Wake

I have a different post about one-third done, but I'm going to hold off on it. It's nothing time-critical, anyway.

I tried to bang out that post this afternoon before I went out to the wake of a friend's ex-husband, who died suddenly and unexpectedly this weekend. But I only got the scene-setting part done, and I don't think I can properly finish it before I go to bed.

So here is a different topic: is the cosmetic preparation and presentation of the body of the deceased for the viewing at a wake a dying art? (No pun intended.) It seems that a decade or so ago it was quite common to hear people say "Oh, he (or she) looks so natural!" But lately, the sentiment seems to be "That doesn't look like him (or her) at all!"

I discussed this with my friend, and it seems like there may be several explanations for this:

1. Perhaps in the past the cosmetic preparation of the body for viewing was an art form that the old-timers in each funeral home reserved for themselves, jealously guarding their secrets or assuming that the younger generations could never develop the required skills. And when the old-timers eventually died, these skills died with them, and the younger generations were left to try to rediscover the tricks and techniques necessary for doing a life-like job.

2. Possibly the specific techniques used in the past made use of materials that are not available to the modern funeral home. I'm at a loss for an example, but I am sure there were things that were common practice in the past that would never be allowed today.

3. This just hit me: In the past, at least in small, tightly-knit communities, undertakers were probably quite familiar with any deceased person who came their way from their pre-deceased days. So when they were preparing the body for viewing, they were working from a specific memory of what that person looked like in life. Nowadays it is far more likely that the person doing the preparation is encountering the person they are working on for the very first time. And so they create a replica of a person, but not necessarily the person; they may not get the set of the mouth or the fullness of the cheeks quite right for that specific person. And so what they end up with is technically passable, but is not immediately recognizable to friends and family.

Morbid, I know. And also at least as long as the post I decided I couldn't do for reasons of time. For people from non-Western (or possibly non-American, or even non-Pennsylvanian) cultures, the whole concept of having a corpse on display for viewing before burial may seem a bit odd. But for those who are familiar with this, have you noticed a similar dropoff in the quality of the preparation of the deceased for viewing?