by Sarah Murray
After three days of sickness and crippling stomach pains, I found myself in a bus rattling across the vast empty spaces of the Takla Makan. But the image of the mummy stayed with me. By then, I’d been in China for more than a month. Few people knew of my exact whereabouts and I remember wondering what would happen if our bus were to disappear in one of the sandstorms that had obliterated so many ancient towns along the Silk Road—how long would it take for anyone to find out what had happened to me? How many months or years would I lie beneath the shifting sands of the Takla Makan before being discovered? Long enough, perhaps, to take on the leathery features of the mummy in that cave. Four thousand years later, would tourists be gawking at my hardened skin and surprisingly well-preserved eyelashes?
I’m not sure what I thought about the possibility of being mummified in this way, but I do recall a reckless, youthful exhilaration in being utterly (if temporarily) removed from my own world. Back then, the idea of disappearing in a remote Chinese desert stirred not the slightest twinge of fear in me. It’s funny how, twenty years on, I’ve fewer of my unused years to be wasted than when I was sitting on that bus; I’ve less of my life to lose—yet now I’m more fearful of losing it.
* * *
Unlike ancient mummies, the corpses in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo were mummified without evisceration (removal of the internal organs). The monks used a number of preservation methods. One involved dipping the bodies in arsenic or lime, a method often used when disease was prevalent. The other was desiccation, whereby the bodies dried out in special cells called “strainers” for eight months, aided by the area’s unique climate and porous limestone subsoil. Then, they were washed in vinegar, dressed, and suspended in wall niches using wires and nails, or laid out on horizontal shelves.
Today, they’re in an appalling state of disintegration. Some retain facial skin, although mostly it hangs off the skull like a leather mask. But it’s the clothes that make the corpses such a disturbing spectacle. Delicate lace collars and cravats emerge from wide-lapelled coats of silk and velvet endowed with decorative details such as covered buttons and brocade. These once-fine garments now droop sadly, many rotted away into dirty wisps of shredded fabric, adding to the sense of decay and making this parade of deceased humans truly shocking.
Some are in glass-fronted coffins, but, for the most part, these macabre wall decorations are untrammeled, exposed to the cool, musky air of the crypt, with no cabinets, cages, or alarm systems to separate them from visitors. Those lying on the shelves look as if they’re languishing in some overcrowded, underfunded medieval hospital. Fingers, toes, and bits of rotting cloth hang untidily over the edges of these divans for the dead.
I’m not the first to find this place disconcerting. The ranks of corpses alarmed some early visitors to the Capuchin Catacombs. “Horror of horrors—what a spectacle!” exclaimed British writer Catherine Gore in 1845. “Brown and skinny arms, extending from sleeves of lace—court-dresses of silk and satin, falling in easy drapery around embroidered silken stockings and shoes hanging loosely upon withered limbs; while caps or coiffures of fanciful device appear to mock the fearful faces whose smiles once constituted the sunshine of some human heart!”
However, one individual seemed strangely unperturbed by the corpses. In 1952, the British writer Evelyn Waugh visited the crypt in the company of his friend Harold Acton. Waugh, who was suffering from rheumatism, responded to the place in a typically eccentric manner. After an hour scrutinizing the grisly relics, Waugh emerged from the crypt, recalls Acton, took one last sniff, pronounced the odor “delicious,” and tossed away his walking stick, declaring his lameness cured.
* * *
Embalming and mummification seem to me the most mystifying of all the treatments with which we indulge our dead. The practice of preserving human corpses, of course, dates back millennia to the ancient Egyptians and beyond. Yet as a Brit from an island that has managed to purge from its funeral rites any evidence of an actual body, one of the traditions I find most exotic is that of today’s American open coffin funeral. The idea of embalming a corpse, dressing it, applying makeup to it, and displaying it in a polished wood coffin—lavished with shirred white satin and often surrounded by videos, images, and memorabilia—seems to me, to put it bluntly, weird.
The practice even seems to contradict the recent consensus of psychologists, social historians, and anthropologists on the contemporary approach to death—something they believe has been shut away from view. “The more we are making advancements in science, the more we seem to fear and deny the reality of death,” argued Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her influential 1969 book On Death and Dying. Dying “has passed from the home to the hospital,” wrote Philippe Ariès in the classic 1981 book The Hour of Our Death (or L’Homme Devant la Mort, in the original French).
And if the process of dying is dominated by medicine, we’re told, the process of dealing with the dead, too, has become unfamiliar. The bereaved are no longer distinguished by black attire. The funeral arrangements are left in the hands of professionals rather than members of the community. “Modern, affluent societies tend to sweep death under the carpet,” say the authors of Psychiatry and Social Science Review, while in countries such as England, says Ariès, death has “been evacuated efficiently and completely.”
All true. Yet in its preference for the open coffin funeral, the American way of death seems to demonstrate quite the opposite. To my mind, such a theatrical display of mortality in all its glory puts this particular death rite high up there on the list of the world’s most exotic funeral ceremonies. The viewing parlor or chapel may benefit from modern conveniences such as air-conditioning, dimmable lighting, plug-in fragrances, canned music, and, of course, embalming fluid. But there, in the middle of the room, is a corpse—an actual dead body—fully dressed and made up to look as if it’s simply sleeping. To me, this seems every bit as outlandish as the Sicilian idea of leaving mummies hanging in a crypt in Victorian finery.
Embalming is not unique to America. In Ireland it’s common, while in Britain, the practice arrived from the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet in Britain it was slow to catch on, and until recently, writes Mary Bradbury in Representations of Death, “British embalming practices were somewhat crude in comparison to the skills and efforts put into the presentation of the dead in the United States.” And while most of my American friends have seen an open coffin, I’ve so far found only one Brit who has.
I’m not alone in finding the open casket tradition perplexing. Ariès is also bemused by it. In the final section of The Hour of Our Death, he’s forced to concede that, in his analysis of contemporary attitudes to death, the U.S. case is somewhat different. While he finds the embalmed corpse a rarity in Europe, in America, in what he calls a “resistance of romantic traditions to the pressures of contemporary taboos,” the body has become the centerpiece of death.
Jessica Mitford, the British-born writer and political activist, had a lot to say about embalming, calling it “an extraordinary procedure.” In 1963, in The American Way of Death, an uproariously witty exposé that became a national bestseller, Mitford argued that with their expensive coffins and embalming services, the “funeral men” were constructing “their own grotesque cloud-cuckoo-land where the trappings of Gracious Living are transformed, as in a nightmare, into the trappings of Gracious Dying.”
Mitford, whose book prompted a Federal Trade Commission investigation into the funeral industry, wasn’t the first to complain about the exploitative practices of the “dismal traders.” A century earlier in Britain, Victorians had expressed concern at what they saw as immoderate display at funerals. The events were certainly lavish. Elaborately carved coffins were conveyed by glass-sided hearses decorated in silver and gold, decked out in ostrich feathers, drawn by six horses, and accompanied by dozens of footmen, pages, coachmen, and pallbearers carrying wands, batons, and more feathers. In the 1850s, organizations such as the National Funeral and Mour
ning Reform Association were established to curb this kind of excess.
In 1948, Evelyn Waugh brought his savage satire to bear on both Hollywood and the American funeral industry in The Loved One, a novel set in Los Angeles. The story features a love triangle between Mr. Joyboy, the debonair embalmer at Whispering Glades, a Hollywood funeral home (based on California’s Forest Lawn); Dennis Barlow, an English poet working in a down-at-heel pet cemetery; and Aimée Thanatogenos, a junior cosmetician at Whispering Glades (and nothing escapes Waugh’s wit—Thanatos is the Greek personification of death).
One of the book’s most brilliant conceits is the role the dead play in the dramas of the living. When Joyboy’s admiration for Aimée is most fervent, he expresses it through corpses, sending the young cosmetician “Loved Ones” that arrive with beatific smiles on their faces, regardless of the requests of the “Waiting Ones” for other facial expressions. However, when Aimée transfers her affections to Barlow, Joyboy’s cadavers arrive in her cosmetics room bearing grimaces.
Less amusing but more inflammatory was Bill Davidson’s May 1951 article in Collier’s magazine, “The High Cost of Dying,” which accused funeral directors of price fixing and criticized the power of the industry’s trade associations. Then in June 1961, the Saturday Evening Post ran an article titled “Can You Afford to Die?” by Roul Tunley, sparking letters from more than six thousand readers recalling unfortunate experiences and asking for advice.
While the funeral business has long been at the receiving end of jokes or cynicism, Mitford’s book threw it into turmoil. The American Way of Death painted a picture of an unscrupulous group of merchants peddling overpriced goods and services and taking advantage of vulnerable consumers for whom the purchase process had to be conducted in haste at a time of extreme emotional distress.
Mitford challenges everything from the language invented by the industry (flowers become “floral tributes,” coffins are “caskets,” and hearses are “professional cars”) to sales techniques that, to ratchet up the price of their goods, play on customers’ guilt, grief, disorientation, and need to make an on-the-spot decision. Citing a casket sales manual, she remarks that the diagram of the selection room “resembles one of those mazes set up for experiments designed to muddle rats.”
Mitford reserves some of her most acerbic remarks for the part of the profession devoted to embalming and what’s known as restorative art. “Alas, poor Yorick!” she writes. “How very surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed—transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.”
Describing embalming in graphic detail, Mitford marvels at “the docility of Americans who each year pay hundreds of millions of dollars for its perpetuation.” She’s surprised to find many people believe embalming the corpse before burial is a legal requirement and a necessary sanitary precaution. Both arguments Mitford convincingly dismantles. Even now, many Americans believe embalming is enforceable by law, even though this has never been the case and, under Federal Trade Commission rules adopted in 1984, it’s deemed deceptive practice for a funeral provider to imply that it is.
For the funeral industry, Mitford was “a new menace,” as she puts it in the introduction to her revised 1998 version of the book, The American Way of Death Revisited. Funeral magazines, she writes, “fulminated against ‘the Mitford bomb,’ ‘the Mitford war dance,’ ‘the Mitford missile,’ ‘the Mitford blast,’ and ‘the Mitford fury.’” Yet despite the book’s success, the funeral industry seems to have barely skipped a beat, at least when it comes to embalming. Almost 70 percent of respondents to a 2008 survey conducted by American Funeral Director magazine said that the funeral they’d most recently attended included a public viewing, and about 60 percent of the newly dead are embalmed.
In the end, it may be other factors that prompt a decline in the popularity of embalming, such as cost, a rise in cremation, and awareness of the environmental damage caused by burying bodies full of chemicals. In a 2006 article outlining some of these trends, John Caranci, a funeral director at Wiefels & Son, discusses the changes. “There was a time when we embalmed just about everything that walked in the back door,” Caranci tells the Palm Springs newspaper The Desert Sun, before correcting himself: “Well, not walked in the back door.”
* * *
The forerunner of the modern embalmed corpse is, of course, the mummy. Preserving corpses has been practiced by everyone from the Chinchorro coastal peoples of Chile’s Atacama Desert (their mummies, dating back seven thousand years, are thought to be the world’s oldest) and the Egyptians (relative newcomers, making mummies two millennia after the Chinchorro) to the precolonial mummies of the Inca rulers of Peru.
For the ancient Egyptians, who believed that to continue living after death, you needed a well-preserved body, mummification was at the heart of funerary culture. The process seems unpleasant, to put it mildly. Embalmers would first wash the body with sweet-smelling palm wine and water from the Nile. That doesn’t sound too bad. But then they made a cut in the left-hand side of the body through which they removed all the internal organs—except the heart, thought to be essential in the afterlife. In the most disagreeable part of the process, a long hook was used to pull the brains out through the nose.
The organs were washed, packed into natron, a natural dehydrating salt, and returned to the body (although in early forms of mummification, they were placed in stone jars and buried with the mummy). The body, too, would be plastered with natron to dry it out and, after forty days, washed with Nile water again (embalming centers were located on the banks of the Nile, says Christine Quigley, partly because of the setting sun’s connection to the underworld but also because of the smell). Oils were applied to keep the skin elastic. To rebuild the body’s form, embalmers would stuff it with materials such as linen, sawdust, and leaves in much the same way a taxidermist pads out animal carcasses.
Then the wrapping would begin, starting with the head and neck, followed by the fingers and toes, then arms and legs, which were tied together. Embalmers used liquid resin to seal the bandages, secreting between the layers amulets inscribed with spells to protect the corpse as it journeyed through the underworld (Tutankhamen had more than one hundred and forty amulets distributed throughout his wrappings). A final piece of fabric encased the entire mummy before it was lowered into its sarcophagus.
It’s hard to believe that today anyone would want to subject their body to this sort of process. However, in Utah, a nonprofit organization called Summum (Latin for “the highest good” or “the sum total”) will turn your corpse into an Egyptian-style mummy using a process patented by its founder, Claude “Corky” Rex Nowell. A former manager at a Salt Lake City supply company, Nowell established the organization in 1975 after receiving visits from “advanced living beings” and changed his name to Summum Bonum Amon Ra “for governmental purposes and to reflect his spiritual path” (he now goes by the name Corky Ra).
In Summum’s process, blood and organs are removed and the bodies are cleaned and soaked for up to six months in a special preservation fluid after which the organs are replaced, covered with lanolin, and wrapped in gauze. A polyurethane membrane is painted on, as well as a layer of fiberglass, and a death mask placed on the face. Contained in a “mummiform,” the body is laid to rest in Summum’s Mausoleum Sanctuary. Summum stresses that this process is common to many cultures and “based on Nature’s own workings.” Still, the organization seems to acknowledge the fact that this form of burial is not for everyone—Summum’s slogan is: “Sealed Except to the Open Mind.”
* * *
Back at the Whispering Glades funeral home, Joyboy gives the final touches to an embalmed corpse. He takes a blank visiting card and a pair of surgical scissors. “In one continuous movement, he cut an ellipse,” writes Waugh, “then snicked half an inch at either end
along the greater axis.” He tests the jaw to check it’s firmly set, draws the lips back, and places the visiting card against the teeth. Then comes the moment for which the embalmer was most admired—“the deft flick of the thumbs with which he turned the upper corners of the card, the caress of the rubber finger-tips with which he drew the dry and colourless lips into place. And, behold! where before had been a grim line of endurance, there was now a smile. It was masterly.”
The ability to fashion facial expressions is just one of the embalmer’s skills. Morticians pride themselves on being able to restore even the most disfigured and damaged corpses. “The boys up there surely know their job,” explains a Whispering Glades hostess. “Why, if he’d sat on an atom bomb, they’d make him presentable.”
Some embalming experts have achieved remarkable reconstructions, as did the embalmers of David Morales Colon, who, according to press reports, had not wanted his family to hold a traditional funeral for him—for his viewing in April 2010, he was propped up on a Honda motorbike dressed in a biker’s shirt, cap, and sunglasses.
The superstar status—in the world of undertakers, at least—of the most skilled embalmers is well represented in an episode of the HBO drama series Six Feet Under in which the Fishers, the family at the center of the plot, are forced to watch as Kroehner Service International, a mortuary conglomerate, poaches their company’s best asset—restorative artist Federico Diaz. The loss of Diaz is a blow to the business.
So how does embalming work? Others braver than myself have explored the process at length—the authors of embalming handbooks, for a start. For more entertaining descriptions, turn to Mitford’s explanation, as well as that in Mary Roach’s Stiff, and the chapter on the embalming of Jenny Johnson in Mark Harris’s Grave Matters. Meanwhile, here are a few details: