This Past Weekend - E301 A Mortician

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

Theo sits down with mortician and dark arts specialist, Frank Giles, on this week's podcast in Nashville, TN. After embalming over 4,000 stiffs, Frank Giles is a certified bellhop for the LORD!   New Merch https://theovonstore.com    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   This episode is brought to you:   Manscaped https://manscaped.com/theo   Mint Mobile https://mintmobile.com/theo    Raycon https://buyraycon.com/theo for 15% DISCOUNT on Raycon Wireless Earbuds   Betterhelp https://betterhelp.com/theo for 10% OFF your First Month   -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Music: “Shine” - Bishop Gunn http://bit.ly/Shine_BishopGunn   -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Hit the Hotline  985-664-9503   Video Hotline for Theo Upload here: http://bit.ly/TPW_VideoHotline    -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Find Theo Website: https://theovon.com  Instagram: https://instagram.com/theovon Facebook: https://facebook.com/theovon Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/thispastweekend  Twitter: https://twitter.com/theovon YouTube: https://youtube.com/theovon Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiEKV_MOhwZ7OEcgFyLKilw   -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Producer Nick Davis https://instagram.com/realnickdavis    Associate Producer: Sean Dugan https://www.instagram.com/seandugan/ -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's guest is a certified death man he is uh he's that he's that Sherpa that helps you through that last step into the final frontier today's guest is here to talk everything about everything we don't know about death and being dead ladies and gentlemen it's mortician Frank Giles uh we are here today with Frank Giles thank you for being in there you're quite welcome it's an honor well it's um it's nice to have you in here man it's nice to have somebody that's really that concierge kind of for the for the dark arts you're really right there i mean you're that last you're kind of the bell hop for the devil or for god really that's right that's one way to look at it you know you word check word checking your reservation or yeah we're going to get you there

one one one way or the other yeah yeah uh i gotta ask you this take me through the process of when you guys get a body okay the first thing that happens is normally a phone call and that phone call most of the time is going to come from either a hospice nurse a nurse at a hospital nursing home or either maybe even the county corner and they're going to call and they're going to say you know we've had a patient expire or we've had a we've got a client in need of your services and they're going to have they're going to say something like that and then we're going to go through and get some information such as you know their name where they're located who the next of kin is and just some short information and then the next thing that happens is we've got to

receive that body entire care so it doesn't matter if it's at a house or a hospital or you know nursing home wherever that person dies we've got to go you have to go to that locale we've got to go to that location and most of the time see i'm in a small community in hopkins hill kentucky we don't have people that you know take bodies to the morgue and we don't pick them up in the morning when they call us we're rolling that immediately oh it's a one-stop shop over there you got that's right so when you call if you call us at two o'clock in the morning we've got an answering service that answers our phone at night and so they're going to take down all the information and then they're going to call us we're going to wake up you know from dead sleep we're going to put

our suits on we're going to go to the funeral home get the hearse and then we're rolling to the location now when you go to that locale do you show up do you go by yourself you take a side care no we've we always take two people because in the words of forest gum you know when you go to a house call especially you don't ever know what you're going to get i mean somebody could be dead in a bed or they could be they could have died on the toilet like Elvis i mean you you really don't know and you've got to go in there that's right we've got to we've got to bring that person out of that house no matter where they've died in the house whether it be the attic the basement the bathroom the bedroom whether they be a hundred pounds whether they be 500 pounds you know we've got

to get that person and we've got to bring them out of the house into the funeral home have you ever had to call for backup you know you show up and they got somebody they're real girthed out you know somebody's real just fully just you know just a real big dog or a big lady most of the time they will tell us that ahead of time you know somebody will try to give give us a heads up and say uh you might need to bring some extra help or whatever you might want to bring somebody from the gym yeah you know yeah you know but i've taken as many as four or five people out to one house you know to get a body or you know to a hospital you know to make sure that we can get the body back and how do y'all do you guys just like everybody like on the kind of three let's lift like that

kind of deal or are the bodies hard when you get there or they still salt it depends on how long they've been dead sometimes they're still warm they're still soft and warm sometimes they've already gone into rigor mortis and that's where they kind of stiffen up but you know in the funeral industry one of the things that you will use more than most is a clean white sheet you know when we go we'll take a we'll take a white sheet oh yeah and it doesn't have to be white but any type of sheet we'll roll it under them and everything get a sheet under them so we can lift up on the sheet you know we've got other devices that are designed to do that that have handles so if you've got a large person that you know that are rated for you know five hundred a thousand pounds and everything

so that you can because that's the thing about a deceased person is they are what they what's considered dead weight and so but if you've got something with handles that you can use it makes lifting it a whole lot easier okay so sometimes if it's a real big dog or a real big gal you got to really get that tarp under them or something real sturdy that's right you gotta you've got to get some type of body move or under them so that you can lift them up and get them to your mortuary card um and it what's the biggest person you think you've ever retrieved out there uh probably just under 600 pounds that's big huh that is big and so you get the body now in a larger city there is a they'll go to the corner first or what is that what is the corner well the corner depending

upon the county and the situation like for instance in in our county the corner responds if someone isn't under hospice care or isn't under doctor's care and then he responds and so for instance like if if we walked in and just found you dead here today then they would call the they would call and the police would come and the corner would come and they would do a death investigation and if they decided that it was no foul play there's no need for an autopsy then they're going to call us and we're going to come get you so everybody doesn't get autopsy no no and it all depends upon your area one thing that most people don't realize with funeral homes and some of the laws and things is they are very state by state and even in the state sometimes

regional as far as funeral customs and like in a bigger city there are going to be a lot more autopsies whereas you know where i am there's very few autopsies wow so it's just direct to you it's direct to farm the table really exactly because in christian county we don't have a medical examiner a medical examiner is the actual person is the pathologist that does the autopsies okay there's one in madisonville kentucky that covers the whole western part of the state of kentucky so there's one for like a third of the state so you know they can't send everybody to him otherwise he'd be overworked yeah and so a lot of times it's just you know uh heart attack or you know you know they'll go through they'll ask the family did he have any heart conditions what was his medical

history and then you know they'll make their judgment based on that so if you had to get if you had to kill somebody right if i'm a killer all right killer and what is there do i want to kill in a particular type of county that may not have that may be more rural that would probably be a better better way to get away with it in a smaller community because that way you know they don't have all the necessarily resources have you ever rolled up on a body and they're like yeah they just died naturally and you kind of felt like they didn't but it's not really your responsibility no not really we've got good professionals that they do their job and everything else now one time i did roll up on a suicide and they had you know they had worked worked it

and everything else and how they do it you know they said rope or gun i mean no it was you know self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head you know it was from the bottom or from the side i can't remember but the thing about it was they had when they'd gone through and cleared the scene when i went over there to start my part i called um one of the deputies back in and i said um do y'all want this gun for evidence or you know because it was still right there oh they just left the gun there and it's like okay before i touch anything and ruin the contaminate this scene what is what's happening here and they're like oh we forgot to move that yeah i believe you did thank you captain obvious things get a little shoddy out there occasionally you know i guess

it was the night shift you know oh yeah man the night shift that's like when you go to like a Hampton Inn or something and they got that night manager it's barely somebody that's even alive sometimes you know dude they had a blind i was in Knoxville Tennessee this is probably nine 12 years ago and they had a blind man working as a night manager man and he just looked trapped back there i felt like somebody just i don't even know if he knew where he was but you hit that bell and he'd come out there you know so night manager can be anybody um what about this so now you get the body okay all right so take us from there once you get that body um then what happens what do you do with it okay so when we get the body back to the funeral home oh yeah if the body is going

to be embalmed then we go ahead and we start the embalming process immediately immediately if it's two o'clock in the morning we're gonna start embalming damn because the thing about our business is you don't know when the next person's gonna die you might you might go an entire day and not get anybody but then the next day you might get four back to back how often do people die um well for instance we at our current location we'll do about 125 funerals a year okay out of one facility and then i've got another facility that's going to do about 120 calls a year what's the most dying its time of year when do people tend to really just say all right i'm the i'm dying normally normally your first quarter january february march why you know cold you know stress the

holidays are over because you know i believe that you know somebody can have the will to live you know and in the end you know they've got thanksgiving they've got christmas they're waiting you know the family the family's coming in at christmas the family's coming in at thanksgiving but then in january they're like we won't see them again for another year or maybe maybe they'll come in at the summer and get depressed and you know say what hell with that i'm out and you know that once you get depressed you know you kind of just you know how it was but back when everybody was under quarantine and couldn't see your friends and everything else oh yeah everybody got depressed oh you couldn't even tickle anybody i remember that that's right they try to take a guy to jail for tickling somebody

in pennsylvania so yes stuff just haywire man uh so people will hold out for the holidays hold out for that time with the family once the super bowl's over though people are like oh i fit i'm dead that's right normally normally in the funeral business if it's your first quarter and your last quarter or your two busiest times okay and um so what you get that body you know you pick that sucker up how do you know if they're going bomb or if they're going uh dust because we're going to talk to the family well most of the time we'll talk to the family either by the family's there where the body is if it's at the nursing home or if it's at their home the family's there and we'll have a interaction with the family and go ahead and talk to them about some preliminary things oh hell get

permission to do the embalming and then we'll go back and sometimes they might say well no he wants to be cremated or you know we're going to do this you know and so we want it done different but but once we get permission we're going back to the funeral home and we're going to start that embalming process now if they go cream right do you do you how do y'all do it y'all do stove y'all do like bar like not barbecue but like luau style how do y'all know it's more of a it's there's a cream the crematory has this chamber that you put the body in and that's how the body's cremated and is it briquettes or wood like what is in there do you know no it's gas oh damn because it has to be pre it's preheated to about 1400 degrees before the body goes in and do you put the body in there

no i've got somebody else that does that okay and is that a trustworthy person usually that person to me seems shady yeah no that's that's a very trustworthy person wow because i just can't i mean if i and how long does it take to really grill somebody down most of the time it depends upon the the size of the person and how new the crematory is like a grandparent though how much you think oh you know you're probably you're probably a little over an hour damn and what about like a what about that 600 pounder now see that's different because you think of somebody that's 600 pounds and the fat that's on oh yeah that becomes a controlled grease fire so it's there are the crematories have weight limits on them so some crematories can only do 500 pounds some of them

can only do like 700 pounds some of them are rated for a thousand and so you have to um you have to make sure that you don't get somebody too large yeah for that for that crematory because otherwise you can get a you can have a major problem one of my friends he was um who had a crematory he was cremating somebody and he didn't realize that they were as obese as they were and so he had a grease fire going you couldn't tell it from inside but the crematory was smoking and they're not supposed to smoke because the afterburner is supposed to be burning off all that smoke well he was in downtown in a city and rolling black smoke he gets a call from the funeral home and what he just said it to cook and left he was like a no he was sitting he was sitting inside the building

with the crematory oh and so he was sitting inside in there you know he didn't notice and he didn't he couldn't see all the smoke outside and he gets a call from probably a native american i guess well hey man look at some rough signals rolling up but it was but the funeral home was actually across the street from the crematory and somebody from the funeral home called said what's going on over there you're rolling a lot of smoke well about the same time that they called the fire department show and the fire department had to come that well the fire department came because there was all the smoke and it it wasn't anything that needed the fire department but they but they just showed up wow so needless to say he learned a lot that day dang so so because the body what

it's just it just like having uh yeah my sister sometimes her and her husband will make um cracklings you know they'll make cracklings in the yard and they'll cut up all the fat and put it in this big open thing and somebody's gotta be right there with like a boat or just kind of hitting it every now and then once they put the body in the crematory in the end of the crematorium into the furnace do they kind of hit it with a thing every now and then or they just it's one time it's kind of just you know starting and close the door no it's kind of starting close the door and then and then of course they'll run it through you know to grind up the bones and everything that don't burn down so there's a grinder in there too well no the grinders after

they pull the cremains out okay so you put that body in you grill them down you know and can you do well done can you do rare it's just one now it's just one setting okay one setting you can't you can't get a medium rare person yeah that's what i would go something a little bit more you know ceviche or something not quite so fine you know yeah yeah i want to be a little grainy you know um so once they get that bone and everything else burns down you know they they take in what doesn't burn down they run through that kind of grinder and you know to where they can make it real fine okay and depending upon depending on what crematory you use and what kind of grinder they've got some cremains are finer than others really so who who's more of a finer cream main

like what are you talking about like a japanese guy no no it's it's just you know because a lot of times there's companies that own these cream crematories so that you don't have so every funeral home doesn't have to own one there's like a third party guy that has this crematory and you take your body there and you know they'll do it for it for you and so some of those guys you know if they have newer stuff it might be finer than the older you know if they're running that push mode yeah yeah yeah totally man yeah yeah every time then you got somebody who just you know they haven't started to silverware in a while exactly exactly like them what do y'all cremate this thing with spoons one thing one thing about the cremation process that you'll find interesting yeah if

somebody has a pacemaker that has to be removed before cremation because that battery will explode no and that and if that battery explodes it can actually ruin the chamber that they use for the cremation wow it's like when some asshole would throw a can of wad 40 in a ditch fire when i was growing up oh yeah everybody's out there where that can of hair spray yeah that white rain somebody whip a can of white rain yeah a good fire bro that projectile's coming at you somebody's going down man that's when you just let the lord work man that was kind of like a rural version of russian roulette man everybody's out there somebody's cooking a wiener couple kids are just running just jumping through the fire you notice little evil knievels and then some a-hole just uh just freaking just

flips a can of uh aquanet into that bastard that's right and you know somebody's it's just pure luck from there on out um okay so if those are the body of it any questions starting to come up we got one from uh melissa about uh involving kthio this is melissa calling from jacksonville florida i have a question for the mortician um the question is have you ever had a customer request you to embalm them when they were alive gang gang gang baby beautiful young lady asking these death questions right here and have you ever had anybody just want to you know get a little hit of it no i have not because you know i could imagine that that would be quite painful if you were still living yeah yeah because you know one of the things that we do is we wire their mouth shut and you know

once you start i would imagine that that would hurt and when we do when we make our incision to start injecting the fluid i imagine once once we hit you with that fluid it's going to burn so say a living person even just took a couple grand or a couple you know 20 milliliters in the arm or something i mean would it kill somebody you think i would i would venture to say if you were injecting it into your artery it would probably would wow what's in it well there's a lot of different things in it there's formaldehyde gluter out of hide perfuming agents you know water conditioning agents and so but the bulk of them are formaldehyde and and gluter out of hide and so that's what and as a matter of fact this is a bottle of arterial solution

really so this is got your formaldehyde in it and your gluter out of hide in it that's a death gravy on that's right this one's called chromatec pink made by dodge chemical company and who goes pink do different people go a different color that might be for a lady uh sometimes you mix mix the colors but most of the time you can use chromatec pink on a man on a woman it doesn't matter oh i want something a little more gray or something well you know we've got some we've got some suntan dyes and stuff that we can put in there can kind of make it a little darker you know something like that you know so you've got some dyes that you can put some stuff in there and then of course the cosmetics that you use can also make it to where if you want you know if you

want to look like that bronze or look you know like you've been laying out you know you can't you just came back from florida without one last tan huh that's right that final tan i love that man we hooked you up so you got a couple items here you got that chromatec pink and so that's the that's just that big sip you put it right into somebody right how many bottles are that you throw into somebody well normally about two that's it uh huh because we'll mix this uh we'll mix this with some other fluids that we have you know such as a water conditioner another fluid that's called pro flow it's kind of like a vane conditioner and an artery conditioner and we'll mix all that in about two and a half gallons of total solution and so it's about two and a half gallons of solution

that we put in the average body okay and so what that what we do is we put that and inject that with an embalming machine through the artery and at the same time it's pushing the blood and stuff out the vein okay so you don't drain the body first no it's a simultaneous process okay so where do you put the entry and where do you put the artery well different embalmers use different locations where do you go i normally go to tell anybody i normally go to the femoral down here on the leg okay because that way daddy getting wow because that way if it's a if it's a lady and she's got a low cut garment you know she's going to show a little you know show a little cleavage at a visitation of needle i don't blame you know you can do that you know if you still got them

exactly if if you paid for them you know and they're still sticking up and you want to show it that's fine but you know you've got so i normally go down here to the femoral and i'll inject in the artery and drain through the vein so you'll do it in and out the same area same locale yeah because it's because as you're injecting it's going to go all the way through you know through all the arteries and stuff back to the heart and then come back out the vein so and so you run in two and a half gallons you said about normally about two and a half gallons for the average person and you'll flush out how much same yeah you'll flush out the same and that won't be all blood you know you get about you know probably about 75 80 percent of all the blood out you know some of the blood

still in the body okay but yeah you'll get out that much so wow damn boy you're rocking right there on the cusp that's wild you ever yeah you ever like do you ever need a couple drinks to get through it no no i'm very i one thing about it i very seldom drink you know as far as you know drunk alcohol yeah but you know a lot of a lot of people in the business do and it's just all in it's all in your mindset you know this business isn't cut out for everybody you know because you think about it and in the one of the most popular scriptures that's used in the funeral business or in the funerals is the 23rd song and it talks about walking through the valley of the shadow of death well the shadow of deaths where i live you know that's that's basically where i live

because somebody's dying and i'm that's where i'm pretty much staying you know oh you out there Voldemort man you're milling around that's right that's right i'm just waiting on the next one do you uh do you ever see people around town you're like i'll probably get a call on this one in a week oh not not normally because you know most of the time those people are in the nursing homes but you never know you ever want to pull with the people at work no no we don't as far as when somebody's gonna die no okay that's just bad juju right there you know then that might make you the next person you never can tell yeah you're right i hate to interrupt this episode but you know what i'm talking about right now people struggling with nose pubes uh people struggling

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at buyraycon.com slash theo that's b u y r a y c o n dot com slash th e o for a special 15 percent discount on raycon wireless earbuds make sure to check it out now while the deal's running buyraycon.com slash theo and now back to the podcast with the death man frank so you got a couple items here now you got a pint of that embalm there and then you got this other uh little holster here what is that that's a cremation urn that's it's a black onyx culture marvel marvel urn and that's that is that a basic is that your basic run of the mill well that's what that's kind of a standard you know that some people use some people like the marble because you can engrave on it and it's pretty sturdy you know unless you just throw it out the window you know and then but you know a

lot of people use the marble urns for cremation you know after they've had them cremated and you know it looks nice you can either set it on your mantle if you're going to keep it or you can also bury it you know put it in a column burial mall there's lots of things you can do with cremates yeah somebody out you hell looks like you almost look for dang Kleenex out of that one it's almost perfect that size exactly how much cremains do you get total huh let's see i would say if you were it's gonna probably well for one thing it's if the if the person has never had a normal situation you're gonna get probably somewhere around you know 180 cubic centimeters or something like that so how many handfuls is that you think oh it's several it's probably gonna

be about that much oh like 40 handfuls maybe yeah yeah it's not gonna fill this up but it's gonna come pretty close okay and is it how fine is it are we talking salt are we talking it's more like dust sand that's down in destined are we talking more like black beach kind of sand you'd find out in san francisco what kind of it's a it's what's the vibe of that dust that death dust it's probably i guess a little bit bigger than salt okay and we is there any gristle in there it's all the same no sometimes there's you know you'll catch a bigger chunk of bone that made it through or something like that and it's half a molar or filling anything like no no you won't ever catch anything that big normally and normally it's pretty gray you know it's not do you feel bad

having done probably you know how many embalms have you done oh let's say probably throughout i've probably been involved in i don't know about four thousand or something damn bro you're going to hell bro you're riding dark dog so four thousand so because i've been doing it over half my life dang bro does one come to mind that there was just the toughest one for some reason something happened no i mean i i would seem like one was in your head there because because you know i think you know i think back and you know one of the things that's so different is a regular embalming you know you're pretty good you know it's pretty much the same you're going to get by with the real small incision you know something like that and then you know that and then a little puncture

room about the size of my pinky that's about normal whereas when you get somebody who's been autopsyed you know that's when you see that big y incision that you see on the tv all the time and you have to you know you have to treat there's a lot more work to that because you can't just inject one site because they've already they removed they removed all the viscera so you put it in it'll sort of start flowing out in the middle so you have to you have to inject down each leg and the arms and you have to inject the crud it's up the head and how do you how do you if you if there's a leak what do you do put a chip clip or something like what do you do just uh well well if there's a leak while you're like in the in the vessels while you're doing it you'll

put a clip on it okay but then what you do is you have to take like for instance in an autopsy in a full autopsy they remove your brain and uh who does the pathologist oh my god and so when they do all that asshole when they remove your brain and all your organs and everything else they come back to to us and they're in the cavity but they're in just a biohazard bag oh kind of like when you get that turkey at the holidays huh yeah kind of like that sometimes they take all the stuff out and put it back in a little sack yeah i guess i guess you could relate it to that and so like we have to go back and we have to make sure that the head doesn't leak and that we can and then we have to sew that back up because they don't sew it back up because you know they'll take and

they'll cut you from behind the ear to behind the ear and then it's like one of these deals where you can flip you can flip it forward to where the hair your hair is actually on your nose oh wow and so and then that's how we have to get back in there to you know to make sure that all those vessels are gonna be to where it doesn't leak and it doesn't leak on the casket you know while we're having the visitation or the funeral so you get the body right and wait what is what happens to the uh before i forget this what about like a man's penis right do a lot of people die holding their penis i feel like no you know i'm talking about though like i'll notice if i'm falling asleep sometimes i'll wake up and i'm just holding my penis for no reason i think it's just a natural thing

you know it's just this is my penis and i'm holding it you know kind of but does when you find a lot of bodies are they doing it holding a certain part of their body or they just do some people just like do like this like they already they're ready to die so they're know they're dying is there any type of thing you notice like a jet like something like a peace out is there anything people are doing no normally they're just you know it's just just wherever their hands fall and you know so a lot of times a lot of times it's just you know if they're down beside them or if they're right there you know somebody will die like that sometimes they you know they've got them like that because they start to you know put them in that sometimes

they start putting them in that position you know but at the nursing home or whatever do have you ever gone to a home where uh they adjusted the body after it had died for some reason like they didn't want it to be a certain place so they didn't they just and you were like you didn't really ask them questions but you're like uh yeah i know this guy wasn't just sitting out here in this rocking chair you know oh no because most of the time the people you know aren't gonna do a whole lot to the body really yeah why is that you think because there's a lot there's a lot about death that people don't understand and there's a lot of people that are uncomfortable around it you know and they're just uncomfortable with you know the whole death and dying process because they aren't

as exposed to it as they used to be yeah you know because back in the old days where the funeral director or the embalmer would come to the house and he would embalm the body at the house no yes he had he had what was called a cooling board because that was back when they would have like an embalmer and a funeral director but he wouldn't that was back before funeral home so he didn't take them back there you did everything at the house or took the body to the church but most of the time they did like postmates or something like postmortem they did the embalming right there at the house and so for instance um i've got um an old glass bottle that was found somebody found it when they were cleaning up around an old house and what it is is it's an old glass

fluid bottle and when they embalmed the body they threw the glass bottle out the out the door and it you know got covered up and so when they were tearing down this house they found it and somebody brought it to me dang because you see they didn't bomb the bodies at the house they'd come out they'd bring what was called a cooling board and they'd set that up and then they'd put the body on the cooling board and back then because they were doing it that way they'd they'd inject and drain right here in the arm so that way they could just hang the arm off the side and then the blood would just drip down into into the into the ground into well most of the time they were doing this like in your house so it would drip down into whatever bucket or whatever reservoir that they had to catch it

and when was this up until do you know that was back until probably you know let's say probably back in the 40s you know and the cooling board what was that is that was it a was it ice at an ice in it or how no it was just what it was called that's just what it was called it was just like it was more rustic than a fold out massage table okay you know that would be that would be kind of what do you think about it today is they would come up with that table and they would fold it out and put the body on it and then they'd take that back with them man when you go to pick up a body in the middle of the night do you knock or do you ring the bell or people usually standing outside sometimes I'll knock sometimes if I can see them in there I'll just walk right on in the house and

you know because I'm in kind of a small area and a lot of times I'll know the family or know some family member and so we'll just I'll just walk or sometimes I'll knock as I'm entering because you know they're sitting there waiting on you oh so Frank you get the body right what happens when you get the body after you do the fluiding all right the fluids out you got the fluid and what do y'all do with the blood that comes out you really want us to answer that question yeah it goes right down the drain no yes it goes right down the drain and right into the system and you better hope that your water treatment guy is doing his job because if not the person down the river is getting it so you could get that a positive hit just on the down because no they treat it because

during this process we're always running water and they've done tests and they've said that that with us running as much water as we do that it's no difference from if you were to cut your finger and stick your finger under the tap water in the kitchen it's no difference than that blood being diluted than when we embalm a body then when y'all drop a couple gallons down there with the amount of water because because we're constantly running water when we're embalming just to get the blood off the table and get it on down the drain and then we're also bathing the person while we're doing the embalming because that massage you know when you bat bat them helps circulate the fluid now you ever see any but you ever see you ever uh keep a little bit of blood

put it on the plants or anything like that you ever know anybody did anything like that now why would you put blood on the plants well whenever I used to live up in uh in Natchez they used to have a man they said and he was uh um I guess he worked with blood or something he was like a blood man and they said he would take some of the blood uh and put it on his house plants at home just to for the vitamins and minerals you know no I've never I've never heard of that that's a new one on me have they ever caught anybody in your industry doing something vile or caught them you know somebody you know it's kind of skimming off the bottom there you know stealing blood or you know how you know copping femurs or something out of deceased or anything

now there have been people in the industry especially mainly like hospital attendants or something like that who have you know gotten caught you know trying to sell body parts or something like that but no reputable funeral person is trying to sell blood or you know bones or anything that's you know to any black market people there's no side hustle or anything no there's no side hustle on that all right there's for sure it now tell me about this so say you get the body it's been embalmed now what do you have to do to it okay well the next process we would be waiting for would be the process of dressing cosmetizing casking and getting the body ready okay for the for the visitation is that your responsibility yes okay or

that's part of my responsibilities now who sells the casket to him i do that as well way yeah i'm one stop shop hey man i'd like to pop a lock of death that's right that's right now is that a little bit of a tough vibe because i mean you're you know like you have to sell some we have to then do a real business you know right and you're dealing with like a you know a human life exactly most states like for for instance in kentucky we have you can be either a licensed funeral director a licensed embalmer or you can be both so for instance i'm dual licensed i have both licenses you got both of you're permitted to do it that's right and you so you'll do it all the time then it's natural right now what's that basic casket man that basic death box what's

that number one deal so now you're talking about i'm talking basic dog like you barely want to go to heaven you know you barely want to go to heaven yeah you know about it yeah like showing up to heaven on the greyhound you know i was talking about i was talking about just a seat it ain't even a whole ride baby you know you're gonna you're talking about a price on that yeah which you know you're gonna be talking about something like 9.95 you know so for under a thousand you can get boxed up no that's just for the box okay it's the box only it's not the service right because in 1985 the federal trade commission came in and they said you know you've got to have a charge for everything that you do so you know they said so there's no freebies in the death

community right so they said you know because used to pre 1985 a lot of times you went into the selection room and that's where all the caskets are out oh yeah and when you would go you'd look at you'd look at this casket and have a price on it and it was everything included well then they said well somebody might not want everything in there so you have to itemize all your charges and then you you go from there and so then they pick out all the services that they want then they have to add their casket to it vault if they're using a vault and then that's your funeral total and that vault how is the vault really necessary man or is it better to just get you know i want almost the gift wrapping i want that low key you know well you know of some cemeteries

require vaults okay some states require vaults it all depends in kentucky a vault is the vault requirement is based on the cemetery okay but a vault will do two things it supports the weight of the earth off the casket and it also keeps water and other elements and bugs and things from getting to the casket and how long does the casket last you well it depends upon the type of casket for instance that 995 brother how long is that going to get me oh you know it depends if you know vault or no vault if you're not getting it in the vault it's not going to last very long talking eight months or something it's going to depend upon well a lot of it depends upon ground conditions because you think that's soil yeah because if you're in if you're in a real wet area

it's that thing's going to be sitting in water and you know water is not good for metal or wood and everything else whereas it's going to last longer if you're in a drier area yeah you know it's kind of like if you go back to the ancient egyptians some of those bodies that were just buried in the desert where it was real dry they lasted almost as long as those that were mummified right whereas yeah you go to that you go to like a swampy area in africa you go to louisiana man that thing's just a little snack for the for the swamp that's right wow yeah let's hit a casket question here what do we have here what up the oh what up nick this is daniel from tuson now i know little boosty turned down the

idea of getting into the casket making business but i wanted to ask your mortician what is the most outlandish or extravagant casket you've seen a customer walk out of your store with you know did that thing have some spinners on it you know was it a translucent water bed hitter i'd like to hear about it anyways gang gang bro what they put in there what's the most extravagant casket you know what i'm saying something with some cat toys hanging from the ceiling or you got you know you got something with a little hot tub at one end of it what's the wildest thing you put somebody in well be honest well well most of the time the people that are buying your real upscale caskets are gonna buy either a bronze casket or a very fine hardwood

such as you know a mahogany that might be you know where that wood was imported from africa and then depending upon the finished work that goes into it because you know whether you know it'd be flat top and you know part the finished parcade and everything else that's that's a very expensive casket and then also you know they've got some that are 48 ounce bronze you know and kind of look like they've kind of they almost look gold almost you know and you can see like some of the celebrities have been buried in you know some of those like i'm thinking of michael jackson and you know i think i'm let's say wittany houston i think was in a was in like a millennium that that baits will make and so you know they some places will use

that as a selling point you know because the casket companies used to furnish a list basically every year every couple years of recent celebrities and what caskets that they used really and what happened to that list you think i think that you know as they've as things have come come on they've just quit publishing it but you know for instance they're used there's a company it's now owned by baits will casket company but it used to be called marcellus casket company and they made the finest hardwood caskets in the world and oh yeah amen and so what they would do is they would make um they would make these caskets and one of them was called the president and the other is called the president carve top and the difference between them is the one that's the carve top

it has a lot of carvings on it but you know jfk and you know a lot of those presidents were buried in those two different caskets and so it was called the president carve top and the president now when ronald reagan died he was put in a marcellus and it was called the masterpiece and the reason they called that the masterpiece was that because it had barbeque sauce in it i that casket was so big that it would not fit in a standard burial vault and so you know of course ronald reagan was put in a mausoleum that was designed to where it would accommodate that casket but you know that's that's a little bit larger casket than your standard casket and so you know that's that's you know you see that you know we sell some mahogany casket some if we've got somebody

that's going to spend a lot of money most of the time they buy a mahogany casket because the look of mahogany you know it looks really good oh yeah and you know that's what oh god that's what that's what they want they like that warmth and the beauty of the wood some people find metal whether it be any type of metal to be more cold rather than you know warm like woods so and how pricey does that get what's the priciest deal you guys have ever put in the ground man hmm probably you know so somewhere over 50 you know 50k huh man and do people on average spend more money put burying men or burying women probably women because a lot of times you know the men the men will care less but now because they will say you know because if you think about it most people

are thinking well you know of all the sacrifices mama made you know what mama did for you and everything else and you know daddy always said just put me in a in a pine bat box or throw me in the ditch or whatever but mama I mean this is mama mama took care of you every need you know we gotta do a little bit better for mama yeah mama love you yeah we gotta do something for mama mama and Jesus always loved you theo yeah yeah amen man so once you get the body you got it you got it embalmed what do you guys what other things you have to do to the body to make it look presentable if you're going to open casket well we do their cosmetics and of course we'll dress them in the clothes that the family brings and sometimes that's suit and tie and sometimes that's

overalls and you know flannel shirt whatever the family wants can you go full naked or not can you go nude if you want that's probably that'd be frowned upon you know because you know that we wouldn't want to make some people feel bad you know if they weren't you know as well endowed you know if you were full nude and you know they'd be like huh or might make them feel better about themselves you know I just really don't know it'd be interesting to get a look at that body fully nude at the end I think it almost would make it a little bit more like okay they're headed they're they're part of life than they are like it's trying to make them still look alive but you know you think about maybe maybe more people have seen you fully nude and more would expect that but most

of the time you know they want that image as close to how they can remember that person so unless you know americas used to seeing you fully nude they probably would much rather see you with clothes on yeah yeah that's true I think and especially if I'm gonna eat after yeah because you know a lot that's a big thing is you know the meal after the funeral because you know a lot of times either churches will host it or a family member will host it at their house and do you guys get invited to that or no sometimes and a lot of times we'll get invited and if we're not really busy then we'll go but you know sometimes you know right after this funeral we've got another one getting ready to start so we don't have time to get up all those meals and have you ever accidentally had the had

the wrong body in a cat in a clothes casket no no because we take we have lots of procedures to make sure you know that we don't do that okay and then especially since you know we're a smaller town you know a lot of times we'll know the person and so it'll be like oh yeah that's so and so you know so that's randy that's randy so he goes in this casket that's the oh he goes in this casket wow so is there any do you so I don't forget about this what else do you have to do to the body you put the cosmetics what about like the orifices and stuff how do you make sure that there's no leaking coming out of the body or there's no you know something's not going to come out of someone's nose or eye okay now that goes back to the embalming process because the majority of the time

as part of the embalming process we do a treatment of the organs and the cavities and that's where we use what's called a trocar okay and we use that to puncture and suck out all the contents of the organs oh wow yeah so so you have to suck out whatever is in the stomach and everything right wow what do you how does that go okay so you've got a trocar trocar is probably you know about that long and what is it it's it's a metal tube and it's you got a handle and it's got it's got a pointed end and the way that it works is there's slots and holes in it and and it's hooked up to what's called a hydro aspirator so water's running through that creating a suction okay and so what you'll do is you'll come two inches above and to the right of the navel

and you'll stick that in and you'll just move it around and that's the stomach you'll just move it around and you're puncturing all the organs and sucking out their contents have you ever seen like liposuction on the Discovery Channel or whatever how they're moving it around and everything else it's kind of like liposuction and worse can you tell what what have people eaten the most usually most of the time you can't tell what you know what foods it is because of the breakdown but what you can tell is you can tell like for instance you know what organ you're hitting based on you know what's the color of the fluid that's coming out of it you ever been able to tell a food no never not even like a lucky charm or anything not not not

that way now sometimes like if we've had somebody who's choked to death you know you've seen the food you know still you know when you've cleaned out their mouth or whatever you've seen the food still in there you know and how far down if people choked to death is the food pretty far down or it's kind of close you think well it just depends you know because a lot of times it's pretty well I would say it would be pretty far down but then when they tried to save them some of that gets brought back up closer to the surface but you know they were if they were unsuccessful and I've now got them in my possession then you know they were unsuccessful then since you've seen so and now what about what about the mouth and the eyes and stuff like that do you have to do anything to keep them

from like just swinging open or the ears well part of the one of the first things that we do in the embalming process is we wire the mouth shut and so we take and we put we put what's called a it's a needle injector or an injector needle and we put one up here and one down here and then we wire their mouth shut thank god man and I need it a lot of these women need it and I need it too and then a lot of times to get that good mouth closure or whatever you'll put a little piece of cotton in there to elevate you know like a lip or something if it's drooping and everything else now your eyes we have what's called eye caps and those look like contacts with ridges and then we'll put those you know under your eyelid and use that to help keep your eyes closed oh so you'll

go eyes closed has anybody ever tried to open the person's eyes when they're deceased not to my knowledge of course a lot of times we'll come back and put a thin little bead of glue on there and the lips so you know that they're also glued you know that's an extra layer of protection dang I respect that yeah yeah extra layer protection you don't want somebody you don't want somebody peeping you know at the funeral yeah you don't want somebody looking out yeah now what he did now what uh does anybody ever try to come in and see somebody after they've been dead for a little bit after you know anybody come knocking on the door you guys are already running the hoses and everything and they got somebody saying I want to see them one more time oh we you know

sometimes like if you're some sometimes I think what you're talking about is like if somebody shows up before you know we're done in bombing and they want to see them then yeah then we don't we don't allow them to come into the prep room to see them they'll have to wait till the public visitation or you know to even if it's a buddy or something yeah even if it's a buddy wow you know one because we take that very seriously you know the private the family's privacy so if they've like if when we have public when we have private family visitation oh yeah it's private family visitation and you know you don't get to see them if you're just a buddy you don't get to see them till that public time I don't care you know what you why you need to see them earlier if the family

is not going to give you permission you'll see them you know during the public visitation a friend of mine works in the death trade and he's up in uh Oregon you know and he said probably about well he worked in it about 20 years ago he said somebody died one time in the town he was working in and then while he was out at lunch they came in and stabbed the guy a couple more times just to make sure he was dead goodness pretty wild huh yeah yeah he must have not been well liked yeah he must have not been well liked sounds like your friend should have locked the door yeah yeah I think he was kind of he was smoking weed and stuff like that um how do you guys keep jovial when you're working around the dead like that you know it's just it has to be it has to be in you because

you have to be able to separate the fact you know that you're doing you're doing what you can for that family because there's no greater honor for somebody to entrust their loved one to you you know because you think about you know this is their this is their prized possession this is their mother their spouse their you know their child oh yeah and they've entrusted that to you there's no greater honor than that and you do what you can to you know treat them with integrity you treat everybody like it's you know your family member and the way that you'd want to be treated and so you know we are very careful we make sure you know there's we've got you know well for one thing you're not going to get in our facility unless we open the door for you you know because

facility's locked you know and during public visitation we've got a greater on all the doors and everything else so we we know who's coming in and out of the building if it's somebody you know before before the nobody's sneaking backstage yeah because the back areas are always locked and everything else and so it's not easy to you know just sneak in there and do anything so do you feel like you learn anything more about life or or do you feel like like have your thoughts and feelings changed over the years working in the death trade I think it's you don't take it for granted because you know that you can you can be here today and gone tomorrow you know I could get killed in the car wreck going home and you know am I happy have I had a good life yes I've had a good life

we do good numbers on the episode if you did though too that's that's right not to say that out loud but that's right hey hey if it can help you you know that'd be all right that'd be all right you know I went out helping somebody else hey man man we got a question right here what do we have here so we've got a question from nick hey guys what's up this is nick from Wisconsin um got a heavy hitter for you so over the course of your career how has your attitudes and emotions towards death changed and evolved anyways be good gang gang gang baby yeah how have you how have do you find yourself getting more emotional as you get older with it is it hard because it just becomes also work like it's tough when things just become work you know right right you know it's the hardest part of our

job is when we're dealing with children and because you know it's unnatural that a parent should have to bury a child and you know it's hard on that parent whether the parents 90 years old and their child's like 60 and dies it's hard it's even harder when somebody's 20 years old and you know their seven-day baby dies you know all that's hard you know and you you still grieve with them but you know the thing is at this time you know I have to be their rock I have to be the person that you know you come to me I want to handle it you know whatever you need I want to handle it you put the weight of the world on my shoulders that's what I'm here for is there a moment where has there been times where you had you've just broken down it's just been tough I mean there's got to

be times I mean there's times where it's been tough you know and it's you know and you know you'll just see it you know and you just got to you just got to keep on going what are the toughest times though you know I'll never forget um one time I had um two you know I had um I just completed my my apprenticeship and you know I was fresh out of school and I had a um I had a friend from high school who had taken his life and I remember I got the call and you know that was tough you know because my cousin had dated him and everything else and that was hard then how do you do it you remember no no then fast forward later I have you know it's almost exactly a year later another friend gets killed and had on collision and then

and another like right after that another friend dies with an enlarged heart that nobody knew he had oh yeah and so so you can see that all those things play and play an influence on you and but you know you just have to keep on for the family and you know you know I'll take my time and I'll grieve later but you know right now I have to be strong for that family yeah because that's what I'm you know that's what I'm here for has it adjusted your relationship with the higher power with faith has that had had things changed for you over the time or you know what was that journey been like in dealing with the deceased you know I've I've always had a strong faith but you know when you look at the human body and you look at everything

that goes into it and how the how every system of the body works and everything else you know that that that was laid out you know that that just that that just didn't happen and the fact that you know we don't understand everything but you know there's there's a god that's there that does and he knows and we you know there's times that we think that we would have had a better way that we would have had a better plan that it wouldn't have been good for this person to die but we don't know we've just got to wait till we get there and maybe we'll understand it one day at a time or you know at the end but you know you just got to keep on going you just got to you know have trust and faith and go on does it still feel like a human you're working with

does it feel like just a carcass like what what is kind of that feeling you know because if I'm carrying a human body that's alive you know it's a that's one feeling but if I'm carrying just a deceased human body I'm wondering if that's a different feeling you know I think that any time that there is a deceased versus a live person there is that difference yes but the same thing at the same time you know that even though they're the deceased is not there you know as far as what made them there like the spirit um that body still deserves that respect because that was the shell that either held that body for one day or 99 years or 100 years you know so it's still it's still all there you know and still have you seen any uh kind of going in a different direction

but is there anything like with COVID deaths have you seen more deaths or anything like that not really because you know everything the same number of people are basically still dying it's just that you know if they've had anything else but they've got COVID right them you know they're saying oh it's a COVID you know yeah the person might have had COVID but they actually died from pneumonia well instead of counting that death as attributing it to pneumonia they're gonna say oh COVID you know or they might have had they might have actually died from cancer but they also had COVID so COVID yeah they call yeah they COVID them up yeah so people gets COVID no matter everybody like yeah like oh they had this but they also had COVID you know it's like can

somebody die can somebody still just die from natural causes or does it all have to be COVID anymore you know and there's a lot of families right now that are very upset about that and they'll and sometimes we'll go to a house or whatever and they'll be like he didn't die of COVID she didn't have the COVID make sure that they don't put COVID on the death certificate really and it's like well you know the doctor the doctor's the one that fills that portion of the death certificate out but we'll make sure to tell them that they didn't have COVID because there's a lot of people who are so tired of hearing about it that they're you know that they want to make sure that their loved one isn't a statistic for something that they don't you know that they don't necessarily

it's not that they don't believe in it but they don't want them to just be a COVID statistic yeah you know a talking point for somebody that they don't like now what about this what's a wild thing somebody wants to have in there when they die somebody throwing a little can of ruffles or somebody put a little couple star bursts in there or something okay you know it's it's not uncommon a big thing a lot of people will take cigarettes with them you know because you take somebody who's oh boy you know they'll put that they'll put that you know cigarettes in that sharp pocket you're gonna want that smoke good if you're dead if i'm dead bruh light me up a damn 100 baby you know what i'm saying i'm burning a fucking Winston dog if i'm dead man i ain't

milling around you know i've had you know you know a lot of people put pictures of themselves you know and what about a joint somebody sneak a joint in there sometime i'm not gonna say that that's never happened because you know when we're when we're standing back up there and the family goes up for their final viewing there's no telling what they can stick in there you know i've had i've had some very interesting stuff you know i had somebody request to be buried with their shotgun amen you know so they took their shotgun with them you know what about can they now somebody requests to be buried with an eight ball you know and i'm not talking bowling i'm talking that cocaine baby can you make can you make do you have to do that well the thing about it is since that

would be an illegal drug you know we wouldn't be required to do that but you know if somebody if somebody were to bring that in and you know sticking up under the foot of the casket you know i'm not i don't keep a drug sniffing dog at the funeral home so it might just go on through you know it might just go with them it might go with them yeah so yeah that's one thing there's no tsa when you're flying up to heaven that's right that's right you're not gonna be you're not gonna be searched you know so now uh what's the wildest thing somebody's put in there somebody ever put something it's a little too big in there you know somebody tried to put a little chainsaw or a leaf blower or something if somebody died doing a you know during a dangerous you know leaf blowing or

something you know no i don't think they've had any power tools or anything like that you know sometimes you have like stuffed animals or whatever you know even for like an older person they'll bring like stuffed animals they'll bring blankets sometimes and you know we've had um you know like fishing rods you know stuff like that that have gone with them but you know as far as you know i've never put i don't think any power tools in there but i'd go with a damn sand or something you know so what are you gonna use that sander for who knows but here's it but i'll tell you it is if you show up and you the only do with the sander you're gonna be you're gonna be steady working that's right but we're not supposed to work in the afterlife but i'm sure there's a couple

opportunities to make a little you always want a side hustle i want that side hustle now do you take those items out or those those items go on the family it's it's the family's choice if the family wants something in there for visitation and then they want that back we'll take it out but if they want it to go with them it goes with them now you close the casket during the if it's an open casket you guys close it during the procession or funeral deal it depends on when the family wants that closed okay they want it closed at the beginning of the service some families like for everybody to file by at the end one final viewing and then after that after the family goes up for their final viewing then we close the casket so a lot of times that's up to the family um and now

is it hard for you personally do you have trouble is it tough to meet women or something like that if you're working in the death trade you know i could imagine it might be a little bit of a or is it kind of a talking point you know well you know it's one of those things that you know that they that they might be interested in that they might have a few questions but you know it's not i would not say that it's a chick magnet you know i'd you know that they're flocking towards undertaker because you know the thing about it is when that call comes in i'm going on that call so you know if i'm on call you know i'm going to be leaving at the middle of the night and everything else and a lot of people you know they get you know they don't like that yeah they

don't like that you that you're going to be gone for that they don't like that you've got to work on the weekends at night holidays that you miss birthdays and everything else you know because it's a big commitment you know when you're when you're working in the death care business because it's 24 seven damn i mean because there's i probably since since i've been involved in the funeral business i've probably spent as many holidays at the funeral home as i have at my house wow and so it's 50 50 split huh that's right you just don't ever know and you know that's the last thing that you know a girl wants to be on the way to a nice dinner then oh i've got to go to the funeral home and and now you ever bring a date over there witching to say this no no no because

then now i keep i keep them keep them pretty separate yeah is it tough dating in a small town is it tough dating in a small town you know it it depends especially especially when you're in our business because you get to know the families oh yeah and you know because you're spending three or four days sometimes with the family in the um in that and you really get to know them and sometimes you become like family to them and sometimes you're like oh stay away from them you know sometimes you learn a little too much yeah you learn a little too much and so that that makes you want to shy away from you know some of them anyway so do families uh can somebody get buried with their money if they want to if they want to bring it in they

can get buried with it have you ever had somebody that that was their request and they put it in there not all their money you know i've i've had people you know want to get buried you know with you know granddaddy always wanted to kept a you know a two dollar bill or you know he always had change in his pocket you know didn't want to go anywhere without a little money you know i've had that but i've never had anybody say we're gonna put a million dollars in this casket yeah because you know then you then you get to the age old question if you put a million dollars in there let's say you put a million dollars in there and cash mm-hmm and then if somebody were to take the cash and write you a check for it you've still got a million dollars mm-hmm so so nobody normally

puts cash in there they just maybe we'll put a check yeah so i guess if you want to i guess if you wanted to go with a million dollars we could write you a check for a million dollars because you wouldn't be able to cash it yeah yeah i'd rather send the check just in case later you decide dang i wish i had that cash yeah yeah yeah but nobody ever puts million dollars or anything in there you know so um have you noticed over time that people bury used to bury nice things with people and now they just kind of bury whatever with them you think has it been any been able to notice anything like that you know most of the time people if it's something of real value they keep it and they pass it down in the family or whatever you know especially jewelry and stuff

like that and of course now with you know there's so much stuff that you know people are using like costume jewelry and stuff like that that people are wearing rather than buying you know real expensive jewelry that they're doing that they're doing that and especially for um especially for your older people because as they as they get sometimes dimension stuff like that the family's already taking their good jewelry away from them so they don't lose it because you know they don't want them to keep the good jewelry in the nursing home or stuff like that and you know because they'll you know they'll lose it or somebody will steal it or whatever now i have had families bring in really nice jewelry for the visitation in the funeral and then they want that back and so have

you ever stolen anything from anybody no sir no sir that that'd be bad for business yeah be bad for business man i didn't think you had but i just had to ask you um we got any other questions that came in that are unique yeah we uh ross has another question about caskets at the um out here in new york just a quick question for the mortician open casket or closed casket me personally that open casket if it was me i'd feel a little disrespected i'm not gonna lie you know but no that's it gang gang bro how you go man how do you suggest you know you got the you know you've been around the way you're really the rex ryan of death right here so what do you say it depends upon how they look i think that the family should have an should be able to have an open casket if the person

resembles himself but you know if they've been in very bad trauma if they've been you know in a situation where you know they don't cliff fall or something yeah car wrecks you know something like that but you know if they look like themselves i think the fire face fire yeah face fire you know bush hall you know oh yeah oh i should drive a bush hog maxinley killed a deer man that was asleep in one time yeah felt horrible about that still feel bad about it but uh so you're saying if they look decent enough you'd go open casket uh you're gonna go oc you think i think so dang you heard it that's right that's that's my plan i want everybody to see me one more time yeah now some people the it start their faces get fat i noticed that the last funeral i went to people's

face get fat when they lay them down like that well some of it could be that they that they swelled them during the embalming process or if they were in the hospital for a for a long time that could be part of it or sometimes if you've got somebody who kind of has jowls and you know well when they lay back those fall back and so it doesn't make them look like themselves because that should be that should be up here whereas it's laying back how hard is that body when it's laying in the casket is it pretty hard it depends upon how how hard you set it up and what i mean by that is this embalming fluid the more you put in the more it's gonna harden somebody up so you can set them up like really really hard but the problem with that is it's going to dehydrate them a lot

so basically you can do that but they're gonna turn more to leather and they're not gonna feel like a human body and they're going to dehydrate and so it's gonna require a lot more cosmetics and stuff and make them look unnatural is there any perfect way to do it man i can't believe there's only embalming and creaming or cremation but i think i'd love to be damn wrapped in bacon or something you know i'd love to be just you know i'd love to be uh what's the one where they cut you open and put cheese in you you know um corn on blue or i go stuff cross on stuff cross to be great and so now they do have sometimes we do what's what's called like a green burial and that's where somebody is still buried but they're not embalmed and so they don't want to be

embalmed and they just want to be more natural and sometimes they'll be you know just like in a wood casket and buried in a cemetery without a vault and everything else because they want to go back to the earth as quickly as possible and is that growing in popularity um in some areas it is but you know the jews don't embalm and orthodox jew does not embalm wow um that's one of the things you learn when you're in a mortuary school is different religions and kind of how their preference is and i'm not for sure if you know this but i went to mortuary school here in Nashville there is a mortuary college in Nashville it's called john a gupton college and it's over on church street and one of the things that they do is your last semester mortuary school they assign

you to work one day a week at a funeral home as part of your schooling so they've got certain funeral homes that they'll assign you at and i worked at one here in Nashville and it was and it was the jewish funeral home wow and so so there's no embalming there there's not for the jews and they're real they're real strict about it and so basically why it's just kind of in their doctrine yes and they would have they have the guild that comes and washes the body and wraps the body and prepares the body it's a sect from the church and then we would put the body in what's called an errand and what that is is that's a jewish casket that's entirely made of wood wow and then we would take it to the cemetery and bury it how quickly pretty quick pretty quick normally normally if

they died normally if they died today it would be by sunday on the next day how fast can you get me in the ground if i die you guys do any like eight hour packages or anything like that we can get you in the ground pretty quick depending upon the cemetery amen so you know used to and how deep can you get me can i go 12 feet or it's only six no you can go you can go deeper because cost more no it's as long as the ground's good you know because sometimes you you've gotten cemeteries and you get down so far and it's solid rock you know you hit that bedrock and everything else but like for instance there's cemeteries such as a lot of veteran cemeteries they do what's called double depth and so like if you've got a husband and wife they'll they'll

put the first one that dies they'll put them down you know probably 10 to 12 feet wow and then and then when the second one dies they'll dig down part of the way and then they'll put them there man and so they're they're double depth now different states have different requirements and most people you know have that ingrained in their head that oh i'm six feet deep well in the state of kentucky the law says that if you're if you're in a burial vault there only has to be 18 inches of dirt on top of you now most of the time there is more than that but that's what the but that's what the that's the minimum legal requirement so you could go shallow here over in kentucky you go 18 inches damn anybody do it still sometimes i mean most of the time is not but but you know

and what it is is used to when when graves were dug by hand they used to be sometimes more shallow than they are now when they're dug by by machine you know i tell you when i was growing up they had a man in our neighborhood who he died and uh and they buried him in the backyard they buried him in their backyard and they invited me and this one kid over there to the to the service and we didn't know what a service was we never seen it or anything you know and they say you want to come to a service and we thought maybe it was like tennis or something you know but um we got back there next you know we're all sitting in these folding chairs and they're burying this this dude this old dude mr palito and they just put him in the ground man and they said anybody want to say

anything and my friend summer all do this young fella he said grace like you would say over dinner you know he didn't know what to say you know so his little wild ass said uh god is great god is good god we thank you for this food not just remember standing there just being like what in the hell is going on you know um do some families still does bury their own um there they have to be buried you can't be just buried on your property unless there's sort of cemetery there now how do you get it legally cemeterized um well if it's just a family cemetery it's the biggest difference is whether or not you're going to be selling plots if you sell plots to other individuals that's a whole lot more red tape than if it's just going to be a family cemetery but you have to have it you

have to have so much um area set aside for the cemetery it has to be reflected in the deed you have to have permanent egress to it and so there's a little bit of work that has to be done and it has to be fenced and so there's some stuff that has to be done legally to make those requirements but if you meet those requirements you're good and do you guys do you get involved at all if it's a family cemetery yes we will still be you know doing them bombing and take them out there and make sure everything's done legally so you can't just go straight from the kitchen table somebody chokes to death and just hold them up in the backyard there's nobody do that route yeah you can't do that because there's gotta be a couple steps in between there

you guys ever run a coupon deal or anything like in the summer or something like that you know no we don't ever run that blue but light special or bible and get one free or whatever nothing like that no it would just taint the industry huh that's right i i hate my phone bill i hate it it's expensive i have to give them money but i get to keep using my phone well now premium wireless just got cheaper with mint mobile they're introducing their unlimited data plan for just 30 bucks a month let that sink in just 30 bucks a month how much is your soon to be x wireless provider charging you for people that hate their phone bill and are ready to cut ties with big wireless mint mobile offers their premium unlimited plan for just 30 bucks a month by going

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living a happier life today visit betterhelp.com slash theo that's b e t t e r h e l p and join the over half a million people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional special offer for this past weekend listeners get 10 off your first month at better help.com slash theo if you need help look into it and now back to the episode any more questions that came in brother hey theo um mortician um just got back from a run got that zen pack in up top okay um so mr or mrs mortician i was wondering if you've ever uncovered anything inside or like on someone's body maybe that uh hadn't been picked up yet and uh it's like something kind of like silence of the lambs but uh maybe not as morbid um well i guess um and how did you get into more

morticianry thank you i don't know what he means by that first part you ever uncovered something on somebody yeah yeah you ever found yeah i guess you ever gotten somebody back to them to the uh morgue is it called a morgue well where we take away to be back to the preparation room okay you ever get somebody back there and you find something in their pocket you know you find a couple pills or you find a little you know something like that a snack a butterscotch anything like that yeah no i've never really taken you know get gotten anything body back there and then just over and oh well here's a handful of pills that was missed or you know something like that and because normally normally they've had they the coroner's office or whoever has checked the

body has been pretty thorough to make sure that everything is you know that they kind of do an inventory and that nothing's missed okay because they you know they kind of have to do those steps before they let us take responsibility for the body now what would what about with is there one body type ethnicity that keeps a little bit better than others um i would i wouldn't say so you know they you know it's all the it's all the same as far as the body you know and everything else now sometimes um dehydration and stuff if on a pale person when they start dehydrating and they start getting a little bit darker it shows up worse on a pale person yeah then it does somebody who's you know darker skin and what's the final lacquer you can put on somebody

how much is it to get a dang just a nice you know i'm talking two coats of just a matte finish you know something uh you know not Sherwin wins but something nice you know do loth or whatever it's called well you know we've got different cosmetics and believe it or you know most of the time you can you know you'll just put a light very light coat but then we have sometimes you have to mask somebody and when i say mask somebody that's when you're putting a lot of cosmetics on them because something went wrong what do you mean something went wrong like they felt like they died by some ants or something you know if they died and they you know and they for instance let's say somebody died and they were face down and nobody found them for a while but what's happens

is in the body the blood will settle to the lowest point you know the blood starts settling so if so if you're if you die face first downhill then then it's gonna then a lot of the blood's going to run to the face well what happens as this as that blood runs to the face if it starts in these capillaries on your face if those start getting so much blood in there that they have that they can't handle the pressure they'll pop and once that happens that blood runs up runs out into this tissue and that's that creates a condition that we call postmortem stain and if it's postmortem stain you can't really get that out damn bro and all you can do is cover it that postmortem stain baby i don't want that no so if i die what's the best way for me to die then um the best way for

you to die would probably be in your sleep okay but with somebody checking on you so there be so that they don't let you just lay there for hours after you die so after i'm dead what should someone just roll me over like every 30 minutes or something like what's the best way they should call me okay after you die that's what you should do you call you call frank jiles that's it you call frank jiles that's right that canary baby he'll get over there and help you to the help you to the afterlife but what's the best way for somebody to take care of the body do they should you rotate it every 30 minutes or what should you do no just leave it there you know front down or back down oh back down you know head head slightly elevated okay and then so put a book under the

head maybe or a pillow okay a pillow is always nice yep another thing that i want to tell you about that is um are you familiar with jaundice oh yeah my sister had jaundice growing up okay okay well jaundice will react with formaldehyde so we've got a there's a special fluid that you use for a jaundice body and if if you don't use the correct fluid and like if if you had jaundice really bad and i just poured this chromatech pink to you well the formaldehyde in it will react with the billy rubin in the jaundice and it will cause the body to turn green just smurf out almost like shrek you'd be shrekt out like green and have you ever had has that ever accidentally happened well i've had it happen where we're like somebody died in another state and they sent them in to me

and i got this lady one time and by the time she got to me she was green and so then what we had to do was we had to all we could do was cosmetize over it oh yeah because you can't go back in and reverse that and so man so they might be green underneath huh wow could i take a sip of that you think it would it hurt me oh yeah it hurt you yeah it's you know they've got they've got all kind of warning labels on their poison you know do not drink and you know and it's also a known carcinogen so yeah so they you know they tell you that you know it's gonna cause cancer if you get if you're exposed to it too much and i still work with it every day wow you know that's the risk i take yeah dang you're helping people with cancer you might get

it but you know that's that's what i do what i do you know because i'm helping the family yeah yeah now can you eat near the bodies or not it's frowned upon you know people you know people don't you know it's now you're you're talking about when the preparation's going on yeah that's frowned upon now if you're saying if somebody's let's say you're having visitation and the widow standing up there you know in the receiving line and she's eating a cracker or sandwich or whatever you know that's her call yeah you know but but what about you while you're fixing the bodies up you know and you guys are there finishing off a rubin or something you ever had yeah no that's frowned upon you know they they oh she doesn't like for you to eat or drink in the prep room damn

because sometimes i'd want to have a beer or something by a body you know so that's yeah that'd be frowned upon have you had to bury any of your own family uh yes um when i was working there um one of my grandmother's died and so we we handled that i've had some great aunts and stuff like that that have gone through the funeral home since i've had it but both of my parents are still living and all my other grandparents were already dead before i got into the funeral business but i've had lots of cousins and people that i've known have come through the funeral home do people look at you weird because you work in the death trade uh most of them have gotten used to it now when i was in high school um the principal he and i got along pretty good and he used to

always pick on me about it he'd be like hi jiles i don't know what you're doing or sometimes he'd just look at me and be like you're sick you're sick and twisted yeah is he dead or not no he's still living he'll die he i saw him at the funeral home but probably about a month ago he said well i see you're still here got your name on the sign say it'll be you soon um now what about our body like now what about like our our colon and feces and stuff like that what happens to that part of us that's that's one of the things that we suck out with that trocar okay we'll suck we'll suck that crap out of you dang and how long does it take just depends kind of yeah it depends upon you know what all is in the body and everything else and you know because some conditions

put more fluid on the body and everything like if there's somebody that's very edematous and they've got a lot of extra fluid we put extra fluids in them to kind of get that fluid out and try to draw that fluid off the body and uh and so all that just goes down the drain and then what do you put in the colon what do y'all fill it up with we have a different chemical that is very similar to this it looks the same just different color but it's designed to go back in there and to treat those cavities wow what color is it it is kind of a greenish blue okay and do you sew up the butt the sphincter do y'all sew that clothes no no really yeah y'all just leave it open well i mean normally it's you leave it natural dang and that thing stays natural

most of the time yes wow so now what if it gets a little unnatural you got a little clip or something a barrette or something you put on there uh it's um more of what would be more like a plug a spackle or something so or you can always y'all caulk it what do you do beyond no it's it's more like a cork more like a plug wow now of course if you go old school old school would be you would stuff it full of cotton because putting cotton in somebody's booty like a build-a-bear yeah i guess if you want to get you call it that but they're used to sometimes people used to refer to morticians as cotton stuffers because we use a lot of cotton you know to build up different things and you know and so they used to have to put a lot of cotton in there especially when the

fluids and the procedures weren't you know as great that they used to put cotton you know and basically every orifice that you could leak from that stuff it full of cotton oh i think i guess i'd take uh yeah i'd take half a rabbit probably man i'd need a decent amount i'd need a decent amount uh any other good questions we got here let's get to one more and then we'll uh we'll just thank you for for coming right wow what's up you death daddies got a question out there first of all gang gang baby i was wondering my granny she used to uh she used to be beautician but she used to you know night night time as that mortician okay moonlight with the disease and she would go in there and uh she would do the makeup for the deads you know

them deceaseds and i was just wondering because she had some wild stories have you working in there at night time by yourself deepen those depths of hell have you ever experienced anything a little nutty a little odd you know anyway gang gang death death baby death death dog now yeah because a lot of people probably see you as like a hell boy almost in a way and so have you ever seen like any you ever had any spiritual experiences when you're in there like if you ever does it get a little haunty i would imagine it gets kind of haunty huh no it you know it's one of those things that you know you're just there and it's not necessarily like i don't ever feel like you know um there's ghost or anything there you know and i've never had any you know quite crazy or

wild experiences with any of the bodies or anything like that i've never you know felt like there was somebody else there or anything like that you know some sometimes people will ask me the question similar to that but yeah no i've never experienced anything like he's talking about wow so in the end of the end the end of it all you're saying you go open casket that's the way to go huh that's the way that i want to go but you know that's my choice and you know at the end it's it's a personal choice and what's what's right for me might not be right for you you know you might want to be burned that's fine that's your that's your choice my choice is i want to be open casket because i want to have you know i want to have one more one more good suit on you

know so everybody can see it and everything else yeah and so but that's that's the way that i want to go i want to be dan krimber laid i feel like a honey mustard i want something i'm ready for that next level is there something new on the horizon of burial that's starting to kind of peek it's head about anything you're hearing well there in some states they have this it's similar it's kind of like what they call a flameless cremation but it's very similar to like an air dryer kind of no it's more like how you see those old movies where the mob would put you in a 55 gallon drum full of chemicals and then you disintegrate it's more like that but that's not that's not recognized as in some states that flameless cremation yeah it's not recognized in kentucky

yet okay but i know a guy who's got that business in missouri and he does it for other funeral homes or whatever because most of them haven't made that investment because it hadn't caught on yet you know some people are thinking that you know freezing people is going to be the next thing right but you know you just you just don't ever know until that next thing gets here and how is the business been is it still a good business to be in it's still a good business to be in now the business has changed a lot from what it used to be what most people don't realize is that there's funeral homes that are what what are considered to be locally owned and operated like i've got a business partner and he and i own the funeral homes what and then there's also corporate funeral

homes and those are funeral homes that are owned by your major corporations and i mean they're traded on nasdaq oh wow i mean you know the stock exchange yeah so you know there's companies that own funeral homes all across the country and you know they just buy and sell funeral homes and they and that's what they do and is that a little bit does that get a little less personal care you feel like when you get involved with those big dogs i feel like some of those big big ones they're they're not necessarily in it for the family they're in it for the money and they're just trying to cut corners so they can make more profit you know i i've born and raised where i work and i see those people every day and i work with those are my friends and i'm not going to take advantage of them

and i want to treat them with the utmost respect that they deserve and i'm going to do everything i can to make sure that they get a proper burial or cremation if that's what they choose and i want it to be the best that it can form whereas you've got somebody who doesn't know these folks taking care of them they might not try us hard that's not as important to them you know because the person that lives down the road for me all my life they're important to me they're not important to whoever owns you know some stockholder in california or texas you know deaths are us or someplace exactly exactly and so you know but that's that's the thing you know you always know who you're dealing business with yeah and you know there is something nice about that knowing when you die who's going

to handle you exactly because you you know you sometimes i have families that you know they'll call they'll call me on the on my cell phone they won't even call the funeral home number they'll say you know mom died we need you to come and so here i come yeah it is something nice about knowing the person that's coming in exactly somebody doesn't have to come in with a name tag on or you know uh you know they don't even know yeah somebody don't know you right you know somebody it comes up to the door i don't want somebody pulling up and honking you know like it's a you know like i'm gonna carry him out there like the other day i went to uh went to a you know a house and i did not know the i did not know the deceased but i was standing there talking to the deceased

wife and then the son came around the corner because he'd been back in one of the bedrooms getting something for his mother and then he came out of the back bedroom and i knew him you know went to high school with him so you know so that made her feel better knowing that oh he knows my son for sure gonna take better care of my husband and everything else wow and you know that's what we try to do and is there something killing people that you've noticed more over time like uh you know you always hear about drug deaths and this and that are there things that are growing that you're noticing here at the at the end of the line well you know it was before you know before covid you know they were talking about you know the the drugs and the narcotics and all that kind

of stuff that you notice in it we were not having that big of an issue there in hopkinsville where they were in some of the other cities where you know and i think it just you know sometimes it takes a little bit longer to work its way through and so drug overdoses were a big thing especially in some of the bigger cities it seems to have tapered off in the moment or you're just not hearing about it but you know that does happen um and sometimes you know if there's one drug overdose you're going to get some more you know especially if you're at that batch if that batch comes yeah if a bad batch comes through you know you can see several oh yeah and you know and that's just that's the thing about drugs that people get so dependent upon them that you know you can have

a bad batch come through and lose five or six people oh fuck we had about some lsd come through one time and people couldn't even tie their shoes for a damn month you know yeah somehow you just don't know what these drugs are going to do to you you don't and and some of these cancer drugs and these drugs that these people that they're putting people on to save you know to try to prolong their life or actually having reactions with like the amount of hide and stuff like that and so you know you're getting sometimes a graying a graying effect or you're getting different effects on the body based on the chemicals that they're putting in them to try to save them and so you don't know that until you really put it in huh exactly dang and so you that's one of the things that you're

trying to counteract as to what you know what drugs that they've been on and everything else somebody comes out that damn turkish gold tent or something that's why you got some of these accessory chemicals that are supposed to help balance out the pH and everything else that's in these fluids like treating the pool almost huh exactly exactly because you know part of that part of that that goes in there is water so you got to make sure that the water is good and everything else you ever feel somebody a little too much you're like oh damn we put a little too much in uh not not really because it's because as you're putting that in it's still pushing it out so you know it's you're getting it right back out so I see and once so once it stops coming out

that's when you know to stop filling well no you you know by the what's coming out you know because you can tell when you when you're draining the blood you know okay this is blood now this is right now i'm getting a lot of fluid back and so you've oh okay you run its course yeah so you can kind of tell that man I think that might be about it Sean you know anything else anything we missed literally huh who has the best funeral music is it really like at I would feel like at black funerals you'd have better music do you just have it well it just depends I've been to black churches growing up I go to black churches man and dude you feel like you're sitting on the Lord's lap you know at a black church right right and you know that's one of the things about it

is here in the south you know just like church you know and this is not this is not a racial thing but just like how church is pretty well segregated here in the south so are funeral homes most of the time you know for instance the the city that I'm in we have primarily white funeral homes and primarily black funeral homes yeah that doesn't mean that I won't bury a black person or they won't bury a white person but people really stick to their uh they'll stick to their culture their culture their upbringing and it's it's who they know you know they went they've known him all their life and you know they've the others have known me all their life and it's just you know just like how they choose to go to church you know the the church is product predominantly

white or black yeah you know that's kind of how they stick to with the funerals because that's funerals and your funerals and your church services a lot of them go hand in hand they cross over you know one of the things that people don't think about with our job is all the coordination that goes involved that's involved you know throughout the lines when somebody dies or whatever one service that um that I'll talk to you about for a minute um the gentleman was k a and that's military terminology for killed in action amen but he was killed in action in war war two so he dies in war war two in the battle of batah he is buried over there on the where in a cemetery that they basically buried all the troops that got killed right there

he's buried there oh yeah but a style they put a bunch of them in one spot you know they would just dig graves they and they had this protocol that they did and they had government issued raincoats and they'd wrap the body up in the raincoat and they buried and then they'd move on to their next battle or whatever well there's organizations out there that are going through and trying to find all these soldiers and bring them back to their homes wow so sure enough I get a call from a family and they have been in touch with one of these organizations and they have found the remains of a guy from our town at batah so what they did was they disinterred his body and flew it to Hawaii and in Hawaii they matched the DNA for him to one of his nieces they matched that DNA to confirm

that it was him and then we started making the arrangements to get him back here so of course they they booked the flight and they said okay he's gonna arrive in Nashville at such and such day at such and such time so you guys show up at the airport so we show up at the airport with the family and everything else meet with the airport police at at Nashville and where do they come through baggage come as a large item like the golf bag well they they they travel underneath they travel underneath on the plane but when I was dealing with the airline the airlines like now what's going to happen is we're going to go out there and we're going to bring his body here and you can you know the family can receive the body at the time you know here baggage claim or

actually it's kind of like air cargo oh yeah and and then the head of the airport police he showed up and I and I started talking to him he said he said these are the cargo people he said I'm in charge he said you want to go out to meet the plane I said yeah I want to go out to meet the plane he said well put everybody in your vehicles and we'll go out and meet the plane and so they brought airport vans and everything else and we went we drove the hearse and everything out to the tarmac wow they brought they brought the you know because we had we had this was pre-covid so we had a full detail of you know of army men there and they received the casket you know right off the plane carried him to the hearse and it was you know it was a big deal you know real emotional

they had everybody in the in the area like in the terminal come to the glass windows and they all watched it and they were all holding flags and everything else as they took as they brought the body to the hearse and then after that then we brought him all the way back from out of the tarmac back to hopkinsville and how big was he well they had him in a full-size casket oh damn because what they did was they crawled large they chronicled everything that they had and you believe it was really him or not I do they had they had it down to they had every one of his bones except for one they had it all laid out they had all the DNA they had everything about him they had in this book that they gave to the families and everything else we um so we're coming back you

know we've got police escorts all the way from Nashville all the way you know to the to the Kentucky state line and that's when the Tennessee people broke off and then when we got to christian county um the sheriff's department was there waiting on us and I bet you they had about eight units there and then when we got to the city of hopkinsville the city was there and the community came out big fort and the fire truck you know they took the back big boom ladder and everything else and they had a huge american flag drape that we drove under and everything else and we took him out to shit we took him out to the local cemetery that um his that his parents were buried at all his brothers were buried there and we buried in there I mean we we even had the

pgr there and um you know the pgr is another group that we work with occasionally and what they are is they're called they're the patriot guard riders and they're motorcycle guys and most of them are veterans and everything else but they really got a lot of notoriety back when there was that group from Kansas that was going around protests and military funerals you could call the pgr and they'd show up and they would show up and so what they would do is they would ride their motorcycles you know with the funeral and when like if you were coming up to the cemetery or whatever and there was the protesters they'd stop right there and the protesters in front of the protesters and grab those motorcycles up you drive right on by and you never could hear

the protesters and so that's really magical people come out to support veterans you know yeah it means a lot to people uh especially to those families especially getting to be back with your family I think have your you know just have your rest in place back with your family is something beautiful about that how uh if you're cleaning out somebody's colon how what if you don't get everything is there a time lady we're like oh I gotta run this thing back again um sometimes you know if you were not to get everything you know you would see some distending distention in the abdomen yeah and then you would go back and you would do it and you know you can wash twice yeah Sam now now what most people wash me twice put a damn piece

of spear man in my ass man you know I'm like I just want to be fresh when I'm laying there what some people don't think about is once like when somebody drowns they sink to the bottom but as they start to decompose and those gases break up in that cavity that's what causes them to float and so sometimes especially back home around the lake you know what will happen is somebody will drown and you know so they're they don't might not find them for a day or two and then you know whenever they start floating up you don't ever know what time that's going to be and sometimes what will happen is they'll float up and they'll get caught up in a barge and now that's either going either up river or down river wet hitchhiking and they won't notice it

until daybreak and then they'll have to stop the barge and then they've got a lot of red tape and everything else and you know they find this person who's from Kentucky up in Illinois somebody's crossing state lines yeah because well exactly now what about this you got that last gas in you your body builds one that that last gas you have to let that out normally normally you can because when we use that trocar and you ever get that hit of gas you get that gas pocket you can hit a gas pocket and it will you know shrink up or whatever but sometimes after you've used that trocar and you've there's a button that we use that's kind of like a screw-in button that we put on the person and if they get distension sometimes you just take that button off and it'll release

that pressure and release that gas and that's like a last fart almost it's in them I guess you could call it that and is it smell pretty bad a lot of times it would yes wow I want that definitely I'm doing one you got to go out with a you know a last blast I think man I can't tell if I'm more excited about dying or not after talking to you honestly Frank well you know as long as you've had a good run on earth you know there's time there's always a time to check out don't get in a hurry you only pass this wave once that's it huh that's right do you feel like people will talk to you about death a lot oh yeah always got questions do you feel like um do you ever have somebody wants to get dressed up in something real wild like a

nightgown or somebody wants to be you know dressed a little cousin up like superman or something well you know therefore it kind of goes in phases like you'll have phases where you know people will want to be buried in like pajamas and stuff like that and then sometimes you know you'll have we have Casworth in Kentucky we have a lot of people that like to be buried in you know like UK jersey not necessarily jerseys but it might be a uk fleece or polo okay so state sports pride yes rocking the sports pride all the way to the grave damn wow man you know what will you wear you think oh i'll definitely wear a suit probably a blue one you know probably blue looks good i like blue suits it'll probably either be a blue or black you know probably but it won't be plain it'll have

it'll have some type of stripe or weave in it you know okay bright tie you know probably you know maybe a red or you know a yellow something like that something kind of flashy you know it's supposed to tie so go flashy is kind of the way to go you think a little bit so you know i i would when i dress i will dress a little less conservative than some funeral professionals but you know because it's you know i'm in a suit every day of my life you know just about every day i wake up and i put a suit on and so and so you know i like to i don't like to just stick with you know a solid brown a solid blue a solid black and a solid gray you know i've got on a gray pinstripe today with a you know a pink tie you know and everything else i'll dyeing your damn arms right now you look

like i'm right you know you're ready to help somebody thank you but you know that's you know you know that's me you know i've got a couple of suits that are that some people say are a little bright but you know that's that's my personality i like to be you know i'm here when you need me and i'm here for the seriousness of it but you know at the same time you know it doesn't have to be all drab have you ever had somebody die they want to be dressed up like superman or somebody dressed up like a damn you know like a wear like a you know a dressed up like he man or you know a miss butterworth or anything like that somebody wants a particular type of costume um not so much as a costume like we've had people who have worn like a superman shirt or you know something like

that and um but you know not a not a real costume leotard leotards and all that no capes you know yeah what what will my penis and stuff look like when i die does it look the same or does it start to look a little different now it'll look pretty much the same nice um and what about like um what happens to fake breasts do y'all puncture them and suck them out or leave now you leave them they paid you in money for those oh yeah boy you know what i'm saying call me up i come over there and i'll work and put some makeup on those on those mounds baby wow and do you have to color the nipples at all with like a powder or a dust no because normally those are covered up and what about the balls you have to suck the stuff out of those no wow interesting man well man i think i'm

just dang i guess i just know everything i know now do your eyes stay the same color they were yes that's cool but of course they're closed so nobody really sees them yeah what bone was that guy missing the guy that came back from i'm not for sure i i don't remember now but they had they had it they had a picture in the book that they gave all the family members that had the entire skeleton laid out wow and so what if uh if somebody lost their legs do you bury them in that full-size casket or will you go a little shorter on that on that casket you'll go you'll still use that full size because it's like everything else if you tried to go smaller you're going to be they don't

really make smaller caskets on a normal so it's gonna cost more right whereas you know like if somebody is really big they have to get a bigger casket and there's a company out there or used to be a company out there called Goliath casket company wow and there that was their niche market was they made oversized caskets and their two most popular models were 48 inches wide and 60 inches wide so that's four and five feet wide on the interior that's a damn queen bed i mean it was they were big caskets but when you needed them you needed them can two people legally be buried in one casket technically i guess you could depending on most states but you know if but most of the time most of the time they don't go together have you ever buried two in one i have

never buried two people in the sun casket well let me rephrase that i've never buried two full bodies in the same casket i have buried people like sometimes one of them wants to be cremated and the other one wants to be buried and if they're one that's cremated dies first i have put their cremains in the casket with the other one when the other one dies i've done that but i've not put two two full bodies in the same casket could you handle it could i handle it as far as as you'd have to have a wider casket but but i mean i guess i could do it if i had to hell yeah but you know we've had um i've had double funerals but they've all been in separate caskets you know and is it cheaper to go two in one casket um no because i'll cut corners man

you know because because what happens is it's becomes more expensive because of because when you're getting into that bigger size because a bigger size casket is more expensive you know when you're getting wider and then also they're not they're not as many out there as there are standard size casket and you can't just lay somebody right on top of somebody else that'd be tacky yeah that'd be tacky what about um um what's the smallest casket you've ever done uh it would be like an 18 inch damn yeah like a damn baby snicker almost for for like a stillborn baby oh that's heartbreaking man oh life is wild huh yeah one time we had this situation where um the um a lady had had a baby who had died and um the she had the baby had already been dead for 24 hours and was just

sitting there with the um with the mother in the hospital room because the mother was still in the hospital and um i remember um i met with the baby's daddy about the funeral arrangements before they even released the body because the mother wasn't letting the baby hoe wow and so um so i told the baby's daddy i said i said you just go back to the hospital and you tell him i'll be there at six o'clock tonight to pick up the body and when i get there she'll need to give me the baby and i told i got to the hospital signed all the paperwork and everything else and i told the nurses on the maternity ward i said i said um i said i'm gonna go in there and i'm gonna speak to the family and then i'm gonna take the baby on back to the funeral home to go ahead and work on preparing

it for the funeral and the um the nurse laughed she said um she said i want you to know she said she's had that baby for over 24 hours she said and nobody's taken away from her she said so um good luck with it good luck with that but you'll be here all night wow so you went in there so i went into the to the room there and i spoke to all the family that was there and she gave me the um she gave me the baby and when i walked out of the room with the baby she started screaming and you know because she was so overwhelmed with grief and i could still hear her screaming when i got on the elevator oh and because it's so it's so hard to lose a you know to lose a child it's so unnatural that you don't know how you would react nobody knows how they're gonna react until they're in that

situation you know it's easy to look look look at it and say oh i would never react that way but you don't know how you're gonna react oh yeah i mean i mean that's that's somebody's child or that's somebody's spouse and you know when they get overcome with grief you just gotta be there for them and you know if they need to if they need to cry and scream you just gotta kind of help them cry and scream but if you know whatever they need to be you know it's you just gotta be there for them you know death brings out the worst in people but it also brings out the best in people so you never know you never know how somebody's gonna react you just gotta be there for them and what do you carry a baby like that in that that's that's that's uh it's just that's heartbreaking um we wrap them in

a baby blanket and we and we carry them just like they were if they you would if they were a live child and do you set them up in the front seat or do you put them in the back or what do you do um most of the time what we would do is we would um in a situation like that we would have we would take um a car and two people and so one person would hold the baby in the car and the other one would drive wow you know they make they make what is called it's it's like a box that you could put the baby in for um you know to transport it but I'm not putting a baby in a black box that looks like a tackle box to you know or something like that I don't I don't think that's fitting and appropriate so we don't use those type of things we just use the baby blanket because baby should

be in a baby blanket whether they're alive or dead and they shouldn't be you know they shouldn't be thrown in a box you wouldn't carry you you wouldn't carry you know a live one like that I'm not gonna carry a dead one like that amen oh working at the finish line man you're working at the finish line that's right sometimes that finish line's real short to the starting line and sometimes it's real far away but you know you gotta be there for all of it wow yeah it's fascinating man uh I don't I think I don't know if there's anything else that I can take out of you today man except just to say thank you very much and and what's the name y'all's outfit over there it's huggart beard and jiles phenol home in hopkinsville kentucky wow

well thank you so much man for coming in and just filling us in on everything that's in that world you know frank jiles thank you so much today man oh last question when the undertaker remember the wrestler when he really popped off remember yeah did that put a lot of pressure on you guys as uh as undertakers and stuff like that to really take it to another level no but you know a lot of times when when he was really big in wrestling you know it would be you know I would get a lot of comments you know if they'd be like hey undertaking let me be your manager let me be your manager you know let me be your paul bearer you know yeah and so but yeah those were some those were some interesting times but did it put pressure on you to like you know did it make you

feel like oh I gotta you know be more athletic or I gotta show up and yell or you know like anything that really did it make you did it put any pressure on the industry no no we weren't out there practicing the tombstone power driver anything like that yeah but yeah how did it didn't make me go hit the gym or anything like that yeah yeah that's always wondered that man frank jiles thank you so much for being here today man really really appreciate it and thanks for just kind of welcoming us into your world and what it's like it seems like uh you're just kind of walking along a really unique part of of existence you know you're just kind of you kind of you're not really guiding people but you are kind of you're just right there with them that's right you know and the thing about it is

is it's kind of like if you fall in a hole and your neighbor jumps in that hole with you and you'd say well why did you jump in the hole with me and you know it's well I've been here before and I've gotten I've gotten out and so I'm I'm here you know I've been I've been through it with before I'll guide you right on through yeah amen well thanks for guiding us through this chat today frank jiles we appreciate it we're quite welcome honored to be here now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves I must be cornerstone oh but when I reach that ground I'll share this peace of mind I found I can feel it in my bones but it's gonna take me a little time for me to set that parking brake and let myself on one

shine that light on me me I'll sit and tell you my story shine on me and I will find a song I will sing it just for you oh love