- If you could be buried
anywhere, what would your favorite place to be buried-- - Anywhere? - Anywhere, if you could choose. - In a video game. - In a video game. (laughing) (cheerful music) Hi. - Hello. - I'm Nora. - Nice to meet you.
- Hi. - I'm Zander. - I'm Oscar. - Oscar. - I'm Atlas. - Do you know what we're
here to talk about? - No. - Do you have any guesses
what we're here to talk about? - Hmm. I don't know. Are you a ninja? - I'm not a ninja. - Okay. - I'm a mortician. - I've never heard that word in my life. - I'm also a funeral director. - You take videos at funerals? - No. Do you know what a funeral is? - Yeah, it's when somebody
passed away and then you go to celebrate their life. - Yeah, so, I'm the
person that a family calls after someone's died to help
make those arrangements. - Do you have, like,
discussions with the passed? Or, not with them, but, (laughing) with their families? - I do, yeah.
- Oh. My grandpa died this year,
so we had a lot of those. - Oh, yeah.
- Yeah. - What do you think happens
to someone after they die? - They go underground. - They go underground, so
that's called a burial. So what happens when you're
buried in the ground is, your body decomposes. Do you know what that word means? - No idea. - Yeah, it breaks down. - Breaks down, what else decomposes? - Dirt?
- Compost? - Compost, yep. Do you know what compost is used for? - Yard-- - To reuse--
- Yeah. - Things? - It's used in your yard, it's dirt. The longer someone's buried,
the more they decompose. - Wait, so if they put
you in one of those boxes and then they opened it up,
you'd just be a bunch of dirt? - Eventually. - Wait, I don't wanna
pick up dirt anymore! - (laughing) Not all dirt is humans. - Are there bugs crawling
around when you're decomposing? - Yeah, that's part of the cycle of life, is you're under the
ground and there's bugs and different bacteria
and organisms all working together to break down the
body to turn it into soil. - Ew. - So if that idea doesn't
appeal to you, then cremation is when the body is reduced
really quickly using fire. - They put you on fire?
(gasping) - They put you on fire. - What?
- [Atlas] Why? - It's a special machine
that the body's placed in. - Like an oven? - Mm-hmm. - Ugh.
- It's called a retort. - Ew. - And then the bones are
heated so hot that they break apart, and then that's
what cremated remains are. That's the ashes that people get back, is ground up pieces of bone. It's kind of like getting a bag of sand. - Does the sand look
different than playing sand? - It looks a little
different than playing sand. It's kind of grainy and dusty. - My mom has our cat ashes in a jar. - So it's the same thing
that happens with pets and with people, but
they're separate machines that do those, yeah. - What are the other options
to get rid of a dead body? - You can donate your body to science. - Oh, yeah, sure. - And so it can be studied
by medical schools. There's another method
called aquamation, which is the reduction of the body
using water instead of fire. - That'd be weird. - Yeah. (laughing) - How many dead bodies have you seen? - I've probably seen
hundreds of dead bodies. - Do dead bodies, like, do
they ever move or make a noise? - Sometimes, if there's
still air inside the body after someone's died and
the air needs to come out, it might brush against the vocal cords and cause a little bit of a sound. - That's creepy. - Yep, it would be creepy. Do you think death is kinda creepy? - Yeah, I'm actually,
quite frankly, terrified. - Yeah. - Just because, like,
everything just stops. And as far as we know, you don't ever have another time to be
alive, so, I don't know. - Death is a hard thing to talk about, and so there's lots of
phrases that people use to kind of make it seem
a little bit softer. Kind of easier to talk about. Do you know what some other
words for dying or death is? - Perished? - Perished, that's a good one. - In a video game, eliminated. - Eliminated, that's a good one. - How do you think you wanna die? - Oh, if only we could choose how. I hope I go just quietly
in my sleep at some point. - Yeah. - Yeah, how about you? It's a hard thing to think about. Have you ever thought about it? - No. - It's okay. - Yeah (laughing). - Have you ever had to
do a child's funeral? - I have, unfortunately. - Very sad? - It was really sad. It's one of the only
times I've had a real cry in front of a family,
was when a child died. We were all crying together. - How do you help a sad person
whose loved one has passed? - Just being there to listen. It's one thing to recognize, you can't fix someone who's sad. It's not your job to cheer them up. It's your job to be supportive. - Should I be very quiet at a funeral? - It depends on the funeral. Some funerals are a little bit more like a party atmosphere, in celebration. - Why would you celebrate
when someone died? - You're not celebrating that they died, you're celebrating who
they were as a person. - So, if Jay-Z died, then
would they sing his songs? - I bet they would sing Jay-Z's songs at his funeral, no doubt. (laughing) That'd be an awesome funeral
to go to, wouldn't it? Not that I want anything
to happen to Jay-Z. I'm Nora Menkin. Thank you for watching
Kids Meet a Mortician. If you want to learn more
about me and my funeral home, there will be links down below. Check out more Kids Meet videos, and don't forget to subscribe. - What's the weirdest
thing you've ever seen written on a tombstone? - One of my favorites is
a grandma had her famous cookie recipe put on her
tombstone, because she always said her family would get the
recipe over her dead body. (laughing)
