An undertaker’s secret
There comes a time in everyone’s life when you realise you are not going to as many weddings as you used to — instead, it’s funerals and memorial services. Bouquets aren’t being t hrown at bridesmaids, they are resting on coffins. Clergymen aren’t falsely cheerful, but falsely mournful. At weddings, everyone gets hugely drunk afterwards and wonders who will be next. And the same at funerals.
here are two books looking at the funeral business from utterly different angles.
Caitlin Doughty is a young American woman who has worked as a mortician since graduating, and has much to say on the American Way Of Death. Yvette Venables, meanwhile, has written the life story of Stan Cribb, an east end undertaker, now in his 80s, who has seen pretty much everything.
half a century and the Atlantic Ocean separate these two books, as well as a cultural chasm that may never be breached.
Doughty is an odd one, and no mistake. having completed her master’s degree in medieval history — and realised there were no actual jobs for medieval historians — she decided on a career in the mortuary business and acquired a lowly job with an organisation she calls Westwind Cremation & Burial.
her main job is to operate the cremation machines. The noise, apparently, is unimaginable. The room becomes ‘an inner ring of hell, filled with hot, dense air and the rumbling of the devil’s breath’. It has to be heavily soundproofed, so as not to freak out any relatives who may happen to be signing forms, or even cheques, in the adjacent offices.
Doughty’s book is not for the faint of heart or sensitive of stomach. She describes each process with often gruesome precision. In the U.S., it is standard procedure to embalm almost every corpse, partly for historical reasons (the long distances corpses sometimes had to travel and the warmth of the weather often made it a hygienic necessity) but now, mainly because it’s very profitable.
In addition, U.S. families like to have a last look at the beloved before he or she is buried or cremated, which means a certain amount of cosmetic work has to be done.
Most dead bodies, says Doughty, look far worse than you could imagine. Their eyes tend to be wide open, their mouths fixed in a final rictus scream.
You wouldn’t believe all the hardware they have to install to make people look human again — although, apparently, the secret weapon is superglue. Did you want to know that? I’m not sure I did, either.
More than once, Doughty wonders what on earth she has got herself into: ‘Should you ever wish to understand the phrase “dead weight” in all its gravitational glory, attempt to lift the corpse of a morbidly obese man off a perilous, wobbly stretcher.’
What saves her is her keen, even joyous, sense of humour — and it saves her book as