- There are two ways to close a mouth.
One involves actually what we call a needle injector.
So this is normally going into bone.
[injector clicking]
So the wire holds it in place.
Hello, I'm Victor M. Sweeney,
licensed funeral director and mortician
and this is part two of Mortician Support.
[upbeat music]
All right, first up, here's a question from lovelynicole.
"How do morticians get into their profession?
"Like, what inspired them or whatnot
"to want to pursue that career?"
That is such a fine question.
It differs from mortician to mortician.
Decades ago, it used to be more common
that a funeral home was a family business,
so it might be that your dad was a mortician
and your grandpa before him
and you just follow in their footsteps
to carry on that family business
and keep up the family name.
Today, most morticians are what we might call
first-generation funeral directors,
so they're going into it cold, they're learning the trade,
and then going off on their own to either work for somebody
or own their own funeral home.
For myself, I always grew up kind of surrounded by death,
if you will.
I found my best friend dead in his bed when I was four.
I had a sister that was born before me that passed away
and we'd always visit her grave.
And then for about 10 years when I was a kid,
we lost a close family member,
an aunt, an uncle, a grandparent,
every year for about a decade,
so I was around funerals a whole lot.
It made me understand that this is something important
and worth doing.
Here's a question from Anthony Pyle.
"Can you be buried according to your heritage or beliefs?"
In Colorado, for instance, there is one county
that actually allows burial outside on a pyre.
So you could build a burial pyre out of wood
and light up grandpa, if you were in that county
and you had proper right-off from the government.
Next up we have from ATotalRandom,
"Why do dead bodies get stiff?"
The proper term for the stiffening of bodies after death
is called rigor mortis.
So this would be when the muscles of the body tense up
until the tissues themself start to break down a little bit.
So if a body is in rigor and we don't want it to be,
the best thing that we can do
is what's called breaking rigor.
Typically you're gonna see rigor mortis in the joints
is where it's primarily gonna be a problem.
So to break rigor, all you actually have to do
is manipulate those joints forcefully,
and I'm talking bending those fingers way, way back.
And after you do that a number of times they'll loosen up,
so then you can have the hands positioned properly.
Our next question is from Alysia Wood.
"Will morticians give you a shower? Asking for a friend."
It's a fine question because really we do bathe
every deceased that comes through.
So we'll wash their bodies, we'll shampoo their hair.
But for your question, giving a shower,
I cannot imagine trying to prop somebody up
trying to make that happen.
Having them laying on a table
and doing it while they're laying down
and I don't have to hold them up with one arm
is definitely ideal.
Here's a question from Sovereigninsane.
"If somebody wished to be turned into a life-sized doll
"after death, would it be legal?"
Absolutely not.
Here's a question from ViViCapitalism.
"How do morticians fix a body
"that was shot between the eyes?
"Like they just fill it in with silly putty?"
One of the things that we do and we work very hard on
is what we call restoration.
When someone's shot between the eyes,
provided the rest of their head is there
and we just have a bullet hole,
first we'd probably wanna pack it with cotton
or some other firmer material,
and then on the topmost layer
we're gonna cover it with what's called a wax.
This wax is called the surface restorer.
So I'll show you how it works.
So we have a wax, it's softer than candle wax,
but when it's introduced to the heat of the hand
it tends to soften up.
And then this wax we can use to wax over a wound,
see how it covers it just like that,
and then we can get the proper texture
with stippling and with brushwork
and then color over it after that and try to blend it in.
Here's a question from genealogy_jill.
"Are sky burials legal in the United States?"
So a sky burial is where you leave a body out
on a high place for vultures and other animals
to pick apart.
It is not legal.
Here's a question from KellyElizabeth.
"Ew, do morticians really sew your mouth shut
"when you're dead?
"#TheRite."
The answer to that is yes. And also no.
You might be thinking that we're talking about
sewing the lips.
We generally don't sew the lips closed.
You can imagine how much time and how much fine detail
it would take to do that.
There are two ways to close a mouth.
One involves actually using suture to bring the jawbone up
with a needle and some thread.
This is a large S-curve needle.
You would go up out of the nose, across the septum,
back down, and then you're actually gonna go through
the frenulum, the frenulum of your lip here,
there's usually a little piece of skin.
You'll go through that on the inside of your mouth.
Once you do that, you can just pull the two ends together
and it tightens the jaw right up.
The other method of closing a mouth
is with what we call a needle injector.
We have a mouth here
and we're gonna take this needle injector,
and it's a piston, you see.
It clicks. [injector clicking]
So this piston is gonna drive our sharp brad
into the wood here, just as a demonstration.
So this is normally going into bone.
[injector clicking]
So there's our bottom one.
[injector clicking]
And there's our top one.
And then you simply twist them together
so the wire holds it in place.
Once the jaw itself is closed,
the lips and the rest of the mouth
take their form very naturally.
Here's a question from HayleyHae.
"How do morticians do people they knows' bodies?
"I could never."
I actually do that pretty frequently,
and honestly, it's kind of nice because you know the person,
you know how they do their hair,
you know how they do their makeup,
you know how they like to get dressed.
And here's a question from Ambryn.
"When viewing my grandmother for her funeral,
"I noticed her nose looked odd.
"Upon closer inspection, it appeared to have been squashed
"and carefully restructured.
"Is this a common occurrence?"
Ambryn, that is a good question,
and I'm sorry that was your experience.
I wouldn't say it's common,
but it depends on the manner of death.
So let's say someone passed away
where they had a very quick heart attack
and fell onto their face,
it's possible their nose might've been broken,
or maybe they laid on their nose for a number of hours
and it maintained that squashed look.
Then it would be just as simple as straightening it out,
maybe putting a little cotton in the nostrils
to hold their shape, and then embalming the body
so those tissues hold their shape.
Here's a question from Tiffany Payne.
"Do breast implants get taken out?"
Five question marks.
Short answer: No.
Our next question is from Aht Aht.
"How do morticians decide what to do
"with the dead person's arms?"
So that's kind of interesting question.
Traditionally, the hands are placed over the umbilicus,
so over the navel,
and almost always the hands are gonna be positioned
left over right.
The reason being is that more often than not,
by the time you pass away, you will have been married
so we want the hand with a wedding ring to be on top
so people can see it.
Maybe the variation on that is if we have someone
who's very large and in the casket,
sometimes their hands don't quite reach up
or maybe they would meet, but it's so high up in the casket
we wouldn't be able to close the lid securely.
So if that's the case,
we usually just put the hands at the side,
typically resting just on top of the hips.
Here's a question from Erin Xecution.
"I wanted to go into the field of work back in the day,
"but I was afraid of how it would affect me.
"What's one situation that's affected you the most,
"good and bad?
"Could that line of work cause PTSD?"
Well, the truth of it is it can be
a very emotionally taxing job.
You do see a lot of things that you just don't wanna see.
Graphic injury, increasingly decaying bodies,
burying children, all those things are really,
really, really hard.
But there are a lot of good things, too.
For instance, when you come across a situation like that,
you're in a position to actually help a family
in a way that really nobody else can.
As for it causing PTSD, maybe?
I think it depends on the person.
But I think if you put the idea
that you're there to help first,
kind of before your own emotional investment in it,
that's probably the ticket to keeping you
free of those kind of debilitating anxieties.
Next up, we have a question from whore of the orient.
"Why do dead bodies have to be prepared and shit?
"Just toss me into the ocean. Why is it so complicated?
"Just drop me in and let the orcas eat me."
That could possibly be an option
if we're talking about burial at sea.
The reason we prepare bodies is to provide time
for families to gather.
More often than not states are gonna have a limit
between the time a person passes away
and when they have to be either buried or cremated.
With embalming, it actually negates the necessity
to bury a person right away.
So let's say we're having a funeral
and we have families coming from both sides of the country.
Hard to do that in 72 hours, let's say.
If we embalm a body, then we don't have to worry so much
about the timing and we can delay it a little bit
if we need to.
I don't have a great deal of experience with burial at sea
being in the most landlocked state in the country,
[chuckles] but there are protocols
for shrouding and wrapping and then disposing of a body
a certain number of miles out on the coast.
So that way when it goes overboard,
it doesn't wash up on shore,
and the orcas get to eat you, just as you wished.
Here's the next question from dollar sign.
"Do morticians really remove all the inside organs
"and put them at the foot of the dead person in the casket?
"Or is that a lie?"
Thankfully, that is an outright lie.
Typically with an embalming,
we don't have to remove the organs at all;
they can just stay right in the body.
Even if we have an autopsy
in which the organs have been removed for study,
they're typically placed back in the body cavity.
So putting them in a bag at the end, not gonna happen.
And at any rate, it's a huge liability.
What if it broke open?
Or what if it was just sloshing around in the end
as you carried the casket out?
You don't want that, we don't want that, no.
Our next question is from frantic woman.
"Can morticians put facial expressions on the dead?"
That is a great question.
Yes, more or less.
So typically a person's facial expression
will almost make itself
when we close the jaw and set the features.
Now there are things we can do
to help create a more pleasant expression,
things like filling in some of the cheek.
Let's say they've gotten older,
maybe losing some of their muscle tone.
We can fill in the cheek with some cotton
or possibly some fluid that we can inject in
to bulk it up a little bit.
One of the things that I always do
is I put a little bit of cotton inside the mouth
under the turn at your mouth when you smile.
In my experience, generally people that smile more
have nicer expressions when they're in the casket.
And people that are frowners,
they tend to frown in the casket as well.
Here's a question from Jordan.
"Are all morticians this hot?"
The short answer to that is no.
I usually look like a pasty, stringy,
just stereotypical mortician.
When they put me in front of the lights with studio magic,
I look very handsome.
Our next question is from Ellion.
"Hey, I have a question.
"What do you do if a person has died
"in some kind of accident and has a severe injury?
"For example, lost a limb.
"Do you fix the part of the body
"that was injured, decapitated,
"or do you simply put it back?
"Asking you out of curiosity."
Really, Ellion, It depends on the type of injury
and maybe the magnitude of it.
So if someone loses a limb,
let's say if the limb is relatively intact,
apart from being severed from the body,
we can re-articulate it and actually just sew up
all the tissue around it making sure it's properly embalmed.
I have not thankfully had too much experience
with decapitation, but the way a person handles that,
you embalm the head independently from the rest of the body,
and then when it comes time to re-articulate the head
to the rest of the spinal column,
you actually drive a dowel into the spine
and then set the atlas of the head, the rest of the neck,
on top of that dowel so you know it's in the proper place.
Then it's just a matter of carefully stitching up
the two ends of the skin together and waxing over it.
Here's a question from The Crypto Knight.
"Do you know why do dead bodies float?"
Yes, the reason for that is bacterial buildup in the abdomen
that creates gas.
That gas will cause the body to float.
Here's a question from Deyna Jarrett.
"The five-year-old questions: Why do dead bodies stink?
"Asked during breakfast no less."
Well, I have a five-year-old at home
and this is probably a normal breakfast for me.
Do you ever have meat or any other vegetable
that goes off, spoils, or rots?
That is exactly what our bodies do
as soon as our immune systems stop taking care of us.
You have a lot of internal bacteria living in your gut,
all those hollow organs, and those things do smell bad.
If a body comes in already smelling bad,
already partially decomposed,
typically we'll put that body in a body bag,
if they're not already in one.
And then a good way to reduce smell
is to actually use baby powder as well as baking soda.
Both those soak up those nasty smells quite well,
as long as the body's in a sealed pouch.
If we have an embalming where somebody is smelling bad,
really the embalming itself typically will fix
some of that smell.
Ideally, the fluid will push out the blood,
and a lot of times, as soon as that blood is gone,
the smell goes with it too.
If someone is smelling really bad,
a nice trick is just a little bit of Vicks VapoRub
under the nose.
The next question is from Jash.
"Is it possible for a mortician to allow someone to watch
"while they're working on a body?"
That is a great question.
The answer is no, unless they are actually an intern.
In most states, they won't allow anybody
outside of someone who has a funeral director's license
to enter into an embalming room,
let alone watch the preparation of a body.
Our next question is from R.L Queen.
"How do hair and nails still grow on the body after death?"
That is an interesting question.
The hair and nails do not continue to grow after death.
There are no life processes that would cause
the growth of hair or nails.
The look of hair growing and nails getting longer
is primarily from skin around them retracting.
All right, our next question
is from Lord and Savior Jared Gaines.
"I heard of a thing where you would die
"and you can have your tattoos preserved
"and given to your loved ones.
"Have you ever done something like that?"
I've never had that request,
but I have looked into a company that does do that.
So really what we would have to do is just remove
the outer layer of skin.
The company would probably send us
a biohazard shipping container
so we could mail that top layer of skin with the tattoo
off for preservation and then probably framing
before they would send it back to the family.
Here's a question from Job_for_a_Cody.
"So I do have a serious question.
"What are happening to the bodies of the deceased
"with coronavirus?
"Are they cremated?
"Are morticians wearing hazmat suits or something?"
That is such a good and relevant question.
So when someone dies from coronavirus,
they do not have to be cremated right away.
We can embalm their body.
It was kind of scary right away
because I remember very distinctly handling bodies of people
that had died of the coronavirus
before we knew how it was spread.
We always wore the maximum number
of personal protective equipment that we could.
So not quite a hazmat suit,
but the next thing closest to it.
Coronavirus is spread by droplet infection, right,
by respiration from the body.
Whenever you manipulate a body,
let's say from the place of death,
there is gonna be some expulsion out of the lungs.
Right as coronavirus started,
we would start to shroud every body with a plastic shroud
to contain in any sort of expulsion from their mouth,
whether aspiration or just simply breath.
You wouldn't normally think that that would be a problem
with a dead body, but as it turns out,
we would always see kind of foggy condensation
on that plastic shroud right around the face.
And that's it.
Thank you for all your great questions again.
I was happy I could inform and teach you guys
a little bit more about my life in the death world.
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