Advanced Embalming begins Monday morning at 8. A small group of 20- and 21-year-olds, all of them dressed in too-big black and dark gray suits, shuffle tiredly into the classroom. Professor Barry Walch stands behind the podium, holding a stack of the students’ exams from last week. They did not do as well as he’d hoped.
“You guys ruined my whole weekend,” he says. “I graded these on Friday and spent the whole weekend crying.”
“Walshie,” says Kayce, who brought in a bagel and orange juice from one of the campus cafeterias, “we need extra credit.”
“There isn’t enough extra credit in America,” he replies.
Walch — sixtysomething, trim, white hair and glasses — is setting up the PowerPoint for today’s lecture. The introductory slide reads “SEVERE EDEMA REMOVAL.”
“Oh ho ho ho,” he laughs. “Wait till you see what we’ve got today. This one even makes me puke.”
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Kayce
Photograph by Andrew Renneisen for BuzzFeed
“Are there pictures?” asks one student.
“Oh, there’s pictures.”
The small, windowless, off-white room we’re sitting in is located on the basement level of French Hall, where most of SUNY (State University of New York) Canton’s mortuary science classes are held. Across the hallway is the Mortuary Science Association lounge, which is decorated with fake cobwebs and caution tape for Halloween. Between classes, students gather around its circular table to complain about tests and play cards. (Right now, they are very into euchre.) When I meet them, they are in the process of designing their wing of the school’s annual haunted house. Kayce, who is one half of a president–vice-president MSA power couple with her boyfriend Nick, tells me: “Ours is always the scariest.”
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Katie Heaney / BuzzFeed
A little more than 50 students (35 of them freshmen) are enrolled in the school’s four-year program, one of just a handful across the country; everywhere else, mortuary science is a two-year associate’s degree. Enrollment is small, but growing: The 2015 American Board of Funeral Service Education (ABFSE) directory of mortuary science programs, groups, and professional associations puts the number of accredited institutions of funeral service education in the United States at 58, comprising 5,000 enrolled students, two-thirds of whom are between ages 17 and 30 — and over 57% of them are women. At SUNY Canton, the students are almost exclusively between the ages of 18 and 22; 80% of them are women.
In their choice of academic pursuit, these are young people who, whether they realize it or not, are pushing back against a lot: the derision of peers, and sometimes family; an aging curriculum increasingly at odds with the needs and wants of the contemporary American; and, according to many I spoke with, high dropout rates and, if they make it that far, high industry turnover. They are signing up to spend years talking about something nobody else wants to talk about. From the moment they show up at orientation, mortuary students are told they are — they must be — different than the rest of us. We need their help.
But a growing, increasingly vocal cohort of alternative death activists argue that the insularity mortuary science programs foster only serves to keep us beholden to a stagnant, stubbornly reclusive industry — to maintain a false binary between death’s proactive managers and the rest of us, its passive recipients.
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Photograph by Andrew Renneisen for BuzzFeed
On Sunday afternoon, the mortuary science upperclassmen are watching football. David Penepent, program director and professor, invites his juniors and seniors — and he does think of them as his, calling the girls “honey” — over for beer and spaghetti. He calls it “supervised socializing.”
Marielle, a 21-year-old with long, flat-ironed maroon hair and razor-precise eyeliner, is from Staten Island, which is obvious as soon as she tells me she joined the program because she wanted to work with the “'uman” body. As a freshman she was one of 15 students; she excitedly tells me the current freshman class is more than twice that.
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Katie
Photograph by Andrew Renneisen for BuzzFeed
At some point the group becomes divided: The girls leave the silent boys on the couch and migrate to the dinner table. I sit next to Katie, who is wearing a navy hoodie and a purple bandana over her tight brown curls. I ask her if she’s always been interested in death and she says yes, since the first time she studied Egyptian history in high school. Her uncle is a funeral director, and when she told him she was interested in becoming one too, he told her, “Run while you can.” But she was undeterred.
I ask the other girls what type of reactions they get when other people learn their course of study. “People look at you like…” says JoAnna, followed by an expression that seems equal parts shock and disgust. Kayce says that a guy once sat down at her table in the cafeteria, asked her major, and, when she told him, promptly stood up again.
She came from culinary school, which she didn’t finish. When looking for a new path, her dad, who used to dig graves, suggested she consider mortuary school. It appealed to her immediately. “This is funny now,” she says, “but I didn’t want to work long weeks and crazy hours.” Everyone, including Penepent, who sticks his head in from the kitchen, laughs uproariously — dying does not have off-hours, or a slow season.
Theirs is the smallest program on campus, and likely the most marginalized too. It’s evident that the students are very close, unusually so. Marielle tells Katie, “We probably wouldn’t be friends if it weren’t for this program,” and I believe her. I ask them if they spend much time hanging out with students from other programs. “We don’t hang out with other kids,” says Marielle.
They even have their own slang: YODO. Like YOLO, but, you know.
At the mention of an upcoming embalming lab, Katie recalls a session in which she and and another student got blood spatter all over their faces after accidentally shredding a corpse's jugular vein. It’s protocol for students to wear protective shields in lab, but they were leaning over the body at just the right (or, wrong) angle, so blood still got on their chins and, I’m sorry to say, in their mouths. As a result, they had to go to the hospital for HIV testing — standard procedure for exposure to bodily fluids, even if the body in question has screened negative for HIV. “I laughed,” she says, with a shrug.
I ask her if there’s anything that does make her uncomfortable. “We all have our things we don’t like to do,” she says, quietly. “For me it’s closing the mouths.” A year ago her grandfather died, she tells me. Her family prepared the body, but when it came time to close his mouth, she had to leave the room.
After spaghetti and garlic bread, we eat a very sweet but allegedly sugar-free dessert that Kayce made special for Penepent, who was recently diagnosed with diabetes. Little sugar gravestones adorn the chocolate frosting.
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David Penepent
Photograph by Andrew Renneisen for BuzzFeed
Penepent then sets up the movie he wants the students to watch: 700 Sundays, Billy Crystal’s one-man show about his father, who died when Crystal was 15. In the show, Crystal describes his grief as a boulder, which he mimes pushing around the stage. Penepent uses this as an entry point to a lesson: What boulders are the students carrying? In what way will various individuals’ boulders play a role in their future funeral homes? When JoAnna answers, she punctuates her thoughts with punches into her palm and liberal use of the word “fuck”: “When I talk about death, I get angry,” she says. It’s not clear at whom. God, maybe.
Mid-answer, she notices that Katie has started to cry. At 27, JoAnna is significantly older than her peers, and it shows: She crouches at Katie’s feet, taking her hands in her own, kissing her on the cheek. “I know you’ve been suffering,” she says. Katie’s grandfather’s death is something they’ve already talked about. The group’s ease with one another is startling. Nobody is embarrassed for anyone; this is what they are here for.
“Does school make your boulder heavier?” Penepent asks.
“No,” says Katie, who has stopped crying.
“Does it make it lighter?”
“Yeah.”
Penepent then asks Katie if she’d like a blessing, and she says, “OK.” It is only then, when she stands up, that JoAnna lets go of her hands.
Penepent leaves the room, coming back moments later with what looks like a palm-size wooden log. “This is NOT a big joint,” he says. It’s sage, which he lights with a match. He tells Katie to hold out her arms, and he shakes the stick around in an imaginary perimeter around her body, a wispy trail of smoke flowing from its end. “May you be blessed with your grandfather’s spirit,” he says. There is some light giggling; they are very serious young people, but they are not unshakable.
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Photograph by Andrew Renneisen for BuzzFeed
Like many students who end up in mortuary school, Caitlin Doughty grew up with an above-average interest in what she calls “morbidly related things.” In college she majored in medieval history. At 23, she got a job as a crematory operator. Now 30, she has a favorite funeral rite: Tibetan sky burial. A tradition of Vajrayana Buddhism, practiced in several Chinese provinces as well as Mongolia — places where high altitude limits tree growth and therefore pyre building, and where the often-frozen ground makes traditional burial difficult — sky burial is the name given to the rite in which a dead body is placed atop a mountain and left there to be carried away and eaten, piece by piece, by birds of prey.
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Doughty from the "Ask A Mortician" YouTube Series.
Ask a Mortician / Via youtube.com
“I think it’s just beautiful,” she says in the third episode of her popular series, Ask a Mortician. (Some episodes have racked up close to 200,000 views.) “The idea of your body being taken apart and flown into the air in a million different directions is really, really powerful, and if it were available in the U.S., I would be cultivating a flock of vultures,” she adds.
Though I knew what Doughty looked like thanks to YouTube, when I meet her for breakfast in New York, I’m surprised by her height: 6-foot-1 before the heels on her boots. Her glossy black hair is cut into blunt Bettie Page bangs. Her sonorous voice is lower in person than it sounds in her videos. She strikes me as unignorable, though she assures me the targets of her critiques do their best.
“Traditional industry people won’t comment on me,” she says, seeming surprised in spite of herself. “I get anonymous comments sometimes, but when I say, like, ‘Would you be willing to do a back-and-forth debate on the blog or in a video?’ there’s no response. They’re not willing to do it. And I'm ready to go.”
Ask a Mortician is especially, delightfully goofy given the subject matter: The series finds Doughty, a licensed mortician, answering a variety of dark and sometimes unsavory questions like “Do you have to grind the bones after a cremation?” and “How prevalent is necrophilia in the funeral industry?” Her answers (short version: yes; not very) are patient, nuanced, and not condescending. If “funeral director” has an archetype — graying, potbellied white man in an outdated brown suit — Caitlin Doughty is the perfect foil.
In the seven years she's been working in the funeral industry, Doughty has created a full-time career as an alternative death activist. She is the founder of The Order of the Good Death, a group of funeral industry professionals, academics, and artists dedicated to changing the cultural conversation about death, and is also in the process of opening a DIY funeral service called Undertaking L.A.
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W. W. Norton & Company / Via amazon.com
