“I have seen the deceased with decomposition all over the body and smelled the odor of the deceased, there are those whose faces are completely disfigured due to car accidents and those who are swollen with blisters all over the body, and sometimes when I return home after a busy bath, I feel that my hands are no longer my own ……” Xin Shasha said when recalling giving the deceased a facelift.
Xin Shasha is a 90-year-old female mortician at Jinan Funeral Home. The industry calls her profession “cosmetic surgeon” and they call themselves “professional mourners”.
Jinan Funeral Parlor has 10 male morticians and 5 female morticians, of which Xin Shasha, born in 1990, is the youngest female and the only five-star mortician. An important indicator of this rating criteria is the evaluation of the family of the deceased. She is the most frequently named mortician by families and has performed cosmetic surgery on more than 10,000 deceased people in the past 8 years. The “mortuary technician”.
90 post-mortician: I have seen the whole body decomposed deceased also smelled the odor of the deceased
Interviewee: Xin Shasha
The following is the dictation of Xin Shasha.
Before going to college, my parents refused to pay tuition
What drew me to this path was a newspaper advertisement for a mortician in my senior year of high school. To put it bluntly, it is to do makeup for the dead. I grew up in a rural area, and I had the impression that people were taken directly to the crematorium after death, so there was no such thing as “cosmetic makeup”. I also paid attention to the news about “morticians” before filling out the college entrance examination, such as “earning more than 10,000 yuan a month”, “make-up for the dead”, “enrolled in the school is booked “…… searched the internet for “mortician” related majors and became interested in the Modern Mortuary Technology and Management program at a college in Beijing.
I have one brother and one sister who are both in college, and my parents are ordinary farmers. I didn’t have any idea about what to do in the future, so I wanted to ease the burden of my family as much as possible and choose a profession with less pressure on employment. On the spur of the moment, I felt that mortician seemed to be a good choice. However, my parents thought it was a “bad luck” profession and told me to choose another major. I finally applied and was accepted. When school started, my parents disagreed and I was a little anxious because I hadn’t paid my tuition yet. I told my family that I would change my major when I enrolled, and they agreed to do so. They later learned that this was actually my “slow plan”.
In 2010, I became a freshman in the mortuary profession. There were two classes in our major, adding up to about 80 people, the smallest number of majors in the school. The first class of the school year, the teacher showed us the movie “Mortician”, after the movie, I was immersed in it for a long time, the original mortician’s work is like this …… only to find out later that it was my illusion.
Defrosting, blushing and baking oil
At the beginning of this journey, I never expected this kind of start ……
In September 2012, I started my three-month internship. On the first day, I saw the remains of a deceased person whose head was churned into two halves by a machine, and the blood kept flowing downward. When I was in school, other majors often teased us about living in a “morgue”. Although it was a joke, it seems to be true now. Usually we stayed in the workroom for a day. When I came home from work, I always felt that my hands were no longer my own. I often had nightmares at night and cried in my dreams along with the families of the deceased.
In school, I had no real contact with human remains. During college, although learned the remains of plastic surgery, embalming, cremation of remains, cemetery management and other theoretical knowledge learning, occasionally there are internship rooms, at best, practice sewing pigskin, carving molds, students than each other to make up …… reality is far from simple as imagined.
90 post-mortem plastic surgeon: I’ve seen the whole body decomposition of the deceased also smelled the odor of the deceased
Xin Shasha is giving makeup tools uniform disinfection wipe
Although I was not afraid, I still had some resistance in my heart when I first applied makeup to the body.
My “first time” was to give a face-lift to a grandmother in her 70s. I put on protective clothing, a mask and disposable medical gloves, confirmed the deceased’s information and organized her clothes. I first used a hot towel on the deceased’s face, and then used a hair dryer to blow. After about half an hour, the skin surface of the deceased’s face returned to a flat state, and I began to clean and wipe the deceased’s face, while putting the towel around the deceased’s neck to prevent soiling of the deceased’s clothes. I used an 80cm three-tier high makeup box with rollers under the feet for easy pushing and pulling. The first layer is filled with brushes of various thicknesses, lipsticks of various colors, blushes, oil colors, baking creams ……. In fact, it is no different from the cosmetics of the general public, I first sterilize the makeup tools one by one, and then the next is to do cosmetic restoration for the deceased. Then she evened out her skin tone, then used a brush to outline the eyebrows, applied a light lipstick, and sometimes we also baked oil to the deceased’s hair …… The whole process lasted about 20 minutes, and the finished makeup tried to make the deceased’s face and skin tone the same as before she was born. After the “first time”, there is a second and a third time …… slowly get used to it.
One day in October, we received the death of a young girl. Because of the car accident, she had several scratches on her face. With tears in their eyes, the family members showed me a photo of the deceased before she died and asked me to compare it with the chemistry. In the photo, she was about the same age as me, with a light makeup on her face. Finally, the girl’s mother could not stop the flow of tears when she saw the make-up finished body in the farewell hall, and she held my hand and kept saying thank you. At that moment, I found my value as a female plastic surgeon.
During the three-month internship, I performed cosmetic restoration for more than 200 bodies, and I have seen the decomposed deceased, and smelled the odor of the deceased, the face of the deceased caused by car accidents, and the swollen body with blisters …… Master often told us that when doing cosmetic restoration for the deceased, we are actually doing grief counseling for the families, so that It is the duty of our professional senders to say goodbye to the deceased with dignity and give comfort to the living. Especially after serving several women, I felt a strong sense of need and accomplishment from the recognition of the families, which gave me a new understanding of my profession.
I am a five-star “mortician”
In December 2012, I came to Jinan Mortuary to start my real “mortuary” routine.
We now have 10 male and 5 female morticians in the mortuary department. My master, Zhao Xiju, who is also the director of the mortuary department, came to work here in 2001. According to him, the area around the unit was still a wasteland and there were no street lights at night and no light in the factory. At that time, the working room conditions were also very limited. The refrigerator was a double-door cabinet, and at least three bodies could be seen when one door was opened. In order to prevent the remains from deteriorating and rotting, check at least two to three times a night …… catch a person on night duty, the storage of remains are all the way back and forth at a trot, is really creepy.
Now the work environment is much better than the original, work room like a cold storage, inside are open, there are refrigerated room, grooming room, dressing room, etc.. Refrigeration room in the middle of a two-meter-wide corridor, both sides of the corridor is a single refrigerated cabinets, three cabinets per side high, can put forty to fifty remains. The corridor of the cold storage room rushes to the grooming room, and the interior can release the trolley of about ten sets of remains. Before and after the service for the deceased, we first change clothes and self-sterilization from the dressing room.
90 post-mortem plastic surgeon: I have seen the whole body decomposition of the deceased also smelled the deceased body odor
Xin Shasha in the Jinan City Funeral Hall to the body of the deceased to make up
It is a tradition in Shandong to have a funeral at noon, so noon is the busiest time for us. Four or five morticians start working at 9:00 in the morning, and they can do more than 20 bodies until noon, so the workload is quite big. It is not uncommon for us to miss meals throughout the day. From contacting families, collecting and placing the remains, refrigeration, embalming, cosmetic surgery, make-up, farewell, cremation, ashes distribution …… is no different from a normal working person. As we get more recognition from the families, they also have higher expectations of us.
I think I am not the best in the mortuary department. In 2019, when I was 6 months pregnant, my belly was getting bigger and bigger, and it became more and more difficult to give facials to the deceased. In the workroom we are required to stand all the time, which is a respect for the deceased and a requirement of our job. Sometimes we have to bend over, and our backs are sore after a few hours. In order to better preserve the remains, the temperature in the workroom is 3 to 5 degrees lower than the normal room temperature. Sometimes, when we encounter some special circumstances of the deceased, such as car accidents, serious body decay, etc., we have to perform suturing and remodeling before plastic surgery and makeup, which may take several hours or even longer to process. After work, I like to read some books about head plasticity and color matching, practice cosmetic restoration on face sculpture, and I don’t wear much make-up, but occasionally I practice make-up techniques on myself.
We have three five-star plastic surgeons in the mortuary department, and I am the youngest of them. Our star rating is three stars, four stars and five stars from the lowest to the highest, and one of the most important indicators of this rating is the evaluation of the family of the deceased. Our service has become more detailed. I am the most frequently named by families, and on average, I perform cosmetic restoration on 6 deceased people per week.
Giving the last decency to 10,000 deceased people
Of course, I also went through a very mournful period.
When I first arrived in Jinan to rent an apartment, I didn’t dare to tell my landlord that I was working in a funeral home, so I said I was in the Civil Affairs Bureau. The landlord later saw me at the window of the unit and within a few days found a reason to ask me to move out. Another time, the second day of the year we started work, I took a taxi to the unit, the driver immediately changed his face when he heard that it was to the funeral home. In the hall of farewell, a mother with her son’s funeral, will point to me to educate the children around me that if you do not learn well, you will have to do this …… sad aggrieved, I will write a diary, fitness.
My object and I met at the gym, and now our son is one and a half years old, sometimes I am busy, he will take the initiative to take up household chores and spend more time with the child. After having children, I went back home less often, about three or four months to go back once. Before that, my parents always hid my work, and my neighbors asked me about it, fearing that people would laugh at me.
When I learned that I was awarded the “National Advanced Worker”, first, my elementary school classmates, whom I had not contacted for a long time, suddenly sent me congratulations by WeChat, and then the good news spread in the WeChat groups of junior high school and high school, and I seemed to be on fire in the village all of a sudden. When I left home, my parents would also instruct me to do well. I feel that everything is quietly getting better.
90 post-mortem plastic surgeon: I have seen the whole body decomposed deceased also smelled the odor of the deceased
Xin Shasha in the dressing room for the preparation of the body before cosmetic surgery
Now, I have been in this business for almost 8 years and have performed cosmetic surgery on more than 10,000 deceased people. Of course, we can also encounter the families of the deceased to take out their bad feelings on us. From the family’s point of view, I can understand them and forgive them for their misunderstanding and even harm to us. As long as we do a good job of service and alleviate the bad feelings of the family, it is also a small contribution to society.
I think that the last decency of people is provided by our cosmetic surgeons, and the decency of living is earned by ourselves. The decent send-off for the deceased is the greatest respect we can do for the deceased and their families, and we also hope to get the understanding and respect of society and others.
Reporter’s Notes
The first time I met Xin Shasha, she was small in stature, wearing a black down jacket and black pants, with her long hair coiled up, her voice soft when she spoke and her walk crisp and clear, a cheerful and outgoing girl. I followed her into the workroom, through the long corridor, from time to time there will be pushing the remains of the car passing, quiet to hear only the sound of footsteps and wheels. When I came to the entrance of the plastic surgery room, there were light green curtains hanging on the door, half open as a shield, and the green inscription “Endless dedication, perfect service” written on the wall. It was 10:30 a.m., and there were four mortuary staffs doing cosmetic surgery on different bodies, their hands moving skillfully and gently, their heads bowed, each busy ……
As Xin Shasha said, their work is no different from that of ordinary office workers.
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