#funeral industry

[whilomm]

to help spread the word a lil, ask a mortician just put out a new video, this one specifically about proposed FTC regulation changes for U.S. funeral homes, and theres a comment period that closes October 10th, 2023 to ya kno. comment on em. tell em to help make funerals a lil cheaper.

I would really reccomend watching the video as she explains it a lot better, but the TLDR is that the FTC is thinking of adding some rules to the regs on how funeral homes disclose a couple of things, like prices (making them list prices online, so you dont need to drive to 7 diff funeral homes to price shop the day your son died, and cause hidden prices=more expensive), and make it clearer WHEN embalming is required (that is, that its NOT required by law, but might be required by the funeral home themselves)

like i said, watch the vid for a better explaination, but both of those things contribute to funerals being Mega Fucking Expensive, so. if you feel like it, go to the FTC and tell em to implement the changes!

comment period ends october 10th, 2023!

#ask a mortician #caitlyn doughty #funerals #ftc #federal trade commission #uspol #funeral industry #buzzy #Youtube

[vidi-ugh]

Trying to find a local funeral home to shadow/intern at and finding out that they're all owned by SCI 🫠🫠

#funeral director #funeral industry #funeral home #death care #Fuck SCI #nina's life notes

[jamesarber]

#studyblr #stemblr #poll #lawblr #mortuary science #mortician #embalmer #funeral industry #funeral director #aerospace #aeronautics #aeronautical engineering #engineer #engineering

[i-meticulous4life]

It seems to be deceased may have loved the color yellow or maybe a particular type of yellow flowers. The light glows flowers that hang and droops from the trees and/or branches around the casket. The light from the torchier seems to highlight all the different shade of yellow too.

#funeral #funeral directors #funeral home #funeral services #the mortuary collection #mortuary science #ask a mortician #death doula #greenburial #funeral industry #casket robbery #coffin #coffins #embalming

[lunahallowell]

I swear to god I would rather eat this book than study it right now. I am sooo siiiiiiick of school work. Love working the trade and helping fams, but the books can eat it! I can’t wait to just. Be working without all the after hours studying. It’s super hard working full time and doing full time school also.

*screams* *flips table* *throws chair* I just wanna write my goddamn book!!!!!!

Ok. Now that I have had my tantrum. I’m gonna suck it up and study till I die. 😎

#lunar chatter #listen man. sometimes. ya just need a good angry post #I have a meltdown I swear at the start of every term #and somehow always get through it #pray for me lmfao #mortuary science #mortuary school #funeral #funeral industry #funeral director

[libraryofva]

Recent Acquisitions - Ephemera Collection

Top o'the Morning ! A Magazinelet Published Bi-Monthly by The J.W. Bliley Co., Inc., Richmond, VA. Easter Number, 1927

#1920s #ephemera #magazine #booklet #Richmond #VA #Virginia #mortician #funeral industry #Easter

[altarflame]

“In America, where I live, death has been big business since the turn of the twentieth century. A century has proven the perfect amount of time for its citizens to forget what funerals once were - family and community-run affairs. In the nineteenth century no one would have questioned Josephine’s daughter preparing her mother’s body - it would have seemed strange if she didn’t. No one would have questioned a wife washing and dressing the body of her husband or a father carrying his son to the grave in a homemade coffin. In an impressively short time, America’s funeral industry has become more expensive, more corporate, and more bureaucratic than any other funeral industry on earth. If we can be called best at anything, it would be at keeping our grieving families from their dead.”

-Caitlin Doughty, in “From Here to Eternity”

#death #hospice #funeral industry #home funerals #natural burial #the order of the good death #my strongest held beliefs

[secretnameofeverydeath]

took me some time but i finally caved and i am now watching Six Feet Under. (i think like twenty people asked me if i had either seen this show or recommeded it to me since i started working at a crematory.) of course i was immediately obsessed with it - i love how real the characters feel, and how real the depictions of grief and death, and how real these attempts at living your life while also 'burying people for a living' (although i am burning them)

but also some things are so weird to me. i am absolutely fascinated by the way these characters casually chat during the embalming process - like i have never even seen an embalmed body?! we just keep the bodies cool and they're fine. and also this one time we had a casket at the crematory, it was a whole thing because it was so heavy and it left so much ash that it did not fit into the containers we use. and i cannot even go oh horrible american funeral industry because i am definitely working for the evil capitalist organisation that attempts to turn funerals (cremations) into assembly line work. on a busy day our crematory cremates six people, hosts 5 or 6 services and 8 viewings. we have space for up to 30 bodies.

#death industry #death #personal #crematory #six feet under #like when david says oh no we cannot organise a viewing without embalming the body #and i was like wow sometimes the most we do before a viewing is stuff cottonwool in the nose and throat #funeral industry

[demi-shoggoth]

2023 Reading Log, pt 1

It begins again! With a straggler from 2022.

151. All the Living and the Dead by Hayley Campbell. Last year, the book that made me cry was Women and Other Monsters. This was the book this year. This book is about the author’s grappling with death via the act of visiting and interviewing people who work in fields handling the dead. Morticians, grave diggers, autopsy technicians and cremation operators are interviewed, as are people who you might not think of—crime scene cleaners, a company that works in PR and cleanup for disasters, a bereavement midwife. The material about the death of fetuses and infants is especially devastating, both for me and for the author; her sense of detachment is derailed upon seeing infant corpses being cleaned after autopsy, and coming to terms with that is a major theme of the book. The book ends with the COVID pandemic, and how death has become a much bigger part of everyone’s lives, after decades of denial pushing it to the fringes. This was a powerful read, and I have a lot of emotions about it; I’m glad I read this book, but I will likely never want to read it again.

001. Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual Movements in Early New York State by Joscelyn Goodwin. This was not the book I thought it was going to be when I picked it up. It covers most of the bases—looking at the “Burnt Over” region of Upstate New York and how it was the site of a lot of religious development throughout the 19th century. It covers the well known ones—the Millerites and their more successful spinoffs, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists, the Mormons, the Spiritualists. It also talks about the interweaving of spiritualist beliefs with leftist politics in the 19th century, and how people like Susan B. Anthony and Fredrick Douglass had connections to séances and channelers. What I did not expect was the strong bias of the author. He is clearly friendly to Helena Blavatsky and Theosophical ideas, much more than an impartial historian would have been of that notorious fraud. The final chapter, where the author lays out his Neoplatonic philosophy and his belief that New York State is the site of ley lines, reads like the reveal in a horror movie. There is useful information to be had here, but it should be taken with more than a grain of salt.

002. Dinosaurs: Profiles from a Lost World by Riley Black, illustrations by Riccardo Frapiccini. The author of this book is on tumblr! Go follow her @rileycatrocks​ , she’s awesome. This book is an overview of what we know about notable dinosaur genera, as well as other Mesozoic reptiles like pterosaurs and crocodiles. The writing is good at summarizing modern research in a readable style; this is a good book for interested laypeople. The art is done using photomanipulation to create the textures on the animals, all of which are featured in a profile head shot. I think it works mostly, but there are some issues. I really like the animals’ eyes, which feel authentic (I especially like the horizontal pupils on many of the ornithiscians). The textures are more hit-and-miss, though. The same sample of monitor lizard skin is used on multiple pieces, and there’s a Brachiosaurus covered in Galapagos tortoise hide that looks really awkward and misshapen. This book was published first in Italy, so I’m a little surprised European dinosaurs don’t get more featured. Although the somewhat obscure and very strange Italian pterosaur Caviramus shows up, which I appreciated.

003. The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky. This book is part food history and part computational linguistics. The book discusses both how foods travel around the world and change when they meet new cultures (like how ketchup was first made with fish, and how much of English and American foodways come from the Middle East). It also covers the linguistic tricks used on menus and food packaging to sell to specific markets, and the similarities in language used on Yelp reviews. These two halves don’t quite gel together the way the author may have hoped. I liked the book, but maybe it could have used a little more scaffolding.

004. what if? 2 by Randall Munroe. This was the hardest I’ve laughed at a book in some time. Highly recommended for the joy factor alone. This is the third of Munroe’s pop-science Q&A books, and like what if? and how to?, it answers questions, some simple, some absurd, with the science of how they would actually work. A lot of planets are destroyed, black holes created, and other chaos ensues. Most of the questions involve physics or chemistry, but there are a few biology questions included (like how many people would a T. rex have to eat in a day, which becomes how many T. rexes can be supported by a single McDonalds).

005. Parasites: The Inside Story by Scott L. Gardner, Judy Diamond and Gabor Racz, illustrated by Brenda Lee. This book is another “recommended for interested laypeople” text, this one about the evolution and ecology of parasites. The book is divided into thirds; the first third covers parasites of humans, the second the life histories and evolution of major clades of parasites, the third individual case studies, most of them involving the first author. The illustrations are a high point—the life cycles of featured parasites are illustrated, and the back of the book has a spotter’s guide to the individual species discussed in the text. I wish it were longer, though—this book is 190 pages, which includes a 10 page glossary and 40 pages of bibliography.

#reading log #lot of emotions in this one #parasite #parasitology #evolution #ecology #pop science #xkcd #linguistics #food history #death #funeral industry #dinosaurs #paleontology #paleoart #comparative religion #occultism #new york state #american history

[figgldygrak]

I love sustainable death care options and there’s currently an effort to legalize human composting in Virginia through bill HJ-513 so I thought I’d share this petition. If any of you support this please sign and share the petition!

#human composting #death positive #funeral industry #funeral service #death positivity #virginia #environment #ecofriendly

[spacetypo]

Obviously being a removal technician has its fair share of difficulties, but one of the strangest and most unexpected effects is that completely innocuous foods will randomly taste how a heavily decomposing body smelled.

I went to eat a piece of cheese earlier and it tasted exactly like a severe decomp I dealt with that day smelled. To the point that I gagged and had to spit it out. Happens the most with cheese for some reason.

#funeral industry

[alterboyx]

What is going on??

I saw the shocking headline of this article, but upon reading it, I'm pretty confused?

This is about a funeral home that does environmentally-friendly return to nature burials, meaning no embalming and decomposing in open, natural conditions. This is a completely safe and respectable practice that has had to fight hard to be allowed, since the US funeral business is deeply misguided at best. My gut reaction is "well shit, now it's going to bring even more unnecessary restrictions and negativity to the practice." But of course, if a funeral home of any kind is desecrating corpses, it's an issue that needs to be addressed.

Okay, that sounds bad, but...it sounds like they just weren't stored embalmed or frozen? Is this just the area the funeral home uses to let the bodies begin to decay? Or are they actively desecrating corpses?

I'm not sure what the rash is supposed to mean. One of the people at the scene got a rash and someone looked at it. Is this a biohazard situation? Is this dangerous? Or did someone just. Get a random rash?

And my favorite part,

Wait, YOU DON'T KNOW IF A CRIME HAS BEEN COMMITTED? They are saying how they'll have to do extensive DNA testing to identify all the bodies and it will take months. I don't know if that means the home didn't keep track of who was laid where, but after this big scary article, they don't even have a suggested crime that has been committed here? I'm not saying there couldn't be something nefarious going on, but right now it kinda sounds like the funeral home was doing their normal practice and people busted in to disrupt the graves?

I am not an expert in the laws around this by any means and cannot personally vouch for the funeral home but I'm confused as to what the actual problem is??? But don't worry, they are going ahead and declaring it a disaster and an emergency. wtf

#funeral industry #desecration of a corpse #natural burial #funeral practices #law #human death

[vitaminwatersupreme]

she was buried how she lived, with an abdomen full of formaldehyde

#tw death #embalming #funeral #funeral industry

[liminalweirdo]

Like with medicine and midwifery, women are still being forced out of roles that were traditionally feminine.

#funeral industry #death positive movement #death positive #human rights

[i-meticulous4life]

I-meticulous4life pet

We sometimes see support dogs and cats at funerals home and/or funeral services. Other times I see an escorted beloved pet of the deceased attending the funeral service and burial.

Should a pet of the deceased be allowed are the funeral service?

How would you handle the request?

#funeral services #funeral home #funerary art #funeral directors #funeral industry #funeral #mortuary science #the mortuary collection #the mortuary assistant

[gwydionmisha]

Illegal Body Trade: Modern-Day Corpse Theft

Why we need regulations.

#Corpse Theft #Funeral Industry #Youtube