Making an Exit

by Sarah Murray

  The body is laid out in a preparation room, where it’s cleaned, groomed, and shaved (those who were bearded in life may retain their whiskers). “Purge”—liquid that originates in the stomach or lungs and that, due to buildup of pressure inside the decaying body, can come out through the nose or mouth—is removed with an aspirator.

  A trocar (a hollow needle attached to a tube) is inserted into the abdomen to empty the contents of the chest cavity and entrails. Up to six gallons of dyed, perfumed embalming fluid is pumped around the body through the arterial system, in the process forcing the blood back through the veins into the heart, where it’s removed either by vein drainage or with the trocar. Another means of vein draining is mechanical, although embalmers prefer the first method, which relies on the pressure of the arterial fluid.

  Embalming fluid consists mainly of formaldehyde, a pungent-smelling chemical that vaporizes easily and can cause the eyes to sting, and which preserves the corpse for a few days, just long enough for the funeral. Borax is also present to keep the blood liquid so it drains easily, as well as glycerin, which rehydrates the tissues, restoring to the shriveled body a look of health and vitality.

  The face is set. Cheeks are restored to plumpness with the aid of cotton wool. The mouth is sutured together using a curved needle and strong thread or a needle injector, a mechanical device that sends metal pins through human bone. Once its tissues are firm and dry, the body is ready for the “restorative work,” when creams and fillers are injected into hollowed and sunken parts of the face and hands. “If the tissues do not fill out,” advises the 1987 textbook Embalming: History, Theory and Practice, “seal the lips with glue, then rebuild the corners of the mouth with a surface restorer wax.”

  To the uninitiated, embalming might well seem an odd practice—part theatrical, part surgical, and using many of the same techniques and tools deployed by those professions.

  Hypodermic syringes, forceps, clamps, and suture needles link the embalmer to the surgeon. But no one is getting cured of anything in the undertaker’s preparation room. After all, how many self-respecting surgeons would have among their instruments a shear designed for removing a patient’s ribs? And few doctors would offer this kind of advice to their students: “If there is a problem of ‘buck’ teeth, it may be necessary to glue the lips prior to injection of the arterial solution to achieve good mouth closure” (from Embalming: History, Theory and Practice).

  After restoration is complete, cosmeticians such as Aimée Thanatogenos wash and brush the hair, and apply makeup to the visible parts of the body (funeral homes sometimes call this “cosmetizing”). Charts provide guidance on how to counteract skin discolorations caused by conditions such as Addison’s disease (orange), carbon monoxide poisoning (cherry red), jaundice (bright yellow), or bruising (purple). The technique, generally speaking, is to apply makeup in the opposite primary color.

  For funeral cosmeticians, the challenge is not unlike that faced by Hollywood makeup artists—creating the illusion that people are something they’re not. Occasionally, the two professions overlap. Bobbie Weiner, who made up the actors playing floating corpses in the movie Titanic, is famous for makeup collections such as the popular Bloody Mary Makeup and Goth Cosmetics lines. Meanwhile, among her products is her Final Touch range of powders, foundations, concealers, bronzers, blushers, and sponges for funeral directors. So as well as making living people look dead, Weiner’s clients can also make dead people look alive.

  * * *

  I have a copy of Jessica Mitford’s book with me the day I show up at the National Funeral Directors Association expo in Orlando, Florida (YOU HAVE FOUND YOUR TICKET TO PARADISE reads the banner above the entrance to the Orange County Convention Center expo hall). As I approach the glass doors, the slim paperback feels like a bomb inside my handbag, ready to go off at any moment. If caught with The American Way of Death on my person, will it be confiscated and my entry barred?

  Happily, I walk unimpeded into the vast hall, where I find a sprawling encampment of exhibition stands displaying a range of unfamiliar products. Who knew, for example, that a need existed for the Zontec PA600, which eliminates odors and controls crypt flies (crypt flies!), or that a “non-tapered interior” was desirable in a niche space? Even the promotions are puzzling. To attract visitors to its stand, one company is running a competition whose prize is a $2,500 certificate for a “Fresh Getaway”—but to where?

  Another first for me is the “widow’s chair,” a one-armed high wooden stool on which bereaved can sit while greeting guests. The stool, explains a company rep, puts her at the same level as the arriving guests but also ensures she’s supported on one side. Not far away, I see some more chairs—a row of mechanical massage seats, the ones you sometimes see in department stores. I sincerely hope they’re for tired exhibitors.

  All in all, it’s a strange experience—here’s a multibillion-dollar industry about which the average consumer knows almost nothing and to whom its brand names are obscurities. I feel I’ve entered a hidden world.

  I spend a few moments talking to a man whose firm makes vaults—encasements to protect the coffin and its contents once below ground. His, he explains, are made from a material into which a special gas has been injected, making it light but strong. To prove it, his stand displays a series of photographs showing disinterred coffins that, after many years below ground, remain in perfect condition. According to Mitford, funeral directors once told clients these kinds of products could keep the body from decaying, too, a claim it’s now illegal to make.

  Another vault company is offering custom-decorated versions, with lids onto whose polished-steel surface you can have family photographs etched. Sometimes, explains a woman in a black dress and stilettos barking through a microphone, customers don’t even bury these lids but keep them as a memory of their loved ones (I’m thinking it might be easier just to have a framed photo). In case the lids aren’t sufficiently eye-catching, the company has employed a woman in a red sequined evening gown to play songs on a large harp (she’s currently in the middle of a rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”).

  In this brave new world, I’m constantly asking company reps about their products. At one booth, a white mannequin hangs suspended by straps from what looks like a small crane on wheels. The whole setup brings to mind a scene from the movie Coma, but the machine turns out to be a mortuary lift. It’s a piece of equipment much in demand, particularly as corpses get larger and heavier, explains a woman at the stand. As I leave, she hands me one of her corporate giveaways—a stick of lip salve with “Em-Balm” written on it.

  While my day is filled with new discoveries, nothing seems as peculiar as what I find in the brochure of an embalming supplies company. Inside are products I had no idea existed. To start with, I learn, preinjection chemicals can do everything from breaking up “blood clots caused by the congealing of the blood cells in the plasma” to inhibiting the “swelling of the capillaries” and improving “drainage qualities.” Arterial fluids have even more impressive properties, from their “firming action” and ability to “alleviate effects of edema” (buildup of fluid between tissue cells) to their prowess in preventing “wrinkling due to astringency” and producing “a more lifelike texture.” Tissue-building chemicals are available for rebuilding facial features and filling in wounds.

  In the “Sundries” section of the catalogue are headrests and arm and hand positioners to help the deceased achieve a comfortable-looking pose. Casket liners and cranium pads can be cut to size, and what looks like a clear plastic jumpsuit without holes for hands and feet is available “for use in extreme cases where entire body leakage protection is needed.” Meanwhile, rubber eye caps covered in tiny little spurs are available by the dozen (pink or colorless) to keep the eyelids firmly closed as well as plastic “mouth formers”—the high-tech equivalent of Joyboy’s deftly snicked calling card.

  * * *

  Often, I find myself longing to hear Fa’s laugh again. Laughin
g was a family tradition. And while everyone wanted to be the one to initiate the joke, it was usually Fa who set off the giggles. Somehow, he made the lamest jokes sound hilarious. In one of his most well worn, he’d lampoon the words of a TV ad for Head & Shoulders, the anti-dandruff shampoo. “Yeah, Head & Shoulders is great,” he’d say. “I used to have dandruff on my head. Now I’ve got it on my shoulders, too!” We’d groan and roll our eyes. We’d heard his jokes many times before. But really we loved them, consuming each one eagerly like a candy treat.

  Fa liked to make fun of death. In a letter advising me about my finances, he suggested I prepare a will in case I were to “suddenly ‘get dead.’” He’d often solicit a laugh by slapping his fist on his chest and addressing his heart, telling it to “keep going, you fool!” And among his favorite quotations was one from Somerset Maugham: “Death, like constipation, is one of the commonplaces of human existence. Why shy away from it?”

  Once, after it had become clear his illness was terminal, he and I were discussing whether or not to sell my grandmother’s cottage, which had been rented since she died. Should we put it on the market now, or wait, we wondered? I felt no urgency as the real estate market seemed strong. “Let’s see how the cookie crumbles,” I suggested, to which with a dark smile Fa replied: “And this cookie is crumbling.”

  As the cookie crumbled, the laughter faded. Watching Fa during his last year, the thing that shocked me most was learning the grim but obvious truth that death is not only painful and undignified. It also triggers depression. For me, the day Fa died was the moment at which I could start to rebuild my image of him as the funny, clever optimist I’d known. No amount of embalming fluid, tissue-filling chemicals, or makeup could have helped me to accelerate that process.

  While some feel the need to see the body, not everyone who attends an open coffin funeral finds it helpful. In a 1990 survey of attitudes to death and death care, 32 percent of respondents said they found viewing of the body to have been a negative experience. In informal polls of my American friends, many have told me they found seeing the body disturbing. One recalled how, when living in an Irish Catholic–dominated town near Boston, she was surprised to find that funeral etiquette required congratulating the family on what a marvelous job the embalmer had made of their dead relative. Not to do so was considered impolite.

  Yet it seems embalmed corpses don’t always resemble the individuals while alive (people often use the term “empty shell” in their descriptions). In her book, Caring for the Dead, Lisa Carlson, executive director of the Funeral and Memorial Societies of America, a nonprofit that protects consumers’ rights, interviews numerous people who’d attended open coffin funerals. Some, she says, reported that the body “looked like nothing more than a statue or mannequin, a caricature of the departed friend or relative.”

  Waugh’s character Dennis Barlow has a similar experience. After his uncle, Sir Francis Hinsley, hangs himself because his writing contract at the Megalopolitan Studios is terminated, Barlow visits his embalmed corpse in the Whispering Glades Slumber Room and is shocked by what he sees: “The complete stillness was more startling than any violent action.” Gazing at his uncle’s face, Barlow finds it “entirely horrible; as ageless as a tortoise and as inhuman; a painted and smirking obscene travesty by comparison with which the devil-mask Dennis had found in the noose was a festive adornment, a thing an uncle might don at a Christmas party.”

  Funeral directors would disagree. They argue that the “memory picture” created by the embalmed corpse is what helps grieving relatives navigate their sorrow and achieve “closure.” In an article on the Web site of Dodge, one of the world’s biggest embalming equipment suppliers, psychologist Donald Steele writes that, “by seeing the deceased, and even by touching the deceased, we have a visual and tactile image of what the fact of death means. We know that being dead is different than being alive, and we know that the person whom we loved is truly dead, not simply gone away.”

  Not everyone is convinced. “The elaborate expensive display of an open casket with all the makeup in the slumber room enforces the belief that the person is only asleep,” writes Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in Questions and Answers on Death and Dying. This, she adds, will “only help to prolong the stage of denial.” Mitford of course was also skeptical. She claimed the funeral industry’s insistence on the importance of the “memory picture” was simply part of an “assortment of myths based on half-digested psychiatric theories.”

  I would have once wholeheartedly agreed with these critics—that is, until I read a moving essay by Thomas Lynch, the undertaker-poet. While embalming still seems to me a strange, intrusive procedure, Lynch’s essay provides a powerful insight into why those who embalm the dead can perform a critical service, particularly in the case of a death that was far from peaceful.

  Lynch describes the tragic case of a small girl abducted, raped, then murdered by a madman with a baseball bat. Most funeral directors would have suggested a closed coffin. However, one of Lynch’s colleagues, Wesley Rice, spent all night working on the corpse. “Eighteen hours later the girl’s mother, who had pleaded to see her, saw her,” writes Lynch. “She was dead, to be sure, and damaged; but her face was hers again, not the madman’s version. The hair was hers, not his. The body was hers, not his. Wesley Rice had not raised her from the dead nor hidden the hard facts, but he had retrieved her death from the one who had killed her.”

  * * *

  If embalming corpses is a very American way of death, its origins are very American, too—they lie in the Civil War. With slaughter, on a scale never before seen in the young nation, came dead bodies; bodies in their thousands, often mangled and disfigured, with arms and legs missing. Between 1861 and 1865, it’s estimated that more than six hundred thousand people died. The question was how, physically and psychologically, to deal with so many corpses.

  “Americans had to identify—find, invent, create—the means and mechanism to manage more than half a million dead,” writes Drew Gilpin Faust in This Republic of Suffering. “The work of death was Civil War America’s most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.”

  Part of that undertaking was getting the dead home for burial. New preservation techniques would facilitate this process. Earlier physicians, surgeons, and anatomists had experimented with ways of preserving bodies using arterial embalming. Frederik Ruysch, a Danish anatomist and botanist born in 1638, conducted pioneering work in the technique. With injections of mercury and red wax, he was able to show the anatomical course of blood vessels. However, he used it mainly in the preservation of animals, bones, and human organs, which he used to produce strange decorative tableaux (one showed a skeleton playing a violin made of arteries).

  Thomas Holmes, a New York doctor born in 1817, was among the first to apply the technique to human corpses, and to commercialize it. His method of arterial embalming—using a solution of chemicals injected into the body—soon took off, particularly after he displayed the body of Colonel Ellsworth, Abraham Lincoln’s friend and one of the first Union officers killed in the war. After he died in 1861, he was embalmed by Holmes, and publicly displayed in New York, Washington, and Albany, where the quality of the preservation generated much favorable media attention.

  Embalming made Holmes a rich man. He claimed to have embalmed about four thousand soldiers from the war, charging families a hundred dollars for each officer and twenty-five dollars for enlisted men. Others followed his example and a fledgling industry was born, with a licensing system and its own trade body, the Undertakers Mutual Protective Association of Philadelphia, established before the war had ended. Of course, tens of thousands were buried where they fell. But during the American Civil War, about forty thousand bodies were embalmed and shipped home.

  After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, the president’s corpse helped put embalming on the undertaker’s map. A shocked nation lined up in the hundreds of thousands to view the embalmed body, which traveled from Washington to
Springfield, Illinois, by train, allowing viewings wherever it stopped, giving people a chance to inspect the impressive preservative powers of the new technique.

  Embalming owed its success to something deeper, though. Demand for the services of embalmers was also linked to nineteenth-century religious concerns over the fate of the soul. The Victorians had revived the medieval concept of Ars Moriendi, or the Art of Dying, which was enshrined in a body of Christian literature giving guidance on how to secure a “Good Death.” While attitudes, actions, and prayers contributed to the soul’s salvation, of profound importance to achieving a Good Death was the presence of family at the deathbed.

  Relatives could, of course, comfort the dying person. But more important, they were essential observers of life’s last moments—moments during which the dying were supposed to seek forgiveness for their sins, pardon those who’d wronged them, and put their soul in God’s hands. Facial expressions were thought to mirror the soul so, explains Drew Gilpin Faust, “family members needed to witness a death in order to assess the state of the dying person’s soul, for these critical last moments of life would epitomize his or her spiritual condition.” In other words, how you died made a difference to what you could expect in the afterlife—and your family had to be there to see it.

  War threw this tradition into chaos. The carnage was such that thousands of bodies had to be tossed into shallow graves or mass burial pits. Letters from fellow soldiers provided firsthand descriptions of comrades in their last moments. But that wasn’t enough. If families couldn’t see for themselves that their father, son, or husband had made peace with God before he died, they wanted to see his face before he was buried. Embalming provided a solution (for those that could afford it), giving the dead a calm, peaceful countenance.