Welcome to the hundred-and-forty-sixth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #146, where we’ll serve up bite-sized, easily-digestible nuggets of the deathcare news you need to crush conversations in the week ahead. Bon appetit!
Plea deals for Hallfords
Jon and Carie Hallford of Return to Nature infamy have been offered plea deals:
- Jon Hallford would plead guilty to 190 counts of Abuse of a Corpse and serve a total of 20 years in the Department of Corrections (concurrent to any federal sentence he may receive).
- Carie Hallford would plead guilty to 190 counts of Abuse of a Corpse and serve a total of 15-20 years in the Department of Corrections (concurrent to any federal sentence she may receive).
They will be in court this week, where they could accept or deny the deals.
Deathcore?
They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, so should deathcare professionals be flattered that metalcore (the Gen Z equivalent of what Gen X called heavy metal and punk rock) bands are using deathcare terminology for their names, songs, and concerts? Well, it’s a thing. Let’s see … There are bands named Caskets, The Undertakers, Fit For an Autopsy, After the Burial, Upon a Burning Body, and Your Memorial. There’s also a subgenre called deathcore (with bands like Cryptopsy and Through the Eyes of the Dead). Death-themed bands aren’t a new thing at all, however; one Redditor estimates that there have been 1,194 bands with “death” in their names.
NOR in the UK
Architectural students at the University of West England recently put their work on display in a showcase that demonstrated a “heightened awareness” of “political and environmental instability.” So it makes sense that one of the projects, called “Life After Death,” tackled the most environmentally-friendly disposition method, natural organic reduction (NOR). The student’s project takes NOR a step further by using the soil generated by the NOR process to actually “grow the fabric of the building.”
Casket cookout
This idea may be a little late for your Fourth of July holiday plans, but you have plenty of time to convert that old policy casket that’s hanging out in your garage into a handy-dandy grill to debut on Labor Day! For specific instructions, check out this article in HouseDigest.
Mar-whats?
Oh, the perils of the cemeterians. It’s an ongoing theme in the 4M, sadly. These days it seems that cemetery workers need expertise in criminal investigation, law enforcement, and wildlife biology to properly deal with cemetery-related challenges. Take the team at Mountain View Cemetery in Pocatello, Idaho, who are battling marmots, or rock chucks. These large evil ground squirrels are tunneling under tombstones, reproducing at an alarming rate, and leaving huge holes and piles of feces all over the cemetery. Families are NOT happy, and the cemetery folks are frustrated. They’ve called in Wildlife Services for help, and we wish them the best.
But this is important
Here in the South, the worst thing a friend can do is schedule their wedding for the same time as an SEC football rivalry game. Apparently, this idea also applies to “futbol’ … and funerals. A family in Chile recently paused funeral proceedings to watch a Copa America soccer match — Chile vs. Peru — on a big screen TV in the funeral home’s prayer room … next to an open casket draped in soccer jerseys. Priorities, right?
What a mess
Whenever you get down about the state of deathcare in the U.S. (i.e. Return to Nature, etc.), just be glad you’re not trying to do business in South Africa. One funeral insurance agency estimates that “up to 50% of the funeral industry operates illegally – without insurance or legal compliance.” In the first quarter of 2024, authorities “recorded 67 new unregistered insurance and funeral parlor investigations.” They also suspended 1,061 licenses and withdrew 75 more.
Roadblocks
And here’s another reason to appreciate living in the U.S. of A. (or Canada, for our northern subscribers!) — People in Kenya are dropping wooden coffins into major streets to protest government anti-finance bills … and to mourn the people who lost their lives while protesting the government anti-finance bills. Police had to use tear-gas to break up what one outlet called the “bizarre coffin protests.” Thirty-nine people have died in these protests to date.
