Sweet Cadavers & Guilty Pleas | 4M #162

Welcome to the hundred-and-sixty-second edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #162, 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!

Eau de formaldehyde

Leave it to TikTokkers to diss a $255 perfume for smelling like a “sweet cadaver.” Yes, apparently Tom Ford’s new Lost Cherry fragrance, which features notes of black cherry, tonka bean, and almond, mimics the “scent of cadavers due to the ingredient benzaldehyde, which is used in food or fragrances to create an almond or cherry taste or smell.” Benzaldehyde is also a chemical often used in embalming fluid. “I’ve smelled this at wakes before for folks who chose to be embalmed,” commented a death doula.

Andrew and Elmo

The classic children’s program Sesame Street has tackled some tough topics in its 55-year span; they don’t even shy away from discussing death and dying. A few weeks ago on the show, Andrew Garfield had a heartwarming chat with Elmo about the grief the Spiderman actor felt after his mom’s death. The conversation clip (below) has been viewed more than 251,000 times, and has been widely applauded by grief experts for the child-friendly way the two discuss this serious subject.

Deathcare defendants on the docket

Courts across the country (and beyond) handled more than their fair share of deathcare-related cases last week. Here’s a quick rundown:

• Return to Nature’s Hallfords plead guilty to federal fraud charges
• Ex-funeral home owner pleads guilty to assaulting police and journalists during Capitol riot
• Arraignment for funeral home owner accused of leaving body in hearse delayed again
• Funeral home in Poland apologizes after a corpse falls out of a hearse in traffic
• Family Claims They Found an ‘Unrecognizable Corpse’ Wearing Their Loved One’s Clothes
• Unlicensed crematorium issued cease and desist order
• Burial plot dispute heats up in court
• Family sues after loved one’s body sent to the wrong country

Anarchy in the UK

Vice recently ran a story about a UK mortician with the title “The Anarchist Undertaker Who Does Death Differently” and this subtitle: “Ru Callender buries people better than all those big money bastards.” Well… So, it seems that Scottish-born Ru decided to start his funeral business after seeing an ad about green funerals — while he was stoned. Ru’s insights mentioned in the article include:

• All funerals should be conducted from start to finish by a “tight two-person team”
• It’s best to let your family decide what kind of funeral to give you rather than sharing your own preferences prior to your death
• Massive corporations have “body hubs,” or a “kind of Amazon warehouse for corpses”