It’s a good thing these people aren’t in charge of taking care of the living.
AVERY PERSONAL EFFECT
In 2009 a New Mexico woman died in a car accident in Utah. Her body was taken to the Serenicare Funeral Home in the nearby town of Draper, and then was transferred to the DeVargas Funeral Home in Espanola Valley, New Mexico. Not long after the woman’s burial, her family received a package from one of the funeral homes containing her “personal effects.” They looked inside, and there, along with Grandma’s wallet, jewelry, and scarf, was her brain…in a plastic bag with her name and the word “brain” printed on it. The family sued both of the funeral homes. “No loved one’s brain,” their lawyer said, “should ever be part of those belongings.” The owner of the Utah funeral home said that it wasn’t uncommon for brains to be shipped separately from bodies after accidents, but he had no explanation for why one might be shipped to a family. The lawsuit has yet to be settled; the brain has since been buried with the woman’s body.
In summer 2009, a mass grave that contained hundreds of corpses—and appeared to be recently dug—was discovered on the outskirts of the historic Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. After an investigation, four cemetery workers were arrested for digging up more than 200 bodies and reselling the plots they were buried in. The cemetery was closed for four months while authorities combed through spotty records and old photographs of headstones—some dating back to the 1800s—to return the departed to their rightful resting places. “It’s going to be a day-by-day, grave-by-grave situation,” said one official. Among those buried at Burr Oak: music legends Willie Dixon and Dinah Washington; former heavyweight boxing champ Ezzard Charles; and Emmett Till, whose 1955 murder helped launch the Civil Rights movement.
Actual therapy animals: Sadie the “bipolar assistance parrot” and Richard the “agoraphobia monkey.”
“Sometimes when families asked for their ashes back, the plastic container was too small,” says a disgruntled former employee of Co-op Funeralcare in Dunfermline, Scotland. So instead of finding a larger container, workers allege that the funeral home’s manager, Bob Aitchison, directed them to mix the extra ashes with sand and spread them on a handicapped-access ramp to prevent people from slipping in wet weather. (Some of the remains, reportedly, had even been tracked into the office.) Other charges against Co-op Funeralcare: After the staff lost the ashes of one deceased person, Aitchison gave the grieving family the unclaimed remains of someone who’d been dead for 50 years. And coffins that had been sold as “new” had actually been used to transport bodies, then cleaned up with felt markers and air fresheners.
When Tito Vasquez’s body didn’t show up for his funeral in Bogotá, Colombia, friends and relatives went looking for him. Hours later, they finally located the corpse several miles away, in the back of a hearse…which was parked in front of a motel bar. The hearse driver apologized and explained that he had gotten “distracted” after stopping in for a beer on the way to the funeral.
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According to the U.K.’s Bereavement Register, the most popular song at English funerals in 2009 was “Goodbye My Lover” by James Blunt. Also making the top 10 were funeral standards such as Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” and the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody.” However, the Register also conducted a survey of the top ten “alternative” funeral songs in England. That list included Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell,” “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead” from The Wizard of Oz, Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” and Sid Vicious’s raucous cover of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” (which may in fact lead to even more funerals in the future—see page 413).
Although it’s illegal, there is a thriving black market in Italy for a cheese containing live maggots.