Marker Madness & Cleaned Cremains | 4M #122

Welcome to the hundred-and-twenty-second edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #122, 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!

Cemetery jail

Recently, authorities responsible for a pauper’s cemetery in Mississippi came under fire for waiting more than a month to notify a mother that her son had died and had been buried. Now, instead of lying low, they’re again making headlines with statements like this: “This is not a public graveyard. It’s just like entering the detention center. The public will still have access to it, but they will have to go through a search and seizure procedure.” Yes, to visit a loved one’s grave at this particular burial ground, you’ll have to be patted down, just in case you’re trying to sneak in some contraband floral arrangements or memorial candles. 

Taking the bronze

Two Los Angeles cemeteries have been vandalized within just a few weeks, and owners, families, and residents are asking the city for help. First, nearly 600 bronze markers were stolen from Woodlawn Celestial Gardens in Compton (yes, they took them straight outta that Compton cemetery). The next week, thieves made off with 100 bronze name plates from a cemetery across the street — the area’s first integrated cemetery. To add insult to injury, the criminals removed the face from a monument to African-American war heroes and tried to steal a bust of Abraham Lincoln.

Houston, they had a problem

Well, Peregrine — and the cremains and DNA samples of multiple individuals — is coming home instead of landing on the moon. A post-launch propellent failure means the module is headed back into Earth’s atmosphere, where the craft and its contents will most likely disintegrate upon entry. You have to wonder if some sort of divine intervention wasn’t involved, though. Members of the Navajo nation have been actively campaigning for a delayed or canceled launch, as many members of the Indigenous community believe the moon is sacred, and shouldn’t be desecrated with human remains.

Go back to jail, do not pass go

Megan Hess, who in 2022 was sentenced to 20 years in prison on charges connected to selling and shipping body parts through her Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors operation in Colorado, is not getting out of jail early — at least not now. She recently appealed to the court for a new trial based on several claims: that the “U.S. District Court abused its discretion,” that her “base offense level was significantly increased without justification,” that “restitution for services provided to victims was not appropriately reduced,” and that the “sentencing judge displayed bias during the proceedings.” They didn’t buy it; her appeal was denied.

One last spin

A UK woman has gone viral after she shared a photo on TikTok of her grandmother’s cremains … in a bag … in her washing machine. “I just washed me nan,” she wrote, explaining that she thought the small bag, which she had planned to send to a jewelry company, was secured in a drawer. Instead, she explained: “I was unloading the machine when I saw a bag at the bottom and I froze because it looked like the bag I kept my nans ashes in. I started laughing because I couldn’t believe she has just been on a wash and spin!”