Youtube Recc -- Ask a Mortician

[wolffyluna]

So, I've recently been bingewatching Ask A Mortician, in which mortician/undertaker Caitlin Doughty does videos about, well, death and funerals and dealing with corpses.

And it's really interesting!

Caitlin is kind and interested in the topics she talks about, and that interest is infectious. There's also a wide variety of videos, looking at everything from the nitty gritty of what happens to a body when [X funeral thing happens], to famous corpses in history, to undertaker inside baseball, to instructions to help you know your funeral options and how to get what you want, to looking at the ethics of different funeral situations.

(Before I link to any of the videos, a warning: there be corpses here. As in, actually pictures of corpses.)

So, here's a tasting platter of Ask A Mortician, because ooh boy is there a lot of variety here.

• In the theme of 'how to get the funeral you want', there is Direct Cremation and How to have a home funeral and organ donation
• In the theme of 'undertaker inside baseball', there is How to keep someone's mouth closed after they're dead and What happens to hip articifical hips and such during cremation?
• In the theme of 'notable dead bodies', I'll have to admit some affection for The Cave of Glowing Skulls
• What happens during cremation and embalming
• The history of Gravestone symbols on America and metal headstones
• Ethics in the funeral industry, including what to do with the bodies of terrorists?
• Not actually death related, but Caitlin has a video asking the big question of our time: Where are the medieval demon babies?

And there's still a bunch of videos that I want to link, but at this point that is a lot of videos I have linked. Just, take my desire to add more links as a sign that if you can stomach it, Ask A Mortician is a very good channel.

Comments

[lb_lee]

...you know what, I never ever thought about it before, but yeah, how DO they keep dead people's mouths shut? Of course that'd be a thing that requires doing!

A whole new universe of questions has opened up to me.

[wolffyluna]

I can give a tl;dw for the video if you want? But yeah, Ask a Mortician is great for 'I never knew I didn't know that, and now I have to know.'