Cadaver

When I was in the 9^th grade, I went through an awkward Goth phase. As an awkward 14 year old, I hated the world. Most of my time was spent in the library reading about death and my eventual vampire afterlife, where I found a work by Jessica Mitford titled The American Way of Death.   The essay that you are about to read is an excerpt from that work titled “Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain,” which does a great job of telling you, the reader, what goes on behind the scenes of an American funeral.

In the very first paragraph, Jessica shows off her excellent style of cynicism and satire. “…Whisked off into a funeral parlor, where he is sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged and neatly dressed;  transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.” This is a perfect summarization of both Jessica’s style of writing and of the passage as a whole.  The work covers the strange and uniquely American practice of embalming. After all, what other country proudly (well, perhaps not...) sends their dead to a salon before putting them in the ground or oven, to be forever buried or incinerated. A queer process, to be sure, and one a large majority of people rarely give any thought to.

When I was about nine years old, or six, or something, my great grandfather died. He was roughly 93 years old, a pretty ripe age. I barely knew the man. Needless to say, I was bored at my first (and his first) funeral. I let go of my mother’s hand, as children tend to do, and wandered over to the casket during visitations. There in the box was a weird, waxy figure. He had rosy pink cheeks, a nice suit, and was smiling with his eyes closed. How peculiar.  It definitely wasn’t my great-grandfather- that I was sure of.  Naturally, being the curious child that I was, I decided to investigate this. I reached down to touch his hands and fingers and started moving them around. They certainly didn’t feel like skin, so it wasn’t as creepy to play with a dead body as it probably should have been.  Thanks to Jessica Mitford, now I know why.

This excerpt does an excellent job of summarizing exactly why corpses undergo the things they do, and the results of the process.  As I read, I became more educated about embalming techniques and the people that perform them.  Did you know that when someone dies, the deceased of the family is almost never asked if they would like their dead relative embalmed? It’s just assumed, and even considered rude to ask such a thing. Another thing I found interesting; the embalmers toolbox. Within that box, he/she has the tools to reconstruct limbs, make the skin that was yellow from jaundice white once more, even reconstruct entire skulls should the head be unable to be recovered in the most grisly of accidents. It is, simply put, fascinating- a word which I use here to mean both extremely interesting and also extremely bizarre.

Jessica doesn’t miss a beat. She goes on to inform you, the reader, of why this is done. How and who does the actual embalming. She even includes interviews with workers in American funeral homes, directors and embalmers themselves. In short- you must read this! Jessica Mitford does an excellent job of educating while entertaining her reader- from the viewpoint of an outsider. She manages to stand out but feel familiar, making this a really excellent piece of work.