Independently owned funeral home in Carmel, IN tour, by owner Jennifer Nelson Williams

hi i'm jennifer williams so nice to be with you all this evening i thought before we get started on the lecture we would take a tour of the funeral home so that you could become more familiar familiar with what a mortuary is like we're going to begin here this is our service room or our chapel and in the chapel here we have a private area where family can sit they don't always utilize this but it has a bathroom for them and they have a little bit of privacy from their friends up here is where the clergy would speak sometimes they don't even have a clergy it's just friends that come up and facilitate the service in the front here is in this larger space would be where the casket would sit or in the case of a memorial service we would have a table maybe some photographs and the urn would be sitting here this room is rather large but it can be divided so that they're smaller groups they won't feel that it's too large of a space for them so we can divide it in half in the middle or we could just use this side and this could be used for two services at one time depending on the type of religious service it is the room would be set up many different ways for instance if it is a hindu or buddhist service we would be taking all the chairs down and just laying sheets on the floor because in those eastern religions they believe in sitting on the floor and there's chanting and they want to be closer to their loved ones and sitting on the chairs is not seen as respectful so we're going to go in now um and look in the preparation room or sometimes it's called an embalming room this is where we take care of the deceased and now hi come on in this is the preparation or embalming room we use this room for a variety of different services so when someone is going to be embalmed which is a preservation process uh it's in exchange for the body fluids using the arterial system with the formaldehyde-based fluid we would have them here and the body would be here laying on this preparation table this is an embalming machine it's a pump this cannula is then inserted into one of the arteries and the fluid is then pumped into the body and again it it firms the tissue it preserves the body but we also use this room for religious preparations so different religions may have different ceremonies attached to their funeral practices for instance in judaism and in islam there is a ritual bathing that's done by community members where the body is dressed in a shroud in hinduism the family would come in and dress the body as well as many times in the buddhist and sikh faith so this room can be used for a variety of different things we also have to do our own laundry because it's not safe for us to send these sheets and other materials out to commercial facilities so we try and use this space in a variety of ways this is an interesting thing this is a lift system that we put in here in the ceiling so that if a casket is too heavy or a body is too heavy for us to lift we can use this to help us so that we can protect ourselves from getting burgers next what we're going to do is go in to see the refrigeration days so we'll just walk through this doorway here so in our funeral home we have these 10 refrigeration bags it's very unusual for a funeral home to have this much refrigerated space but due to the mix of our business because we are primarily first and foremost a jewish funeral home and jews do not believe in embalming we built this such as it is and then over the years as we've branched out and are serving other faiths that are more uh typically choose cremation refrigeration worked very well because when somebody's being cremated they don't need to be embalmed and then there's also people who believe in green funerals and being more eco-friendly and the embalming chemicals are extremely toxic and there is no state law that requires evolving so there are people that just opt for refrigeration even if it's not a religious preference one of the things we built when we built this building was a crematory right on our premises and it's right here inside this room attached to our facility it's on right now so it may be a little loud but this is the room where this is called a retort which is the crematory and it heats to 1650 degrees and the body is placed into this chamber where that black door is the cremation takes about four hours and then afterwards we take out the remaining particles and pulverize them to give them back to the family as the cremated remains so since we designed this building specifically for to meet our needs we decided the time to put in a viewing area so this room here gives us the ability to allow families to come in and either view the cremation if we open the shade into the crematory or for our jewish families there is a religious practice of having a show mayor which is the hebrew word for watchmen or guard and there is a traditional orthodox practice of having a watchman a show mayor here in the facility reciting psalms over the soul of the deceased and so they would be able to sit in this room and have direct visual contact with the refrigeration unit so as they're saying their prayers they're able to see the name of the person that they are praying for so that was a big upgrade from our previous facilities where it was a much more a larger distance and didn't really have that connection for the community and so this has been very well received we're going to go down a hallway back through past the chapel and go into the casket display room and the urn display room one of the advantages one of the things that's made it so desirable for hindus and buddhists and six to use our facility is that part of their religious belief in the eastern religions coming from india is that the family and friends process to the crematory in their case it would be to the riverbanks in india to light a funeral pyre and since we're not able to do that here in the united states they process down this hallway and then use our crematory so that's a that is the building as it is is able to give them a much more accurate type of service that mimics what they would be able to do in their country of origin so this is our casket display room or um i can't even think of another word we would use for it but our casket display room and this is sometimes the hardest part of the entire arrangement process for families because when you come in here it really gives a finality to their loved one's life we have different types of caskets to meet the needs of all of our clients many of these here in this area of the room are orthodox jewish caskets what that means is they're made entirely of wood there's no metal in them at all and they are made with little dowel pins fitting the corners together the interiors are glued in rather than stapled and there's no hinges on them so they're rather delicate they're made from different woods this one is an african mahogany there's pine there's oak so it doesn't make it more religious the type of good but sometimes people have different ideas and many times it's what they see in their homes and what feels comfortable to them but there's also metal caskets there's many caskets now that have been made specifically to be cremation friendly so they have less metal they may not be entirely wood like these jewish caskets are but they are [Music] used so that it's less work for the crematory to process we also have some things over here which are samples of what a burial vault would be so in the midwest most cemeteries require a burial bolt what that is it serves as a foundation for the grave so it is maybe much larger than this because the casket fits inside and this holds the ground above it up so that it doesn't all cave in on the casket um in judaism we want our bodies to go back to the earth though so we've designed a couple so that they can fulfill the obligation of what the cemetery wants but also to be more religious conscious so here's one so again this would be much larger when it's at the cemetery and it would be lowered down over the casket so the entire base of the casket touched the earth below it so that would allow the unembalmed body and the all wood constructed casket to eventually return to the earth but there's also metal caskets they come in all different colors and gauges of steel there's also copper caskets stainless steel and bronze caskets all right we're going to step now here's some samples so many funeral homes have really left this practice of having a full room devoted to holding all these caskets in their actual forms and they've gone to either corner displays or a total virtual environment but we still feel that it's very important for the family to come in be able to touch the casket to be able to see it we feel that it's for their for their closure for their coming to terms with what's happened it's very important so we're going to go in and just look at the earned display rule and then we'll open it up for questions oh so this is our earned display room we have a large number and every day more and more things are coming into the marketplace years ago when we first started our cremation program we had one urn there were so few that had been designed as you can see now there's really something that could appeal to all types of families and tastes so these many of these come from india they're steel or ceramic or glass this is a very traditional shape but now there are also scattering vessels things that have been designed to really meet the needs of those families that don't either want to invest in a cemetery plot or would just like like that idea of allowing their loved ones ashes to be part of nature or a special place that they loved going as a family so something like this it's made out of a cardboard but it has a nice graphic on it and there's a little pencil here where if you punch it you could scatter the ashes without getting them having to put your hand in them and getting it all over you there's also a variety of keepsake items there's jewelry all these pieces of jewelry have a little chamber in them to put a small token of the cremated remains in them there's a company here where we can take a imprint of a finger and then put the fingerprint on the outside of the jewelry so there's again all different things are coming onto the market all the time there's many different things that we can do to meet everybody's needs all right i think that pretty much sums it up for in here so we'll take some questions in a minute thanks you

Channel: Jennifer Nelson Williams

Views: 81,685

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Id: EHQT2387bnc

Length: 15min 55sec (955 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2022