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How to embalm a dead body

posted by Jason Kottke   Oct 08, 2008

An editor from The Morning News goes to a mortuary and learns how to embalm a dead body.

"Once I worked on an old man with a really bad moustache, like the kind a teenager would grow. It was really crooked and misshapen, so I shaved it off. At the funeral his family kept coming up saying, 'Oh, where's his moustache?' Apparently, it was supposed to look that way."

The closer to its living self a body looked, the happier a family would be. And keeping families happy, I'd learn as the night went on, was the main objective of Carla's work, and a task she took very seriously.

Apparently watching every episode of Six Feet Under does not prepare you to be a funeral director.