Last fall, the annual convention of the National Funeral Directors Association featured a brand-new event: the Restorative Art Technical Showcase, in which a group of elite morticians competed over the course of three hours to transform a mangled silicone head into a face you wouldn’t wince at during a viewing. The competition came at a delicate moment for the field: While funeral services remain lucrative overall, open caskets appear to be on their way out. Cremation is now the most popular method of disposition by a significant margin, and various trends within the industry (consolidation, the imposition of private equity) have devalued the practice of restoring bodies even where demand for it still exists. 

What would it mean to lose an entire tradition of memorializing our dead? And how are morticians, so accustomed to cheating the appearance of death, confronting the possibility of their own obsolescence? In the August issue, John Semley set out to answer these questions, attending the showcase, speaking to undertakers about the challenges they face, and even witnessing the restoration of a cadaver at a medical lab in Washington, D.C. I spoke with him recently about the American history of death rituals and our changing relationship to public expressions of grief.

Jess Bergman: I know from our early conversations about this piece that you already had some exposure to the funeral industry and the work of morticians before you began reporting. What were your early impressions of the field?

John Semley: A close family friend of my parents, whose kids I played hockey with, ran the funeral parlor in my small Ontario town. Sometimes we would hang out there when it was empty, so I probably spent more time than most kids in the empty, calm, refrigerated funeral-parlor environment. I always thought it was interesting that the owner, my dad’s friend Mark, had a sense of humor. We have this cultural idea of what the undertaker is, but I didn’t because the one person I knew in that line of work was just a hilarious friend of my parents. 

Later, when I was a teenager, I attended the funeral of my hockey coach’s toddler. I remember that they had an open-casket ceremony in which the child was dressed up in a baseball cap and overalls. It had a formative impact on my brain, in a way that I can’t totally account for.

Bergman: There is a surgical aspect to restoration and to restorative art: suturing wounds, resetting bones. But it requires a wide variety of skills, including elements of sculpture and cosmetology. What did you find most impressive about the process?

Semley: With a good restoration, you can’t pinpoint the moment when someone goes from looking like an object to looking like a person. There’s something really magical about that: it might happen when you put in some crow’s feet or paint on some liver spots. 

When I arranged to watch a corpse be embalmed and restored a few weeks after the showcase, I worried that I would find it totally disgusting. And there were some gnarly bodies in various states of preservation and decay in the lab that I visited,. But in my head, that was only matter. Then, when the mortician started to do the work, the raw material of the body transmuted into something so convincingly lifelike—and that was when I started feeling a little queasy. 

Bergman: Working on this story took you to one of my favorite places: the Mütter Museum, in Philadelphia—a museum of medical history and, in particular, medical oddities. What was it like to do research there? Were there any pieces of history you turned up that didn’t make it into the piece?

Semley: In the Mütter Museum’s archive, I found many old books dedicated to the history of undertaking that were incredible. I was reading about rival undertakers and mad scientists who said things like, “I will be able to preserve the human body for as long as stone.” The early funeral industry had this mix of genius and carnival-barking hucksterism that feels very American. You can imagine half of these guys walking onto Shark Tank and pitching their embalming fluid. 

I also read early trade catalogs advertising embalming clinics and a whole range of goods and services for undertakers. The funeral industry is often presented to people as if it is the most somber thing you could engage in, but then you see these old ads offering “two corpses for a nickel,” and stuff like that. So there’s a tension there.

Bergman: By the end of the piece, it’s clear how much of an appreciation you have gained for what morticians do: not only for the technical aspects of their craft, but for the emotional seriousness with which they approach this work, even if they speak about it among themselves in a more lighthearted way. How did your feelings about restoration evolve? 

Semley: I write about Jessica Mitford’s book that everyone loves, The American Way of Death. I love it too. It’s a great piece of nonfiction. And at the time she was writing, the funeral industry was totally exploitative. But there’s also a disapproving high-mindedness to the book, in which she basically asks, about formal, open-casket funerals, “Why would anyone need this level of extravagance?”—which is a bit rich coming from someone like Mitford, whose life was defined by total extravagance, even if she abjured it by becoming a communist and marrying outside of the aristocracy. 

I would not say that everyone needs to be embalmed and restored, or that this is a totally necessary thing we have to do in order to say our final goodbyes. But I do think there is merit to it. First, as a craft, I think it has tremendous worth. And as a form of ritual, I don’t think that it’s inherently exploitative. The people who are exploitative are the corporate owners of funeral parlors who instruct their employers to tell a family their loved one can’t be restored if it’s going to take longer than thirty minutes, or who treat the business as nothing more than a numbers game where you’re just trying to churn people through. 

Bergman: You also write about a more recent strain of criticism of embalming and, to a lesser extent, restorative art, which are these death-acceptance or death-positivity movements that have cropped up in the past decade or so. They embrace more “natural” methods of disposition, essentially based on the argument that facing the reality of a loved one’s corpse can be an important part of the grieving process. I do believe there’s something to that, but I’m curious whether you think there’s something that those critics are misinterpreting, or perhaps overlooking, about the value of restoration and more traditional funerals?

Semley: I think what they’re overlooking is the fact that, especially with intimate loved ones, you often watch them waste away before they die. There are also people out there identifying relatives who have been shot in the face. So this idea that our culture is alienated from confrontations with death—I do not buy that whatsoever. 

Millions of people today watch true crime, or in my case, listen to bands called Obituary and Carcass, to say nothing of when we turn on the news, or go on TikTok and Instagram, and are bombarded with footage of children being killed all over the world. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw bodies being stored in refrigerated trailers on the street. You could argue, I guess, that precisely because of that surfeit of images, we have become detached from death. Even as I understand that argument in its contours, I don’t believe it. 

Now, if people want to have “green burials” for the environmental factor, I can understand that. But to say that it’s unnatural to put chemicals in bodies and to put makeup on them—well, you could also say that our entire time on this planet has been spent doing things that are unnatural: synthesizing chemicals that have only a tangential basis in nature. And in that sense, the preserved, pickled body might be the ultimate statement of the human endeavor. I don’t really believe that as a politics; it sounds a little bit fascist. But I can understand seeing the embalmed corpse as, if not the most positive expression of humanity’s life and works on this planet, then at least a very fair representation of them.

Ultimately, though, if you’d prefer to be wrapped in a biodegradable shroud and rolled into a bog, that’s your own business. (Well, a bog probably wouldn’t be allowed, so I don’t recommend that.) It just comes down to which of these rituals is consistent with your values—if you are someone who is even thinking about the ritual of your own death at all.

Bergman: That last point is an important thread in your piece: the waning appetite in general for more public expressions of grief, perhaps especially since the pandemic. What did funeral professionals have to say on that score?

Semley: They all talked about COVID-19 as the major rupture point in the industry. In the early days of the pandemic, medical professionals thought that the deceased might be vectors of disease, and there was pressure to cremate, cremate, cremate. Because, first of all, the volume of fatalities was crazy, and second of all, you can’t hold public gatherings like funerals anyway. So what benefit would there be to embalming or restoring a corpse if you can’t have a ceremony? 

I think what happened after is not dissimilar to people’s attitudes toward going to the movies. People talk about the death of theaters, and you can certainly blame the movies themselves, but the issue is also that a lot of people got used to watching new releases at home. They thought, Ah, this is fine. I don’t really miss going out and spending forty dollars plus popcorn and soda to go see Captain Marvel, or whatever. Not to imply that saying goodbye to a loved one is exactly the same, but I think certain things, once we fall out of the habit of doing them, are hard to start up again. 

COVID-19 is the specter haunting the industry. You’d think because there was so much death, it would have been gangbusters for the business, but it really wasn’t. 

Bergman: Obviously, you can grieve alone; you can grieve in the privacy of your own home. But do you think that there is something lost when we get used to not honoring people’s lives in a more communal way?

Semley: I would not go as far to say that it’s fundamental, that we all need this. But I do think that it serves a social function. When I got married, my wife said something like, “It’s so nice to have everyone together, because as you get older, the only time you see each other is when people die,” which is true to an extent. Taking the time to put on a suit and a tie, or a black veil, and remember someone: I mean, it has to be valuable.

At the same time, I’m not a religious person, and I hate being fussed over. So there are respects in which having a big funeral is not necessarily appealing to me personally. I’ll have to weigh it all when I make those arrangements myself. What do I want to do with my body? As my editor, maybe I’ll throw the decision to you. No pressure.