Death and dying memorabilia quickly filled attendees' bags at the National Funeral Director Association's conference last week at the Las Vegas Convention Center, in what seemed like a costume-free Halloween for undertakers. In the spirit of the season, candy and cookies abound, though no raisins were distributed. Shriveled grapes are neither trick nor treat, and these funeral directors, corpse make-up artists and general purveyors of death products knew it, deigning instead to hand out "Advanced Interment Systems" coffee mugs, "Don't get burned! Frigid fluids" pot holders and pencils that change color at the touch (assuming that touch is a warm, living temperature, the pencil-givers pointed out). The "Discovering Your Oasis" conference attracted more than 3,300 funeral directors from around the world.
The Eternal Reefs (www.eternalreefs.com) booth, decorated with plastic lobsters, plastic crabs, a sea turtle and reefs, offered an enterprising and ecologically sound postmortem option: Cremated remains are mixed with concrete and dropped into the ocean to flourish for all eternity. Don Brawley, the company's founder, stands amid the sea creatures providing information about his creation. It's a living memorial, he says, one that grows algae, which feeds fish, thus sustaining life, replenishing the ocean's depleted reef supply and sustaining the ecosystem.
"Even if nobody ever visits these memorials, again, they're reefs. They're going to be visited every day by all the fish and the life that's out there," he says. Rather than decomposing in the ground, or getting sprinkled at sea, these memorials truly give something back. "It's good for the environment, good for the families involved. It's a win-win-win situation."
A few booths away, men in suits encourage attendees to have their pictures taken with a large mummy. Enthusiastic takers stand between the top of the Egyptian tomb and the mummy that sits next to it, some even draping their arm over the mummy's gauze, and smile for the camera. This is Summum Mummification (www.summum.org), a Salt Lake City company that, for $67,000, will ensure that your body will remain with the Earth, decomposition-free, ad infinitum.
How? First they remove the organs, clean them out, and dunk the body in "an immersion bath" for three or four months. "When the body comes out, it's just like when they just died. It's not all dehydrated," explains a Summum rep. "We put the internal organs back in, sew them back up, we wrap them with cotton gauze and we paint a polyurethane membrane on the cotton that just penetrates a little ways into the cotton because we put a lanolin coating over the body so the skin is protected. And we wrap them with fiberglass and there's a solid chrysalis that forms a cocoon around the body." They then place the body in the casket, surrounded it with resin, force all the air out and weld the top on. After that it's eternally preserved for burial, mausoleum placement, interior decoration or whatever you choose.
To the right of the mummies, a man is wheeling a gurney out of a man-sized refrigerator. To the left is a hearse fit for double-decker coffins. Ahead, there are animal cremation booths, marble urn pedestals and sign-up sheets for Grief Digest. Oreck Vacuums have taken advantage of the show, setting up near the Natural Crematory Gardens, where large fake rocks and tree stumps can hold your ashes in the ground. Across the way, a banner advertises "Odor-control products for the funeral industry." They're orange-scented cleaners, and the nice-looking woman working the booth sits behind a bowl of Halloween-themed cookies that passersby are free to indulge in. They, too, are orange.
The Frigid Fluid company reps are touting their line of embalming fluids, hardening compounds (don't ask), the Da Vinci morgue table (a fiberglass specimen modeled after the heavy porcelain tables of yesteryear) and medical scissors and scalpels. A salesman points out that their casket-lowering device and embalming fluids are their hot items. "We supply your last drink and your last ride," he laughs.
An aisle away, an ashen, taut-skinned man, who looks a Frigid Fluid poster boy, is singing karaoke funeral tunes, and Ethereal Cosmetics ("Designed by funeral directors for funeral directors") has a makeup artist on hand, poised and ready to do your colors. The National Museum of Funeral History is a hotbed of activity, selling Blair's Death Rain Chips, Undertakers University coffee mugs and Undertakers-brand root beer and spring water. There's a DNA retrieval company, various shipping companies ready to retrieve your body if you die away from home and a hearse and limo hardware station. Eckels Embalming Fluids advertises "Ask us about a free sample case of fluid," and the Cadillac hearses, Lincoln hearses, GMC hearses are all open for you to climb around in, should you choose to do so.
The only thing missing, it seemed, was a cryogenics booth, the cloning services of the Raelians and, of course, raisins.