I don't know if I'll talk about them all, but I got all sorts of fun blood draining devices and this one is for closing mouths kind of cool.

Hi, I'm victor m Sweeney and I'm a licensed funeral director mortician and this is mortician support.

This is a question from Saint Severin question for morticians when someone dies, do you remove their poo or are we all buried with an unproved poo?

That is such a good question.

More often than not, your poo is up to you.

Sometimes you you hear the myth that everybody poos themselves before they die.

That's not always the case.

Sometimes it is for my purposes when I get someone back to the funeral home and I'm preparing them.

Um if they have pooed then I'll clean them up.

If it's the case that they start pooing.

When pressure starts to build up in the abdomen, then I stop what I'm doing.

I clean them up.

Typically what I'll do is I'll actually flush out the bowels with the hose because the last thing you want to have happen is someone to start pooing and then to continue doing it when you can't control it jaded.

Never won.

If a person where in context dies, does the mortician take them out, shower thoughts.

Yes.

Historically I've always removed contact lenses because one of the things that we need to do of course, is what we call set the features setting the features would mean that we close the mouth and we also need to close their eyes.

So we actually have a device that helps us do this.

These are called eye caps.

They're essentially spiky contact lenses that fit over the eyes and will actually grip the eyelid when we pull it down over those little birds there.

I typically remove contact lenses because those just get in the way of me doing what I need to do to set their features and provide a decent appearance for the family question from Laney, will my cat eat me when I die?

Possibly.

Hopefully.

I think the short answer to that is yes.

I've heard of that happening from colleagues of mine and as we all know, cats being inferior to dogs, they will do anything.

They're opportunists.

The question from vamp Florence, how do morticians not want to chug the embalming fluid?

These look like they taste like Froot loops.

Well, I really love the picture you have and I noticed you forgot the blue flavor.

Embalming fluid is really colorful, but I can assure you it is not tasty, It smells awful as far as the coloring goes.

It is strange, isn't it?

One of the reasons that a lot of these fluids are maybe red or other colors is so that the embalmer knows what they are without having to maybe read the label.

But you'll also notice that a couple of them are red when we push the blood out of the body in arterial embalming, We're pushing out a red fluid.

So ideally we want to put a red fluid back in.

so we gain access to an artery.

Typically will make an incision, maybe in the neck or in the thigh.

And then we'll also gain access to a vein.

We open the artery.

We are going to have an embalming machine which acts as a pump.

And we're gonna use this arterial tube, something like this.

So this goes down the artery and then it's gonna pump fluid through.

Now you're vain.

We are going to open with either a large forceps or this device called a drain tube.

So this goes down the vein and then when we open it the blood will pour out the side of our device here and then we can control how quickly or how slowly we want the blood to leave the body when we have a deceased loved one?

They're going to look very, very pale because the blood has stopped circulating.

So when we put in the red blood, the red fluid rather that's actually gonna pick them up in some ways and make them look a little bit more alive.

This is a question from clementine.

Okay, full disclosure, I'm fat and this is a legit question.

I'm not trying to be fat phobic, but how do extremely obese people like, I'm talking 400 plus pounds fit in a coffin.

Do they make a plus size coffin or does the mortician like cut fat out of them and sew them back up.

You can answer the second part of that question first.

No, we do not remove fat.

And so someone back up, everybody is buried intact if we can at all help it.

So we actually have caskets that are made by our manufacturer to be oversized.

Typically, when someone passes away, if they're larger will measure them at their elbows because those tend to be the parts that stick out the furthest and then determine what width of casket we will need to give them a more comfortable appearance C for chase.

Do morticians put chapstick on the bodies or are they just sitting there casket?

Open lips cracked out?

That's actually a great concern of ours is drying out.

Not just the lips, but after you die, of course your body is not producing any oils so your skin can get quite dry.

We actually have a like a heavy face cream that we use on almost everybody that comes through in the interim between when they're embalmed and when we get them ready for the funeral and put their makeup on, if we need it, we always have that heavy face cream on to make sure that their lips don't dry out.

So as far as chapstick goes, I've never put chapstick on a body, but if someone really wanted me to, I I guess I wouldn't say no.

Here's a question from Coco.

Now, I'm going on, google, looking up the weirdest stuff, What do dead bodies smell like?

Dead bodies smell awful rotting.

anything smells awful.

We are hard wired to think that dead human bodies smell bad and it's a smell you never forget.

I myself, I went out to a nice restaurant to have some aged steak and I couldn't do it.

I love this user name.

This is a question from future corpse.

Aren't we all, what do morticians do with our organs after an embalming?

What happens when they aren't donated when we do embalming all your organs?

Just stay inside your body.

We can prepare them all internally.

After we finish the arterial embalming, we have what's called the cavity.

Embalming optimally with the cavity embalming.

You're trying to puncture the lungs, the heart, the intestines, the stomach.

And then you're also going to try to shoot for the kidneys to, we actually use what's called a choker and I I have one here, it's a hollow point spear essentially and it hooks up to what we call an aspirated.

So it's a it's a vacuum essentially, insert this in the abdomen and then try to puncture all the hollow organs and then the vacuum will actually draw all those nasty fluids.

If you donate your organs.

Typically, organ donations are handled by organ harvesting companies and they will actually work with the hospital or with me to transport a body where it needs to go and then they'll harvest the organs donate them where they need to and then the body will be returned to me after that whole process is done.

Question from paul.

Matthews do morticians normally just drain the blood down the sink.

The short answer is yes.

All of our bodily wastes are disposed just like our normal bodily wastes, the sewer system that goes right to the water treatment plant.

This is a question from soggy Emma, Why are coffins so expensive?

Y'all just bury me raw.

Well soggy Emma, that is definitely an option.

You can be buried in the ground without a casket.

A lot of funeral homes put substantial mark on their casket and I think it's just a way to collect money on the tail end of a service, but just like a furniture store, which would maybe mark up their kitchen tables four times what they actually cost.

I would guess that most caskets are marked up probably 1.5 to 2 times what the wholesale cost is.

This is a question from tiny rain.

Do morticians put a bra on you?

If so, I would like my rotting corpse to not wear a bra and would like my ghost to be wandering bra lists with poking nips.

Well, tiny rain, I don't know if there's much I can do about poking nips, but we do put bras on if the family requests and the reality is I probably put on more bras than I have taken off in my life.

That answer your question.

This is a question from Leonard de Monte does a mortician feel just as sad as a normal person, when someone close to them dies.

The short answer of that is yes, that was one of the things actually I myself really worried about when I got into this profession, because at a certain point when you see a dead body, you almost always kind of go into work mode, what can I do to help this family?

What can I do to prepare this body?

So, I was very concerned when I started doing this, that maybe I would start to even think of my own loved ones as something to help or something to fix and not really taking grief, like used to for my own family, for loved ones.

Um my own grandpa passed away just a few months ago and I feel just as sad about that as I think I ever would.

It's just a matter of perspective and maybe where you're at at the moment, question from t what foundation do funeral directors use to make dead people look alive?

Well, that's a good question.

All the makeup we use is actually formulated for dead people.

So it's made to go on cold skin as opposed to warm skin, like regular makeup.

And one of the things we try to do is not cake people with makeup, but just do kind of, light layers.

So that way they're actual skin tone does shine through a little bit if you've ever gone to a funeral and maybe you've seen someone in the casket who has caked with makeup, they don't really look like themselves.

So one of our goals is to tone that down a little bit.

So they do question from La la approximately.

How much does a mortician make the minimum and the maximum.

I really couldn't say what the minimum and maximum are.

The average I've read in the country is about $65,000 a year.

And talking to my other friends and colleagues that seems to be about the average from my area as well.

O.

P.

A dana.

Can you get half your body cremated and the other half buried?

The morticians do that asking for a friend.

I have never done that and I've never had anybody ask.

I guess I could see it happening if you really wanted to.

You would have to have a disposition permit that would have cremation and burial.

And I guess we probably have to sign a waiver to cut someone in half.

But maybe the bigger question would be, what half are you going to cremate?

And what half do you bury?

This is a question from that doodle bunny.

How do morticians handle their jobs without becoming emotional wrecks.

That is a good question.

Most morticians I know are pretty normal people.

There are times where it's emotional, so you do feel it and there are maybe days you come home where you just feel done and you don't want to work or maybe do what you're doing anymore.

But I think the fact that you can actually help people on my side of the desk, on this side of things, there are things that you can do that maybe nobody else can do, you can provide a chance for a mother to see her son one more time.

It's those kind of things that keep you going in those hard times.

This question is from not waving.

How do you dress the deceased?

I have theories.

Well, I would love to hear what your theories are, but really it's fairly simple.

You're just gonna work their arms through just like you dress a baby.

Maybe.

Oftentimes, if we have someone may be very large that we can't move very well.

Or maybe someone who has outgrown their clothes or maybe their clothes are too big.

Well, oftentimes make cuts down the back and simply drape it over the front and tuck it under the back.

Maybe.

So it in a couple of places.

So that way it sits right on the person and doesn't look like like an over large tent or squeeze them into their clothes.

Like a sausage.

This is a question from trap Jason.

Why don't we bury people vertically instead of horizontally?

They are already dead.

So why does it matter?

We could save so much space.

That is a great question.

I think a lot of it has to do with practicality.

So if you were to bury someone vertically, you'd have to dig pretty deep hole, it would have to be pretty narrow.

You can imagine how tough it would be for, let's say six people to carry a casket to the grave side and then turn it up on its end and drop grandma down the hole.

You might need a, like a seat belt of some kind question from crowbar jones, What does a mortician do if their artificial nails on a corpse, keep them, take them off asking for a friend.

I hope you don't mean keep them by keeping a collection, but if you mean keeping them on.

Um more often than not, I will typically the artificial nails look nice clean and of course your nails underneath are pretty rough if they have them on.

I usually keep them other things that people might be concerned about removing piercings, they almost always stay if it's an ear piercing and they have their earrings in, maybe we'll take the earrings out, clean them up a little bit.

Other body piercings, I always leave them in.

This is a question from Melody Jacks.

Do morticians take makeup classes when getting their certifications?

Yes, we do.

I have a four year degree.

I mean at my college we took courses on what they call restorative art.

So this would include things like makeup and coloring, but it would also include things like putting people back together after accidents, sculpting an ear if someone has lost an ear lip boy do morticians also give haircuts, anyone, no one that can do a nice fade.

Yeah lit boy I do give haircuts every so often.

Usually only two men and usually only if it's something minor, if someone does need to get their hair done well actually usually call hairdresser in.

It's fairly simple because really you're only working with the front and the sides of the head.