Welcome to the two-hundred-and-thirtieth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #230, 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!
Are you lying?
Leave it to the Japanese — a culture known for embracing 1×2-meter capsule hotel pods and 50-square-meter micro-apartments — to find comfort and relaxation by lying in a closed coffin. “Coffin-lying” is the “practice of meditating inside a coffin” and giving one the opportunity to “contemplate their mortality.” While this trend started with plain wooden coffins arranged in a “coffin lounge,” newly-opened spas now provide “cute coffins” to “accommodate different personalities.” Scoff if we must, but the reasoning behind this odd offering is actually well-intentioned; providers say that it’s a creative form of mental health advocacy hoping to curb the record-high suicide rates among Japanese youths. “Before choosing a death that cannot be reversed,” says one business owner, “I want them to experience a death that can be reversed.”
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It’s all fines, everything’s fined
No one likes to wait on a tardy family member (or an entire car full of mourners) to show up before a graveside service can begin, but you do it anyway. Apparently the Northern Irish have a lot less patience for such delinquency, as several councils are now enforcing fines on funeral directors who turn up late to a cemetery… and some of those funeral directors are passing along those fines to the families they’re serving. The fines and the timeframes before which they are enforced vary from area to area, but can be as high as $250 after a 15- to 20-minute wait. Directors are blaming the late arrivals on excessive travel times, priests talking too long at services, and families stopping to shake too many hands afterward.
Exposing with excellence
Reporters with NBC News have received a prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for investigative reporting for a series that exposed illegal dealings with unclaimed bodies in Texas. The “Dealing the Dead” series “uncovered a system operating largely out of public view [and] prompted major reforms” at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. The Center was receiving and dissecting unclaimed bodies, then leasing the body parts to other organizations, often without notifying the person’s family of the death.
Jackson’s journey
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who passed away on February 17 at age 84, had a profound impact on people across the country, and his two-week funeral procession definitely reflects that. A string of memorial services commenced last week in Jackson’s hometown of Chicago, where a two-day visitation was held at the headquarters of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a nonprofit that he founded in 1996 to advocate for social justice and civil rights. This week, Jackson’s remains will be transported to Washington, DC for a memorial event, and then to South Carolina, where he was born. Services at a Chicago megachurch and a final farewell at the PUSH headquarters will wrap up the journey. Leak and Sons Funeral Home, a nearly-century-old establishment led by a prominent family known for their successful desegregation efforts in Chicago and their lifelong support of Jackson, is coordinating all of these arrangements.
