A human body shows signs of decomposition as little as three hours after the heart’s final beat. Blood gathers, creating bruise-like blotches as it succumbs to gravity while the skin turns cold, producing an odor as it rots.
It’s a dirty job, being in the business of death.
Modern embalming is a much different procedure now than its Egyptian antecedent. But despite centuries of separation, they share the same objective: to preserve the dead.
“The purpose of mummification was to make sure that souls would come back to the body as long as there was a body to flourish,” said Ruth Palmer, associate professor of classics and world religions at Ohio University.
Body preservation methods were pioneered in America during the mid-1800s. Union officers who died in the Civil War were packed in ice and transported home by train. The quandary of the decomposing bodies led President Abraham Lincoln to suggest embalming.
Embalming allowed families to view the bodies of their deceased before closing the casket and established a tradition Americans still live by today.
“Without an embalmed body, you wouldn’t have a funeral, which is something everybody deserves,” said Tim Jagers, funeral director and embalmer at Jagers & Sons Funeral Home, 24 Morris Ave. “And everyone needs to view the bodies of their loved ones, whether they want to or not.”
Jagers, whose grandfather started the business in 1923, said he thinks it’s his civic duty to provide peaceful rites, rituals and ceremonies for the dead.
“It’s about closure,” he said. “Seeing is believing.”
The practice of embalming carries much cultural and religious significance and is not accepted by many societies. North America is one of only a few places where the practice is commonplace.
Though not a legal requirement in the U.S. unless a body is being transported out of the country, almost every corpse is embalmed in order to allow time for viewing, even in the cases of closed caskets and science labs.
“We do it differently than for funeral home viewings,” said Donald Kincaid, director of the Ohio University Heritage College of Medicine’s Body Donor Program.
Bodies donated to science are embalmed exclusively for preservation purposes rather than aesthetics, so disfigurements on lab cadavers are left unrepaired, Kincaid said.
“It takes the students a while to get used to it, and some of them have a rough time during the beginning of class,” Kincaid said. “We let them know what they’re going to see before they see it so it won’t be such a shock.”
Unlike some students, Jack Moquin, director of Hughes Moquin Funeral Home, 168 Morris Ave., said he isn’t bothered by body mutilation.
“I’m not squeamish, and I grew up hunting animals in the country, so I don’t have a weak stomach,” he said. “But some of these people are good friends of mine, and I do not like seeing my friends dead.”
Not every corpse in America is embalmed, though. The Jewish and Muslim faiths even forbid it, leaving only days or hours to hold a viewing before the body starts to decay.
Different parts of the world abide by various traditions to honor their dead. While Americans dress the dead in fancy suits and uniforms, the Islamic ceremonial garb is a simple, white coffin cloth.
Contemporary embalming in America also requires restoration of the face, using wax to repair injured features and makeup to cover blemishes.
“We don’t try to make bodies look lifelike, but rather give a semblance of what somebody looked like prior,” Jagers said. “If you make someone look too lifelike, it’s not very good for the person viewing because they need to realize the person is dead.”
Sometimes more attention to reconstructing facial features is required.
Embalmers can recreate a nose from molding wax, replace an ear with wire, close an open mouth with superglue and eliminate burn marks and scars with makeup.
Jager and Moquin both learned their trade at the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science, a school that specializes in death. Ranked fourth of about 70 schools nationwide by the International Conference of Funeral Service Examining Boards, CCMS is the oldest mortuary school in the country, dating back to 1882.
The fatality facility in Finneytown, Ohio, trains almost 100 undertakers a year.
The $11 billion-a-year industry employs more than 100,000 people, according to a 2007 report by the National Funeral Directors Association. Of the about 21,000 funeral homes throughout the country, almost 90 percent are family-owned.
“It’s the same kind of experience someone would have growing up on a dairy farm,” Jagers said. “If you’re exposed to dairy cows all the time and exposed to farm equipment, you’re just used to it. It’s the same with me.”
Jagers, who spent much of his childhood in the funeral home, said he was never afraid of the lifeless bodies despite his belief in spirits.
“The way I look at it is every ghost, every spirit and every dead person is somebody’s parent or grandparent, and I look at them the same way I look at my own grandparents,” Jagers said. “That’s nothing to be scared about.”
Today, there are about 8,190 certified embalmers in the U.S., suggesting that thousands of people haven’t succumbed to the culturally created phobia of death.
“Dying is a part of life,” Jagers said. “It’s a normal process that everyone goes through. And I am a normal person; I just happen to do this for a living.”
oy311909@ohiou.edu
