www.popularmechanics.com /science/health/a42941288/monica-torres-brings-dignity-to-the-dead/

After You Die, Monica Torres Can Bring Life Back To Your Body

25-31 minutes 2/22/2023

From the moment Tyrone Timms pulled up outside his father’s Arizona home on Veterans Day 2019, he knew something was wrong. John Gause, a Vietnam War veteran, hadn’t picked up the phone. The blinds were drawn. Mailers littered the porch. When Timms cracked the door, the scent was overpowering. A body was lying in the hallway—his father’s, now unrecognizable due to decomposition.

Gause’s remains were turned over to the Maricopa Medical Examiner for autopsy. The results indicated he died of natural causes, roughly four days before Timms found him. Their investigation complete, the medical examiner released Gause’s body to a local funeral home. In a tiny planning room at Thompson Funeral Chapel, Timms and his family asked for the seemingly impossible: Could they have an open-casket service?

That’s how Timms met Monica Torres, a Phoenix-​based embalmer, funeral director, and reconstruction specialist. Torres, a 5-foot-2 Latina in her 40s, stands out in her colorful dresses and partially shaved head in a field still dominated by older white male funeral home owners in three-piece suits. When funeral homes have a tough case, it’s Torres who picks up the call.

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Torres is a visionary in the end-of-life industry and a specialist in traumatic deaths: miscarriages and murders, car crashes and suicides. Over the last decade, Torres has launched what she calls her “dark arts” into an internationally recognized brand with more than 27,000 Instagram followers who know her as “Cold Hands.” By day, Torres leads continuing education classes for embalmers around the world. By night, she drives from one funeral home to another with her wheeled embalming kit, restoring bodies in the perfect quiet.

While Torres sees embalming as a spiritual calling, the practice is not without its critics. The work is built around formaldehyde, a carcinogen. Its use can have negative consequences for the health of the embalmer, and of the environment in which an embalmed body is buried. Green funeral advocates push for more presumably eco-friendly options, such as direct cremation, alkaline hydrolysis, and human composting, widely believed to be the future of the American funeral industry.

But for those who still want to be embalmed—a demographic that in the United States includes many Catholics, Black Americans who uphold the homegoing tradition, and those whose loved ones are damaged beyond recognition—Torres is their greatest ally. “Families do want this and they do find value in it,” she says of embalming. Whether it’s Torres or one of her former students in the prep room, she wants to ensure all of her clients get the quality service they deserve.

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gloved hand reaching for tin of lip restorer wax on shelf of embalming fluids

Embalming fluid can include preservatives like formaldehyde, alcohols, dyes, detergents, and disinfectants.

Ash Ponders

So when Torres sat down with Timms that mild November day, she gave him the standard disclaimer: There are no promises in her line of work. Every body responds differently to the embalming process, and even the most skilled technicians can accomplish only so much under a time crunch. “I didn’t pull any punches,” says Torres. “This is invasive surgery.” But she told him she would try her best. She had just 72 hours to make it work.

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Embalming dates back at least 4,500 years to ancient Egypt. Ritual mummification was meant to help the deceased navigate the journey to the afterlife; it also ended up preserving their remains for thousands of years. But modern techniques, which aim not only to preserve the dead but to make them appear as they did in life, emerged only 160 years ago. In the U.S. Civil War, roughly 620,000 men—or 2 percent of the total U.S. population—were killed, often hundreds of miles from their families. Loved ones paid surgeons to identify the remains of their fallen soldiers, embalm them, and ship them home for a proper burial.

At first, embalming was a practicality. But in the wake of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, embalming became seen more and more as a cultural inevitability. In the two weeks after his death, Lincoln’s embalmed remains traveled by rail from Washington, D.C., to his home of Springfield, Illinois, for burial. The train stopped in 10 cities along the way, allowing an estimated 1 million Americans to see their slain president’s hardened, bronzed, but nonetheless recognizable visage. Eventually, many of these citizens would choose embalming for themselves.

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The quality of embalming has advanced dramatically since Lincoln’s day, but the goals remain much the same: help this person look good for the very last time. For Torres, the process starts when she walks into the prep room and dons a full-face respirator, surgical gown, and nitrile gloves. Epidemiologists say dead bodies are generally safer than living ones, but interacting closely with human remains can still lead to the spread of pathogens like hepatitis, tuberculosis, and COVID-19. In addition, the embalming process itself carries risks due to the toxic chemicals that could be inhaled.

Next, Torres removes the naked body from its vinyl bag and lays it out on a steel embalming table. The head is elevated to prevent blood from pooling behind the ears, which could leave the skin dark and discolored. Moving 360 degrees around the remains, Torres notes the consequences of death that will affect her approach. If there has been an autopsy, the organs are embalmed separately and placed back into the abdomen. She looks for other open wounds (which leak if not properly sealed) and medical devices like fentanyl patches (which could be dangerous if touched bare-handed).

After Torres assesses the state of the remains, and begins plotting their restoration, she vigorously scrubs the entire body with water, antibacterial soap, and disinfectant. The extra effort goes a long way; Torres says that many of the odors of decomposition actually waft off of the body’s surface. Usually, they’re coming from the same places that stink in life—like the genitals, armpits, mouth. She then gives the teeth one last brush.

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With the cleaning complete, Torres uses reference photos to set the facial features in a peaceful expression. She places tiny plastic domes under the eyelids to keep the eyes closed and seals the mouth using either a surgical needle and mortuary suture or injectable feature builder and a chemical stabilizing agent.

skeleton next to canister of formaldehyde with biohazard sticker on it

Formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, is still a key ingredient in embalming fluid.

Ash Ponders

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Now, the real work of embalming can begin. Torres first makes a small surgical incision just above the collarbone, locates the carotid artery, and raises the vessel to make an incision that will allow her to access the entire circulatory system. She inserts a medical instrument called an arterial cannula and clamps the vessel to secure it in place. The cannula is connected by hose to a small embalming machine, which looks almost like a drip coffee maker, but holds a customized preservation solution (often formaldehyde) as well as other tinctures, including humectants for rehydration and loosening coagulated blood. As the machine pumps the solution into the arteries, the formaldehyde interacts with the proteins inside, causing the corpse to stiffen. (You know you’re done, one embalmer told me, when the body’s consistency goes from a soft-boiled egg to a hard-boiled one.) Torres then ties the artery off, and sutures the incision closed.

With every death, Torres seeks to center the body. It’s her conviction that this the presence of the loved one in the death ritual is what helps families heal.

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With arterial embalming finished, it’s time for Torres to embalm the body cavity. As the dead decompose, naturally occurring microbes in the stomach begin feasting on their remains, producing gases and liquid as they go. To stop the body from swelling, Torres makes a small incision near the belly button and inserts a 2-foot-long hollow device called a trocar. Once it’s in place, she aspirates any organs inside, drawing white fluid from the lungs, red fluid from the heart, yellow fluid from the bladder, brown fluid from the intestines, and so on. Torres then uses the trocar to flood the abdomen with embalming fluids, before sealing the body once again. With nothing left to decompose, the risk of further bloating is gone.

In cases of trauma, restoration comes next. Depending on the individual’s needs, Torres may cut away excess tissue in the mouth to reduce signs of swelling, craft new noses or matching ears with embalmer’s wax, or graft hair from the back of the head to restore the hairline—a procedure she pioneered. Torres often injects dermal fillers, conceptually similar to ones you might find in a plastic surgeon’s office, to plump the deceased’s lips and cheeks or give the skin a youthful appearance. “There is a great deal of troubleshooting,” Torres says. At every step, she makes adjustments, until everything looks just right.

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In the home stretch, Torres focuses on final touches: the little things that make someone not just recognizable, but beautiful. Embalming fluids are often dyed to help match the deceased’s natural skin tone. Specialized mortuary makeup can also help. The creams are thicker than what you tend to find in a Sephora, and specifically designed for cold skin. However, personal makeup is often used to customize the final appearance. Torres will also style the deceased’s hair and nails, dress them in their finest clothes, and casket them. “[Torres] will actually take the time to give somebody a full manicure,” says Elizabeth Fournier, an Oregon-based funeral director. “She doesn’t cut corners.”

The entire embalming process can take as little as an hour. But if someone’s remains have already begun to decompose, like Gause’s, or have been subjected to treatments like chemotherapy, a standard formaldehyde solution won’t cut it; the body has changed in ways that make it harder for the bonds between proteins to form. So Torres turns to more powerful embalming fluids, some of which could clear out the room with a single drop. Each fluid has to be given the time to do its work, so the process can stretch on for days, or even weeks, as Torres continually tweaks the balance of chemicals until she’s struck the perfect balance between wet and dry, soft and hard.

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If nothing else, this might be a good time to rest. But when it comes to complicated cases, no one can say for sure how the body will look in the morning. “You’re dreaming, what can I do, what will work?” Torres says. “That worry never leaves.”

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In the sun-bleached courtyard of Phoenix’s Heard Museum, a space dedicated to American Indian art, Torres sits drinking a pink prickly pear lemonade. As a child, Torres loved Frida Kahlo—a strong woman, unflinching in her intimate portrayals of the human body. For her own part, Torres liked to draw skulls. Each fall, her parents would bring her to the Heard Museum for its annual Día de los Muertos–inspired celebration, where masked figures called calacas play music and dance, children make paper marigolds, and everyone eats a special sweet called Pan de Muertos, or “Bread of the Dead.”

Death surrounded Torres from an early age. Looking back, she believes it was likely the untimely passing of her father, Raoul “Bully” Torres, that put Torres and her brother Israel, a labor lawyer, on their respective career paths. In 1978, in Torres’s hometown of Silver City, New Mexico, Bully was crushed by a truck in an accident at a mining site, along with several of his fellow laborers. He died and his remains were horribly disfigured. Torres was just 9 months old.

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Despite the extent of the damage to her father’s remains, a local funeral director agreed to embalm Bully for an open-casket funeral. It wasn’t a perfect job, but the small community was moved by the effort.

Torres predicts more change is on the horizon. For instance, future funeral directors may be able to 3-D print life-like body parts for their restoration work, whether it’s a left ear or an entire face.

“Really the only connection I had to my dad was other people talking about his funeral,” Torres says. At school or the grocery store, people would stop her and say, “Oh, you’re Bully’s daughter. I was at his funeral.”

Even so, Torres never set out to be a funeral director. As a teenager, she was drawn to cosmetology of the living. By the time she finished high school, she had her nail technician’s license, and started her own spa shortly after graduation.

When Torres was 21, her grandmother died. The funeral director offered Torres and a few of her family members the chance to style their loved one’s hair and do her makeup. “When it came down to it, it was harder, I think, than everyone anticipated,” Torres says. While her cousins, aunts, and mom ended up standing back, Torres says interacting with the body felt “natural.” Her grandfather, who was also in the room, directed Torres as she went, making sure she added her grandmother’s signature mole on her cheek. “That was the first time that I realized this is someone’s job,” Torres says. “Somebody is trained to offer this kind of care.”

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Life continued pushing Torres closer toward “working hand in hand with death,” she says. After her grandmother died, Torres discovered photos tucked away in her mother’s garage, showing her dad in his casket. “At that moment, I got closure I didn’t even know I needed,” she says. “All the stories I’d heard, they started to make sense.” But other things called her attention, including her new role as a military wife, which kept her moving from base to base for the better part of a decade.

It wasn’t until Torres was in her late 30s that she finally took the plunge and enrolled in a Phoenix-area mortuary school for a two-year degree program. Initially, Torres marketed herself as a specialist in desairology, the technical term for cosmetology for the dead. Her work in the salon had given her a good foundation in color theory, which is critical to creating a lifelike palette for people of all skin tones. As her career progressed, Torres began to take on more complicated embalming cases.

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Throughout her training, Torres noticed that other funeral directors were often too anxious to innovate—the stakes are high, after all, and people tend to stick with what they know works, especially when time is limited. But Torres was an eager experimenter, always finding new and hopefully improved ways to get the job done. She has since gone on to invent her own hair-grafting technique, a new tummy tuck strategy, a means for sealing bodies without embalming, a wax-free restoration method, and more. “[Each one is] inspired by a family that I served that has suffered a loss,” Torres says, “and I’m faced with a new challenge.” So she finds her own solution—and makes it a point to teach others.

In 2014, Torres started her own trade embalming company, NXT Generation Mortuary Support. The premise was simple: When other funeral directors didn’t have the time or expertise to embalm a traumatic death, Torres would do her best to save the day.

Two years later, the Catholic Church’s Phoenix diocese offered Torres a position managing a funeral home—Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery and Funeral Home in Avondale, Arizona. Although she had to put NXT on hold, the opportunity allowed her to try her hand at every aspect of deathcare, from working with families in the throes of mourning to supervising the exhumation of long-buried bodies. More than anything, the experience taught her she never wanted to own her own funeral home. Torres says she couldn’t stomach the enormous liability, and saw others struggle with the balance between work and personal life.

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Chandler-Gilbert Community College is the only mortuary school for 300 miles in any direction. On a blisteringly hot day in early August, the campus, which sits about 30 minutes southwest of downtown Phoenix, is quiet, save for the singing cicadas. It was at this program that Torres learned her trade. The next class won’t arrive for another few weeks. When they do, they’ll be diving into the deep end of a rapidly changing field.

mortician monica torres wears pink scrubs and holds a long metal tool in front of shelving unit with bottles of chemicals

Torres holds a trocar, which she uses to drain fluids from the body cavity.

Ash Ponders

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Embalming, which once took center stage in the American funeral tradition, is now widely understood to be toxic, thanks to formaldehyde’s starring role. The risk is not to the family members viewing the body, but to funeral industry workers. Embalmers are more likely to develop leukemia, ALS, and other diseases at higher rates than their peers in other fields, according to a handful of peer-reviewed research studies spanning more than 20 years. The most plausible explanation is chronic workplace exposure to carcinogens.

Now, it seems that such contamination can leak over into cemeteries, too. In the U.S., something like 800,000 gallons of embalming fluids are buried each year. While there are few systematic studies of the risk, formaldehyde has the potential to contaminate the soil and groundwater in and around cemeteries, according to Fournier, author of The Green Burial Guidebook. The environmental threat appears to lessen over time; by about 10 years after burial, any formaldehyde at a burial site is so diluted as to be harmless. But newly embalmed bodies are buried every day.

Yet many people continue to turn to embalming as a matter of tradition. For example, many Black Americans elect for a “homegoing”—a celebration marking their return to heaven. While homegoings predate modern embalming techniques, today they typically center on an open-casket presentation of an embalmed body. By dressing the dead in their finest clothing, styling their hair, painting their nails, and repairing any evidence of hardship or traumas met in death, funeral directors can offer the deceased dignity.

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Families with loved ones who die traumatic deaths may gravitate toward embalming for similar reasons. Torres often works with people who said goodbye to a spouse or a child in the morning, and never saw them again—except, perhaps, to identify their body in a morgue. For these clients, embalming may be the only thing that allows them to reconnect, for a final time, with their loved one.

For Torres, the emotional benefits of embalming outweigh any of the risks. So she masks up and gets to work. But while Torres is particularly passionate about embalming, she says she would never try to convince a family that it was right for them. There are instances where even Torres finds herself telling a family not to view a traumatic case, and instead rely on their happiest memories of that person alive. With every death, Torres seeks to center the body. It’s her conviction that this—the presence of the loved one in the death ritual—is what helps families heal.

Emerging research lends credence to Torres’s claim. There are few studies evaluating the role of funeral rites in metabolizing grief, says Christy Denckla, PhD, a grief researcher and assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. What we do know is that avoidance—especially in cases of traumatic deaths—can increase an individual’s odds of mental illness. Embalming and open-​casket viewing are one way for people “to confront the loss, assimilate the loss, and reconcile a reality of a future without the loved one in it,” Denckla says.

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No way of mourning is necessarily better than any other, says Robert Neimeyer, PhD, a clinical psychologist and director of the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition in Oregon. “Virtually anything that honors the dead will assist us in our grief,” he says. What’s most important is that the living feel they have agency as they process their loss. “The choice made by the family to do all that one can also helps confront the powerlessness of a traumatic death,” Neimeyer says. Whether a family chooses embalming and burial or a direct cremation, being able to make that choice can be healing.

Americans have more choice than ever. Flame cremation was almost unheard of before 1960; now, almost 60 percent of families opt for it. Twenty-​six states have legalized alkaline hydrolysis, which dissolves a body in a matter of hours using water, lye, and heat. And in an era defined by the climate crisis, green burial and human composting speak to eco-conscious customers.

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These emerging methods are often defined in contrast to the traditional funeral and burial—and against embalming in particular. But nontoxic embalming fluids could help bridge this divide. Chemicals like glutaraldehyde work almost exactly like traditional methods, but they’re not carcinogenic. Some are even approved by the Green Burial Council, which otherwise requires that anybody interred in a green cemetery skips embalming, casketing, and the like. Yet many funeral directors remain skeptical of these alternative chemicals, and are poorly educated in their use, Torres says. Similarly, customers who want eco-friendly options tend to forgo embalming altogether, while those who really want to be embalmed don’t worry themselves over what materials are used.

Torres predicts more change is on the horizon. In the future, funeral directors will be able to 3-D print lifelike body parts, whether it’s a left ear or an entire face. Plastic surgery will continue to inspire new procedures for deathcare. After a pandemic bump, transhumanist technologies, ranging from simple digital memorials to holographic representations of loved ones, will grow in popularity. And while Torres loves embalming and believes nontoxic approaches will gain traction, she thinks green burial methods will ultimately reign supreme.

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Since working 20-hour days at the height of the Covid pandemic, Torres has begun trimming her client list and refocusing on her growing role as a mentor to other female, nonbinary, and transgender embalmers, who will take care of families like Gause’s when the wear and tear on her body means she can no longer do the work herself.

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Torres worked to restore Gause’s body almost up to the minute Timms and his family arrived for the viewing. The biggest challenge she faced was a phenomenon called skin slippage. When a body begins to decompose, the cells holding the layers of skin together start to separate, and the top can slide right off, pulling hair and other features along with it, and make bodies unrecognizable. For three days, Torres used different chemicals, preserving Gause’s body with formaldehyde, combating odor with essence of clove, adding suppleness via hydrating agents to give his remains a lifelike color and texture. Finally, she tucked his hair beneath a veteran’s cap.

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With Timms’s permission, Torres documented every step of Gause’s embalming, so she could turn his case into a continuing education class—her own way of memorializing Gause. Thousands of embalmers have since learned how to apply the same methods to their own difficult reconstructions. Though it’s a technical course, Torres’s primary objective is psychological. To take on a case this challenging, she says, “you have to be able to overcome fear” of failure.

When Timms, a tall, lean man of 55, entered the chapel on the day of his father’s funeral, his own body was tense with trepidation. He had no idea what he would see—and he was still tormented by the sights and smells of the day he found Gause dead. But when Timms’s half brother, Shawn, looked down at the casket and saw his stepfather’s face, “it was a relief,” he says. “He looked like he was sleeping peacefully, as he should be.” Others in attendance were vocal in their surprise—hadn’t Gause been decomposing for days? How could he look so good? So young?

To this day, Timms says he struggles with post-​traumatic stress as a result of his father’s death. But when intrusive memories of discovering Gause’s body resurface, Timms says he now gets the choice to focus instead on the memories of his father as he appeared in his casket.

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Tools of the Trade

In addition to forceps, needles, and scalpels, morticians use a variety of specialized tools to prepare the dead.

aneurysm hook

Aneurysm Hook

This instrument lifts arteries away from the connective tissue holding them in place to provide quick and easy access to major blood vessels.

Courtesy Affordable Funeral Supply

arterial tube

Arterial Tube

When inserted into the decedent’s arteries, the arterial tube flushes blood from the circulatory system, making way for embalming fluid.

Courtesy Pierce Chemical

embalming machine

Embalming Machine

Essentially a pressure pump, this device pushes blood out of the body and embalming fluid in. Many machines have a setting that mimics the heart, sending pulses of liquid into arteries.

Courtesy Frigid Fluid

hydro aspirator

Hydro Aspirator

Near the end of embalming, this instrument flushes remaining bodily fluids from the abdomen and can alternately rinse and vacuum liquids via water pressure.

Courtesy Affordable Funeral Supply

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trocar

Trocar

Connected to the hydro aspirator via a rubber hose, this long, hollow rod is inserted into the abdomen and organs to drain them of remaining fluids.

Courtesy Trocar Supplies

mouth former

Mouth Former

These tools can be placed in the mouth to give the lips a more realistic shape—often used when the decedent used dentures or lost teeth.

Courtesy Frigid Fluid

eye caps

Eye Caps

Ridged eye caps slipped beneath the eyelid—one of the body’s thinnest skin membranes—prevent dehydration and seal the eyelid. If the patient has donated their eyes, multiple eye caps can be layered.

Courtesy Absorbent Specialty Products

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Freelance Science Journalist

Eleanor Cummins is a freelance science journalist in Brooklyn whose work can be found in The Atlantic, The New York Times, National Geographic, The Verge, WIRED, and more. She is also an adjunct professor at New York University’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program.