O/T You never know..........

Goose

Well-known Member
A friend of mine was out harvesting yesterday morning, and came home at noon. He noticed his wife kind of slumped at their computer, but went on into the kitchen and fixed a sandwich.

When he called to his wife and got no response, he went to check and found she was dead. She was 64.

The interesting part is, he has a twin brother who is a mortician and who was in the middle of conducting another funeral. He called his brother on his cell phone right in the middle of the other funeral.

An interesting question. Doctors will not ever operate on members of their own family, or even deliver babies, although a friend of mine once delivered his own son out of necessity at the time. The question I've never seen addressed is, do morticians do what needs to be done on members of their own family? This mortuary is a father/son operation, so even if the father deferred to the son, the son would still be working on his aunt.
 
My condolensces to your friend ... you never do know.

I don't see any problem with that if the nephew is comfortable with it.

In fact, he'll probably do a heck of a job and she will look as close to alive as any one could during a viewing.
 
It's very hard to "work" on a relative as it just brings up a lot of emotions, but then again, people in the 1800's buried their own families. I would not want to "work" on my own family, that's just my opinion.

I'm sorry for the loss.
 
I used to listen to KSTP radio out of St. Paul Minnesota in the evenings....when the signal would reach Nebraska. They had an old guy on that would call about every night on the Tommy Mischke talk show. They called him Undertaker Fred. He talked about embalming and preparing both of his parents. He was an entertaining old gent....would sing songs on the radio...he died about a year and a half ago.
 
locally owned funeral home here, the mortictian worked his wife and then his son worked him when they passed. sorry for your loss.
 
The morticians in this area do conduct funerals of their own family members or employees. But they call in an embalmer from a competitor to come to their facility to prepare the body. Sounds like a good arrangement to me. Our local man participated only as a family member when his mother died.
 
Sad story,I hope he will never any giult looking in that room thinking if he could have done anything sooner, chance"s are she was all ready gone, friend of mine found another boy dead at his house in the morning and all ways had that "If only I had" .
 
I'm sure she was already gone when he walked into the house. I don't think he'll suffer any guilt. The sad part is, a nephew of theirs was killed in a car accident several weeks ago.
 
This a hell of a question! My son in law is a mortician and they tend to have a code amongst themselves when it comes to 'family'. They generally have the body taken to their facility but as another person said, call in somebody else to do the preparation. At that time, there are a hundred other more pressing matters to deal with. Grief being foremost and the other arrangements of calling in family, etc.

Like any other occupation, they become accustomed to doing what would turn our stomachs. Embalming a body is not pretty work. Contrary to old tales passed around, cotton is NOT stuffed into body openings!

I suppose you could call a mortician a human taxidermist.
 
Mary Roach wrote a book entitled, "Stiff". She definitely did her homework.

The book relates how human cadavers are used for not only medical training and research, it reveals that human cadavers are used in staged automobile crash tests to learn things that dummies can't tell, like which bones break under what circumstances, etc. She breaks the news that when someone donates Granddad's remains to medical science, he might not be lying on a gurney in a lab, he might be out being busted up in staged vehicle crashes, among other tidbits of info.

Roach also talks about the embalming process fairly candidly. If you're familiar with Mary Roach from her articles in Reader's Digest, you'll know she has a frivolous writing style that makes this subject easier to take. It's an absorbing book, but not for the faint of heart.
 
Don't know if this pertains, but as a grave digger we bury our own family. Never thought about asking another digger to do it. We just don't feel like paying somebody else for work we can do. My Dad and his brother buried their folks and my brother and cousin buried my father. And my brother and i have buried an aunt and a cousin. And will do other aunts and uncle when the time is needed. chris ps No machine either hand crafted by shovels and a heater for the winter.
 

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