Mortician Answers MORE Dead Body Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED

there are two ways to close a mouth one involves actually what we call a needle injector so this is normally going into bone [Music] so the wire holds it in place hello i'm victor m sweeney licensed funeral director and mortician and this is part two of mortician support [Music] all right first up here's a question from lovely nicole how do morticians get into their profession like what inspired them or what not to want to pursue that career that is such a fine question um it differs from mortician to mortician decades ago it used to be more common that a funeral home was a family business so it might be that your dad was a mortician and your grandpa before him and you just follow in their footsteps to carry on that family business and keep up the family name today most morticians are what we might call first generation funeral directors so they're going into it cold they're learning the trade and then going off on their own to either work for somebody or own their own funeral home for myself i always grew up kind of surrounded by death if you will i found my best friend uh dead in his bed when he was when i was four i had a sister that was born before me that passed away and we'd always visit her grave and then for about 10 years when i was a kid we lost a close family member an aunt an uncle a grandparent every year for about a decade so i was around funerals a whole lot it made me understand that this is something important and worth doing here's a question from anthony pyle can you be buried according to your heritage or beliefs in colorado for instance there is one county that actually allows burial outside on a pyre so you could build a a burial pyre out of wood and light up grandpa if you were in that county and you had proper write-off from the government next up we have from a total random why do dead bodies get stiff the proper term for the stiffening of bodies after death is called rigor mortis so this would be when the muscles of the body tense up until the tissues themself start to break down a little bit so if a body is in rigor and we don't want it to be the best thing that we can do is what's called breaking rigor typically you're gonna see rigor mortis in the joints is where it's primarily going to be a problem so to break rigor all you actually have to do is manipulate those joints forcefully and i'm talking bending those fingers way way back and after you do that a number of times they'll loosen up so then you can have the hands positioned properly our next question is from alicia wood will morticians give you a shower asking for a friend it's a fine question because really we do bathe every deceased that comes through so we'll wash their bodies we'll shampoo their hair but for your question giving a shower i cannot imagine trying to prop somebody up trying to make that happen having them laying on a table and doing it while they're laying down and i don't have to hold them up with one arm is that definitely ideal here's a question from sovereign insane if somebody wished to be turned into a life-size doll after death would it be legal absolutely not here's a question from vv capitalism how do morticians fix a body that was shot between the eyes like they just fill it in with silly putty one of the things that we do and we work very hard on is what we call restoration when someone shot between the eyes provided the rest of their head is there and we just have a bullet hole first we'd probably want to pack it with cotton or some other firmer material and then on the topmost layer we're going to cover it with what's called a wax this wax is called the surface restorer so i'll show you how it works so we have a wax it's softer than candle wax but when it's introduced to the heat of the hand it tends to soften up and then this wax we can use to wax over a wound see how it covers it just like that and then we can get the proper texture with stippling and with brush work and then color over it after that and try to blend it in here's a question from genealogy jill are sky burials legal in the united states so a sky burial is where you leave a body out on a high place for vultures and other animals to pick apart it is not legal here's a question from kelly elizabeth you do morticians really sew your mouth shut when you're dead hashtag the right the answer to that is yes and also no you might be thinking that we're talking about sewing the lips we generally don't sew the lips closed you can imagine how much time and how much fine detail it would take to do that there are two ways to close a mouth one involves actually using suture to bring the jaw bone up with a needle and some thread this is a large s curve needle you would go up out of the nose across the septum back down and then you're actually going to go through the frenulum the frenulum of your lip here there's usually a little piece of skin you'll go through that on the inside of your mouth once you do that you can just pull the two ends together and it tightens the jaw right up the other method of closing a mouth is with what we call a needle injector we have a mouth here and we're going to take this needle injector and it's a piston you see it clicks so this piston is going to drive our sharp brad into the wood here just as a demonstration so this is normally going into bone so there's our bottom one there's our top one and then you simply twist them together so the wire holds it in place once the jaw itself is closed the lips and the rest of the mouth take their form very naturally here's a question from haley hey how do morticians do people they knows bodies i could never i actually do that pretty frequently and honestly it's kind of nice because you know the person you know how they do their hair you know how they do their makeup you know how they like to get dressed and here's a question from ambryn when viewing my grandmother for her funeral i noticed her nose looked odd upon closer inspection it appeared to have been squashed and carefully restructured is this a common occurrence amber that is a good question and i'm sorry that was your experience i wouldn't say it's common but it depends on the manner of death so let's say someone passed away where they had a very quick heart attack and fell onto their face it's possible their nose might have been broken or maybe they laid on their nose for a number of hours and it maintained that squashed look then it would be just as simple as straightening it out maybe putting a little cotton in the nostrils to hold their shape and then embalming the body so those tissues hold their shape here's a question from tiffany payne do breast implants get taken out five question marks short answer no our next question is from ot how do morticians decide what to do with the dead person's arms so that's kind of an interesting question um traditionally the hands are placed over the umbilicus so over the navel and almost always the hands are going to be positioned left over right the reason being is that more often than not by the time you pass away you will have been married so we want the hand with the wedding ring to be on top so people can see it but maybe the variation on that is if we have someone who's very large and in the casket sometimes their hands don't quite reach up or maybe they would meet but it's so high up in the casket we wouldn't be able to close the lid securely so if that's the case we usually just put the hands at the side typically resting just on top of the hips here's a question from aaron execution i wanted to go into the field of work back in the day but i was afraid of how it would affect me what's one situation that's affected you the most good and bad could that line of work cause ptsd well the truth of it is um it can be a very emotionally taxing job you do see a lot of things that you just don't want to see graphic injury increasingly decaying bodies burying children all those things are really really really hard but there are a lot of good things too for instance when you come across a situation like that you're in a position to actually help a family in a way that really nobody else can as for it causing ptsd maybe i think it depends on the person but i think if you put the idea that you're there to help first kind of before your own emotional investment in it that's probably the ticket to keeping you free of those kind of debilitating anxieties next up we have a question from horror of the orient why do dead bodies have to be prepared and just toss me into the ocean why is it so complicated just drop me in and let the orcas eat me that could possibly be an option if we're talking about burial at sea the reason we prepare bodies is to provide time for families to gather more often than not states are going to have a limit between the time a person passes away and when they have to be either buried or cremated with embalming it actually negates the necessity to bury a person right away so let's say we're having a funeral and we have families coming from both sides of the country hard to do that in 72 hours let's say if we embalm a body then we don't have to worry so much about the timing and we can delay it a little bit if we need to i don't have a great deal of experience with burial at sea being in the most landlocked state in the country but but there are protocols for um shrouding and wrapping and then disposing of a body a certain number of miles out on the coast um so that way when it goes overboard it doesn't wash up on shore and the orcas get to eat you just as you wished here's the next question from dollar sign do morticians really remove all the inside organs and put them at the foot of the dead person in the casket or is that a lie thankfully that is an outright lie typically with an embalming we don't have to remove the organs at all they can just stay right in the body even if we have an autopsy in which the organs have been removed for study they're typically placed back in the body cavity so putting them in a bag at the end not going to happen and at any rate it's a huge liability what if it broke open or what if it was just sloshing around in the end as you carry the casket out you don't want that we don't want that no our next question is from frantic woman can morticians put facial expressions on the dead that is a great question yes more or less so typically a person's facial expression will almost make itself when we close the jaw and set the features now there are things we can do to help create a more pleasant expression things like filling in some of the cheek let's say they've gotten older maybe losing some of their muscle tone we can fill in the cheek with some cotton or possibly some fluid that we can inject in to bulk it up a little bit one of the things that i always do is i put a little bit of cotton inside the mouth under the turn at your mouth when you smile in my experience generally people that smile more have nicer expressions when they're in the casket and people that are frowners they tend to frown in the casket as well here's a question from jordan are all morticians this hot uh the short answer to that is no i usually look like a pasty stringy just stereotypical mortician when they put me in front of the lights with studio magic i look very handsome our next question is from elian hey i have a question what do you do if a person has died in some kind of accident and has a severe injury for example lost a limb do you fix the part of the body that was injured decapitated or do you simply put it back asking out of curiosity really ellie it depends on the type of injury and maybe the magnitude of it so if someone loses a limb let's say if the limb is relatively intact apart from being severed from the body we can re-articulate it and actually just sew up all the tissue around it making sure it's properly embalmed i have not thankfully had too much experience with decapitation but the way a person handles that you embalm the head independently from the rest of the body and then when it comes time to re-articulate the head to the rest of the spinal column you actually drive a dowel into the spine and then set the atlas of the head the rest of the neck on top of that dowel so you know it's in the proper place then it's just a matter of carefully stitching up the two ends of the skin together and waxing over it here's a question from the kryptonite do you know why do dead bodies float yes the reason for that is a bacterial buildup in the abdomen that creates gas that gas will cause the body to float here's a question from dinah jarrett the five-year-old questions why do dead bodies stink asked during breakfast no less well i have a five-year-old at home and this is probably a normal breakfast for me do you ever have meat or any other vegetable that goes off spoils or rots that is exactly what our bodies do as soon as our immune systems stop taking care of us you have a lot of internal bacteria living in your gut all those hollow organs and those things do smell bad if a body comes in already smelling bad already partially decomposed typically we'll put that body in a body bag if they're not not already in one and then a good way to reduce smell is to actually use baby powder as well as baking soda both those soak up those nasty smells quite well as long as the body's in a sealed pouch if we have an embalming where somebody is is smelling bad really the embalming itself typically will fix some of that smell ideally the fluid will push out the blood and a lot of times as soon as as that blood is gone the smell goes with it too if someone is smelling really bad a nice trick is just a little bit of vicks vaporub under the nose the next question is from jash is it possible for a mortician to allow someone to watch while they're working on a body that is a great question the answer is no unless they are actually an intern in most states they won't allow anybody outside of someone who has a funeral doctor's license to enter into an embalming room let alone watch the preparation of a body our next question is from rl queen how do hair and nails still grow on the body after death that is an interesting question the hair and nails do not continue to grow after death there are no life processes that would cause the growth of hair or nails the look of hair growing and nails getting longer is primarily from skin around them retracting our next question is from lord and savior jared gaines i heard of a thing where you would die and you can have your tattoos preserved and given to your loved ones have you ever done something like that i've never had that request but i have looked into a company that does do that so really what we would have to do is just remove that outer layer of skin the company would probably send us a biohazard shipping container so we could mail that top layer of skin with the tattoo off for preservation and then probably framing before they would send it back to the family here's a question from job for a cody so i do have a serious question what are happening to the bodies of the deceased with coronavirus are they cremated are morticians wearing hazmat suits or something that is such a good and relevant question so when someone dies from coronavirus they do not have to be cremated right away we can embalm their body it was kind of scary right away because i remember very distinctly um handling bodies of people that had died of the coronavirus before we knew how it was spread we always wore the maximum number of personal protective equipment that we could so not quite a hazmat suit but the next thing closest to it coronavirus is spread by droplet infection right by respiration from the body whenever you manipulate a body let's say from the place of death there is going to be some expulsion out of the out of the lungs right as coronavirus started we would start to shroud every body with a plastic shroud to contain in any sort of expulsion from their mouth whether aspiration or just simply breath you wouldn't normally think that that would be a problem with a dead body but as it turns out we would always see kind of foggy condensation on that plastic shroud right around the face and that's it thank you for all your great questions again i was happy i could inform and teach you guys a little bit more about my life in the deaf world

Channel: WIRED

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Keywords: burial, cadaver, cadaver support, dead body, dead body support, dead body twitter, dying, funeral, funeral director, funeral support, funerals, funerals mortician, funerals wired, mortician, mortician support, mortician tech support, mortician tech support wired, mortician wired, tech support cadaver, tech support dead bodies, tech support mortician, tech support wired, undertaker, undertaker support, what happens to dead body, wired, wired funerals, wired tech support

Id: Pon4Zux5MaQ

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021