When you're busy they all start looking alike
even to the professional eye.
This is only a story because it involves a wrong body, peoples' emotions and a funeral home, otherwise it's just another dispute over poor customer service.
This kind of mix up doesn't happen often but it does happen. Mostly due to the fact that a lot of funeral homes are now corporately owned and when your loved one's body is removed from the place of death most likely it will go to a care center that is not connected to the individual mortuary. There the body is embalmed, dressed, prepped and casketed. Some care centers deal with numerous cases a day and like any other high volume operation mistakes get made.
My associate had a switched body case just before I started here. He had two visitations on the same night and not enough help. Just too busy and lo and behold...right casket, right suit, wrong body. The first family arrives and the son walked up to the deceased, looked perplexed and said, "Why did you shave my Dad's mustache?" My buddy's thinking "Mustache?" Then a little kid blows the whole thing wide open. "Hey!!!!! That's not Uncle John!!!!" To make a long story short the bodies get redressed and the family gets the price of the visitation and the casket comped.
I remember when he told me this story I said to him, "You mean that you took them all the way back in the prep room, undressed both guys, redressed them, recasketed them and then got them back to the viewing rooms?" "Yeah," he said. I looked at him and smiled. "Wouldn't it have been easier to just switch the heads?"
Ha ha. Funeral home humor.
Just in: Video of the funeral fiasco. I guess if it was your loved one it would be hard to find the humor in the situation.
Funeral guy, I think you are the perfect one to answer this question.
ReplyDeleteIf some people believe that a person becomes a person at at the moment of conception like Rick Warren for instance or maybe you, then why do the righteous let their babies become "medical waste" instead of affording them a decent christian burial after a miscarriage?
I don't know anyone else in the stiff business to ask this important question. It just seems morally inconsistent to me. I think this is an interesting subject, because in most states you can't get a cremation or a burial without a death certificate and I could not find any state that would issue one before 20 weeks. I also was surprised that Christian groups have not made an issue out of this like they have out of abortion. BTW lest you think I am some pro or anti abortion person I am not. Just a curious bystander!