Shawarma Trucks & DIY Cremation | 4M #200
Welcome to the two-hundredth (🎉!) edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #200, 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!
Nobody wants this
While any deathcare business owner would be thrilled to know that their organization is growing and profitable, the news that an entire country’s funeral industry was the only consumer segment with significant growth just doesn’t sit right. But that’s what’s happened in Russia. According to a recent report, funeral service was the only “civilian sector” to grow in the first six months of 2025, increasing by 16% amid “demographic decline and losses in the war against Ukraine.”
16 years in the making
Last week, the Illinois Department of Insurance distributed $18 million to Illinois funeral directors to place in trust for 47,000 families who purchased preneeds through IFDA-member funeral homes. The $18 million was secured from Merrill Lynch Life Insurance Agency in 2009, but distribution was delayed by a lawsuit.
Dream hearses?
Yahoo! Autos recently asked its readers to post comments and pics of their “dream hearses,” and, yeah, they delivered. Among the responses were:
- “A Doc Brown DeLorean time machine. I, of course, will be driving.”
- “Any car, but with a Lightning McQueen body kit.”
- “Choose a 20-year-old BMW […] and you’d almost be guaranteed immortality since you’d never make it to the cemetery.”
- “Ghostbusters ambulance. Inappropriate on so many levels.”
- “My friend’s shwarma food truck. For sanitation purposes, I could be stowed somewhere as to avoid food contamination, and after the funeral, he can open up shop during the wake and make some extra money catering the event.”
- “[…S]hould I expire before my cyborg body is ready, that my dream hearse would be some kind of rocket that would launch my remains someplace cool, like into the sun or to Jupiter.”
Kid’s got goals
When the Parsons Advocate in Hambleton, West Virginia posted a Q&A from a few members of the Tucker County High School Mountain Lions football team, one player’s responses stood out — not because of his height or weight, but because of his career aspirations. You guys might want to keep an eye out for young running back Luke Barb, class of 2027, who aspires to “Go to college for two years then go into the fire department, retire then go to mortuary school and become an embalmer.”
You’re safe, embalmers
Microsoft has published a list of the 40 jobs that will be most affected by artificial intelligence, and the 40 that will be least affected, and the good news is that embalmers are included in the latter list. The irony here, to us at least, is that Microsoft collected data from 100,000 conversations people had with Copilot, Microsoft’s own AI. So AI decided which jobs are safe from AI and which aren’t? SMH …
Cremation, not arson
A man who set fire to his apartment while smoking marijuana has pleaded not guilty to arson charges — and he has a pretty good excuse. He was just trying to give his deceased cat a “proper cremation.”
