Mortician Shows Every Step a Body Goes Through at a Funeral Home | WIRED

Hello, I'm Victor M Sweeney, Licensed Mortician. We are here at Cormo Funeral Service. Come on, they've given us unprecedented access to the entire

funeral

home

. We're going to go to the prep room where we embalm and prepare the bodies normally. If an outsider like you wanted to enter the preparation room, he would not be allowed. Today we have received special access from the Department of Health and we are going to see the coffins that win that type of thing. We're going to see the Funeral Chapel and then we'll also do a tour of the hearse to see how that works for us today.

It's Sean Victor. Thanks for inviting me here. I really appreciate it. Death can be a little scary. There are many things about our field that are unknown. I'm excited that you're bringing those answers to

every

one today. First let's enter the preparation room. Why don't you come with me and I'll show you what we know? do it here, we are in the preparation room, the room where we do all the embalming, embalming is meant to disinfect and preserve the bodies as well as provide some level of restoration, so for example if someone is seriously injured , we can work to rebuild it.

Other than making sure their

body

lasts for maybe the week we have between the time they die and the time we have the

funeral

at this funeral

home

, the prep room is off the garage. I don't want to be carrying cots with bodies up or down or through the entire funeral home to get them here because then we can go straight from the van to the room where the magic happens. We have taken our Mike doll from the back of the truck. and now we are ready for EMB packaging. Every time you prepare a

body

, you're starting from scratch, so you're going to take inventory, go over them, and make sure you know

every

thing about their condition and then adjust your embalming processes accordingly in a normal situation.

I am covered from head to toe in personal protective equipment and that is mainly to keep me safe when I am dealing with blood and pathogens. I am also dealing with embalming fluids. so these are things that keep bodies preserved and disinfected and many of them contain Al Ides, they are actually toxic chemicals. Every prep room will have ventilation, will have Malahide level monitoring, all of these things are in place to keep me safe and uh, to make sure that we don't infect our public spaces with what we have to do here in private, one of the first

step

s of embalming is to shape the features so that the face has a natural expression, they are sometimes called eye caps when people die their eyes are open and we can position the eyelids and have them stay that way.

We use this device called a needle injector that actually drills these sharp nails into the upper and lower jaw to hold it in place and they will stay that way. The next part of embalming after setting up those features is that we are going to do what is called arterial embalming to gain access to the arteries and then this is how we will use our embalming machine to pump fluids so that there are three different types of fluids that embalmers use when preparing a body. The first arterial solutions will be fixatives, so they are going to disinfect the body, preserve it and fix it in place.

Other fluids. They are what we call co-injections or accessory fluids co-injections can add fluid to the tissue they can extract fluid they will add color sometimes maybe a pink color is helpful and then we have other fluids that are really good at preventing certain types of decay probably the most common place for For a funeral director to gain access to one artery is up here in the neck and that's called the cylindrical artery. Let's say you choose not to elevate the cylindrical artery, you can actually embalm an entire body right here. the leg, so the femoral artery is one of the largest arteries we have access to.

If you push the fluid up, you can open the corresponding one and then the blood will drain out and the arteries are interesting because they are very rubbery, they think like a tube. rubber band and when we put high pressure on them with the embalming machine they are able to withstand the liquid just going directly to the body, so this tank here is the embalming machine and this tube

goes

down the artery and then it will inject liquid into high pressure to circulate that fluid while expelling the blood that has been building up in the Venus system, so this will actually simulate a sort of heartbeat, so if you have large clots trapped in a Venus system , can propel the fluid at high pressure and expel those clots out of the body and that will create a better distribution of our fluid and better preservation in the final procedure.

This is called a tissue spreader, so let's say you have someone with a little extra weight and you need to get into, say, the flesh of their leg to access their artery. You can put this type in like this and it spreads all that grease. Any number of practical scissors. A curve is nice sometimes, especially when you're cutting arteries or perhaps other tissue. This is called an aneurysm hook because it is used to separate tissue and hook the arteries and pull them out where you have access to them. It's called a slot director. I can hold this.

Put it on. the artery and then this hard surface at the bottom is going to open up the artery so I can slide my other tools right into some angled forceps that you can actually use to pull out clots. This type is called a drain pipe. Usually this end is It will be connected to another tube that we pass through the table and then this end will go into the artery. One thing that's great about a drainage tube is that we can actually control how much blood is coming out of the body if we're having drainage problems, you can stop it, the pressure is building up in the body and then all of a sudden you pull on the end and scream , it will come out the bottom, so you want to create that pressure because sometimes you need a little bit more to get into the extremities, like your toes or fingers, kind of like cavity embalming is the second part of the preparation of a body in which we want to puncture all the hollow organs and then drain all the slimy, unpleasant substance that wants to live there.

The tool that we are going to use to do that is called a tro car. The tro car is a large steel spear, this tip is going to pierce the organ and then this part is connected to a vacuum cleaner, so it is going to suck everything up. that sticky substance down the drain and then the holes that we make will actually provide access points to introduce what we call cavity fluid, meaning a fluid that is made to kill all the bacteria and solidify those hollow organs so that we don't have no problem. Going forward, this is a tro is also slightly different and it doesn't suck in liquid but returns it, so in this case we take a cavity liquid bottle, we would actually turn it around and place it on top of the tro cart. and then through the same hole that we made before we came back, while gravity actually pulls the liquid down and inserts it from the end of the tip back into all the holes that we made in the heart, into the lungs and then you'll go back go down to the abdomen, this is really the bottom part, it's where all the bacteria like to hang out and so my friends, it's how to embalm a body when I embalm my first body, it's a little scary. disconcerting because it's one of those things that you have to do right the first time and you only have one chance, so if you make a mistake and maybe the pressure is too high and the face starts to swell and you don't see that you've caused a problem with the grandma or grandpa you really can't fix, so attention to detail is welcome in the sorting room.

If you have a loved one who passes away, there is a good chance you will end up in a room like this to select your funeral. Merchandise when a family chooses cremation the family may want to select and win, and these vary everywhere, there are simple wins that maybe start at $100 or less, they are really fancy, maybe cast bronze that cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars or a few families. just opt ​​to use the container that comes from the Crematorium, just a simple plastic one is any of those that are perfectly suitable for what a family wants to do, so one thing that can be a little confusing and is often used interchangeably is the difference between a coffin and a coffin in other parts of the world, like in the UK for example, they have what are called coffins, so they have what we might call an anthropoid shape, so they are narrow at the top where there is the head, they widen at the shoulders and then come back again towards the feet, while coffins are uniformly rectangular in the United States, we almost exclusively use coffins, coffins vary as much as you can imagine, we have very simple coffins covered in cloth cardboard that might be more suitable for a simple burial or perhaps a cremation. and then we have high-end coffins made of hardwoods like mahogany or cherry or even a variety of bronze coffins which is really the spice of death here, we are in the funeral chapel, we have taken our Mike doll and now we are ready to his family to come and say their last goodbye, this opening here is called a cap and this is an example of what we call a half couch coffin, so you'll only see from about the middle section up, you need to write down each person in the coffin . he is wearing pants but not always shoes when we are going to close a coffin. um many times I have deceased family around me.

There's a locking mechanism under here and we're just going to pull it and open the latches here at the bottom and then with the family we all hold on and slowly lower the lid and then we say goodbye as the last

step

um I'll have you come with me while we load the coffin in the hearse and we'll make our way to the cemetery come on oh this one is cool oh look at the lights inside they are amazing you have a great herar Sean so the vehicle behind me some call it hearse, others call it a coach, but in any case.

In case you are taking the deceased from point A to point B, there are a few special things about a hearse, the first thing you should know is that each one is custom made, so there is no single company that makes their own From the start, they are all made with a normal car cut in half, extended and completely rebuilt, you don't need a special license or anything the driver hears that is built with Lincolns and Cadillacs, they usually have nice big engines and, if need be they go over 100 mph in the back it usually has a vinyl top at least in the states that swooshy design on the back is called a landow bar it's kind of uh the quintessential car brand funeral is a holdover from when they used to be coaches so the horse carriages and top were removed We don't have convertibles nowadays but it's a nice Mark, when you see one you know exactly what it is so one thing you'll notice about a Hearst is that the door opens very wide, so when you have six coffin bears you can get nice and close before you put the coffin on the rollers and the rollers go all the way in so it's a nice smooth roll inside the hearse when you put the coffin in place, you will take this plug, put it like this and keep the coffin from flying out the back when I load a hearse.

I always go ahead first. The reason is that when you tilt the coffin a little to put it in, its feet are down and they do slide. it slides towards their feet, whereas if you turn it the other way, they will go head first and it is very heavy, so always the heavy head finishes first and the feet will follow fine, why don't we try to carry it with our? our friend Mike we've taken him from point A now we're going to point Z and uh Sean is going to help me here. I really appreciate you coming with me on this journey today through the funeral home.

I hope you learned a few things and maybe feel a little more comfortable coming with me in my life with the dead