This mortician is destigmatizing death, one viral TikTok at a time

Brut America

"I treat it like a spa."  This woman makes videos about being a mortician and explains what it’s like to work with the dead ...

Transcript

00:00Hi everyone, today we're going to be talking about death.

00:03A lot of people ask if I was wearing all that before COVID, and yes, I was wearing it before

00:27COVID.

00:28A lot of the questions that have made me giggle, things that I just have never really thought

00:32about before, like how would you know that they have a tampon?

00:37I wouldn't.

00:38That like made me giggle because I'm just like, it's just a little more blood.

00:43I love working with the families.

00:46I love working with the dead, especially just like restorative art and putting everyone

00:55back together and making them themselves again, not just a quote dead person.

01:01I've always loved like top model and what not to wear and all of those like final makeover

01:10reveals and stuff.

01:11So I kind of treat it like that, like we're at a spa.

01:26Morning, you're now entering the embalming room.

01:28All right, here we are.

01:30It's kind of small, nothing special.

01:32Here are some eye caps and some hemostats and scissors.

01:39That is our embalming machine.

01:42The embalming process is, you know, cleaning your body, disinfecting your body, injecting

01:50formaldehyde in your artery and flushing out the blood out of your vein.

01:57I don't like to just embalm and get it done like in 20 minutes or like half an hour.

02:05Like I just really like to like brush the cream on your face and like really, it's intentional

02:13for me.

02:14I cosmetize them.

02:15I put their makeup on however you want.

02:19I contact the family and, you know, ask what was their usual situation.

02:27Like did they have no makeup, makeup?

02:29Were they like all about eyeliner?

02:32I even go as far as to go to the thrift store and pick out a dress for you if you don't

02:38have family.

02:45I grew up above our funeral home.

02:48I wasn't like a Wednesday Addams or anything like that.

02:51I was very much like a Veda Sultan fuss from my girl, just like, you know, nosy and going

02:59downstairs and like lurking around while my dad is like, you know, setting up flowers.

03:06When I was little, I used to skip dance class and hide underneath a sea of caskets and do

03:14my homework.

03:15I wasn't thinking like of going into the funeral business at all, but it kind of just happened.

03:24You have to be a really good communicator and you have to, the most important is patience

03:30because you're, you're handling families at the most sensitive time in their life.

03:37A lot of the time I'm, I'm a huge empathetic BB.

03:41Like I can really put myself in some people's shoes and you just think this person just

03:48lost their child or like this person just lost their dad.

03:53Like how would I feel if I lost my dad?

03:56And so you just want to give them a service that really means something.

04:02Sometimes you just get really hard cases.

04:04Today, unfortunately we have a very small baby in, in our funeral home.

04:13Normally I can, you know, can keep composure with these things, but I think it's important

04:18for you to see that funeral directors are not heartless, greedy monsters.

04:24I'm grateful to TikTok for a creative outlet and to give me a platform to educate people.

04:41It's really nice when people just reach out and say, Hey, K you inspired me to go to school,

04:49which is great because every funeral convention that I sit in on, it's just like, they always

04:57make it a point to say, like, we need funeral directors.

05:00We need a younger generation of funeral directors.

05:04And here we are.

05:06We might have pink hair, but we're, we have good hearts.

05:10Everyone is going to die.

05:20It is the one thing that we have in common.

05:22I'm not asking you to think about this and dwell on this every day, like, you know, but

05:29just maybe once a month, if you think about it, just acknowledging that death is, is real

05:38can really help curb your fears surrounding death.

05:44I will never judge anyone for how they want to dispose of their body.

05:49Some people will like poo poo embalming and everything like that.

05:53But I'm, I always say this, it's whatever makes you feel safe.

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