This YouTuber says that, at least in Michigan, the decedent must be in a box, and they do sell heavy-duty cardboard boxes for this purpose for about $75. They do not need to be dressed in any particular way.
TL - DW - about “Embalming Conjoined Twins” - that was a Zoom presentation with several morticians, and none of them had ever done it, or knew of anyone who did.
I suspect vaults are used to keep the ground level over the years to come.
My paternal grandmother prepaid her funeral in the early 1990s, and then there were a lot of news reports about these being fraudulent. My dad took the paperwork to an attorney, who told him that everything was legitimate, and when Grandma died in 2007, everything was taken care of except that she lived in t-shirts and sweatshirts for her last few years and didn’t have a “nice” blouse for the viewing, so my mother went to Walmart and found this shirt in what looked like her size with a ruffle on it, and that’s what she was buried in.
This is a great commercial.
Have you heard the story of the invention of the automatic phone exchange?
Almon Brown Strowger was a funeral parlour owner who is said to have suspected that the switchboard operator in his town directed all calls away from him and re-directed them to the only other funeral parlour in town - because the owner was her husband.
So he invented the automatic phone exchange to not only solve his problem but to permanently put all switchboard operators out of a job. Revenge is sweet.
Of course that last part isn’t really true since I suspect that by the time switchboard operators were entirely phased out, Almon Strowger and his business had long moved on. But anyway, cute story.
Me too, but there is something to be said for contingency plans.
Yes! Great ad.
You would be surprised at the number of people who have a strong negative reaction at the very thought of a loved one’s body decaying. Mortuaries make a lot of their money from the hands of people who WANT the body to be preserved.
And they make that money by lying.
I actually have an irrational discomfort with the idea of decaying after death. Cremation doesn’t bother me at all.
Decaying before death is bad enough, thank you.
I will be cremated in the handbasket I use for my celebrity death pool research storage. To get used to the heat. Dip your toes, lower legs, torso, etc… in gradually. You do go feet first, don’t you?
My friend Sharon is afraid of being burned postmortem, so cremation is out. She’s freaked out by bugs, so no burial. She seriously wants her husband to empty their chest freezer and put her in it, then have candles and pictures of her on the freezer.
The Zoroastrian faith has the perfect solution for her:
Would the modern version of that be leaving the corpse on the roof of a Manhattan skyscraper and waiting for the pigeons to take care of things?
Thank you. I forwarded it to her and she responded immediately “Fuck You”. About a half hour later she sent me a long text updating me on her and her family’s recent stuff.
He should assure her he’s going to do that, then have her cremated. Will make no difference to her.
Ouch!
IMO if people want to spend money on a funeral, it’s pretty much ok. Pay off the creditors etc. but if it brings solace to the survivors, ok.
That said, I’d be asking the funeral director if he had any coffins in “saran wrap” for me. We’re going back to the earth, the water table, etc. Let it go.
Last week, my fiancée and I attended a seminar intended to get us to buy an all-inclusive cremation package. I asked if they had a Soylent Green option.
Here’s an alternative to both burial-and-bugs and cremation-and-fire:
My ideas often get that response.
In Manhattan? It would definitely be the rats taking care of things.