The Last Laugh : Those in Funeral Industry Cope With Gloom, Grief Using Own Brand of Humor

One of the last stops on the way to the hereafter is a place marked by hushed voices, ominous organ music and traveling embalming-fluid salesmen.

There’s even miniature golf.

Such is life in the land of the dead--the somber yet often strange world of morticians. From not-quite-beyond the grave come stories of post-mortem suntans, modern mummies and the real reason dead men tell no tales.

Call it the lighter side of dying.

Not that most undertakers aren’t serious about their work. But the business of death definitely has a weird edge. Like cops and emergency-room doctors, American funeral directors use their own brand of gallows humor to cope with the round-the-clock gloom and grief of about 2.2 million U. S. deaths each year.

“If you don’t, you either go crazy or quit,” says Adrian Glenn, a traveling embalming-fluid salesman based in Valencia.

Fifty percent of the employees in America’s 20,000 funeral homes do, in fact, leave within their first five years, says Dave Kneib of the National Funeral Directors Assn. Among those who stay, alcoholism and depression rates run high.

Handling the funerals of children, for instance, packs an emotional wallop that some people simply can’t take, he says.

If humor is an antidote, however, there’s plenty of material to work with.

Such as the Palatine, Ill., mortuary with a miniature golf course in the basement. Between funerals, players try to negotiate a nine-hole layout featuring such obstacles as a metal skull with blinking red eyes, a guillotine, a faux pinball machine with tombstone bumpers and a water hazard inhabited by rubber alligators.

Owner Roger Ahlgrim started the course 27 years ago for his children, but word spread and the legion of putter people grew to include everyone from Kiwanis and Rotary members to birthday revelers and Boy Scouts.

As if that isn’t enough, an adjoining room houses a model train that chugs through a miniature war zone, complete with explosions, flying dirt and--at battle’s end--a rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

The only rule, Ahlgrim says, is no games during services: “The noise downstairs comes right up through the heating ducts.”

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Funeral-director conventions can be another weird outpost--especially when the Mummy Brothers show up.

Traveling salesman Glenn says the siblings used to lug around a bandage-swathed mannequin and a sarcophagus to promote an ancient Egyptian embalming technique. They also snapped Polaroid pictures of convention visitors posing alongside their mannequin mummy and sold sarcophagi burial space inside an abandoned Utah salt mine.

Alas, the mummification technique never caught on; nobody has seen the brothers for several years. But other conventioneers pick up the slack.

Funeral industry gatherings have been known to showcase novelty caskets (a San Francisco 49ers motif for the die-hard football fan), cryonics programs (freezing bodies with the intention of later restoring them to life), even Dear Abby (as a keynote speaker).

And don’t miss the embalming-fluid booths.

The Champion Co., for example, sells formulas made with its patented glutaraldehyde disinfectant, the same concoction used to hose down the lunar module after a trip to the moon. All told, the company markets about two dozen chemicals for embalming corpses, Glenn says: “We have dyes that’ll give you a Palm Springs tan if you want one.”

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Blame it all on the Civil War.

Before that era, embalming in the United States was mostly a curiosity. But the need to ship corpses long distances for burial changed everything, says industry spokesman Kneib. (Even modern body bags owe their origins to the North-South conflict.)

“The Civil War was the genesis of modern funeral service,” he says.

From there, the industry evolved to such space-age amenities as the videotape tribute, drive-through viewings and, in San Diego County, the monorail of no return. The latter transports bodies into a high-tech, Swedish-designed crematorium lined with thermal bricks similar to those used in pizza ovens, says Glenn.

Despite such advances, the funeral industry’s image remains mired in myth and misunderstanding, morticians say.

In that respect, times haven’t changed much at all. In early Egypt, for instance, the touch of an embalmer was considered fatal. Yet undertakers also won admiration for their spiritual role as overseers of Egyptian necropolises--cities of the dead. It was a love-hate relationship, Kneib says.

Today, the public regards the industry with a similar mixture of fascination and fear.

“People are morbidly curious,” Glenn says. “At the same time, they don’t want a whole lot to do with you.”

Among outsiders, morticians spend a lot of time dispelling myths. Glenn says he’s constantly asked about corpses sitting up and talking, or chest-length beards found on men buried clean-shaven.

All nonsense, he says: Hair--and fingernails--sometimes appear to grow because the skin shrinks as the body loses moisture. But dead men don’t sit up--and they definitely tell no tales.

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John Evans, an embalmer who now runs UC Irvine’s program for bodies willed to science, says mouths are pinned and glued shut after death to create an appearance less startling to survivors. (Many people die with their jaws and eyes open.)

Other common myths: Mortuaries dismantle bodies too big for caskets (oversized coffins are available), and they sell fillings extracted from corpses (dental gold is virtually worthless, Glenn says, although families occasionally insist on having teeth removed for possible sale).

Many undertakers shy away from discussing their trade--especially with the media--for fear that publicity about behind-the-scenes activities will scare off business. But others applaud presentations--as in the movie “My Girl”--of the industry’s human side.

That human angle can sometimes be an unusual one, though.

Glenn recalls the biker service after which friends and relatives paid tribute to their dearly departed by relieving themselves into his grave site.

Archeologists of the far future will have a field day excavating cemeteries, Glenn predicts. He has buried people with violins, toy trains, pornographic magazines, boxes of fine cigars, automatic weapons, illegal drugs, explosives and pets put to death at the request of the owner or relatives.

“Whatever the family needs to deal with their grief, we try to see if we can comply,” says Ned Phillips of Las Vegas’ Palm Mortuaries and Memorial Park. In one case, the firm ordered a flower arrangement shaped like a 1957 DeSoto automobile; in another, it allowed survivors to paint a coffin bright orange with racing stripes.

Palm Mortuaries is perhaps most famous, however, for finding a way to wed the industry’s reverent and irreverent natures. Its roadside billboard says: “Don’t drink and drive. We’d rather wait.”