Mortician Answers Cadaver Questions From Twitter

Yeah, I don't know if I'll talk about them all

but I got all sorts of fun blood draining devices.

And this one is for closing mouths.

Kinda cool.

Hi, I'm Victor M Sweeney

and I am a licensed funeral director and mortician.

And this is Mortician Support.

[upbeat music]

This is a question from St. Severin.

Question for morticians.

When someone dies, do you remove their poo

or are we all buried with an unpooed poo?

That is such a good question.

More often than not, your poo is up to you.

Sometimes you hear the myth

that everybody poos themselves before they die.

That's not always the case.

Sometimes it is.

For my purposes, when I get someone back to the funeral home

and I'm preparing them,

if they have pood, then I'll clean them up.

If it's the case that they start pooing

when pressure starts to build up in the abdomen

then I stop what I'm doing, I clean them up.

Typically what I'll do is I'll actually

flush out the bowels with a hose.

'Cause the last thing you want to have happen

is someone to start pooing and then to continue doing it

when you can't control it.

JadedNever1, if a person wearing contacts dies,

does the mortician take them out?

Shower thoughts.

Yes.

Historically I've always removed contact lenses

because one of the things that we need to do

of course is what we call set the features.

Setting the features would mean that we close the mouth

and we also need to close their eyes.

So we actually have a device that helps us do this.

These are called eye caps.

They're essentially spiky contact lenses

that fit over the eyes and will actually grip the eyelid

when we pull it down over those little burrs there.

I typically remove contact lenses

because those just get in the way

of me doing what I need to do to set their features

and provide a decent appearance for the family.

Question from Laney, will my cat eat me when I die?

Possibly, hopefully.

I think the short answer to that is yes.

I've heard of that happening from colleagues of mine.

And as we all know,

cats being inferior to dogs, they will do anything.

They are opportunists.

The question from vamp Florence.

How do morticians not want to chug the embalming fluid?

These look like they taste like Froot Loops.

Well, I really love the picture you have.

And I noticed you forgot the blue flavor.

Embalming fluid is really colorful,

but I can assure you, it is not tasty.

It smells awful.

As far as the coloring goes, it is strange, isn't it?

One of the reasons that a lot of these fluids are maybe red

or other colors is so that the embalmer knows what they are

without having to maybe read the label.

But you'll also notice that a couple of them are red.

When we push the blood out of the body

in arterial embalming, we're pushing out a red fluid.

So ideally we want to put a red fluid back in.

So we gain access to an artery.

Typically we'll make an incision maybe

in the neck or in the thigh.

And then we'll also gain access to a vein.

We open the artery.

We are gonna have an embalming machine

which acts as a pump

and we're gonna use this arterial tube, something like this.

So this goes down the artery

and then it's gonna pump fluid through.

Now your vein, we are gonna open with

either a large forceps or this device called a drain tube.

So this goes down the vein.

And then when we open it,

the blood will pour out the side of our device here.

And then we can control how quickly or how slowly

we want the blood to leave the body.

When we have a deceased loved one,

they're gonna look very, very pale

'cause the blood has stopped circulating.

So when we put in the red blood, the red fluid, rather

that's actually gonna pink them up in some ways

and make them look a little bit more alive.

This is a question from Clementine.

Okay, full disclosure, I'm fat.

And this is a legit question.

I'm not trying to be fatphobic

but how do extremely obese people

like I'm talking 400 plus pounds fit in a coffin?

Do they make a plus-sized coffin

or doesn't mortician like cut fat out of them

and sew them back up?

Can answer the second part of that question first.

No, we do not remove fat and sew someone back up.

Everybody is buried intact if we can at all help it.

So we actually have caskets that are

made by our manufacturer to be oversized.

Typically when someone passes away, if they're larger,

we'll measure them at their elbows

'cause those tend to be the parts

that stick out the furthest

and then determine what width of casket we will need

to give them a more comfortable appearance.

Cforchase, do morticians put chapstick on the bodies

or are they just sitting there,

casket open, lips cracked out?

That's actually a great concern of ours is drying out.

Not just the lips, but after you die of course

your body is not producing any oils.

So your skin can get quite dry.

We actually have a, like a heavy face cream that we use

on almost everybody that comes through

in the interim between when they're embalmed

and when we get them ready for their funeral

and put their makeup on if we need it.

We always have that heavy face cream on

to make sure that their lips don't dry out.

So as far as chapstick goes,

I've never put chapstick on a body.

But if someone really wanted me to

I guess I wouldn't say no.

Here's a question from CoCo.

Now I'm going on Google looking up the weirdest stuff.

What do dead bodies smell like?

Dead bodies smell awful.

Rotting anything smells awful.

We are hardwired to think that dead human bodies smell bad.

And it's a smell you never forget.

I myself, I went out to a nice restaurant

to have some aged steak and I couldn't do it.

I love this username.

This is a question from futurecorpse.

Aren't we all?

What do morticians do with our organs after an embalming?

What happens when they aren't donated?

When we do embalming, all your organs

just stay inside your body.

We can prepare them all internally.

After we finished the arterial embalming

we have what's called the cavity embalming.

Optimally with the cavity embalming,

you're trying to puncture the lungs,

the heart, the intestines, the stomach.

And then you're also gonna try to shoot for the kidneys too.

We actually use what's called a trocar

and I have one here.

It's a hollow point spear essentially.

And it hooks up to what we call an aspirator.

So it's a, it's a vacuum essentially.

Insert this in the abdomen

and then try to puncture all the hollow organs.

And then the vacuum will actually draw out

all those nasty fluids.

If you donate your organs,

typically organ donations are handled

by organ harvesting companies

and they will actually work with a hospital

or with me to transport a body where it needs to go.

And then they'll harvest the organs,

donate them where they need to

and then the body will be returned to me

after that whole process is done.

Question from Paul Matthews.

Do morticians normally just drain the blood down the sink?

The short answer is yes.

All of our bodily wastes are disposed

just like our normal bodily wastes, the sewer system

that goes right to the water treatment plant.

This is a question from soggyEmma.

Why are coffins so expensive, y'all?

Just bury me raw.

Well, soggyemma, that is definitely an option.

You can be buried in the ground without a casket.

A lot of funeral homes

put substantial markups on their casket.

And I think it's just a way to collect money

on the tail end of a service,

but just like a furniture store,

which would maybe mark up their kitchen tables

four times what they actually cost.

I would guess that most caskets are marked up

probably one and a half to two times

what the wholesale cost is.

This is a question from tinereign.

Do morticians put a bra on you?

If so, I would like my rotting corpse to not wear a bra

and would like my ghost to be wandering braless

with poking nips.

Well, tinereign, I don't know if there's much I can do

about poking nips

but we do put bras on if the family requests.

And the reality is I've probably put on more bras

than I have taken off in my life.

That answer your question?

[laughing]

This is a question from Leonard Se Montaque.

Does a mortician feel just as sad as a normal person

when someone close to them dies?

The short answer of that is yes.

That was one of the things actually

I, myself really worried about

when I got into this profession

'cause at a certain point, when you see a dead body

you almost always kind of go into work mode.

What can I do to help this family?

What can I do to prepare this body?

So I was very concerned when I started doing this

that maybe I would start to even think of my own loved ones

as something to help or something to fix

and not really take in grief like I used to.

For my own family, for loved ones,

my own grandpa passed away just a few months ago.

And I feel just as sad about that as I think I ever would.

It's just a matter of perspective

and maybe where you're at at the moment.

Question from T.

What foundation do funeral directors use

to make dead people look alive?

Well, that's a good question.

All the makeup we use is actually formulated

for dead people.

So it's made to go on cold skin

as opposed to warm skin like regular makeup.

And one of the things we try to do

is not cake people with makeup,

but just do kind of light layers.

So that way their actual skin tone

does shine through a little bit.

If you've ever gone to a funeral

and maybe you've seen someone in the casket

who is caked with makeup,

they don't really look like themselves.

So one of our goals is to tone that down a little bit

so they do.

Question from Lala.

Approximately how much does a mortician make?

The minimum and the maximum?

I really couldn't say what the minimum and maximum are.

The average I've read in the country

is about $65,000 a year.

And talking to my other friends and colleagues,

that seems to be about the average for my area as well.

opiadana, can you get half your body cremated

and the other half buried?

Do morticians do that?

Asking for a friend.

I have never done that.

And I've never had anybody ask.

I guess I could see it happening if you really wanted to.

You would have to have a disposition permit

that would have cremation and burial.

And I guess we probably have to sign a waiver

to cut someone in half.

But maybe the bigger question would be

what half are you gonna cremate and what half do you bury?

This is a question from That Doodle Bunny.

How do morticians handle their jobs

without becoming emotional wrecks?

That is good question.

Most morticians I know are pretty normal people.

There are times where it's emotional.

So you do feel it.

And there are maybe days you come home where

you just feel done and you don't want to work

or maybe do what you're doing anymore.

But I think the fact that you can actually help people

on my side of the desk, on this side of things,

there are things that you can do

that maybe nobody else can do.

You can provide a chance

for a mother to see her son one more time.

It's those kinds of things that keep you going

in those hard times.

This question is from notwaving.

How do you dress the deceased?

I have theories.

Well, I would love to hear what your theories are

but really it's fairly simple.

You're just gonna work their arms through

just like you dress a baby maybe.

Oftentimes, if we have someone maybe very large

that we can't move very well

or maybe someone who has outgrown their clothes

or maybe their clothes are too big,

we'll oftentime make cuts down the back

and simply drape it over the front

and tuck it under the back.

Maybe sew it in a couple places

so that way it sits right on the person

and doesn't look like an overlarge tent

or squeeze them into their clothes like a sausage.

This is a question from trapjason.

Why don't we bury people vertically instead of horizontally?

They are already dead so why does it matter?

We could save so much space.

That is a great question.

I think a lot of it has to do with practicality.

So if you were to bury someone vertically,

you'd have to dig pretty deep hole

and it would have to be pretty narrow.

You can imagine how tough it would be

for let's say six people to carry a casket to the grave side

and then turn it up on its end

and drop grandma down the hole.

You might need a, like a seatbelt of some kind.

Question from crowbar_jones.

What does a mortician do

if there are artificial nails on a corpse?

Keep them?

Take them off?

Asking for a friend.

I hope you don't mean keep them by keeping a collection.

But if you mean keeping them on,

more often than not I will.

Typically the artificial nails look nice, clean.

And of course your nails underneath are pretty rough.

If they have them on, I usually keep them.

Other things that people might be concerned

about removing, piercings.

They almost always stay.

If it's an ear piercing

and then they have their earrings in

maybe we'll take the earrings out,

clean them up a little bit.

Other body piercings, I always leave them in.

This is a question from Melodie Jackson.

Do morticians take makeup classes

when getting their certifications?

Yes, we do.

I have a four-year degree.

At my college, we took courses

on what they call restorative art.

So this would include things like makeup and coloring

but it would also include things

like putting people back together after accidents.

Sculpting an ear if someone has lost an ear.

LippBoi, do morticians also give haircuts?

Anyone know one that can do a nice fade?

Yeah, LippBoi, I do give haircuts every so often,

usually only to men.

And usually only if it's something minor.

If someone does need to get their hair done,

we'll actually usually call a hairdresser in.

It's fairly simple because really you're only working

with the front and the sides of the head.

This is a question from Veronica.

Say a body gets exhumed after two years,

what should be the state of the body to be expected to be?

That's one of the interesting things about my job

is that I never actually know what happens after burial.

If we had an exhumation,

you actually have to have a court order to open the vault

and open the casket.

I've heard of cases where they've opened the casket

and the body looks more or less unchanged.

And this was maybe 50 years after the fact.

This is a question from Jonathan Cowap.

Monty Python's Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

is the nation's number one funeral song.

What's the oddest funeral music you've ever heard?

I haven't heard too many strange funeral songs myself

but I do have this dream.

I have a friend

and I told him if he passes away before I do,

I'd really like to sing On Eagle's Wings.

But like the Swedish Chef from The Muppets.

It would sound like this.

[singing On Eagle's Wings]

[laughing]

And that's it.

That's all your questions.

I sure enjoyed answering them.

And I hope you learned something.