Death

In the dead of night, as people sleep, that's when the spirits creep. As the bell tolls three, dark things take power. We like to call it the supernatural hour. And now, our hosts.

You don't see that every day. Hey, put that away, Tim. That's a 18-inch long tongue going on. Wait a second, that's not leaves you're feeding it though.

What's the tongue? What's it doing there? I know. Today, Junior.

What's the supernatural hour, everybody? We're recording. We are recording. That's when.

And we are talking about a giraffe. By the way, get your mind out. I got her people. Giraffe.

Giraffe. Giraffe. I made it worse, I know. But I did it on purpose.

Jeffery the giraffe. Oh, that's sad, though. That's why giraffe's fun. It has been two long weeks.

And we are back. And we missed all of you, which is only partially lie. We missed most of you. I am your host, Castle.

I clearly missed you because you're still around. Right. We've got Tim, aka Beaker. What's happening?

We've got beaches, aka Brandi, aka Beaches. We've got Baker, we've got pages. Just move on, son. And we've got Lert.

So. Missing today is Brandi Cinnamon. I think she fell and broke a hip. Missing?

Oh, she's gone. She's gone. Yeah. Brandi Cinnamon broke a hip.

Well, when you're spinning around on those poles, sometimes you get a little too. They go greasy. At the age of 80 with the osteoporosis. Now is she.

She has to take her calcium pills. She is traveling and will be back with us next show, perhaps, depending on what her schedule is. So, it has been two weeks. And we have had.

How long has it been? Two weeks. Two weeks. Two weeks.

Half a month. Super secret. Oh, I'm glad you brought up Super Secret. We ran into a snag on our Super Secret investigation.

We had scheduled. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that, Tim? Yeah, Castle let out where it was on the last episode. Are you kidding me?

I did not. No, he had it. I'm sorry if I ever say that. He did some really awesome editing.

It sounded like Rimmland's fighting in the background. No, there's been some technical difficulties with the location. And we will be unable to be in that location until sometime next year. We are going to keep our eyes out for another location.

And it's for health and safety reasons. So, it's not like we just said, hey, we're not going to do this. It's from the powers to be. Yeah, there were actually some safety issues.

Yeah, basically some infrastructure at the place. Yeah. Kind of went capoey and they're fixing that. We don't want you to investigate a building that's going to crash on top of you.

So, that would be bad. Exactly. There might be lawsuits. We can't pay those out.

We didn't get no money. You know about time for that. So, speaking of us not having money because we don't. We have got a new event coming up in the middle of August.

We're calling it Paranormal or Haunted one. I want to call it. It'll be August 17th at 7pm. And it's actually going to be a little bit different than anything that we've done before.

So, it will be as you can come to a lecture that we're going to do where we'll show ghost photos that we've captured. We'll play EVPs. We will basically talk about Paranormal and all things Paranormal complete with pictures. And then after that.

I got pictures of your mom. Do you? Yeah. Sweet lady.

Makes a wonderful Sunday roast. After the lecture, we're going to do a brief investigation. So, there are a couple options as far as tickets go. Who's brief for you investigating?

Mine. Step into the dark room alone with me. Let's investigate. Together.

Okay. Well, you're doing that. That's a little type of investigating. Well, while you're doing that.

That's not okay. I'll be sprawled out on some long deck chairs chilling by the pool. Probably drinking a margarita. That's right.

You're going to be out of state. I'm going to be visiting the Winchester mansion that day. Meanwhile, I will be at Fort Douglas not getting on KSL. So, we've got a couple options.

First off, as you can come to the lecture. We've actually done this lecture before one time. It's a very successful event. That was the one at the Salt Lake Library, wasn't it?

Way back when? Yeah, we did it way back when it's Salt Library. We had a great turnout. We had a great time.

So, we've decided that we're going to do this again at Fort Douglas. I remember Bill was that one. You just don't need sushi beforehand. Yeah, do not eat sushi beforehand.

I can stomach it. It does not sit with you. I can handle it. There was a lot of...

What's funny is it's just that one location. If you go to the other one. Oh, okay. There was a whole lot of tummy grumbling for the recording.

All right. Because we did an investigation. I got to go. All right.

Yeah, I'm fine. I need to step on the porch for just a minute. Someone turn on the Bluetooth speaker. This one's going to be a loud one.

Okay. All right. Yep. We're telling poop and fart jokes.

So, we've got a couple ticket options. First off, if you want to buy a single ticket, just for the lecture only, it is 15 bucks. If you want to bring a date, two tickets are $25, so we give you a little bit of a discount, and that's just for the lecture. There are some upgraded tickets.

So, for $25, you can come to the lecture and investigation, or it's $40 for two tickets. So, $20 each. If you want to bring a date, or a friend, or something along those lines. But we hope to see you there.

It's August 17th. You can go to advancedpenermal.com to purchase those tickets. If you come to the lecture and you change your mind, if you said you want to do the investigation, we will let you upgrade at the venue. So, we hope to see you guys there.

And by we, probably me, Lurch, and maybe a couple others, Tim is going to be drinking drinks with umbrellas. And this is Fort Douglas too, right? Fort Douglas is always active. There's always activity going on there.

We seem to always catch something. There's, I mean, there's four-diggles in family drink. Yeah, four-diggles. Yeah.

So, we're going to go to the military museum theater. And so, we can break right after the lecture and go straight into an investigation. Now, this is our spot. Formally known as the Bad Building.

Is that what it is? That's correct. This is something we call the Bad Building. If you listen to Radio Ronin, this is the building where Peaches went wandering off into the sprinklers.

Yeah, because we never talked about it. This is the building that has the poker room in the back. I can't even freakin' talk today. Poker room.

You make me so self-conscious. The way you make a set room. This has got the headstones and the bones in the base. It's got the bones, yeah.

They're not human remains, despite rumors you make. They're cow bones. They are. I actually think there are several different sets of bones down there.

I think there's cow bones and human remains. There might well be, but it was like, I don't know. The ones you saw were definitely cow bones. The ones that I've seen have definitely been cow bones.

Like from someone's stake where they ate a T-bone or something just through the bone out into the yard. This is a T-bone from the year 1823. That's awesome. Alright.

So, let's get on with it. Tonight's episode is going to be something a little different. And we're going to kind of give it to Lurch. We've talked about ghosts, we've talked about different religions, we've talked about everything, but what we haven't really touched on itself.

Death. Death. Mega Death. Don't think you want to touch Death.

Death. Dun, dun, dun. So, it's all you Lurch. Vani, I don't really know where to segue into this.

I was going to just talk about kind of the history of this one time at Bandcamp. Yeah. Don't even go there. Let's start a little bit through background.

I don't think a lot of people really know your background. I know you touched on it before and past episodes, but I don't think we've really gotten to the nitty gritty of what it was that you used to do. So, for 10 years, I was actually a licensed funeral director here in the city of Utah. I worked for four different funeral homes.

One of them I consider more of like a corporation. Actually, two of them I consider more of a corporation. One was kind of a local Salt Lake area. I was a family owned business that had seven different locations and nine different cemeteries.

And then the other was more of a nationally and actually internationally owned corporation before that I worked for to mom and pop funeral homes. So, I've done everything from, you know, you get called out in the middle of the night at 2am to go make a removal at someone's house because mom passed away in her sleep. You go pick her up. I've done everything from that until the time that she's in the ground and the cemeteries filling in the hole, everything in between.

You pick up the person. You do the preparation. You do the embalming. I operated a retort for one of the locations that I was at.

You dress and casket the bodies. You prepare the service. You contact all the clergy. You get all the coordination set up for, you know, arranging flowers and programs.

All the little details, you're there with the family, the day of the service. You're there to supervise the internment when the family's left and you watch the casket go over to the ground. But yeah, everything from the time you pick the person up to the time that they are in the ground, entombed to that for 10 years. And I was actually recognized nationally by the National Funeral Directors Association, bringing the top 2% of funeral directors in the country and both the US and North America.

But unfortunately, it wasn't enough to provide me with job security. I was laid off four times in those 10 years, so I'm currently back in school and taking a different route in my life. So if we can, we're going to interview mode here and you're going to be our guest. That sounds great.

No, that sounds good. So why are we? Let's talk removal. When, let's explain that whole process to us.

What happens when you remove somebody from the time you get the call to kind of how that goes? So what happens is it's called a first call where a family member or someone from the hospital contacts us. And it's the very first call they make after the person has passed away and they said, Hey, we just had someone passed away. We need to make arrangements.

We'll gather some information from the board of the phone, name of the incident. Maybe just like some general statistics, date of birth, date of passing, time of passing, social if they have it. All stuff that will later gather from the family as well for coordinating the death certificates with the state. But we'll get that as much information where they're located.

And depending on the time of the day or what the location is, sometimes we'll send one person by themselves. If the family's not present or sometimes we'll send two people, the family is present. If it's in a hospital or if it's in residence, because sometimes those places can be a little tricky. Especially if you're in front of family members, you want to make a look graceful.

You want to make a look ease and put the family at ease. And yeah. You know, I say you send one person by themselves with the family's not there. I just have this picture of somebody trying to wrestle this body.

Oh yeah. Trapped underneath the body, calling it a second person for help. Oh yeah. The body's falling and trapped them on the ground.

I've actually been in that situation where I've gone on a late night removal like, you know, in the wee hours of night until the wee hours of morning. And I don't remember exactly where it was. I don't remember the details. But I do recall at least a handful of times showing up at like a care center by myself to make a removal on someone's past away in their bed.

And they're literally like four or five hundred pounds. And I'm just like, oh crap, how am I going to do this? Sometimes the nurses will be there to help you. Sometimes they don't.

Sometimes they'll like, oh there he is and they'll walk away. And it's like, okay, do you not see that he's like twice my size? But you know, I handled it. I'm a pretty big guy.

I was able to wrestle them by myself, but I always appreciate the help. I've been there. Yeah, it's definitely the struggle is real. So you show up or somebody else shows up with you and you guys do removal.

What happens after you guys get them on the gurney? Now, do you guys put them like in a body bag or cover with a sheet or how do you guys do that? No, we don't have any products for removals, but usually when I present for removal, they're going to put the medical exam in the office and they go on a body bag. Exactly.

Yeah. Medical examers office, that's a state government organization. They do things differently. The guys that make the removals for them, they're privately contracted and they'll show up in a pair of jeans and a dirty t-shirt.

Whereas if we're working for a private funeral home, even if family's not there, we're dressed in a business suit to the nines, 2 a.m. You put on a suit. Even if family's not going to be there because you're setting this rapport of professionalism. You can trust us.

But yeah, you get them onto the gurney, you contact the family. If it's late in the night, usually don't do any preparation until the morning. Sometimes people would work after hours because they can get overtime, plus they could also get a little bit of incentive for doing the embalming or doing the preparation. After hours.

So there's always a way to supplement or income that way. But usually you contact the family, find out what they want to do. If they want to have a burial, if they want to have a viewing, you know, like to have a visitation, it's not required by law. But pretty much any funeral home is going to save.

We require it for health and safety issues that we do require embalming. What embalming does is it does 3 main things. It restores a healthy appearance. It retards the growth of microorganisms and reduces decay.

So it's kind of like a temporary form of preservation. I think what a lot of people don't realize, and I think in the group here, I think you and I have both experienced recently to see, probably more than anybody. But a fresh dead body or even a dead body that's been a day or two old before it's been embalmed. They're not pretty.

They're not. They're usually kind of grayish, levity set in. It's the blood's pooled down. If they're like died face down, their faces usually all mushed up and kind of frozen and then mushed up.

Look at how they're being pushed into the carpet. I'm always amazed when I go on a dead body call and people want to see their loved one before the medical examiner's office or funeral home picks them up. I always kind of tell them you can, but you're better off waiting a day until they've been properly embalmed. You don't want your final memories to be of grandma's face all mushed up because she died face down.

That's exactly right. And the carpet and her noses all pushed up and are all mushed together. I wish I could paint the picture for people. It's not pretty.

I've got a story for you if you got just another moment too. This is actually, it kind of hits close to home because I found out later that one of the sons in this family, his wife, is my wife's cousin. So anyways, I go to this removal and dad, he's probably in his mid to late 60s, possibly early 70s. He's lying face down in the middle of the floor, his family's all around him.

He was in the shower and I guess he had a hard tech coming out and he was naked and he fell down in the middle of the living room and he had blood coming out of his nose. The EMTs were there and they had tried the defibrillator and had left the pads on him and all they really did was just like through a bathrobe over him. So the guy's naked. This is dad.

This is their dad, their husband, their dad that they've looked up to their whole life. And it's a terrible scene. So we show up, we take him back into our care. Excuse me, it turns out that the family wants to cremate him.

But before we do the creation, we give them an opportunity to have a moment to privately view him. And what I had done is I had bathed his body, I'd washed his hair, I'd set his features, closed his mouth, closed his eyes, got him dressed in the clothes they gave me. I had him looking really good on a table in a private room. They came in and it was like a night and day experience for them.

They were in tears. They're like, this is exactly what we needed. We needed this final closure of him not being bleeding and naked in the middle of our house. We needed to see him looking peaceful and you did that.

And it was just a great experience. And I've got so many experiences like that too, just being able to help families in difficult situations like that. So now explain to us the embalming process. What does that entail?

So you've done removal, you get back to the funeral home and I realize this is probably going to be a little bit graphic. That's okay. I'll try to keep it as PG as I can. Essentially what it is, it's a fluid transfer.

You're making an incision on the collarbone and you're using some instruments to kind of separate the fascia, separate the tissue and you're raising two vessels. You're raising the carotid artery and the jugular vein. And what you're essentially doing is you're making two holes in both of these vessels and you're injecting fluid, the embalming fluid into the carotid artery, which then goes into the heart and throughout the entire circulatory system, your legs, your arms, your face, your head. And it pushes all the blood out of the jugular vein.

So you're injecting into one artery and it goes through your entire body and it pushes all the blood out. And then the embalming fluid itself, it's kind of like, like I mentioned, it's a preservation technique, but it changes the structure of proteins where when you touch someone that's been embalmed, they kind of have a stiff feeling to them. A lot of people think that's rigor mortis, rigor mortis comes and goes, but the embalming, it will permanently kind of set those proteins. Like if you've ever seen the body worlds exhibit the plasticization, that's kind of like a more thorough form of embalming where they're just preserving the muscle, the protein, and the tissue.

So it can be on display, that's kind of what you're doing with embalming. There was a guy that I worked with that they did a disinterment, is what they call it, where they open up the grave. They take the casket out and they're going to move the casket to another location or whatever they're going to do. And so they open up this grave and it was from a young man that had passed away in the 70s.

They opened up the grave, opened up the vault, and the casket is literally floating in water, so they're like, oh crap, this is going to be bad. They get the casket out, the casket is one of those sealed caskets, it has a gasket going around the entire perimeter of the lid. That casket has a gasket. Yeah, and it's locked down.

So essentially it's like a locked chest with this watertight seal around it, so they open up the casket and open up the lid, and he looks just as good as the day that he was buried. And that's like the best case scenario, that's what ideally embalming does. It's temporary. There are other scenarios where you're just trying to slow down the decomposition processing that for the family to have the viewing and to get them in the ground because it's getting bad.

So we've faced all kinds of... It's a constant challenge of trying to problem solve of how would we best make this person presentable. Well, I guess in reality, anyone who's ever dealt with an involved dead body, it takes almost no time at all for them to smell really bad. Well, once they're involved, there's no smell at all.

And if they're not going to be involved, we had a walk-in cooler where we would keep all the bodies. So there wasn't really a smell there either. If you're going to start preparing someone, you've got to first de-clothe them, and oftentimes there's bowel movements. People, you know, pee themselves, happens all the time.

Everything's loose, everything just kind of comes out. There's body fluids, out the nose, out the mouth. I said this is really graphic, it doesn't happen all the time. But death is not pretty, what we'd always say, death is very ugly at times.

It's not a neat package. So you've talked a little bit about the embalming fluids. Let's move past PG. Let's talk a little bit about the trail car.

The trail car. Okay, so yeah, it embalming many stages of preservation. The main one is, like I said, the embalming fluid injected into the body. Which is so hazardous, by the way.

It's all car gigantic. I get that product from my work. It all causes cancer. It has met.

Right? And then you still have certain areas that haven't been fully preserved, which is like, you know, your abdomen, your chest cavity. So you have something called a trail car, and you can even Google images, I'm sure. It's probably about, I don't know, two and a half feet long.

It's a giant needle that probably has a diameter of about a centimeter. And the front tip has a nice point on it with some holes. So essentially what you're doing is you're poking a hole into their belly, and it's sucking. You're poking holes in all of, I know this is really graphic, you're poking holes in all of the organs, and sucking any residual blood or gases or fluids out of the chest and the abdomen area.

And then once you've kind of poked and sucked as much as you could, then you inject with, through the trail car, you inject some even more concentrated, special blend of cavity fluid. That's a lot stronger. Concentrate. You inject that into the chest and the abdomen.

Because usually the first point of decomposition is going to be in the abdomen area, and there's a lot of natural flora in your gut that really goes rampant after you die. Yeah, basically your body keeps that stuff in check until you die. Then once your body stops biting it off, it just starts to basically ease it from inside out. From dust to dust.

I mean, it's nature's way of just resetting everything. So now after you've embalmed somebody, do they need to go back in the cooler? No. We've had people that have said, you know, we're waiting for a family member that's flying in from Alaska.

They're on a fishing boat. They won't be back in dock until two weeks from now. And no problem. Once you've embalmed someone, you know, we use different lingo.

You know, you get them tight. You embal them tight. Get them nice and tight, which means you know, you really hit them with that embalming fluid, really preserved them really well. So there's no chance of them decomposing at all.

But yeah, basically once they're embalmed, they can sit for a few days. They can sit for a week or two. It's, like I said, it's a preservation technique. Now, is there anything that you have to do to help keep a body preserved if you're going to wait that long?

No, sometimes there's a little dehydration. So the chemicals can really dry out the skin tissue. So what you usually do is you'll take some cream, you'll smear it all over their face so that their face doesn't get dry. Otherwise, sometimes the nose will dry up.

The cartilage will dry up. The tips of their fingers. So you want to kind of hydrate the outside as well. But no, once they're embalmed, you've got everything closed up and sewn up and looking nice and neat.

And essentially they're just sitting on a table with a cloth over them and some hydrating cream on their face until it's time to actually get them ready for the service. And then you take the cream off and you get them dressed and you place them in the casket and put a makeup on them depending on if they're male or female. You want a very amount of makeup. You don't want a dad to look like Edgar Hoover.

He may have been a drag queen in real life, but we don't need to make an issue of it. But yeah. And then that's pretty much it. So obviously, I'm sure most of our listeners see the news.

Let's say a body that's been dredged out of the Jordan River that's been there for a week or two. Or somebody who hasn't been found for a week or two. Or somebody who's been mangled in the car accident. But basically, let's see you get a body in the less than prime condition.

It tells you the process on that. We go to the medical examiner first. Anything that is a homicide accident, suicide or suspicious. Any of those four categories would go to the medical examiner first and they would determine the cause of death.

Sometimes there's toxicity reports that they need to run if they're getting samples of urine or blood samples. They run reports to see whether or not they're under the influence of any sort of drugs or alcohol. They sample tissues. They test everything.

So if there's something like that, they're doing a third examination. I had the privilege one time when I was still an intern at the very first funeral home I worked at where we had a guy that passed away in his bathtub. And he wasn't found for like a day or two later. And so it was really bad.

He had really bad skin slippage. He was not good at all. He smelled very unpleasant. But the medical examiner, one of the medical examiners actually came to our funeral home in Provo and did the autopsy there.

And I was still in school at the time. I was studying anatomy at the time. So it was really cool to be able to hang out with him. And he was showing me everything and he's pointing things out.

And he's able to pretty much determine that he had a heart attack because there was some calcium build up. And one of the arteries in his heart. He's slicing some of the arteries in his heart. He pulls the heart out of the guy's chest and he slices some arteries.

And he's pointing at the calcium bits. And it's just an amazing experience to be able to witness something like that. But you have someone who passes away unexpectedly if there's any kind of suspicion for foul play, for accident, for suicide, homicide. It goes to the medical examiner first.

So we don't even get involved in that side of it. We just handle the family dealing with the situation and providing that transition for burial so they can make a piece of things and pick up the pieces and move on to speak. So let's talk skin slippage because I know what you're talking about. Our listeners may not.

What is skin slippage? Disclamation. It's skin slippage. It's like when someone's been in water for a long time, it's kind of like the skin, the top layer kind of peels off.

Like I've grabbed someone's hand before that had been passed away for a day or so. And that first few layers of skin just kind of peels off. And you go to grab like their forearm and it's like pulling off a glove. That's the best way I can describe it.

Like that top layer of skin just pulls off and slips off. And I've seen skin slippage before. Yeah, basically the skin starts to decompose for lack of a better term. And it breaks and pulls off like you said like a glove.

And that happens a lot when they've been soaking in water or when advanced decomps starts to sit in. So now the medical examiner, they usually cut those bodies up pretty good when they're doing their examinations. What do you guys do to make somebody who's been examined not look like they've been examined? The only kind of things that the medical examiner will do is they'll make like a Y incision on the chest and abdomen.

Where just like in like the CSI shows, they've got an incision in the shape of Y on their chest and they use that to open up and to open up the rib cage and to literally pull out all of the internal organs. They'll weigh everything. They'll check for abnormalities. But when they're done, they put everything into a bag and then they place that bag back inside the cavity.

Sometimes they'll even do what's called a post-examination where they'll make an incision across the back of the skull from one ear to the other ear. And then push the hair and the top of the scalp forward so they can actually take off the calvary of the top of the skull and do any kind of testing on the brain. Remove the brain and make some tissue samples of that. It's pretty simple.

Once we get someone that's been full of top seed, it's a little bit more intensive. The evolving process, you've got to do a little bit more work. You're taking out this bag of organs. You're pouring the evolving fluid into that actual bag while you're doing the evolving process.

Instead of just raising the vessels by the neck, by the collarbone, you're actually going inside the cavity and you're finding those arteries of the face. The arm arteries, the femoral artery in the legs, the brachial artery in the arms and then the corona arteries in the neck. So you're finding all the different arteries from the inside of the cavity and injecting on those different sides. Then just putting everything back together and sewing it all up and making them look pretty.

Sometimes we would get them dressed in a plastic jumpsuit or if they needed just like a top or if they needed just a bottom. Sometimes we had footies where we'd get them fully dressed with just their hands showing and from the neck up. So once they're dressed, once they have their clothes on, you can't even really tell if they're in anything. You're only seeing from the neck up and their hands.

Even if they're having organ recovery, what Mike was talking about, Mike Finley, he used to work for the organ recovery. He mentioned that they would often get bone grafts. They'd actually pull out long bones for marrow and for transplants, different joints and stuff. Even that, they're taking out the long bones and replacing it literally with PVC pipe or broomsticks I've seen.

Anything to hold that leg shape and then they'll sew it back up and then we do the repair work from there. So even really dramatic stuff like that, you can still work around. We had a lady that, I'm not sure if anyone remembers in the news about, probably been about five or six years now, there was a young married couple that went to Zion National Park. They were kind of adventure seekers, adrenaline junkies and they base jumped off of Angel's Landing and her parachute never opened.

This is like a day or two after they got married. She was literally not in good condition. I don't want to say anything disrespectful, but it was kind of like a bag of gelatin. It just kind of squished around.

There was no structure at all. So what we did, because the family still wanted to have kind of a viewing here quotations. So what we did was we got her all dressed up and then the family gave us her parachute and we draped the parachute over her in the casket and had a white glove on her right hand. And that was the only thing that was really above the parachute.

So the family could still walk up, they could hold her hand and see her underneath the parachute, kind of see her form. So there's ways to kind of problem solve around that. So what about like advanced decomposition of somebody who's been found at considerable time after they passed? How would you guys address something like that?

You typically recommend cremation. If it's really bad, then yeah, you just kind of have to be 100% honest until the family like, you know, look, we can try to embalm him. But we have a certain window. We're not miracle workers.

We work with what we have, the tools we have and do the best we can. But I've been completely honest with family. It's like, you know, look, he's so far gone. Even if we try to embalm, it's not going to do anything to change the condition.

We can give you some time to view him privately if you want to. You know, you can make your own decision from there if you want to. If you want me to go ahead and pursue that, I can. But I've been completely honest and said, you know, in my opinion, my expertise, I would not pursue embalming.

I would not pursue having a public viewing in certain situations. And usually situations like that, two families are kind of in the same mindset like, oh, we're going to cream it anyways. We're not going to have a viewing. We know that he doesn't look good.

We've done a lot with cosmetics. We've done a lot with, you know, you have like a thin fabric, like a veil, and you drape that over the head of the casket. So it kind of clouds the appearance of how they look. So if they're really disfigured and the family still insists on, you know, having kind of an open viewing, there's still ways to get around that.

You know, if we've used this veil fabric where it's translucent, you can kind of see the person in there, but it really hides a lot of the problem areas. No, you mentioned cremation. Talk to us a little bit about cremation and what you guys have to do to prepare a body for that. That entails, if there's any special things you have to look out for.

Hope you guys aren't bored. You look like your body that falls asleep there, Tim. I don't mean to... I may have already fallen asleep.

You may have. I think it's interesting. So cremation. Yeah, so what would you do to prepare?

First of all, there's a lot of paperwork that the family has to sign. They have to, you know, sign away that they've, you know, positively identified the person, and there's a lot of steps you do because cremation is irreversible. If you make a mistake, you're facing a lot of potential lawsuits from families, and so we took a lot of measures to make sure that we were checking and double checking and triple checking to make sure we had the right person. We were doing the right thing at the right time and had all the paperwork in order, the death certificate, everything just, you know, taken care of.

So we knew without a doubt that we were doing the right thing that all the checks had been marked. Eyes have been dotted, teas have been crossed. But essentially what you would do is you have a big retort and you heat it up to 1,700 degrees. You place the person inside of a cardboard box.

We always use a cardboard box because it was more respectful than just having wrapped in a bed sheet. Plus it's easier to slide them into the retort when they're in a box. So you'd slide them into the box and you would close the door, fire through the door to about 1,700 degrees for about an hour or two. And sometimes you'd have to reposition the remains halfway through, so you'd have to open up the door a little bit, take this ten-foot middle pull, excuse me, and kind of reposition the body a little bit, you know, shuffle things around so that it's all burning evenly.

Excuse me, I'm kind of burpy, drink-oake. And then once it's done, a lot of people think, oh, that's it. But you still have to sweep out the retort. There's still large calcified fragments of bone.

And these are big pieces. So you take all of those remains and you put them into basically like an industrial blender. It's a metal blender and it breaks up all those bone fragments. You have to take a huge magnet and pull out any kind of metal because that can damage the blender.

Sometimes people have like implants, titanium screws and rods, so you got to take all of that stuff out, all the metal pieces, and then you blend up all the bones. Because if you were not to do that and you were to get the remains back to a family and they decided to go sprinkle the ashes out in the middle of the woods with these huge chunks of bones and then a hiker comes along and they're like, holy crap, you know, someone got killed here or a bear killed someone or there was a murder. And so it starts this huge police investigation for nothing. And so that's why you break up the bone.

So it's unrecognizable and you can scatter remains like that. So you're saying it's not to use a food processor at the funeral because you don't know if they use it to chop up bones before you make yourself. Although what's that a processor company here in Utah that the Remco, what is it, the blender? Blendtec.

Yeah, that can probably do the job. Those blenders can like chop up a hard drive. You can have one of those. I think we've got one upstairs, but yeah, you can like chop up a garden rake.

I take the pep to challenge. I try to process some human remains on one of those. If anyone has some dead body lying around, freshly cremated, lurch knows how to take care of them. Now I remember you told me a story once about, tell me a story.

You've told me a few stories about the crematory stuff. Please tell me I have another story time. Now one of the stories you told me is about how the cremate people who are obese and another one was getting to remove from a body prior to cremating them. Yeah, so first of all, removing items from a body before they're cremated, certain things like a what do you call for a pacemaker for a heart pacemakers often have radioactive equipment in them.

So if they had a pacemaker, you actually have to remove that before cremating. We've had other people with other types of implants. The families requested some of that stuff back. Sometimes it's implants like the metal in their back.

I had this one lady ask for it back because she was going to do some metal art in her backyard for the bird feeder. She wanted all these little bolts and nuts and stuff from her mom. I see the look you're giving me. It's bizarre stuff.

You have to remove some certain things. The pacemaker is the most important one because it has radioactive equipment. It can explode during the cremation process and damage the retort. So you have to remove that.

And then even with obese people, first of all, you have to place them in a cold retort because they have so much fat. That fat renders down into oil. We're talking like grease fires. Morbidly obese.

Morbidly obese people. No. You mean me, Tam kind of or these people. And so normally with the obese people, you would place them in feet first because where their chest would be located would be right underneath the flame.

But with a morbidly obese person, you place them in head first. So that flame is more towards their feet and it's slowly rendering this fat. Because if you burn it too fat, it's turning into a grease fire that's literally going to pour out the door of the retort. There was a funeral home here in Salt Lake area that a couple years ago they burned down the crematory.

The young buck, funeral director, son of the, no, he was the sending law of the owner. That's just fun, by the way. The sending law of the owner wasn't paying attention and he cremated a morbidly obese person that started to grease fire and literally burned down their entire building. So they had to build a bigger and better crematory.

It's kind of a joke among the funeral director here in the Salt Lake area that he's known as the fire starter. He's kind of a joke of a kid. That was an awkward conversation. He's going to be as far as getting the ashes back.

Well, that too. But I mean, yeah, never mind. I'm not going to say anything more about this particular individual power to him. He married into a great family.

He's got a business that will provide him and his family for generations of income. But yeah, that's it. I don't know. Cracks me up when people marry into wealth like that.

That's exactly what he did. Alright, so we've talked about cremation. So what happens with the ashes after you guys get those out? What happens with the ashes after we take them out?

We give them back to the family. You've grown up with the family and others do it. Sometimes they'll say like, you know, we're going to have an internment. They're going to actually place it into the ground or they're going to place it into a niche and a mausoleum.

Or sometimes they'll just hold on to it for themselves and they'll do whatever they want to later. What about turning your loved ones into diamonds? It's a thing. You can do that.

It's not as much ashes as people think. It's literally like maybe a tablespoon full of someone's remains. You can have them turned and pressed into a manufactured lab-made diamond. There's so many different options with cremation too.

I mean, there's different options with urns that are biodegradable, that are water-soluble. So you can take the remains, put them into an urn that floats on water and you push it out at sea and it stays afloat for five minutes and then slowly sinks into the water. There's biodegradable urns that eventually return everything back to the soil. There's urns that you can place your ashes in with a tree seed.

You can choose what seed you want and turn into a tree. So you can be buried with an acorn. I was going to see the people. I've been made into an maple.

I chose mine already. I got a little picked out and paid for. That's a thing. And then there's a great book called Stiff by Mary Roach that I wrote.

I read years and years ago and each chapter talks about different things with what happens to people that donate their body to science. That's an amazing read too. There's the chapter that talks about people that are in school for plastic surgery. They actually do that process on cadavers practicing the different...

There's different forms of decomposition that European countries are testing with where they'll actually grind up your body into ground beef. It's a fascinating read though. The body farm in Tennessee where they'll use it for forensic study with seeing how bodies decompose over certain periods of time and in different elements whether they're exposed or helps the crime scene investigators with determined causes of death when they can see the maggots are this size. That means the body's been out here for four days or this is happening now and they can tell all that stuff from the information gathered from the body ranch in Tennessee body farm.

People stuff. Now have you heard of liquid alkaline hydrolysis? I have not heard of liquid alkaline hydrolysis. Please enlighten me on what that is.

It's an interesting technique. I actually ran across this the other day. In fact there's an article on KSL if you go look for it. There's one funeral home here in Utah to Willa specifically who just ordered and installed the machine.

Actually I don't know if they've installed yet but I know they've ordered it. But what it is it's a kind of a big long round tank. Almost water heater looking but it looks like it can kind of tell up and down. It's considered liquid cremation.

So what they do is if you have passed away they put your body in place. I sure hope they do it after you passed away. Hey people have been burning crematories on the live before. There was that story that popped up a couple months back when the dude was taking an app and they're working through them in the fire pit.

Apparently that happened recently too. Another one has been two of those. That's a bad work there. Yeah I've read stories about that.

None of it's been here in Utah. I've read a story that happened a couple months ago and I want to say it's somewhere in the flyover states where he threw a fire pit. He threw a person into the crematory. Did not know that they were dead after alive.

Yeah I did not know that they were alive. I think we talked about that. He was exhausted and basically passed out. Yeah it's one of the other crematory workers wasn't he?

Yeah it's ridiculous. The intern cremated him by accident. Like I said cremation is... What's the guy that was taking an app in there?

Why would he take an app in the water pit? Why would you take a nap in a cardboard box in the retore? Maybe not to get caught on the job. I don't know but that was just stupid.

I will admit that I have taken an app or two but that's been out on the couch in the foyer area where I'm not going to be mistaken for a dead body. Alright so let's talk alkaline and liquid hydrolysis. What they do is they put the body in this tank and then they put a liquid alkaline solution in there and heat the tank up. I'm not sure how hot they heat it up too.

It basically turns the body into a syrupy liquid and then they essentially flush you down into the city wastewater system. It's basically a way to dispose of a body. It basically dissolves you into goo and away you go. So they start doing this after they watch the breaking bed?

That's essentially what happens with cremate or not cremation but with embalming too is that our embalming tables they would drain into a toilet. We actually had a toilet system. It's like a urinal. It's like a urinal.

The embalming table it's at an angle so everything flows down into a drain and then that drain there's a tube that connects into a urinal and you're periodically flushing it. So all we're doing is we're draining all this formaldehyde and blood back into the sewage system where it's treated and put back out is tap water. That's why I thought that right. So think about that next time drinking tap water.

That's all over the world. You have drank dead bodies before. Anyway so apparently this liquid alkaline hydrolysis is only legal in 16 states. You've done one.

You've done one of those states. And just recently this basically recently legalized it. So you can actually be dissolved into goo if you don't want to be. Right on.

So what I should do is present is I have no one to pick up there. Well with actually we do we used to do a man I forget the actual technical terms but it's like if no one has a next of kin it's a state. An unclaimed body. An unclaimed state paid for cremation.

And people when they find out about something for free they'll do everything they can to take advantage of a free burial. Because typically cremation is usually less expensive. Cremation today typical one I would say would be about two to four thousand dollars. But for burial you're looking at about ten to twelve thousand dollars or more.

But I've had I've experienced people that have bucked the system. They claim they don't have any money. And they're like yeah we heard that the state's going to pay for this. We want to have a viewing.

We want to have a burial. And it's like no no wait a second. The state will pay for a cremation. They'll pay $450 for us to cremate the body for you.

And that means no viewing, no visitation. We cremate. We give you back the ashes. You do whatever you want from that point.

But I've had people say that they've had no money and then the next day you see a two column obituary that cost them two thousand dollars. That runs for four days. And they're driving them Mercedes. And it's like okay you lied to me and I don't like being taken advantage in that regard.

But yeah that answer your question. I don't know what the question was. I don't know the question. I'm sure to answer it.

Okay. Can I supply my own coffin? Like if I build my own coffin I want them buried in this. Absolutely.

I've seen it happen more than a few times where people have made their own casket. Whether it's been a family member or the person themselves. I know of a couple people that have said dad built this casket 15 years ago and it's been propped up in our garage since then. And we knew that's going to be the caskets buried in.

You know you get the diameters for the measurements for the ground. Because what happens first is they dig the plot but then they place what's called a vault. And that's like a concrete box. What the vault does is it provides structure.

So if you get like a wooden casket that eventually decays you don't have all these sinkholes all over the cemetery. The vault provides structure so the casket inside everything can decay or rot or break down. But you still have the structure on the ground because you still got the backhoe. Excuse me.

You got the backhoe. Still got the dump truck that are driving over the ground to open up other plots. That makes sense. Yeah you can be you can choose to be buried in cardboard box if you wanted to.

There's certain requirements for cemeteries. Most cemeteries require a vault but don't require a casket. So if you wanted to go the cheap way of burial and say like you know they had no friends or family but we still want to bury them. You could get like a cardboard box and literally place them in the ground in a cardboard box.