn.
Seven. It’s Okay If We’re Slightly Depressed
If you’re hanging out with a funeral director and you notice they’re down, it’s not a reflection on you. Most of the time we are the stable minds in the midst of the bereaved unstable souls. But sometimes — whether it be the death of a child, or a particularly tragic death — our job throws us down.
Eight. We Tend to be Givers
The nature of our business is service. And many of us enter and stay in this business because we enjoy serving. This “servant hearted” nature bleeds out to our family and friends. We like to give things, whether it be paying for your meal, or giving nice Christmas gifts, or nice cards. Accept our gifts. It might be hard. But gifts and service is how we show you our love.
Nine. Yes, We Might Have a Morbid Sense of Humor
We’re notorious for having an odd sense of humor. So be forewarned.
Ten. We Need You.
Our family and friends are our life. Literally. Our jobs are dark and at times depressing. You are the light that gives us life. And in a job that consumes so much of us, if we’ve invested in you it means that we really value you. Sometimes, you — our friends and family — are the only thing that keep us grounded. Even though it might be hard for us to show it, we not only love you, but we need you in our lives.
10 Things You Should Know about Cremation
© 2005 Justin Seabrook-Rocha, Flickr | CC-BY-SA | via Wylio
One. No such thing as DIY.
In many counties in the US, it’s difficult to get a permit to burn leaves, yet alone a human body. There are DIY funerals and green burials (which have a large degree of family and friend involvement), but when it comes to cremation you’ll need to use a cremation provider.
Many cremation providers will allow you to witness the cremation (the retort isn’t made of glass, so you won’t see anything nightmarish). Some cremation providers will even allow you to activate the retort and start the cremation.
In some European countries, it’s the custom to wait at the crematory until the cremation is finished; once complete, you take the cremated remains home with you while they’re still warm.
Two. Crestone, Colorado is the place to go …
… if you want to (legally) cremate outdoors on a pyre. The body is surrounded by juniper logs and branches and set aflame. It’s the only outdoor funeral pyre in the US and can only be used by local residents. It’s offered by Crestone End of Life Project, which asks for a $425 donation for each cremation. Per US-Funerals.com, “It takes about four to five hours for a body to burn completely, and as there is no way to separate the human ashes from the wood ash, the family receive about five gallons of ashes.”
Three. Price Standards
One of my major gripes with the funeral industry is the utter lack of price standardization. You can go to a funeral home and pay $15,000 for a funeral; and you can drive down the street to another funeral home and get the very same funeral for half the cost.
The nice thing with cremation is that there is some degree of price standardization; enough that you should be able to distinguish between a legitimately fair priced cremation and a total rip-off. If you JUST want a cremation (what funeral directors call a “direct cremation with no funeral service”), you should be able to do so for under $3,000. In some places, you can have a direct cremation for under $1,000.
Four. Pacemakers Explode
They will explode when cremated and can cause upwards of $10,000 of damage to the retort. So, pacemakers need to be removed before cremation. And don’t worry, the funeral directors/cremationists will do the removal for you.
Five. The Body Doesn’t Need to be Embalmed
As a way to pad their pockets, bad funeral directors want to make you think that embalming is ALWAYS required. It isn’t. In fact, the Federal Trade Commission’s “Funeral Rule” states explicitly that funeral directors need to disclose that embalming is your choice. And if you want cremation, there’s absolutely no reason for embalming. But, be aware, that if you use a funeral home and want a public viewing, you’ll likely need your loved one embalmed.
Six. But you Can Have Embalming, a Public Viewing and then Cremation
This option has gained some popularity because it allows for a public viewing and is less expensive than a traditional burial. With this option, you don’t need to purchase a casket (most funeral homes have rental caskets), you don’t need to purchase a grave lot (although you still can if you wish), you don’t need to purchase a vault and you don’t need to pay for the opening and closing of the grave. In Rob Lowe “Parks and Rec” voice: It can literally save you thousands .
Seven. Super Obese Persons May Cost More
“Super obesity” is the class above “morbid obesity”. Super obesity is the sad state where the victim can barely move or function. These types of obesity cases can rarely be cremated in a regular retort and will often have to be cremated in a larger, more specialized retort … which can (and often does) cost more.
Eight. You Don’t Need to Buy a Cremation Casket
Crematories (all?) require that the body is placed in some protective container before it is cremated. Our funeral home simply uses a body bag (a body bag that comes at no charge to the family). In fact, funeral directors are breaking the “Funeral Rule” if they tell you that state and/or local law require a casket for cremation.
Nine. Bodies are not cremated together.
There isn’t a two for one special. One at a time.
Ten. This is a bad idea:
