deruvoo

Oh man, I have the perfect story for this question. Never thought I'd find a "good" reason to tell it.

This will require a bit of explanation before we get to the juicy weird part.

So, usually, if embalming, you can get lucky and only have to make one incision-- this goes on your upper right clavicle. However, depending on the quality of your arteries, an embalmer may have to make incisions in different areas of the body to inject arterial embalming fluid to make sure the spread of the fluid encompasses and preserves the entire body.

On one such case, an elderly woman had not received proper flow of fluid in the legs, so we had to make incisions on both of her thighs to reach her femoral artery.

So, we took care of all that. Left the incisions open for the time being, because we still needed to aspirate her. Now, aspiration in embalming involves taking a "trocar" (basically a long-ass spear, google it) and piercing the stomach, effectively vacuuming out the internal viscera.

When we were performing this part of the embalming, I could hear a strange sound, like a combination of a fart and a bagpipe's high pitch playing. (I'm great with descriptions.) Took myself and the overseeing embalmer a moment to figure out what it was, as she hadn't encountered this before either.

Turns out the incisions we left open were lightly being sucked in by the pressure of the trocar. Figured it out when one of us squeezed one of the incisions with one of our hands, and the other two incisions turned into different notes of musical death.

Not sure if I'm proud to say it, but it was a little humorous squeezing the different incisions to different tunes. It was the same sort of magic as someone running their finger along a glass to make music.

There was a very, very large woman who had passed away from a car crash. Very sweet family overall, no issues there. The bra they had brought us to put on her was rather Madonna-ish. When she was laying in the casket, it made her boobs look like twin pyramids. We sorta shrugged it off as "Well, this is what the family wanted."

Later on, during the visitation, the husband actually came and requested we remove it since it was just too weird. Which, was a little difficult. We had to reach into her arm's sleeve, cut the bra up with a dull scalpel (as our embalming facilities are not actively used or kept up, like they should be) and remove the bra piece by piece.

Was more on my "weird" factor just because it was difficult moving around with such a large woman, to remove the bra.

Other weird requests:

-A woman wanted her pet dog buried on top of her husband's grave after the dog had passed. We technically are not allowed to do that, but we did so after hours at dark because she's a well known, and very kind, member of the community.

-One young model's funeral was handled by her agent, who wanted her buried in her lingerie only. Complied with that as well.

Honestly, you can't do much to make it easier on us. Maybe remove their clothes and wipe any excrement that came out? Not sure if you're allowed to do that with bodies at the hospital.

We do talk to the bodies, can confirm.

I'm lucky in that a family has never become unbearable with me directly. We've had our share of alcoholics that act out, snobs that look down on our job while ironically needing our services, and people who are just straight up repulsed by what we do. Nothing ever happened with any of them that set me off, though.

The craziest instance of a family we've performed services for... that would've been when this man was found shot in his home. Police didn't catch the suspect until a couple of weeks after the funeral service, and it turns out said suspect was the man's wife, who plotted the murder with her boyfriend. The thought that I was sitting across from a murderer when handling those arrangements-- that was mindblowing.

It helps in the realm of accepting the reality of the death itself. Frequently, we see people who find a reason to avoid viewing the body, and they have chronic grief for years to come. Saw it happen with my mother when her parents passed away.

When you see the body there, dead, you can no longer make up crazy stories like "Nah, dad's alive in Bermuda." (And some people do these mental gymnastics, you'd be surprised.)