11. I’m a funeral director. Learning the process of embalming was intense and seeing the process of decomposition actually encouraged me to write Greg Nicotero about how he could improve the zombies on The Walking Dead.
Here’s some facts:
The abdomen turns lime green when decomposition starts.
NO ONE dies with both their mouth and eyes closed unless there’s severe swelling.
The smell of a decomposing corpse can fill a huge building in minutes. It’s the most unbelievable, pungent, rotting Taco Bell diarrhea, awful smell that you can think of multiplied by a million.
Maggots don’t like Pine Sol.
Obese people being cremated smell like bacon.
Skinny people being cremated smell like fireworks.
We have to take a special gun called a needle injector to punch a barb attached to a wire into your gums, to get them to shut.
We use plastic eye caps to fill in the eye socket because the eyes deflate. The caps have spikes on them to keep your lids shut.
There’s a device called a trocar which, is my zombie apocalypse weapon, and is a VERY sharp hollow instrument that we use to puncture the abdomen, stab the organs repeatedly, and aspirate out the fluids.
Every race is the same milky red color on the inside and even under just a few layers of skin. (Skin commonly sloughs off after death.)
Yes, if you had urine or gas in your system, when you die, there’s no muscles to hold defecation, period expulsion, and farts back. We commonly have to “plug” the vagina and anus.
I specialized in reconstructive cosmetology so I have a plethora of knowledge on putting faces back together… I’ve worked on rock slides, car accidents, hangings, decapitations, overdose, gun shot wounds, fire deaths, even bomb shrapnel.
I love my career… It’s really rewarding when I get to give families the chance at a peaceful goodbye.
It’s a difficult job though… on call 24/7.
It’s been really difficult getting into this field because it’s run, primarily, by older men who think women belong in the kitchen.
– Tejnin
