Teenage Directors & TikTok Preneeds | 4M #181
Welcome to the hundred-and-eighty-first edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #181, 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!
Maybe “pay before you go?”
We know that the UK has some interesting and vastly different terms for some of our common words; over there, a car’s trunk is a “boot,” cookies are “biscuits,” and apartments are “flats.” When someone dies, the family goes to the “funeral directors” (funeral home) to meet with the “undertaker” (funeral director). A few of the latter have even coined a new term for what we refer to as prepaid funerals, or preneed arrangements. They’re calling this “scheme” (arrangement) “pay as you go” funerals, and a few of those undertakers have gone viral for sharing it on TikTok. While we admit it’s catchy, we can think of a few better ways to emphasize the “pre” part of preneed — pay before you go, maybe?
Speaking of terminology …
Last week a Georgia news station shared the good news that a bill to legalize natural organic reduction in the state had passed the house and senate and was headed to the governor’s desk for final approval. The bad news? In the headline, they referred to the practice as “human mulching.” Not the best way to get citizens excited about the new option, in our opinion…
Not immune from crime
A 66-year-old funeral director in Harlem thought he was sitting down with a grieving family member to make arrangements for a loved one’s services last month, but he was in for a terrible surprise. The man across the desk from him was only posing as a client, and proceeded to brandish a machete, then physically attack and rob the director. Police are still looking for the perpetrator, and the funeral director declined to press charges.
Starting them early
Many of our readers may have known from an early age that they would pursue a career in deathcare, but how many of you actually started working as a funeral director at 16 years old? A young man in the UK who just supervised his first funeral in his uncle’s establishment is being lauded as Britain’s youngest funeral director. At age 16, he’s already completed his GCSEs (similar to a specialized high school diploma in the US) plus six months of training with his uncle and says he has no plans to change careers.
Weed weaving
A woman in Australia who found solace in basket weaving after the death of a dear friend is now offering the same therapeutic experience by teaching others to weave their own coffins for natural burials. Her process utilizes the invasive but flexible Cat’s Claw vine, and it takes about 15 hours to complete a coffin. She teaches participants in her fully-booked classes how to include floral elements and biodegradable memorabilia in the weaving, and completes the coffin with the required absorbent lining and fluid catcher, which she makes from corn starch. If only we could find a similar way to make kudzu useful…
Did Elon uncover this?
A “disabled” Georgia man has been sentenced to nine months in federal prison and will pay more than $131,000 in fines and restitution after being found guilty of 20 years of Social Security fraud. Although Timmy Stephens began receiving monthly disability payments for a cardiac condition in 2001, in 2003 he returned to work in a funeral home, filing his earnings under a relative’s Social Security number and receiving more than $360,000 in disability benefits until the fraud was uncovered in 2024. It’s not clear from the press coverage of the funeral home’s awareness of or complicity in the plan.
