Death is not a moment but a process. Something fails in the body and the system shuts down as the news spreads – as air is cut off, as blood stops flowing. Decay, likewise, does not happen all at once. No two bodies decompose at exactly the same rate – factors both environmental and personal cause variations across the board: things like room temperature, clothing and body fat all affect the speed of decay. But the basic stages are the same: minutes after death, the cells, now starved of oxygen, begin to self-destruct; the enzymes within turn on the walls that bind them. Three or four hours after death, the drop in body temperature triggers rigor mortis to start its journey downwards, and proteins in the muscles, now without an energy source, lock into place. The eyelids begin to stiffen. Then the face and neck. Twelve hours later the entire body is rigid, spending twenty-four hours, sometimes forty-eight or more, frozen in whatever position it happens to be in. Then, the stiffness vanishes in the order it arrived: eyelids, face, neck. The body relaxes. The next stage – putrefaction – begins.
The embalmer’s job is not to halt this process indefinitely but to slow it down. It has been a death practice for millennia all over the planet, with many methods and motives, religious and otherwise. In Europe, bodies were embalmed for reasons of transport, medical science and – in the case of the eccentric eighteenth-century British quack dentist Martin van Butchell – to get around a clause in a marriage contract that said he was only allowed to remain in his wife’s property while she was above ground, though this is possibly a rumour of his own making. Either way, in 1775, he had her injected with preservatives and dye, dressed her in her wedding dress and, in his front room, laid her down in a glass-topped coffin with her new glass eyes staring out of it until his second wife, understandably, objected.
Its modern-day popularity in American funerals begins with the Civil War. Until this point in America, much like in Europe, embalming had been mostly used for the preservation of cadavers in medical schools. But as the war escalated and the death toll mounted, bodies of soldiers – both Confederate and Union – overwhelmed hospital burial grounds and were buried by their comrades with makeshift markers, or rolled into trenches near where they fell, theoretically by the victor but then, later, by whoever was nearest: friend, foe, local civilian. Richer families would send for the bodies via the quartermaster general, who would employ a team of men to locate the dead and transport them home; others would travel there to search for the body themselves. At best, they were transported on the railways in airtight metallic coffins or those designed to hold ice, but none of these delayed the onset of decay as much as anyone would have liked on those long trips.
In 1861, when a young colonel called Elmer Ellsworth – formerly employed as a law clerk in President Lincoln’s hometown office – was shot and killed as he seized a Confederate flag from the roof of a hotel in Virginia, every aspect of his death was covered by the press, including the unusually ‘lifelike’ condition of his corpse at the funeral. He had been embalmed by a physician named Thomas Holmes, who had offered his services free of charge. Holmes had spent the years before the war experimenting with a new arterial technique he had learned from a French inventor, Jean-Nicolas Gannal, whose book – detailing his method of preserving bodies for anatomical study – had been translated into English twenty years earlier. Soon after the news about Ellsworth’s body got around, other entrepreneurial embalmers set up shop beside battlefields. Holmes himself, who became known as the father of American embalming, claimed to have embalmed 4,000 men for $100 each. In his shopfront in Washington DC, he displayed the body of an unknown man, found on a battlefield, as further advertisement for his services.
When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, he too was transported across the country: from Washington DC to his hometown in Illinois, where he was placed in his tomb. It was a three-week trip, passing through seven states and thirteen cities. As he lay in state, his coffin lid open, thousands of people filed past to pay their respects. They could see the work the embalmer had done – this was a dead body, but not as they knew dead bodies to be. Despite the fact that the general mood towards embalmers during the war was one of suspicion and hostility – the US Army received complaints from families saying they had been cheated by embalmers, and at least two were officially charged with the crime of holding embalmed bodies hostage until families paid up – embalming became something aspirational, as well as deeply commercial.
One embalmer in Puerto Rico has since taken it to an extreme, posing bodies like statues at their own wakes: the dead fighter propped in the corner of a boxing ring to show he’s still going, the gangster still holding wads of hundreds despite the bullet that killed him. But mostly, the purpose of embalming is to make it look like nothing happened at all. An embalmer’s job is to make the dead appear alive but sleeping, to be the art restorer returning the painting to what it might have been – to blur the line between life and death. But if someone is dead, why make believe that they are otherwise?
In 1955 the English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer wrote in his essay ‘The Pornography of Death’ that in modern death ‘the ugly facts are relentlessly hidden; the art of embalmers is an art of complete denial.’ It’s been a subject of argument in death writing and embalming textbooks ever since. Later, in 1963, Jessica Mitford published a book called The American Way of Death, which is a very funny but also radical look at the funeral industry, and a pretty ruthless exercise in muckraking. She looked at every part of the industry – anything that could be sold to the consumer for a high price, anything under a baffling name, anything veiled by the illusion that it was a legal requirement and therefore mandatory. She posited that since embalming does not preserve the body indefinitely, and she could not get a straight answer on whether or not an unembalmed body did actually impact the health of the living as many embalmers claimed, embalming merely gave the funeral director something else to sell. The crux of her book was that the funeral industry was preying on the vulnerable.
She may have been opinionated (casually mention her to embalmers and the mood in the room still turns) but she was right about the high cost of death: even now people set up GoFundMe accounts to crowdfund the most basic funerals. If you want, you can sign up for monthly plans to prepay for your own funeral at the cost of a mid-range phone contract. You only need to walk through a Victorian cemetery in London to see how expensive burying someone can get, and how much people were – and still are – willing to pay. Death, of course, can be another way to flaunt your wealth: in Highgate Cemetery, where Nick Reynolds’s bronze death masks sit atop headstones, a newspaper magnate lies in a vast mausoleum that deliberately blocks the view from the promenade.
On the subject of embalming, Mitford was wary of funeral directors ‘donning the mantle of the psychiatrist when it suits their purposes’ in saying that it had a therapeutic effect on the grieving. Reading her book fifteen years ago, I liked her attitude and, having at that point had no personal experience of embalming, I assumed a similar one. It sounded logical to me.
Then, a lovely, retired embalmer called Ron, sitting beside his wife Jean, looked at me across a cafe table and said that he felt hurt when I had described the physical process of embalming as ‘violent’ in a magazine article. We had been talking for some hours about his life and career, after Dr John Troyer suggested I meet him; Ron Troyer is his father, which has a lot to do with why John is now director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. It was his father he spoke about at the dead philosopher’s wake, shortly before Poppy told us that the first dead body you see should not be someone you love. John grew up in a house where death was not hidden, and it’s very easy to fixate on something that was normal at home but taboo elsewhere – I should know. His parents were visiting from Wisconsin, in February, and were the only people in the crowded Bristol cafe with adequate coats for the light snow outside. Every English person shuffled in looking personally attacked by the weather. I don’t pretend to be above this reaction.
Ron is seventy-one, a tall guy with broad shoulders and an expanse of forehead that reminds me of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. Before we got onto the subject of embalming, he had been telling me about the changes in the industry that he had witnessed in the thirty-five years he worked in it. He talked about how the hospice movement in the 1970s – which began in London in the 1960s, with Cicely Saunders, who took it to America – began a shift in our approach to dying, from one of a frenzied medical battle to one of more comfortable acceptance; how when he first started as a funeral director, most deaths occurred in hospitals, with a few on the road or the railway track, but by the time he retired, he was mostly making house calls, calmly sitting with the dying at their deathbeds. He spoke about how the gradual decline in religion over the decades has changed the role of funeral directors, from one of a mere functionary – who dealt with the disposal of the body while the church took care of the soul and grief – to one that now encompasses some kind of bereavement counselling; and how at the University of Minnesota, which he attended himself and where he later taught, the percentage of women in funeral training has gone from almost nothing to 85 per cent of the class.
‘When I first started teaching in 1977, if there were women who were coming to the program to learn, they were either the daughter of the funeral home owner or they were married to the son of the funeral home owner,’ he says, still ignoring the menu the waiter keeps asking about, because there’s a lot to cover in a thirty-five-year career. ‘It wasn’t that the male funeral home owners wouldn’t have hired female funeral directors, but because of the crazy hours you worked, and because of how close you worked, there was a stigma in the industry from spouses about integrating these women. We had to fight that, that was tough. And there was the sense that women wouldn’t be strong enough physically, or couldn’t face it. It was just bull, right from the beginning. Now it’s very common to have female funeral directors. It’s changed, it’s revolutionised.’
‘Women brought a lot of compassion that just wasn’t there,’ adds Jean beside him, who, as a teacher, was not one of the wives who worked in the funeral home, except for two occasions on busy nights when she was roped in to mind the telephones. ‘Men are raised to be stoic, but women – it’s OK for you to be nice to people because you’re a girl.’ She rolls her eyes a bit. ‘It sounds silly now. But people accepted it more from them.’
Some things never change though: Ron’s joked about bribing gravediggers with bourbon to coax them out to work in the frozen Wisconsin winters, and how funeral directors themselves will always be buried in the most expensive caskets available, which they get at wholesale price and rarely manage to sell. ‘Finally they get rid of the bronze casket!’ he laughed. A lot of Ron’s stories are funny but he’s also made me cry, talking about working through the AIDS crisis in a small town, watching as families blocked lovers and friends from saying goodbye to the dead. While funeral homes across the country were refusing to take the bodies at all, Ron would stay after hours and sneak in the people who had loved them. ‘They were perilous times,’ he said, quietly. ‘Doing something that might cause community backlash, or take business away from us. We had to be so careful.’
Ron is clearly not a man who values money above all else. He bribed the clergy at Thanksgiving with free turkeys like every funeral director did, but at that time it was the clergy who recommended you to the families of the dead. ‘If the clergymen didn’t like you, you were outta luck, kid. You were not going to get the funeral.’ This is a man who helped bereaved parents dress their dead children, who remembers now, in the cafe, the small, missable detail that when parents of autopsied babies saw the incision on the tiny body, they always referred to it as a ‘scar’ – implying healing; it was heartbreak in syntax. Outside of the funeral home, he would help support groups for young widows and for parents of murdered children; he was a person who could talk about the darkness when few would. And when a fifteen-year-old girl was killed in a car accident, he went to the school’s principal and pleaded with him to allow her class to attend the funeral, explaining the importance of them being there, of seeing, how it was all a part of each student’s own grieving process to be present. The family only found out he had done this later; I read it in a thank-you letter he showed me, written by the girl’s mother.
Ron didn’t see embalming as an act of violence, as I had described it in the magazine article, the one he keeps bringing up to cheekily have a go at me. ‘I always thought it was an act of compassion,’ he says now. ‘I embalmed both of my parents.’
‘Was that … therapeutic?’ I ask, borrowing a word Mitford had argued about.
‘Well, let’s see…’ he says, pulling an exaggerated thinking face. He smiles. I already know what’s coming. ‘It wasn’t violent.’
He said he could not personally show me what the process entailed, as he was long finished in the business, but he urged me to try and find someone who would. I was missing something, he told me, if I was only reading about it.
If anyone was going to convince me that embalming was more than a commercial thing, it would be Ron. But I can’t help feeling that hiding the dead body with artifice implicitly agrees with the idea that some truths are too awful to face – and while there are awful truths, I’m not sure that death is one of them. Then Ron told a story about the ‘unviewable’ body of a Vietnam soldier, one of nine he received that year when he was just twenty-two years old himself. At the father’s insistence, he had pried off the bolted-down metal lid of the transport coffin so that the father could see the dog tags and the bag of burned bones and tissue that remained of his son. ‘Sometimes what we see isn’t what they see,’ said Ron. ‘What I learned in the work I did was that people are much stronger and much more capable of doing things than we give them credit for.’ Ron was not simply telling me that dead bodies should never be seen as they are.
I wondered if there was another thing at play here, that maybe the role of the modern embalmer had been overlooked, regarded as merely mercenary because their work was difficult to see, apart from on a bill. Perhaps there really is a psychological reason for it, I thought, if in embalming both of his parents, Ron was both the family member paying for the funeral and the practitioner of the service.
Dr Philip Gore pokes his head out of the door of his office and says he’ll be with me in a minute. It’s a little before 9 a.m. in Margate, a town on the coast of south-east England with a flat, sandy beach and an iconic amusement park called Dreamland, though it’s a little early for sunburned tourists to be crowding the pavements clutching oversized teddy bears and ice cream. It’s here that Dr Gore’s family have, since 1831, been involved in the funeral industry – first in funereal apparel, then in the embalming and burying of the local dead. He is tall and thin, owlish in his glasses, and I’m early; he won’t come out into the quiet of the reception area until his silk vest is buttoned all the way – until his costume, as if he were an actor in the wings, is perfect. It’s this theatrical aspect to funerals – the horses, the plumes, the ceremony – that drew him into the family business in the beginning. He says he liked the ‘pomp and pageantry’ of it all, the presentation of a carefully curated image. He too embalmed his own father.
We settle in his office. As vice president of the British Institute of Embalmers, Dr Gore is also a teacher of embalming’s history and, as his PhD in the subject will attest, he is someone who has spent decades thinking about why embalming exists in its current form and what social factors have led to its invisibility. It wasn’t always this way: in the 1950s and 1960s – in his father’s time – he says that people were more in tune with the reality of nature’s course, partly because of the proximity of war, but also because the dead were not taken away by the funeral home. The dead stayed in the community, they stayed in their houses – the coffin placed in the sitting room, ready to receive their final guests. Gore Sr and his team would travel around instead of staying static in their office. ‘When things got to the point when it was a bit … challenging, they would screw the coffin lid down,’ says Dr Gore. ‘Because that was the only option you had. We’re in the twenty-first century now. There’s a lot you can do to mitigate that.’ Forty years ago, in the early days of his own career, he remembers moments when ‘the brute reality’ of decay made itself known in the form of a puddle at the crematorium, or in the back of a hearse. ‘It may have been real, but it wasn’t particularly comfortable.’ He pulls a face like a judgemental aunt experiencing a sub-par baked good.
Back then, funerals happened within four or five working days, so embalming was less common. Now, somewhere between 50 per cent and 55 per cent of bodies in the UK are embalmed in a typical year (experts estimate it to be similar in America, though the industry doesn’t publish statistics) because funerals take longer to arrange, partly due to the paperwork involved in certifying a death, and also because of the difficulty in scheduling. In the quiet area of Thanet, the district that surrounds Margate, there are 110,000 people, sixteen funeral homes (six of which belong to the Gore family) and only one crematorium – organising a funeral in less than three weeks is rare. ‘It’s very difficult to put the schedules together, unless you want a funeral at half past nine in the morning,’ he says. ‘Who wants to travel from the back of nowhere to get here for half past nine? And refrigeration is a wonderful technique, but I don’t know what the contents of your own fridge would be like after three weeks away. You may not want to open the door.’ He grins softly and clasps his hands under his chin. I picture Adam in the mortuary, how he had been dead for over two weeks but only smelled of death when we moved him.
Dr Gore speaks with a deliberate delicacy, the product of forty years of practised sensitivity, of figuring out how much the person sitting on the other side of his desk wants to know. The funeral industry is full of euphemistic speech – another thing Jessica Mitford loathed – but he uses none of it on me, and I thank him for it. ‘Well, nobody in your family has died today for you to come to see me,’ he says, smiling. ‘So we’re in a different sort of environment.’ He tells me that if I were one of the bereaved, he would describe the process of embalming as something akin to a blood transfusion. People tend not to ask much more after that.
Now, what he calls ‘the brute reality’ of death is so hidden from us that it’s not something we would even worry about confronting at a funeral. In England and Australia, coffins at funerals are usually closed – unlike in America where mourners can pass by the open lid and peer in at the dead, as they did with Abraham Lincoln. Death here is more of a quiet, family moment than a public event. Fewer people will see the body, if any choose to at all. If they do, it will be laid out in the Chapel of Rest, those small rooms in the funeral home (religious only if you want them to be) where visitations take place. It’s there they might see the work of the embalmer, not that many would notice it even if they themselves agreed to the ‘hygienic treatment’, as it tends to be called in the funeral arrangements. The final result is so ordinary, so normal-seeming, that there would be no clue as to the astonishing technical abilities that go into creating that image of normality – or so Dr Gore tells me. I, of course, have no idea what we’re actually talking about. I haven’t seen an embalmed body to compare to what it looked like in its untouched state. I’ve seen swollen, embalmed medical cadavers in real life, but that’s a different kind of thing altogether – they are preserved for utility, not with the aim of remaining faithful to how they looked to family and friends. I’ve seen photographs of notable embalmed dead: Lenin’s incorruptible body in its glass box – dead for nearly a century, yet largely unchanged thanks to ongoing preservation work. A sleeping Aretha Franklin, her glittering heels raised on a white pillow at the end of her shining gold casket. Rosalia Lombardo, who died of the Spanish Flu one week shy of her second birthday, and was the last body to be shelved away with the monks in the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, Sicily. She lies in a tiny, glass-topped coffin and has only very recently started to discolour. But what is anyone gaining from seeing a dead body made to look alive?
Dr Gore believes that with the same dwindling religious element in funerals that Ron Troyer observed, the body of the dead has become more significant in the grieving process, and therefore, so has the embalmer. ‘In mainstream religious life you’ve got a two-part individual: you’ve got the body and you’ve got the soul. If you don’t believe in the soul, all you’ve got left is the physical individual,’ he says. ‘And until the funeral, there is still this ongoing sense that they have died but they’re still there. There is some sort of relationship continuing for those who need to do that, in the Chapels of Rest.’
Dead bodies are not dangerous, or unhygienic, to be around – despite what many embalmers may have claimed to Jessica Mitford – and Dr Gore isn’t suggesting that they are now. There is no legal requirement for a body to be embalmed, unless it’s being repatriated overseas and the country receiving the body insists on it. But Dr Gore believes the final image is important. ‘If you haven’t seen your mother for a long time because you live abroad – which is one of the reasons people take so long to get together – to come and have a few moments with her can be really helpful.’
‘And your last picture of her is not—’
‘—the desperate image. It is disguising reality, but the irony is, if you said to people, “We’re not doing any of that, this is the way she really looks,” would that help people? I’m not sure the answer would be yes.’
I think about it for a moment and try to imagine what I would want to see, or what I would expect to see. When I saw the dead bodies at Poppy’s mortuary they looked dead, and I didn’t find the sight of them, on their own, traumatic – but then again, I didn’t know those people in life. I wonder if the process of acceptance in watching someone die over time, becoming gaunt and different, would be undone by seeing them look alive, however briefly, in their coffin. ‘I find honesty to be a reassuring thing,’ I say. ‘Am I alone in this?’
‘Completely not. But the issue is that what people assume to be honesty and what is, occasionally, the shocking reality, is quite different,’ he says, very patiently. ‘There’s the irony that we’ve produced this unknown world. Every dead actor in a film is a live actor pretending to be dead. That is not the way individuals routinely look once they’ve died. But the public don’t know that. Or they’ve failed to realise that. The embalming process has been in this country for about 150 years; it’s a bit late in the day to say, “Let’s not do that, we need to get back to our real roots.”’
Dr Gore says he’ll put me in touch with an embalmer who will show me the process – he tends not to deal directly with the dead so much any more; as captain of this particular ship, his attention is required more in the steering. I thank him and promise that I won’t turn it into some horror story, which is something almost everyone I’ve approached for this book has feared, and which is why I got up before dawn to drive three hours to this seaside town to go through what I suspect is some kind of vetting system. It’s taken me five months to speak to an embalmer, but it’s understandable: journalists and editors have been sensationalising those who work with the dead for as long as anyone can remember. Even I have, over the years, had to talk editors down from clichéd embellishments of ‘hushed tones’ and tall, sombre giants who greet you at the creaking door like Lurch, the Addams Family butler. But the British Institute of Embalmers is keen to get the reality of the process not exactly in the public eye, but available to anyone who is interested – their expectations of journalists may be decidedly low, but they want to educate. I’m grateful and apologetic.
‘Let’s face it,’ he says, walking me to the front door. ‘We’re all producing a manufactured world of some kind. You’re producing a word picture. Ours involves the dramaturgy of the funeral.’
A month later, I’m waiting out the back of another south London funeral home, by the open roller-door of a garage filled with gleaming black hearses and limousines. A man in a dark suit sits on a fold-out chair, scrolling through his phone, a radio playing at his feet. A young woman with neatly pinned hair, a business skirt and thick beige tights, despite the heatwave, smokes a cigarette over a railing and stares at nothing. Kevin Sinclair emerges smiling from between the bins and smuggles me in through the back door rather than announcing my existence to the front desk. He’s in his early fifties, wearing a blue-and-red-check shirt tucked into blue jeans, with glasses and gelled hair. He’s been a qualified embalmer for nearly thirty years and a teacher with his own embalming school for half of that, though he seems more like someone you’d split a bag of scampi fries with in the local pub than someone who would show you how to embalm a body.
He leaves me for a moment by the wooden arched door to the Chapel of Rest, next to the staff toilets – one bearing the sign ‘DON’T SPRINKLE WHEN YOU TINKLE’ and a cartoon bear, winking. A large pine coffin is wheeled past me, disappearing through double doors to be slid back into the refrigerator, where it will stay until the hearse collects it. I can hear two of the funeral home employees arguing with each other in the driveway, something about a family unable to pay for a funeral, something about them being stuck in a hell of probate.
‘All he has to do is prove that the family can pay for it.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’
This is the business end, the unquiet voices you only hear out the back, during a break. Inside the office, in the part where the families go, you don’t even hear the sound of your own feet on the carpet.
Kevin waves me into the prep room and introduces me to his former student, Sophie, who will be working while we watch. Most of his students these days are women. She’s shy and a bit nervous to have me there. She smiles and waves briefly, small colourful tattoos flashing between the sleeve of her purple scrubs and the cuff of her nitrile gloves, before turning back to the body laid out between us: the pale, long remains of a man who died of lung cancer three weeks ago. Neat, dark pubic hair fans out across his belly that has, over the last few days, been slowly turning green.
Sophie has spent the morning going through the same process as we did at Poppy’s, removing all tubes and hospital ID bracelets. She’s also washed and blow-dried his hair, which now looks fluffy and soft. But there is more to do here before the man is dressed. She has already placed some eye caps under his eyelids, the small convex plastic shields that give the illusion that they have not sunk. When Mo at Kenyon was explaining why visual identification of bodies is unreliable, this is the kind of thing he meant: we instinctively look at the eyes of our person, and the eyes of the dead are not as we remember them. These are not the oysters I saw in Adam’s face when I dressed him for his coffin – these look like living, sleeping eyes. These are the eyes that Nick the death mask sculptor hopes to find when he arrives to cast a face. If they’re not here – whether by biology or eye cap – he has to create them.
Now Sophie is tying his jaw together so his mouth doesn’t hang slack. It’s a fiddly, invasive procedure to do – one that requires the embalmer to be face to face with their dead person – and even more fiddly to describe. She opens the man’s mouth as wide as it will go, his head tipped backwards, and then inserts a large curved needle with a line of suture thread under his tongue, behind his bottom teeth, pushing it through the flesh until it exits below his chin. She then turns the needle around and goes back up through the same hole, but directs the needle to emerge behind his bottom lip so the thread is looped around the U-shaped bone at the front of the jaw. She pulls the string taut so the slack bottom jaw will be controlled by whatever the thread is anchored to, which, in a moment, will be the upper jaw. She inserts the needle under the man’s top lip, into the left nostril. She then passes it through the septum, into the right nostril, and finally it emerges under the top lip again. She pulls the thread tight, the jaw closes, the ends of the strings are tied and tucked behind the man’s lips. From the outside – unless you knew what you were looking for, directly under his chin – it looks like nothing has happened at all.
It’s not a scary or gross thing to witness, even though the idea of having my mouth sewn shut, of being made mute, is one of pure terror; if he were alive during this it would be torture, there would be muffled screaming. While peering over Sophie’s shoulder, I couldn’t help but make strange jaw movements as I watched, as if proving to myself that I was not the one on the table. But even though I know this man is dead, and he no longer has a use for his mouth or his voice, I find it both touching and sad that he is lying there, limp and unresisting. You could do anything to a dead body and all they are doing here is trying to make him look like himself.
Kevin and I are standing on the other side of the room now, out of Sophie’s way, leaning against a steel bench piled with papers and plastic tubs of more papers. There are no windows: in this bright white box you are cut off from the external world, vacuum-sealed in your own one. In winter, their busy time, embalmers can be expected to arrive at 4 a.m. and stay until 10 p.m. While their hands are occupied, the only connection to the outside is a radio; they judge the weather from the clothes of the delivery men.
I can’t see it yet but I can smell it: embalming fluid, that alien yet familiar smell, the combination of high-school biology labs and a sharp tang of nail varnish that will get stronger as the procedure progresses. When I get home later, I’ll notice my jeans stink of it with a strength that invades the whole room. Kevin explains that the formaldehyde gas that evaporates from the fluid is heavier than air (I nod, having learned this from Terry at the Mayo Clinic, as he showed off the floor-level ventilation system in the anatomy lab), but old pre-health and safety embalming rooms placed the air filters high on the walls, assuming all fumes travelled upward, meaning they would only start to filter out long after the gas had filled the room from the ground up and the embalmer’s head was in the cloud. Kevin’s voice is deep and croaky, a vibration you could hear through walls; this, he says, is the product of decades of chemicals at work on his vocal cords as he worked on what he estimates is over 40,000 bodies. ‘I’m actually eighty-four. I’m just very well preserved,’ he grins.
‘There’s three reasons why we embalm,’ he says, getting back to the body in front of us, holding up his fingers in teaching mode. ‘Sanitation, presentation, preservation. What Sophie’s doing at the moment is, she’s just setting the features. We want a good facial presentation of what we think the person should look like. Obviously not knowing them, we have to look at the clues in regards to how they hold themselves.’ I ask if they ever have photographs to work from. ‘Sometimes,’ he says. ‘Normally it’s just guesswork and looking at the deceased. We have photos for things like reconstructions, so we can get measurements and skin tone.’ Later he will tell me about piecing a skull together like a jigsaw, wiring the pieces of bone one by one, for a man who played chicken in front of a train, and in front of his two young sons. He says he tries not to judge people on their deaths, but sometimes it can be difficult.
The man is still rigid – the cool of the refrigerator has slowed down decomposition, temporarily extending the state of rigor mortis that would come and go more quickly in the sun. Sophie lifts his long legs into the air one at a time and bends them with force at the knee. It sounds like an old leather wallet being twisted in white-knuckled fists. ‘You only have to do it once and then the rigor mortis doesn’t return,’ explains Kevin. The proteins, once snapped, do not knit themselves back together.
When starting work on a body, the embalmer assesses the situation: how long the person has been dead, how long until their funeral, and whether or not there was any drug intervention – legal or otherwise – that might alter the efficacy of the chemicals in the embalming fluid. They consider the weather both where they are and where the person is going: is it hot and humid? Is it February or July? Are they a holy man who will be taken on a tour of various temples? They do their mental calculations and settle on a concentration of liquid: one that will halt the process of decay so that the person can be transported across the world, or across town, and arrive in the same condition. Too weak and you risk putrefaction, too strong and you risk dehydration – the art is in the balance. The stronger the fluid, the longer the body remains suspended in time, but none of this is forever.
The fluid, depending on what it is, might last longer than the body itself. Those embalmed men returned from the Civil War continue to leach arsenic – a long-ago-outlawed ingredient – into the soil around them, which goes on to contaminate the groundwater. These days in the US, more than 3 million litres of embalming fluid, complete with carcinogenic formaldehyde, are buried every year. In 2015, flooding in cemeteries in Northern Ireland brought the chemicals to the surface, prompting environmental campaigners to call graveyards ‘contaminated spaces’. My gut reaction to view embalming with suspicion is not purely about hiding the true face of death, but wondering whether any of this is worth it.
The Western funeral industry does not have the monopoly on injecting bodies with chemicals to preserve them. Caitlin Doughty, in her book From Here to Eternity, wrote about death practices around the world, and there was one place in particular where embalming played a large role. In Tana Toraja, Indonesia, families periodically take the dead out of their tombs to wash and dress them, offer them presents, light their cigarettes. In the period between death and the funeral, a body can be kept at home – sometimes for years. As a trained embalmer and funeral director herself, Doughty was interested in both the emotional element and the practical. She found that these bodies were, in the past, mummified by a technique similar to one taxidermists used to treat animal hide in order to make the skin strong and stiff: oils, tea leaves and tree bark. Now they are mostly embalmed with the same chemicals I can smell in the prep room here in south London. But given that those bodies in Indonesia have a reason to be preserved – that they will be met again by their family, propped up and danced around during a festival – Doughty, echoing Mitford, asked the excellent question: what is the point of preserving a body as intensely as we do here?
This body, lying in front of me, is not being preserved to last centuries in a vast pyramid or to be hauled out of his coffin twenty years from now for a party. He just needs to get through the funeral, which is taking place on the other side of the world. Sophie has selected a fluid on the stronger side to make it happen.
Next she makes two small incisions at the base of the neck to locate the common carotid artery on the right and left: these are the vessels you feel with your fingers when measuring a pulse, and again my hand moves unthinkingly to my neck to feel them. She lifts these blood vessels out of the neck – they look a bit like udon noodles – and slides a thin steel tool underneath to hold them slightly proud of the skin surface, the arteries stretched tight like a rubber band. She ties a thread around each of them so that the fluid can only move in one direction, and inserts clear tubes downwards into the vessels – the head, elevated on a neck rest, will be embalmed separately by reversing the tubing. Using the arterial system as a delivery mechanism, the candy-pink-coloured fluid flushes through the body to replace the blood. The veins, aided by the pressure of the incoming liquid, push the blood towards the unbeating heart, where it pools in its chambers.
‘No two deceased will embalm the same,’ says Kevin, as the level in the tank slowly lowers. ‘Everyone’s an individual. Mother Nature’s laid out the arterial system slightly differently in everyone. You could have twins and they would embalm totally differently because of the randomness of nature – the general layout of the arterial system could be different, the heart valves could be open or shut at the time of death.’ He speaks with the confident certainty of someone who has done this job over 40,000 times. Sometimes the embalming fluid goes through the body in the first attempt, sometimes it doesn’t – time makes blood clot and paths close. The same paperwork that delays Dr Gore’s funerals means that most embalmings take place weeks after death – again, usually three – unlike in Ireland, where the dead might still be warm, or in America, where Kevin says they consider most of the bodies he works on in England ‘unembalmable’. But there are six points of injection around the body – the neck, the upper thigh and the armpit – and a dead end in one direction doesn’t mean the journey is over.
While the embalming machine whirs, Sophie massages lanolin lotion into the man’s skin – it helps with the dehydration, and the manipulation encourages the embalming fluid to travel through the blood vessels and settle in the muscles. Rubbing his hand, the white of his palm blooms pink. She watches for changes in the skin’s colour, or for places where it doesn’t, which would indicate a blockage. She massages more lotion into his face and arms, constantly taking a look at the whole picture, like a painter before an easel.
It takes about forty minutes for the fluid to flood through the pipes of his body. Watching it is like a trick of the eye: it happens so imperceptibly that I cannot see it if I don’t look away periodically so I can see it afresh. In slow stop-motion, I watch a dead man come back to life, age in reverse: his skin becomes plump, the pink in his veins gives the illusion of warmth, his face is no longer shrunken skin stretched over bony features. ‘Shit, he’s so young,’ I say in shock, then apologise for swearing; maybe it’s because I’m new here, but it feels bad to swear around the dead, like I’m swearing in church. No one seems to mind. Kevin reaches over boxes of supplies behind us to grab the death certificate off the top of a stack of papers. What I thought was a frail man in his seventies with oddly dark hair is actually a man in his forties. Cancer had ravaged him, and dehydration had sucked any remaining youth out of his face.
He looks not unlike my boyfriend, Clint, and this situation now feels decidedly stranger. I remind myself that this is not the dead body of someone I love. Months later I take a chance and see if the name I heard in the prep room would bring up an obituary on the internet. There, beside it, is a photo uploaded by someone who did love him. He’s tall and fit, smiling. I wondered when his family had last seen him, if they had watched him shrink in life. I cannot imagine knowing the man in the photo and seeing him as he was in the mortuary, when I first met him. He was a different person – a body, destroyed from the inside out. He looks better embalmed, this is undeniable. But I’m still not sure I buy the psychological purpose of injecting chemicals into a dead body for cosmetic purposes: surely seeing the evidence of what he endured at the end of his life is not only part of his story, but part of your process of understanding and grieving?
Out of my head and back in the prep room, Sophie makes a small incision in the abdomen, before picking up a twenty-inch metal rod called a trochar – it has a pointy sharp end, with multiple holes near the tip and transparent tubing that runs from the handle to a machine behind her. She inserts it and guides it blindly, by muscle memory, into the right atrium of his heart. A sucking noise fills the room as a plastic jug in the machine collects a mixture of blood and embalming fluid. ‘The more blood we can remove, the better the embalming,’ explains Kevin – blood contains bacteria, and bacteria equals decay. The buzzing of the blood aspirator gets louder and Kevin has to shout over it. ‘ALTHOUGH YOU’RE NOT GOING TO GET AS MUCH BLOOD AS YOU THINK! BECAUSE HE’S BEEN DEAD SO LONG – BLOOD STARTS TO SEPARATE INTO ITS COMPONENT PARTS!’ Sophie pulls the trochar out of the heart and repositions it to pierce the trachea, tipping the man’s head backwards to straighten out his windpipe. It releases a sound like a gasp – but this, I’m assured, is from the machine, not the man. She packs the windpipe with a kind of cotton wool, poking it through his nostrils with tweezers, creating a vacuum so nothing will leak. As I watch, my breath catches in my throat imagining the dryness of that cotton. Kevin tells me it’s the same stuff as the inside of babies’ nappies.
I’m still marvelling at the pink in his fingertips, how soft his once-shrivelled hands look, when Sophie takes the trochar and turns her attention to the abdominal cavity: puncturing internal organs so there won’t be a build-up of gas inside them, and sucking out more fluid. This is the bit that looks – you cannot deny it – violent; it looks like stabbing, though Kevin would, in describing it to families, liken it to liposuction. They don’t do this in anatomy school embalming – it destroys the organs the students are there to study. She pours the blood down the sink, clots sticking to the bottom of the plastic measuring jug. I notice that there’s four litres of it (is it less than I expected? I have no idea) and also that it hasn’t made me feel remotely queasy. I’m absolutely fine. I figure it’s one of those tricks of the brain where fresh blood from a shallow cut on a live person would make me feel worse than a jug of clotted blood from a dead one in a sterile room. This is blood, obviously, but not as I know it.
Finally, Sophie injects green cavity fluid into the abdomen. It’s a more highly concentrated version of the chemicals she’s been using so far, and it will firm up the man’s belly, making it as solid as the bench that Kevin raps his knuckles on to demonstrate. ‘The family will hold his hands, touch his face,’ he says. ‘Those parts will be softer.’ Sophie sutures the incision with medical superglue and looks up shyly, finished. She will do this whole process another six times today.
Over the next twenty-four hours this man will lie in the refrigerator and the colour will even out over his body. He will no longer look like he’s just stepped out of an overly hot shower. The tissues will set and plasticise. He will appear alive, only sleeping. And, despite what he’s just been through, he’ll look more like himself than he did when I arrived.
The ubiquitous box of Kleenex sits on the table between us in the family room as Kevin explains how the technology has changed for embalmers over the decades he’s been doing this: ventilation of prep rooms is one of them, but there’s also the safety of the fluids used, and the hardware. Since it’s a process that’s almost surgical, as medical implements improve, so too do embalming ones. And more recently, on the cosmetics side, as contestants on TV shows get airbrushed with silicone-based high-definition make-up, so too do the bodies: what stops singers being washed out under bright lights brings skin colour back to the dead. But really, when you strip it back to the essentials, an embalmer can work anywhere. They can embalm in a hut in the jungle with no electricity, using a mobile kit with hand pumps while the rest of the disaster response team drags victims to the shore – in the warehouse at Kenyon, Mo had shown me their kit. They can embalm in the wake of a tsunami, in a hotel room, in a war zone, using the same tables I saw stacked high on those shelves. They can do everything I just witnessed in this funeral home in Croydon in the midst of the most catastrophic events on earth. It’s not a huge production. It’s just them and a corpse.
In a mesh tent on a faraway island Kevin has embalmed the drowned passengers of a plane that crashed into the sea, people who would have survived if they had not inflated their life jackets inside the plane and become trapped within it, glued to the ceiling as the ocean rushed in. He’s peeled the shirt off a man who knew a flight was going down but had the foresight and the steady hand to write a letter to his wife on the fabric, knowing that a piece of paper would disintegrate or be lost, but a shirt had a chance of being recovered with him. He’s looked after the bodies of British soldiers in Afghanistan, realigning broken bones and charred pieces, reconstructing full limbs inside a uniform to send them back to their mothers.
‘It’s the last thing you’re able to do for them,’ says Kevin. ‘Give them some dignity. It’s a privilege to do things like that. What we do, to the outside world, looks very aggressive. But part of the grieving process is recognition. We want the deceased to be looking their best for the family, so they can move on. They’ve had the disbelief, and the anger, and the tears. It’s helping them in their journey.’
I ask him the same thing I asked Dr Gore, if it might be harmful for someone to see the dead body looking dead. He says sometimes it can be a shock that doesn’t help. People don’t want to think about the car crash, or the suicide, or the cancer; they want to think about the life before that – the football match, the afternoon tea. Kevin says his job is to trigger memories so that the focus is on loss, rather than the manner of death.
‘What we want to do is impact their senses, so as well as how they look is how they smell: aftershaves, perfumes,’ he says. ‘Maybe someone wears a specific scent, and even before you see them you know they’re in the vicinity because you can smell them. It’s all triggering memories.’ It’s true that scents can make you time-travel – I have walked past men in the street who smell of turpentine, and suddenly I am at my father’s feet, thirty years ago, watching him paint with cheap oils that he later complained never dried.
Memories also hide in the folds of clothes. Kevin has embalmed and dressed a Father Christmas. He has gently eased the body of a very elderly lady back into the dress she was married in: sewn by her own hand from the silk of abandoned German parachutes, saved up for when her man came back from the war.
In America, cosmetics are a major operation in the embalming process – I saw an advert in the back of one of the magazines at Kenyon for a paint colour palette that ‘visually elevates sunken eyes’ and thought briefly about buying it, before I remembered what I was looking at – but traditionally it is less so in the UK. If someone wants it done, Kevin asks them to bring in the dead person’s make-up, and then he plays detective in the prep room. ‘We won’t actually ask any questions, but we’ll open it up and look at it. There’ll be four or five lipsticks and one that’s just a nub. That’s your favourite one. There’ll be an eyebrow pencil about that big –’ he pinches his fingers together and squints like he’s crushing an ant – ‘that’s their favourite. Eye shadow, you’ve got several shades, but there’ll be one that will be worn down to the silver. That’s the one.’
There’s a pause. I can’t help it, I have to say it. ‘I think you’re a brave man drawing a woman’s eyebrows on.’
He shakes his head, laughing at the absurdity of eyebrows. ‘It’s so hard! Why do you pluck them out and put them back on again? I don’t understand.’ I assure him that some of us learned our lesson in the early 2000s.
I think back to Ron Troyer and Phil Gore embalming their own parents, how two people who are aware of the artifice of embalming still went through the process with their own dead. Neither said they did anything differently. But I wonder, now, if it is technically more difficult to embalm someone you know, when you knew their face so intimately in life.
‘It is harder when you know someone,’ says Kevin. ‘Not because of the process but because you could picture them as they were, and they never look the same. I do a lot of celebrities for one company I work with, and I get mega-critical of what I do because I’ve got a picture of how they were on stage. They look different because the muscle tone is gone, they’re holding themselves differently. I stay longer to achieve that picture in my head. I’m never happy.’
I ask if he ever thinks about his own death, and he gives me a joke answer about his funeral plans: a coffin with each side bearing a multi-angled life-size photograph of him naked but for his Y-fronts. ‘I just want to make people laugh. I’ve seen too much sadness,’ he says. I try again and ask him if he thinks about dying. He says not really, but if someone he knows announces a cancer diagnosis he extrapolates the graph to its worst-case scenario, because that is all he sees. You don’t get a cancer survival story in the prep room: you just see, as Kevin calls it, ‘the inevitable end point’.
The dead have surrounded Kevin all his life. His parents ran a funeral home, and the family lived in the flat above. He remembers being sent downstairs on a Sunday, the day when the flat was cleaned, to fetch the hoover from a cupboard under the stairs. He’d have to walk right past the dead people, laid out in their coffins in the Chapel of Rest. He doesn’t remember ever being scared of the bodies, but he knew instinctively not to talk about it outside the house. ‘Kids just didn’t understand what my parents did, so it was up for ridicule,’ he says. Even now he doesn’t talk about what he does – he’s only talking to me because I asked him to, or rather Dr Gore did – and instead of ‘embalmer’ he says he’s a teacher, if anyone asks. ‘There’s a denial of death in England,’ he says. ‘They don’t want to know us unless something happens, then we’re their best friend for the next two weeks. After that, we don’t exist again.’
He didn’t immediately follow his parents into funeral service, but he was never really apart from it. When he was tall enough to carry a coffin, he’d earn £15 as a freelance pallbearer and spend it all on records at HMV. When he left school, he became a stonemason, carving angels into the headstones that will stand in cemeteries for longer than any of us will live. He made the monument you look at, the place you return to, the thing you address your monologue to in the cemetery when your person is under the ground. Now his work is something you see for a minute, then it’s gone.
‘As an artistic person, don’t you feel sad that your best work gets buried or burned?’
‘No,’ he says abruptly. ‘Because I’ve already…’
He pauses, thinks about it a bit longer.
‘Here’s one that happened a few years ago,’ he says. A man had been in an industrial accident, his head and torso crushed while attempting to free a jam. His wife had to identify him as he was, after he had been pulled from the machine. ‘It was … just a mess. She said to me, “Is there anything you can do?” I told her I’d do the best I could.’
Later, he received a letter.
‘Thank you. It wasn’t perfect. But you gave him back to me.’