Embalming leaves her cold (2024)

I see dead people.

But I don’t want to.

After attending my umpteenth wake this summer — we really are dropping like flies — I’m once again struck by our bizarre and rather gruesome need to dress and decorate the deceased human body like a child’s doll. Some years ago, I was standing somberly before the casket of a dead relative with my 10-year-old niece when she noted in a horrified but highly amusing stage whisper, “She looks like she’s gonna jump out of her coffin and get me.” For that lifelike depiction, I suppose we should credit the embalmer.

Too often, though, the dead don’t look very natural, despite extensive and expensive efforts to render the body fit for public display. The corpses of older folks seem to fare better in the “doesn’t she look good” department, perhaps because they’re already, well, old. It’s the younger people who never look quite right as they rest on their satin pillows: too much rouge, puffed up and waxy, the sort of lifeless ghouls befitting a Stephen King novel.

Behind the scenes, it’s weirder still. First, the body is drained of blood and preserved with gallons of ethanol and formaldehyde, which makes it feel hard to the touch. Then it’s dressed and gussied up like it’s headed for the zombie town fair, so the mourners can file past to pray and secretly gape while making the sign of the cross. It’s a wonder we don’t stick a tape recorder in the mouth and make the lips move.

I’ve never understood the Christian waking ritual and have always found it morbid and unnatural. Not everyone does it, of course. Tibetan Buddhists, for example, will sometimes leave a dead body exposed to the elements as food for vultures, and now would probably be a good time to apologize to anyone reading this column during their Labor Day weekend cookout.

Because of my distaste for wakes, I was interested to learn that only in the United States and Canada do people routinely embalm the dead. This is according to Mark Harris, an environment journalist and author of “Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry To a Natural Way of Burial.” It’s not summer beach reading, but summer is over anyway.

“There’s something about our culture that we need to see the body in a state where it looks like the dead have just slipped off to sleep,” Harris said. “We don’t really deal with death. We don’t want to talk about death. We’re scared of it. But we all know that death is a part of life.”

In the face of the billion-dollar funeral industry, Harris is a strong advocate for “green” or chemical-free burial, a concept that’s gaining much steam among environmental-friendly baby boomers. That means no embalming, no gussied-up corpse, no metal caskets and no burial vaults. Instead, the deceased is wrapped in a cloth shroud or simple pine coffin (the latter used in Jewish burials), placed in a vault-free grave, and buried in a natural cemetery or on rural land. The goal is to avoid both the toxic chemicals that can seep into the earth and the “landfill of materials” and wood buried in the typical cemetery, he said.

People were basically planted in the ground with little fanfare until the Civil War, when bodies were often shipped home long distances and tended to … well, you know. Harris said that Abraham Lincoln was the first public embalmee, as it were, and he kicked off the elaborate ritual that continues today. Contrary to popular belief, however, it’s unnecessary.

“Most of us believe that a body needs to be embalmed, which is almost never the case, and that you must use a funeral director, which is rarely the case,” he said. “More and more people are having funerals at home, where they wash, dress and lay out the body themselves. It’s returning to old traditions.”

Personally, I’m not sure I could lay out mom on a slab of dry ice in the living room parlor, but lots of options are available. Cremation is a good choice, because it consumes fewer resources than the modern funeral. Plus, it tends to creep out fewer kids. And in these lean economic times, it’s a lot cheaper.