The next of kin make that call. We try to encourage them to make it a consensus, because there will be some who want to see this person. Some who may not have seen the person for two or three months, maybe even years. Sometimes families will be adamant and say no viewing. If they say no viewing, then nobody can view.

Last week, we had a man who'd been in a car accident. He was ejected from the car. His head hit a tree or a pole, and it just caved it in, the whole skull. The coroner that advised the family said there's nothing that can be done. They contacted us. We said, give us a chance. Let us see what we can do, and then you can look at it. Our restorative art teacher came down and while I was running the students through the embalming, she was rebuilding the head with cotton and plaster and Styrofoam, rebuilding the structure on the inside until his head fit his body. We had to do cosmetics and cover up the scratches and scrapes. We did the embalming on Tuesday, and on Friday the family came in. We said to them, take a look and decide what you want. So they took a look at him and then they pulled out a picture of him. We didn't even have a picture to look at when we were working. But he looked enough like his picture that they were very happy with what we'd done.

In your experience, is it preferable to view the body?

For the past 44 years I have been associated with the University of California Willed Body Program. I've been the night, weekend and holiday curator since 1969. If a person wills their body to science somewhere from Fresno to the Oregon border, I'm the one who gets called. If the person who has willed their body dies at home, somebody arrives, picks up the body and that's it. Then the family can have a memorial service, but for many of these people, it's out of sight out of mind. As soon as death is over, zoom. Then they start thinking. They start dreaming. They don't finalize it. They don't say goodbye. They don't have a ceremony. And they have problems for years.

I had this one woman, she called up six months after her husband died. I want you to look in his brown suit. I dreamt he wrote a poem. I checked the records, and I said, "Well the records show that he was removed in his pajamas and you did not want the pajamas back, so they were destroyed or passed on to somebody else. So his brown suit wasn't here, but she was grasping at all these straws.

Your life doesn't go on if there's a major part of your life gone. It's always going to be a part of your life even if you try to deny it. So this is why I feel that there should be some kind of ceremony, even if it's just a ceremony in a church.

In addition to learning embalming, do your students study psychology or counseling?

A mortician must be able to adequately deal with three factors: the embalming, the business and the families, because they all grieve differently. You have to deal with everything ranging from belligerence, to where they are blaming the mortician for the situation, to the people you have to lead through the process step-by-step. Some families will come in and there's just no emotion. Other families really can't get anything done because every time there's a mention of the death they break down.

Before, morticians just did this by intuition. Now, students study the psychology of grief. Mortuary schools were the first to teach psychology of grief. It was later picked up by the other schools who were saying, hey, grief is one of the contributing factors to people's mental attitude and mental balance and how they deal with things.

What are some common misconceptions about your profession?

One of the biggest is that it is expensive. If you compare the cost of a funeral to any other service where you're compensating people for time, it's really quite inexpensive. Some people buy a nice casket because that is the lifestyle they have. Some people buy a less expensive casket; they choose wood over metal.

Another misconception is that people think that if you have cremation, you can't have a funeral service. Cremation is just a disposition of the body. You can have all the services you want before you have cremation.

Also, I've had people who won't shake hands with a mortician because a mortician has touched dead bodies. Now, they may have come from countries where the people who handle dead bodies are ostracized. But we consider ourselves in the United States a little more enlightened.
salon.com | May 23, 1999

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