I’m not OP, but as a fellow Ask a Mortician fan (I’m even on the Patreon, Caitlyn is out here doing G-d’s work), HERE IS AN UPDATE:
—cremation and burial are not your only options. Some states now offer aquamation (basically your body is put in a special brine that breaks it down into nothing in a few hours) and terramation (aka human composting; your body is put into a dedicated pod with plant matter that accelerates the decay process and turns you into nutrient-rich soil in about six weeks). You also have the option to donate your body to a body farm or medical school. Check your state’s or country’s laws, and if you don’t see the option you want, contact the Order of the Good Death to find out who’s advocating in your area. If the answer is nobody, YOU can always be the person who starts the ball rolling.
—“bury your cremains in this fancy urn and you’ll become a tree!” is a scam. Cremains contain no organic matter. If you want to be a tree, go for terramation or natural burial.
—“turn your loved one’s cremains into a diamond!” is a scam. While you can technically turn cremains into a zircon (artificial diamond), the result is likely to be EXTREMELY ugly due to the amount of inclusions. If you want to wear a loved one’s cremains as a memento mori, you’re far better off speaking to an artisan jeweler about getting a modern version of one of the glass rings or pendants that were popular in the Victorian era. There are likeminded people out there who will absolutely do this for you in a beautiful and compassionate way, but the “it’s diamonds!” techbro startup thing is not the way to go.
—what is and is not respectful to the dead will vary based on culture, but the one constant should be consent of the deceased. What do THEY want to happen to their body? Have this conversation with your loved ones while they’re alive, and make sure the answers are written down. I know my sister wants a traditional Jewish burial—“just put me in the dirt and forget about it,” in her words—and she knows I want to be terramated. I know my dad wants to be buried next to my mom, although I need to check in with him if he wants his body buried or if he wants to be cremated first. Destigmatize this talk. It doesn’t have to be uncomfortable—making sure your loved ones know exactly what you want takes a burden off them in the future, and making sure YOU know what THEY want will both help you when the time comes and provide the comfort of knowing you’ve fulfilled their wishes.
The reason I’m such a staunch Caitlyn evangelist is because there is a nonzero chance one of her videos saved my life. My mom died sometime in the night between the first and second of January, 2021. Because travel for large amounts of people was off the table, my dad opted for two small funerals—one here with a funeral home that refused to handle her body without a showing (unfortunately this was part of Covid price gouging—there was literally nowhere else capable of taking her), and one with our proper family funeral home in our hometown. Because of Covid, this meant it took A FUCKING MONTH for my mother to be buried, and that shit is absolutely scarring. I’d recently watched Caitlyn’s “what does a full embalming look like” video, and her partner for that video said she likes to bring the family in to assist in helping with the deceased person’s hair, makeup, clothing, any part of the process they’re willing to do, because she feels it helps with the grieving process. I was ready to grasp at anything that would let me feel like my mother wasn’t stuck in an episode of American Horror Story, especially after the shitshow that was the funeral home here in Arizona. With this in mind I called the family funeral home and asked to do my mom’s makeup; while I personally shudder at the thought of a traditional American burial, it’s what she wanted. Nancy—our family’s mortician for the last 40 years—readily agreed.
And so I went in, put on some of my mom’s favorite old country singers, and did her makeup exactly the way she taught me when I was sixteen, with her own cosmetics instead of what the funeral home had on hand. Her hair was thin and fragile from her last illness and I couldn’t curl it, but I fixed it up as well as I could, and painted her nails.
And let me tell you something.
The other mortician lady was right.
It was a massive comfort to me when Nancy took one look at my mom and said “oh, when you said she did her makeup differently you were right. I never would have guessed to do this.” (I don’t know where my mom learned to put on blusher, but she did basically the exact opposite of every makeup tutorial I’ve ever seen, and her method of doing eyeshadow was extremely 1940s.) Every single person at the service kept saying she looked exactly like they remembered from so-and-so’s wedding, such-and-such’s graduation, this-and-that’s honorary party. It wasn’t a vague “oh she looks so good”—she looked LIKE HER to those who remembered her. People who knew I’d done her makeup said they could tell it had to be someone who’d known her well. I remembered her horror at seeing unfamiliar makeup on her own mother’s face, and it was a massive comfort to me to know she was turned out exactly as she would have liked. And my dad? My dad hadn’t even cried yet. But he cried when he saw her in the same makeup style she’d worn at their wedding. He was finally able to cry and connect to my mom, his wife and beloved, and begin to find closure, seeing the woman he knew instead of a tired, worn body that bore little resemblance to her. It mattered. To him, to me, to my mom’s friends. It mattered a lot.
I don’t know that I would have ended up suicidal if not for that hour alone with my mom and Charley Pride and a stack of Bare Minerals compacts. But her death hit me hard and the month that followed was a special circle of hell, and I think I might have. Every time I think of her death and her burial, I think of that video and I’m insanely grateful it exists. (Incidentally, Nancy agreed. She said she thought she might make it an option for other families, after seeing both my response and the response of others in our family circle.)
Caitlyn knows her stuff. Watch, learn your rights, teach others to be death-positive. Life is the only occupation with a 100% mortality rate, so we might as well do it the way we want.
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