Mean PSAs & Chameleon Cremations | 4M #156
Welcome to the hundred-and-fifty-sixth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #156, 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!
Only six?
A Las Vegas woman who has been accused of stealing an occupied casket from a funeral home in August has said she was drunk and had “blacked out” after drinking six beers. Law enforcement discovered the theft after receiving a report of a suspicious person lying face down on the sidewalk in front of the funeral home. Officers found the casket sitting on a cart, and the body of the deceased lying on rocks near the funeral home entrance. The 47-year-old woman was apprehended later after being identified from surveillance video and has been charged with burglary of a business, grand larceny and the removal, transfer and distribution of human remains.
Words matter
We’re all aware that plenty of people don’t want a crematory, columbarium or cemetery as a neighbor. Even so, the purpose of these properties — to provide disposition or permanent memorialization of others’ loved ones — doesn’t deserve disrespect by the local press. Case in point … A reporter for the Clinton (Iowa) Herald penned the following headline: “Camanche turns down storage units for cremation urns.” Storage units?? Really?!
Tiny pets
It’s a case of demand creating supply in Japan, where a deathcare firm has responded to requests for a cremation method for the smallest animals that will leave enough cremains for keepsakes. Progress Co. of Osaka has come up with a “way of adjusting the intensity of the flames as well as the strength of the jet of air that is blown in” so that tiny pet cremation — without complete obliteration — is possible. This article says this method accommodates even the smallest animals, like ornamental fish, chameleons, spotted garden eels, and axolotls — all pets for which the company reported they received more than 2,000 cremation requests every month.
ICYMI
According to People magazine, a Maine woman is surprised at how many people have read the four-sentence PSA (pictured above, and FYI it’s NOT an obituary) that she wrote after her mother died in February. “Let’s be clear. It’s a PSA and it’s no joke. It was written with sarcasm and relief, but it’s real,” she told PEOPLE exclusively. “It was done in four sentences because I refused to spend another dollar on that woman.” Well, at least she’s honest.
Beware of angry exes
An ex-cop in the UK decided that the best way to get even with his ex-wife was to drive his car into the funeral home owned by her family. Video captured the moment the “former advanced driver and driving instructor with the Police Service of Northern Ireland” who “had been drinking whisky since 6am on the day of the attack” plowed his car through the facility’s plate glass window in December 2022, narrowly missing his wife and her mother. Both are still suffering from the incident, for which the man was convicted of attempted murder this month.
