Gallows humor is frequently used as a coping mechanism. Unfortunately, drinking is often done by funeral directors in order to cope and many in the industry walk the functional alcoholic line.
For me, I purposely went out of my way not to increase my alcohol consumption after my wife died, frankly because it scared me since it would have been so easy to drown out and numb my emotions with booze, and I feared becoming reliant on it as a means of coping.
I’ve known Caitlin for many years now and to me she is a rockstar. I think what she did with the Order and her YouTube videos is a positive thing. Clearly folks have a lot of questions about the Death Care industry, and having someone like Caitlin being willing to answer these questions does a lot to demystify the profession. It also helps that Caitlin is a charismatic person and quite unlike the usual assumed dark and goth weirdness that most folks associate with folks in our industry.
Caitlin also started her own funeral home and is a proponent of green burials and the entire funeral midwife concept.
Thank you for your answer…and the latter info about the threaded butt plug. A friend of mine would like to know if said butt plug is a right-hand thread or a left-hand thread.
It nearly killed me tbh, but somehow - and I’m not sure how - I managed to survive the last three years without drinking myself to death or opting out.
Not a dumb question, but a fair one that comes up quite frequently. The final weight of the cremated remains can vary based on a couple of factors- weight and size of the decedent is the primary factor since a larger person has more bone mass, and the type of cremation unit (outer container) containing the remains would also be a factor. Some units, such as a cardboard casket, will vaporize thoroughly and leave very little residue however a hardwood such as mahogany can leave more residue behind.
Generally speaking I have had cremated remains range from between 5 to 15 pounds, with the exception being infants which all but completely vaporize during cremation leaving behind very little to add to the weight.
I’ve not seen that bit and will take a look at it later since I am currently at work and have no clue what to expect from the link. Plus upper management recently installed a firewall preventing folks from accessing YouTube primarily because of a particular counselor in my office who constantly watched stuff on his computer during business hours.
What happens to all the gold crowns when a body is cremated?
Why don’t mausoleums smell like a giant refrigerator full of meat after a long power failure? The one I visited had a peculiar “sweet” odor. How long will a body last in a mausoleum?
A cemetery worker told me that burial vaults fill with water, hydrostatic pressure and all, and that the bodies become floaters. True?
Re: videos etc. of funerals: 50 years ago in Kansas there was living memory of when it was usual to take photos of the deceased in the coffin; it hadn’t happened recently, that I knew. But a younger second wife, whose husband had been told by his doctor he would only have one more heart attack, dragged him to a portrait photographer - she wanted her memory live! In some jurisdictions it is illegal to build over or disturb graves, even if not in a cemetery; they must be disinterred and reburied elsewhere.
I have been asked on more than one occasion if it was possible for the family to have gold crowns and fillings returned to them prior to cremation. I do know that my embalming and morgue staff will refuse to do this since it will require extraction of the teeth with pliers and as such is rather destructive to the remains. I have heard of other funeral homes that have accommodated this request however required that a dentist be hired to do this at the expense of the family, however none of the families whom I have worked with persisted on this request to this degree and most simply give up on the idea once they realize just how intrusive the process will be.
Gold and any non combustible items - such as surgical implants, hardware from the casket, detritus left over from any mementos that the family placed in the casket for cremation - are removed from the bones before the remains are processed to an aggregate substance resembling “ashes” - as to what happens to these items I do know that my local crematory disposes of these items, and I have heard of other crematories donating the metal to a charity for recycling. It would be unethical for these items to be harvested and sold for profit.
Most remains encased in a casket these days are embalmed. Additionally, metal caskets are constructed with a gasket that makes the casket airtight - this can pose a potential problem as the remains inevitably decays in the airtight casket. Even after embalming there is a multitude of bacteria that will still cause the remains to decompose in the casket, often releasing gases that have in the past caused airtight metal caskets to buckle from the pressure and in some instances actually burst from the pressure. In this regard, the sweetish odor you detect in a mausoleum may be a combination of rotting necrotized flesh, embalming fluid, deodorizing compounds and cleaning fluid.
All burial vaults, regardless of how well constructed to be moisture resistant will inevitably break down to the point where moisture will breach the vault itself. In the case of a vault containing a casket, it is entirely possible that the moisture will eventually breach the casket itself and reach the remains. I have personally done disinterments where the remains inside of a casket were completely submerged in fluid and had decomposed in the fluid to the point where the only thing to reinter was a few bones fished out of the casket soup along with articles of clothing and hair. Conversely I have done disinterrments where the remains were bone dry and in good enough condition to be recosmetized and viewed by the family even after 25 years. I have also done disinterrments where the vault had been breached by water in which the casket itself was floating but otherwise uncompromised. So there are various factors at play that can cause the remains to become floaters, however this is not the standard case scenario for every burial.
Thank you so much for answering all these questions. I’m going to be DMing you, if you don’t mind, for some further info.
Okay, let’s say I wake up tomorrow morning dead. As I understand, the procedure from there would go:
Someone calls the mortuary/funeral home (is there a difference?), and they come pick up my body.
The mortuary embalms my corpse and takes care of the legal paperwork; my loved ones plan the funeral.
The funeral takes place at the funeral home, everyone cries a lot. The funeral may be at the mortuary/funeral home, or it might be at a chapel in the cemetery.
My body is taken to the grave, there is another speech or two, and I’m interred.
So my family could theoretically have to deal with two different companies - the mortuary and the cemetery, right? All the burial funerals I’ve been to have taken place at the cemetery proper, and the cemetery has also been the mortuary, so I’m a little confused about what roles the different parts of the death industry play.
The rather extensive amount of gold dental restorations in my father-in-law’s moth was recovered prior to his burial, at his request (obviously, pre-death request). The funeral was also closed-casket, at his request (bone cancer really did a number on him). So at least in some cases the gold is recovered. In his case, it amount to well over $1,000 in gold so the family thought it worth the effort and didn’t mind the cosmetic damage they didn’t see anyway. Also, one of the relatives was a dentist willing to do the work for free.
I specifically requested that the titanium implant that held my husband’s right lower leg together for 40+ years be returned to me. The crematorium sort of poo-poo’ed the idea, telling me such things were small, hard to separate from the ashes, and not worth much as salvage. I didn’t want to sell it for scrap, I wanted it back because it was part of him. Also, he was ADAMANT that NO ONE would profit from any bit of his remains - including “scrap” metal. When I phoned the crematory service about when I could pick up the boxed remains the guy on the phone’s statement was “Holy crap! Now I know why you wanted it back! That thing is HUGE!” Yes, yes it is - it entirely replaced the bone in his leg from the knee down. At present, it’s sitting on top of his boxed remains, which await an urn - I’d like to get something bird-themed but couldn’t find anything that struck my fancy in the catalog available at the time. I’ll get to it, but it’s been less than three months and I’ve had lots of more urgent things to worry about.
Anyhow - yes, people DO get dental gold and surgical implants back at least some of the time. It does require a bit of persistence, and yes, the industry very much DOES discourage the families getting these things back.
My husband also demanded that the ashes of his dead leg bones be presented to him when they were removed, and that took a lot of persuading because a number of doctors wanted them for research and study - well, it was experimental surgery that my husband had NOT consented to that led to his leg bones dying so he wasn’t inclined to make any further donations.
Sure, the whole “saved and donated to benefit charity” sounds nice, but my husband was adamantly against it, for his own reasons.
And the implant is kind of cool in a morbid sort of way.
But anyone wanting bits like that back from a crematory is going to have to do some serious arguing to get them.
Er… if you suddenly wake up dead there’s an autopsy involved in there, before the embalming, to rule out foul play and establish a cause of death.
There are other variations, too - Orthodox Jews, for example, don’t get embalmed, they’re buried by sundown of the day they die, and the funerals occur at the graveside. (Which was a lot of fun when Grandma died in February, relatives had less than 24 hours to get to St. Louis from as far away as New Jersey (I came from Chicago), and we got to freeze our butts off at the graveside. I did enjoy the Obnoxious More-Jewish-Than-Thou Cousin being booted out by the rabbi, though.)
But yeah - you could wind up dealing with more than one company, easily.
Depends on what sort of suddenly you’re involved with. If you’re under a doctor’s care and the doctor is not surprised, then there’s usually no autopsy.
My dad had two heart attacks, and was under a doctor’s care for the aftermath for several years. When he didn’t wake up one morning, the doctor felt confident entering another heart attack as the cause of death, so no autopsy.
My grandmother was also under a doctor’s care. She had gotten old enough that, among other things, she no longer felt hunger. I’m not sure what her doctor listed as the cause of death, but she also had no autopsy.
Not to get too detailed, but if I recall Maggie the Ocelot falls into a category where, in the event of sudden expiration tonight there’s a likely explanation and may not, in fact, require an autopsy.
However, I was thinking more in the line of a truly sudden and unexpected death in a typical adult - that generally does call for one, as opposed to the elderly or someone suffering from something chronic and/or terminal or likely to be so.
