Casket Comedies & Drained Brains| 4M #22
Welcome to the twenty-second edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 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!
This guy deserves to put his name anywhere he wants
A Minnesota man decided to start his own cemetery after the deaths of his parents and, later, his wife, whose death he described as “like a boot in my ass” that kicked him into gear. Lee Rossow, 75, was so inspired and determined to convert his parents’ home and 10 acres of land into a cemetery that he fought his city’s zoning laws all the way to his state’s Supreme Court. Thank goodness he did, though, because now the city of Lake Elmo can boast that it’s the home of one of the most unique and quirky cemeteries ever. Rossow’s Halycon Cemetery features:
- A monument of his parents’ caskets side-by-side at the entrance,
- A 180-foot shelf in the meeting room to hold mementos and photos of everyone buried there,
- Nautical-themed art (because that’s what Rossow “has in his house”),
- 60 unoccupied, buried concrete vaults to hold one or two caskets each,
- An area for placement of cremains in canvas pouches,
- The number “337” (Rossow’s first name upside down and backwards) engraved in random places around the cemetery.
Rossow may have included some quirky features in Halcyon Cemetery, but he’s also done something quite serious and incredibly honorable. In one corner of the cemetery Rossow has buried the unclaimed cremains of 97 people who died penniless, which he acquired from a business that provides services to local funeral homes. Way to go, Rossow.
Charges mount against yet another unlicensed funeral director
Former Johnstown, NY funeral director Brian Barnett was arrested last week after authorities found decomposing bodies in his garage in January. Barnett’s business, Ehle and Barnett Funeral Home, had been unregistered since last summer, and his license was suspended in November 2021 — yet he continued to offer his services to unsuspecting families. In addition to the charges of operating and practicing without a license, Barnett is also charged with grand larceny, concealment of a human corpse, failing to bury a body within a reasonable amount of time, and endangering the welfare of a child. As if what he was doing to the families of the deceased wasn’t enough, Barnett earned that last charge because one of the corpses was located on the same floor as his family residence — and was found surrounded by children’s toys. And we’ll just leave that right there.
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Funeral home play is “sublime theatre”
A “musical tragi-comedy” called Fun Home is drawing rave reviews in Melbourne, Australia. The play, based on a graphic memoir of a woman whose father was a funeral director, includes a segment where three children “leap out of a casket to sing their own Motown-inspired ad for the funeral business.” A theater critic calls it a production of “extraordinary calibre emotional range, performed by an equally extraordinary cast.” Let’s just hope the Sydney & Melbourne Theatre Companies take this show on the road!
What’s that, Lassie? An ancient embalmer fell down a well?
A cache of ancient embalming supplies was recently unearthed in a huge well in Egypt, shedding light on the mummification practices of the 26th Dynasty (664 BC to 525 BC). In the cache, archaeologists found 370 ceramic vessels containing “remnants of materials used in the mummification process,” including tree resin and fragrances used to stop brain decomposition. Embalmers of the time removed and drained the brain and most abdominal organs and placed them in jars to preserve the body of the deceased. Do you ever wonder what the next millennium’s archaeologists will find when they unearth the embalming rooms of today?
Worst. Neighbors. Ever.
The mummified remains of an Italian woman who died sitting at her table more than two years ago was just discovered last week. An article in People says her neighbors “assumed” she moved at the beginning of the COVID epidemic since they hadn’t seen her since late 2019. However, when a tree fell in her garden, her “concerned” residents called the fire department, who discovered her body. We have so many questions: Didn’t her bills go unpaid? Her mail and newspapers pile up? Her grass grow waist high? How were her neighbors oblivious and unconcerned until her tree fell? OK, rant over. But … Really?
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