THE BUSINESS OF DYING
News Article, 2016
News Article, 2016
‘I’m giving her a natural, youthful look,’ says Nina, the twenty-five-year-old hair and makeup artist. Her client, eyes closed, appears serene as Nina applies the final touches of eye shadow. She brushes a soft blush across the woman’s cheeks and pairs it with a quiet pink lipstick to match.
‘It’s a privilege to look after someone who has died,’ Nina states as she applies foundation to the woman’s hands.
‘The idea is to make the person look as natural and relaxed as possible.’ The foundation makeup used on the deceased’s hands is intended to ‘bring life’ back into the skin.
Nina is charged with preparing the dead for showing. ‘It’s important to pay attention to the little things, that’s what makes the difference,’ she says as she pins the woman’s legs closer together in the coffin. Some of the other ‘little things’ Nina attends to include moisturising the hands, putting Vaseline over the eyelids to keep them closed, and trimming both the nails and nostril hairs. ‘The funeral directors do most of the work, I’m just here for the finishing touches.’ Nina also works part time doing makeup for fashion shoots and special events.
The man in charge of this particular funeral home is Victor, a fifty-three-year-old man with silver streaks in his hair. He wears a black pinstripe suit, rather eccentric for a funeral director, I’m told by the receptionist. Victor has been working in this industry since he was sixteen; his first experience with death, collecting an elderly man from the retirement home just a few blocks away.
His task as funeral director is to ensure the dead are prepared and honoured in accordance with the wishes of their loved ones. ‘We’ve had to cater to so many different beliefs; Christian funerals, Jewish funerals, we work with Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, atheists and all manner of other people with their own specific requests.’ He was even asked to hire a magician for one funeral.
While working with the family to craft the perfect funeral, Victor also takes care to prepare the body. Most of the time this means embalming; the process whereby the body is restored, and preserved for viewing.
Whilst preparations are being made for the flower arrangements, domed caps are inserted under the departed’s eyes, preventing them from collapsing. As the colour scheme and decorations are decided, the deceased’s mouth is being stitched shut. Food and drink are organised, and the arms and legs are massaged, relieving rigor mortis. The family chooses the font for the program, and the body’s blood is drained, replaced with embalming fluids. Music is selected. Disfiguration, dismemberment and trauma are treated with reconstructive surgery; fixed by thread, wax, plaster and glue. Cuts are concealed. While the speeches are written, the body’s throat and nose are packed with cotton. All other cavities are plugged and sealed. An outfit is chosen, and a plastic bodysuit is put in place, preventing bodily fluids from seeping onto the clothes.
The decorations, programs and speeches, Victor tells me, are there to honour the deceased’s life; the makeup and embalming preparations are about allowing the family to ‘recognise their loved one and remember them as they were.’
‘The embalming process seems clinical and insensitive,’ Victor continues, ‘but it’s an important process for the family.’
He and Nina have both had to prepare people they’ve known. Nina recalls her shock upon the first experience she had working on a family friend; ‘it was because of how little he resembled the person I knew. Even after all our efforts, I barely recognised him.’
Victor reflects a similar sentiment. ‘I’ve seen so many bodies that my perspective on them has changed. The body is just a body; when someone dies, their personality, spirit - what makes them who they are - goes somewhere else.’
He elaborates; ‘once a person has died, there’s no spirit -‐ no personality -‐ left to fill the body. The body I receive is just a shell of who that person was. The hardest part of the job is making the deceased look as though their personhood is still there.’
Victor doesn’t believe in a soul or spirit in the religious sense, for he himself is not religious, but has developed the utmost respect for this absent thing, as he has dedicated his life to trying simulate it. Even after so many years, catering for people from many religious backgrounds, each with their own theories and practices, he concedes that he is still no closer to understanding this; ‘their body is there, but who they are – it’s just gone.’
It is as though this ‘personhood,’ this invisible, intangible thing, takes up physical space. The body begins to collapse when this ‘personhood’ leaves, and it is Victor’s job to fill the space it has left behind. The bodies are stuffed and filled, preserved and reordered, all in a transitory attempt to reclaim what has been lost.
Herein lies the importance of Victor and Nina’s work; the two act as the intermediaries between the corpse and the family; between the dead and the living. ‘We do the best we can, to bring life back into the body long enough for the family to still feel a connection, and be able to say goodbye to someone they remember.’
Observing the work of the funeral home attendants, it becomes apparent just how much of the process of shaping a funeral is centred around helping the family. All the preparation of the departed is to allow the family and friends to properly grieve their lost loved one. It becomes clear that funerals are far more for the living than for the dead.
It may seem a macabre task, working with the dead, but for Victor and Nina, it is work in which they take great pride. As Victor says, ‘it’s definitely not work than everyone can handle. But it’s actually a really rewarding profession. You’re helping people through what is often the worst time of their lives.
Victor has been in the industry for thirty-‐seven years, Nina, just five. For them, death is a part of their everyday. ‘It’s astonishing how usual it feels now,’ remarks Nina, ‘as though working with dead people all day is entirely ordinary.’
A similar sentiment was reflected by Victor as he recounted the process of preparing a body. His tone, not callous, but professional, ‘you can’t get emotionally involved, you do the best you can and hope that the viewing experience is a positive one,’ he says. While for the average person, seeing death is rare and affecting experience, for Victor and Nina, it is simply business.
They don’t remain entirely unaffected however. Both Victor and Nina struggle when children are the deceased party. ‘90% of the time we’re working with older people, people who’ve had natural deaths,’ says Victor.
‘It’s still a bit of a shock when children are brought in,’ adds Nina. ‘I never expect to see them – they’re meant to be so far removed from death.’
Victor comments that for this reason, children’s funerals are the most difficult to curate; the families of lost children grieve the longest and the hardest of all. ‘It’s definitely the worst for staff with kids of a similar age. I remember it was almost unbearable when mine were young,’ he tells me.
To deal with the grief they encounter everyday, Victor and Nina agree that it is best to keep busy, and remark that it’s crucial to remember the importance of the work at hand. ‘When you remember how important it is, the work becomes a privilege. You can focus your energy into honouring their life,’ says Victor.
Indeed, the way Victor and Nina conduct themselves makes their work appear far more sacred a task than the popularly morbid depiction of their professions suggests. The time they spend with death is more of a way of venerating life, than of dwelling in melancholy. Their movement around the bodies emanates dignity and a deep deference to the work they are doing. ‘It’s a gift to work here. I think I value my life more because of it,’ Nina tells me.
It is Victor’s wish to be cremated.