A Dying Art, by John Semley

“Time,” said Anthony Saldivar, his eyeglasses slipping down his broad nose, “is always the biggest enemy.” Sporting a black tie and thick suspenders, his shirtsleeves cuffed at the elbows, Saldivar was one of eight contestants stationed across four folding tables inside a cavernous glass-and-steel convention center in Chicago, all of whom were attending to the same ticking-clock task. They had three hours, split over two afternoons, to rehabilitate a decomposing human head. The heads, of course, weren’t real. They were props furnished by funerary-cosmetics supplier Post Mortem Restorative Cosmetics, a company founded by the Hollywood special-effects technician Dean Jones, who parlayed techniques honed on the sets of Blue Velvet and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine into a career in the mortuary sciences.

PMRC casts its heads, which retail for $855, in a proprietary blend of silicone polymers. Dark gray in hue and riddled with disfigurements—a sunken mouth, a smashed nose, an exposed patch of skull, scars and divots along the cheeks—they are used to train undertakers in the specialty of mortuary beautification known as restorative art, the process by which dead bodies are gussied up for viewing and the big sleep. Organizers had distributed the heads among the elite group of undertakers, who were participating in the inaugural Restorative Art Technical Showcase, the highlight event of last year’s National Funeral Directors Association convention. Armed with various putties, fillers, waxes, and bundles of human hair, their goal was to produce a visage worthy of an open casket.

At fifty years old, Saldivar was used to performing under pressure. As an army infantry veteran, he completed one tour in Afghanistan and two in Iraq, all of which were, as he put it, “very kinetic.” During a particularly violent fifteen-month deployment in Baqubah, a city situated about thirty miles north of Baghdad, he would decompress by reading copies of Fangoria, the long-running periodical dedicated to horror movies and their fandoms. Leafing through an issue, he came across an article about a makeup-effects school whose curriculum was designed by Tom Savini, the award-winning gore meister and Vietnam War vet who lent his prowess with prostheses to such venerable franchises as Friday the 13th, the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Night of the Living Dead. “It just hit me like a sack of bricks,” he recalled thinking. “Why am I not doing this?”

Saldivar’s business card is long and hexagonal, like a classic haunted-house coffin. With his bald dome, severe features, and gray-black beard that drapes down to his sternum, he looks a bit like Kerry King, the stone-faced guitarist of the thrash-metal band Slayer. When I told him as much, his eyes widened. “You are my best friend!” he shouted. But his enthusiasm for heavy metal, horror cinema, and all things that go bump in the night belies a simple truth: Saldivar is a total sweetheart. He speaks thoughtfully and with almost exaggeratedly precise elocution about how his military service accustomed him to the sight of the human body in various states of degradation. The experience, he said, also made him aware of his deep wells of compassion and respect for the dead. Like many of those called to his vocation, he describes it in language that freely blends the material with the metaphysical. “I am here to help this person,” he told me of his approach as a mortician. “It may just be their vessel. But there are people that love this person.”

When he left the military, Saldivar decamped to the West Coast to enroll in a special-effects program in Los Angeles. But Hollywood didn’t agree with him, so after graduating, he headed home to Texas, where he started a two-year mortuary-sciences degree. Saldivar had struggled to make sense of civilian life after a long stint in the service, and the work invested his life with newfound meaning. “I became a sheepdog for the dead,” he said, “protecting their bodies.” After completing the program, he finally made it to the Savini school he’d read about in Iraq. There, he learned the tools of the horror-movie trade: sculpting and casting monster masks, airbrushing makeup, and simulating all manner of bloodcurdling wounds. The techniques felt surprisingly applicable to the restorations he’d performed on cadavers in mortuary school. He soon began working as a freelance undertaker, essentially using his Savini education in reverse: instead of making human actors look maimed, mutilated, or straight-up dead, he would help the dead better resemble the living.

At the Restorative Art Technical Showcase, Saldivar and his fellow contestants had the opportunity to put their highly particular talents to the test. Ranging in age from mid-twenties to mid-sixties, they had traveled to Chicago from cities like Pittsburgh and San Antonio, as well as from tiny towns in North and South Dakota. To the victor, i.e., whoever produced the most convincingly intact head, would go a trophy, some makeup vouchers, free seminars provided by leading experts in the field, and a lab coat branded with the PMRC logo. Most coveted of all was the esteem of their peers and other funeral-industry professionals, who’d packed themselves into a cordoned-off patch of the convention floor to watch the competitors work.

The showcase was conceived at a critical moment for restorative art, whose future has never looked more uncertain amid a changing funeral industry. As consumer tastes shift toward closed caskets and cremations, reflecting a general American ambivalence toward the traditions of ritualized bereavement, demand for posthumous primping has fallen dramatically. While restorative artists are accustomed to battling the ravages of time, it is now coming for their own discipline.

About a decade ago, cremation surpassed traditional burial as the most popular method of disposition in the United States. Last year, data provided by the NFDA showed that the cremation rate has since risen to 63.4 percent and is on track to hit 82.3 percent by 2045. Of the number of total cremations, an estimated 40 percent are direct cremations: those in which a body is delivered to a furnace shortly after death, circumventing any kind of casket, embalming, or restoration altogether.

There is no shortage of explanations for this broad cultural shift. There’s the decline in regular religious attendance, which now stands at 34 percent, and the corresponding waning of associated ceremonies. Some morticians cite the widespread adoption of smartphone cameras and the ready availability of photos of our loved ones, which may diminish people’s interest in creating what is sometimes called a memory picture, or final mental image, of the departed. There are environmental concerns that traditional burials monopolize too much land and employ toxins that can leach into the soil and groundwater. Cremation is often seen as a greener end-of-life option, even though the process releases into the atmosphere about a quarter ton of carbon dioxide—the equivalent of a 637-mile journey in the average gas-powered car—when the body’s carbon reservoirs are kindled. But the most frequently cited reason for the plunge in traditional burial services is also the most obvious one: the cost.

A traditional funeral arrangement, including a basic casket, hearse, embalming, restoration, and various other professional fees, averages about $8,300 in the United States. Direct cremation, meanwhile, can be accomplished for as little as $795, inclusive of the urn. The gap between the two suggests a superfluity that has long dogged the business. Such criticisms were mounted most extensively by Jessica Mitford in her best-selling book The American Way of Death (1963). In her journalistic exposé, Mitford—a woman born into the English aristocracy who fled hereditary wealth and more than one fascist family member to join the ranks of the Communist Party of the United States—revealed the ways that canny morticians exploited grieving loved ones to hawk all manner of unnecessary goods and services, essentially marking the bereaved as saps. Of restorative art specifically, she had this to say:

Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed—transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.

Mitford’s sarcasm was not unwarranted; particularly at midcentury, the funeral industry was awash in grubby hidden fees. Her book led to congressional hearings that ultimately forced funeral directors to adopt a more transparent cost base for consumers and prevented them from engaging in expensive embalming procedures without express permission. Tighter regulations haven’t eliminated opportunities for excess (you can still be ferried to your graveside in a Cadillac XT5 Platinum MasterCoach, or buried in a solid bronze casket, if you so desire), but widespread belt-tightening has rendered a great many of Mitford’s critiques moot. Most Americans cannot afford lavish, pageantlike funerals, or multiday open-casket viewings, even if they might want them.

It isn’t only a lack of demand, however. Restorative art is threatened by problems on the supply side too. Big chains and private-equity-backed firms such as Carriage Services, Hillenbrand, and Service Corporation International are snapping up an increasingly large share of the $21 billion funeral industry. The resulting drive toward profit maximization and efficiency means that specialized services like restoration are often regarded as expendable. One funeral director told me that his boss at a corporate shop said that if a body couldn’t be restored in thirty minutes, then he should tell the mourning family that an open casket was out of the question. Mortuary schools now spend less time than ever teaching restoration, and the rise of cremation affords working morticians fewer opportunities to learn those skills on the job. Lawsuits in which aggrieved families sue funeral directors over subpar restorations can also have a chilling effect. As Karl Wenzel, a Canadian funeral director and one of the convention’s showcase judges, told me, “The art of embalming itself is almost becoming lost.”

Good riddance to all that rubbish, critics in the Mitford mold might say, and not just because it means fewer opportunities to upsell mourners whose judgments are clouded by grief. For all its materialist analysis, The American Way of Death wasn’t only about money. Mitford regarded the “psychotherapeutic” rationales for embalming, restoration, and open-casket viewing as “flimsy and ridiculous” and essentially death-denying. Such customs, to her mind, did not actually put the living in closer contact with the dead. Instead, they cloaked the painful, putrescent realities of nonexistence in perfumes and specially concocted cosmetics.

In recent years, a similar argument has been taken up by the “death acceptance” movement, which encourages frank discussions around dying, in all its gory detail. Its advocates preach the environmental and emotional benefits of natural burials and encourage mourners to bear witness to a corpse in its unprocessed state before it is borne away to a funeral home. According to Caitlin Doughty, a mortician and the founder of the nonprofit Order of the Good Death, cleaning or spending time with a dead body can play “a powerful role in processing grief.” Yet it’s hard not to feel that alternative funeral services have become their own consumer category: costs for so-called human composting, for example, can balloon up to $7,000.

Beyond the commercial aspect, the assumptions undergirding death positivity have begun to feel nearly as outdated as putting lipstick on a corpse. In a death-saturated culture such as ours, where videos of state violence overflow our social-media feeds and listening to grisly true-crime podcasts is something of a national pastime, do we really need to be assaulted by the sight of grandma’s spoiling remains to understand that she is gone and someday we will be too? These days, the American way of death seems less like denial than desensitization. We may still fear the reaper, but we are also bored by him.

Such a conclusion is bolstered by the fact that the decline in formal, open-casket funerals has hardly correlated with a return to less mediated death rituals. In many cases, our dead are barreling headlong into the void without any kind of ceremony at all. This is especially true in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which profoundly reshaped the funeral industry. Amid waves of mass death and restrictions on public gatherings, in-person memorials were dramatically curtailed and some funeral directors were encouraged to push the bereaved toward cremation, in part to mitigate concerns that corpses might harbor the virus. Large numbers of Americans fell out of the habit of funeral-going during this period, and many weren’t especially keen to return to it once conditions allowed; six years on, virtual services remain surprisingly common, offered by nearly half of American funeral homes. Mourning has increasingly become a private practice.

Michele Rupar-Smith, the director of funeral service education at Ogeechee Technical College in Statesboro, Georgia, worries that this shift will bring about a climate of “disenfranchised grief”—a state of atomization wherein public mourning rituals are treated as little more than a costly hassle. “People are calling me and saying, ‘Well, I can’t have a funeral for three weeks because I have a cruise planned,’ ” she said. “That would have never happened several decades ago. Today, it’s like your loved one is just gone. Dead. Boom.”

While restoration may be a moribund art, the atmosphere at the NFDA showcase was anything but sepulchral. On Monday afternoon, Gabe Schauf, a funeral director and then voice of the NFDA’s podcast, A Brush with Death, kicked off the proceedings with a starting signal. “Ready, set, restore!” he announced, microphone in hand. With his sharp cheekbones; broad, Seacrestian smile; and the game-show-host deportment to match, Schauf was the natural choice to emcee. Wearing a custom lab coat with host embroidered above the breast pocket, he wafted from table to table, interviewing the morticians about their personal hobbies as they tried to maintain focus. A temporary wall behind their workstations had been papered over with an enormous photo of the Bean, Chicago’s signature tourist-baiting whatsit, and hung with a flatscreen TV that showed live close-ups of competitors’ work. “This is like The Great British Bake Off, but the restorative-art version,” Schauf joked to the audience as he made his rounds.

A number of the contestants had evidently brought their own cheering sections. A few pitchy “Woo!”s rose up from the crowd for Saldivar, who was introduced by Schauf while kneading a sticky glob of derma-filler in his palms—it made the material more pliable, and thus easier to mortar into his dummy’s gaping wounds. To encourage the filler to set, he aimed a cheap drugstore hair dryer at the head from time to time, looking a bit like a barber fussing over a client who was both hairless and wholly decapitated. At this early stage in the competition, Saldivar and the other challengers were focused on redressing the most severe trauma to their synthetic dummies, or zombie heads, as they’re sometimes called to the chagrin of more discreet undertakers. Before the heads could be polished to perfection, they had to achieve a base level of structural integrity.

The morticians employed a range of strategies: some rebuilt the butchered noses and missing lips from scratch, shaping them out of wax with delicate, stainless-steel tools or their own agile hands. Others, conscious of the time constraints, plucked ready-made prostheses from the trove of loose facial features that had been provided to them. Unique among the group, the eldest competitor, Frank Vosicky Jr., smothered his dummy with a thick base layer rather than patching its individual imperfections. In the showcase’s first session, he burned through an entire twelve-ounce tub of pink surface-restorer wax. It left the head looking, from a distance, as if it had been dunked in Pepto-Bismol or the river of neon ectoplasm coursing through the New York City sewers in Ghostbusters II. When Schauf asked him where he thought he’d be by the end of day one, Vosicky cracked, “The bar.”

The cosmetics that the contestants were using have been refined over the years, thanks to advances in postmortem chemistry, but the techniques on display had their roots in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the American funeral industry underwent two technological revolutions. The first was the Civil War–era adoption of embalming. While serving as a Union Army Medical Corps captain, Thomas Holmes concocted a solution he called Innominata, which he claimed could preserve a body “forever, or at least as long as stone.” It was a profitable solution to the problem of large numbers of Union soldiers dying so far from home. For a fee of one hundred dollars, Holmes would embalm the bodies of the fallen and ship them north in sawdust-filled coffins, where they arrived in presentable condition. Abraham Lincoln’s assassination brought the practice to wider attention when his chemically preserved corpse was transported across the newly mended nation for three weeks before being interred in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois—piquing the interest of a general public that, as one historian wrote, might also wish to be “thus transported into immortality.” (For his part, Holmes would request not to be embalmed when he died, in 1900, believing that no one but himself would be up to the task.)

The second revolution in the trade came via the New York mortician Joel E. Crandall, who popularized the practice of reconstructing bodies altered by illness, severe physical deformation, and plain decomposition, using a range of cosmetic and surgical methods he called demisurgery. An advertisement in the American trade journal The Casket from 1912 maintained that Crandall could handle “every phase of unsightliness from the most mangled or disfigured body to simple cases of discoloration from flushing or disease.” One of his earliest and most public successes was the restoration of John Jacob Astor IV, the ultra-wealthy Manhattan business magnate who drowned with the Titanic. Astor’s body was dredged from the drink, shipped from Nova Scotia to New York, and attended to by Crandall with such deftness that his funeral featured a public viewing.

Demisurgery advanced the mortuary sciences by turning them into an art. It also expanded the potential client pool. Before Crandall, severe cases would simply merit a closed casket; after him, virtually no corpse was too damaged to escape a mortician’s care. In 1918, Crandall opened his Demisurgical Institute. By the late Twenties, the popularity of demisurgery had spawned its own secondary industries, as companies emerged to sell prefabricated noses and eyeballs to funeral professionals. Crandall’s techniques, and the subsequent innovations of his peers and protégés, were eventually collected in a textbook published by the embalming-fluids company Champion. The textbook ditched the demisurgery label for the more genteel “restorative art,” the term by which the practice is still known.

In due time, restorative art was more broadly incorporated into funeral practice. In 1945, the NFDA declared it a vital part of any undertaker’s skill set. No longer the sole domain of the non-viewable, restorations began to be performed on cadavers arriving to funeral parlors in near-pristine condition—a story that is now repeating in reverse, as a practice once heralded as a building block of the industry becomes increasingly marginalized. Today, restoration usually involves hiding blemishes with cosmetics or waxing over small abrasions. More substantive work, when it happens at all, might require the wiring together of broken bones or the suturing of deep gashes. A new and comprehensive restorative-art textbook published last year by Dominick Astorino, a professor of mortuary sciences at Wayne State University, features a full-color photograph of a totally blasted-apart human head. “The reconstruction of a disarticulated skull is considered a major restoration,” Astorino’s caption notes, in what is probably an understatement.

The PMRC dummies weren’t quite as pulverized as all that. But they certainly needed more TLC than the average stiff, who may have passed away in relative peace, in hospice or their own comfortable bed. The showcase was designed to simulate the drama of a demanding case: one that would require the whole range of a restorative artist’s arsenal.

Shortly after the grinning Schauf called time on day one of the showcase, I met with contestant Berri Cooper beside a noisy fountain in the otherwise empty atrium of the convention center. Slight and wiry, she kept her gray hair shaved close to her scalp, save for a few loose curls framing her face. A recent convert to Kabbalah, she had a tattoo of the sefirot—a ladderlike grid representing the ten emanations of God that connect infinite and finite worlds—inked on her throat.

Cooper has dealt with several particularly complex restoration cases during her long career. While we chatted, she pulled up images on her phone of a father who’d been burned so badly in an accident that he was, save for some faintly visible protruding teeth, barely identifiable as a person. She was able to perform a full facial reconstruction on him based on photographs, so that his loved ones could say goodbye to someone who was not only recognizably human, but familiar to them. “There’s not a body where I’ve said, ‘No, I couldn’t,’ ” she told me. That includes the mutilated body of a stillborn baby, whom Cooper embalmed and restored at a grieving mother’s request.

Like the other pros plying this particular trade, Cooper was capable of evoking distressing scenes with an untroubled matter-of-factness. She also had a tendency to litter her remarks with bloody non sequiturs. “We’re cosmetologists, we’re plastic surgeons, we’re everything. I did a guy who was missing half his head!” she barked between chomps of bubble gum. But Cooper’s equanimity seemed to recede a bit when the challenging headwinds facing the industry—and the general lack of respect she and her colleagues are afforded—came up. Along with most of the other contestants taking part in the showcase, she has been feeling the pinch in recent years. “I’m nearly obsolete,” she told me. “People don’t see the value in an open casket.”

This devaluation is both figurative and literal. Many of the restorative artists I met in Chicago told me that they often perform their handiwork pro bono, or at a significant discount that does not account for the actual hours a job might demand—particularly in cases where a body has been subjected to the ruins of prolonged disease or grievous injury. Danielle Colquitt, another contestant, was no different in this regard. “I don’t charge for restorative art,” she told me when we spoke later that day. “I don’t want your pocketbook to determine your everlasting mindset, or view, of your loved one.” Yet, despite the dwindling profitability this implies, thirty-three-year-old Colquitt seemed more bullish about the future of the discipline than her competitors. She believes she can recover restoration’s role in commemorative practices and make people care about it again. To that end, she was busy establishing a new company that would train a squad of restorative artists to freelance for funeral homes without specialists on staff. She had even chosen a name for this endeavor: Embody Grace.

Optimism wasn’t the only quality that made Colquitt unique. A licensed funeral director in Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia, and a licensed embalmer in charge of lab operations at the anatomical donor program at Georgetown University’s School of Medicine, she cuts against pretty much every stock idea one might entertain about the professional mortician as a death-obsessed neurotic or pallid mall goth. She has an easy, generous laugh. She unwinds at hookah bars on her days off. She is vegan, in part because she has noticed that the bodies of vegans she works on are often in better shape and tend to smell better. And, like only 11 percent of funeral professionals in an overwhelmingly white industry, she is black, which gives her a particular vantage onto a field that has been segregated since its founding.

Jim Crow laws forced black Americans to tend to their own dead, a form of prejudice that ironically created new economic opportunities: funeral businesses allowed many black families to build wealth and break into the middle class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Black funeral directors, morticians, and embalmers still have their own members-only professional association, the National Funeral Directors and Morticians Association. Founded in 1924, the group was initially associated with Booker T. Washington’s National Negro Business League, which aimed to ennoble black entrepreneurs and professionals. But the industry’s significance to black history goes beyond economic understandings of racial uplift. In the mid-nineteenth century, the abolitionist Henrietta Bowers Duterte operated an Underground Railroad stop in her Philadelphia funeral home, hiding fugitive slaves in coffins. Later, during the civil-rights movement, black-owned funeral parlors served as community hubs where bodies disfigured by racial violence could be restored, and where collective mourning often swelled into protest.

This vibrant parallel tradition may account for Colquitt’s greater store of positivity. While black funerals have been subject to the same material forces affecting the entire industry in the post-COVID era, she told me that, in her experience, extended visitations with bodies of the deceased remain common, as do open caskets. She has personally restored multiple members of her own family, including two grandparents. Her most challenging case was that of a cousin who sustained multiple gunshot wounds during a robbery. “Our community likes to say their goodbyes,” she explained. “That’s why it’s important to assure them that they get that moment with them. With restorative art, that can happen.”

When the morticians reunited with their heads on day two of the showcase, most of the major injuries had already been redressed. Now the object for the competitors was to make their silicone subjects look casket-worthy. Back at his station, Saldivar fussed over imperfections in the dark-pink wax around his dummy’s earlobes and eye sockets before air-brushing on a few base layers of foundation, which PMRC provided in shades ranging from Pink White to Gold Earth to the frankly delicious-sounding Rice Pudding. To make this blank canvas look more skinlike, he then dipped a chip brush into a darker shade of special-effects paint and dangled it a few inches above the head, running his thumb along the bristles to splatter the pigment and create layers of fleshy depth.

Many of the dummies evolved admirably over the competition’s final hour, complete with fine laugh lines and subtle details like creeping wisps of nose hair, which were gingerly applied with tweezers and Krazy Glue. (While usually considered unsightly in the living, nasal vibrissae can be a marker of a sophisticated restoration, lending additional realism to the deceased, whose heads are typically tilted slightly back during a viewing.) Colquitt, who wanted to highlight the role of black women in the restorative arts, was the only contestant who made up her head as a black woman, and one of the few who got as far as adding hair extensions: a few wefts of long, dark curls, which tumbled over her head like a veil. Saldivar’s completed entry was as bald as he is—the better to show off the dappling of liver spots he’d created. Others were not as good. Flushed and flailing during Schauf’s final countdown, her gum-chewing getting a little more exaggerated with each second, Cooper quipped that her handiwork might be better sealed under a closed casket.

Then it was time for the verdict. The finished heads would be evaluated by a triumvirate of accomplished restorative artists who were dressed in matching baby-blue T-shirts with judge 2025 printed between their shoulder blades. There was Karl Wenzel, the Canadian funeral director; Glyn Tallon, an Irishman who works at a hospital in County Meath and had a charming habit of praising things as “brilliant” or “absolutely brilliant”; and Vernie Fountain. Small and pink-cheeked, with a wave of silvery hair and a slight Southern drawl, Fountain is a living legend in the industry—a Marine Corps veteran who nearly lost his hand in Vietnam, until he pleaded with the military doctors in Da Nang not to amputate, so that he might realize his civilian dream of becoming a professional embalmer. “If he takes you out drinking,” one funeral director had cautioned me earlier that week, “don’t try to keep up.”

As Fountain surveyed the contestants’ efforts, he pulled out a little pocket flashlight to examine the “lines of delineation” between the original head and the cosmetic work. Famously exacting, he joked to the crowd that when it comes to restorative artistry, “There’s the right way, the wrong way, and my way.” Once he and the other adjudicators had completed their respective circuits, they huddled in front of the tables, their hands covering their mouths in the manner of NFL coaches on the sidelines as they murmured among themselves. After a few moments of tense deliberation, Hannah Bugos, who had produced the eerily convincing head of a middle-aged man whose eyes were wreathed by delicately carved crow’s-feet, was declared the winner.

Bugos works in a mom-and-pop shop in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and she accepted the trophy, the vouchers, and the lab coat with a gracious, slightly embarrassed poise that betrayed her Midwestern manners. But her moment in the spotlight was short-lived. The contestants and their heads were quickly shuffled offstage, and their workstations dismantled, to accommodate the undertaking-themed trivia showdown that was scheduled to follow.

I caught up with Bugos after her victory. She is thirty-four, with a shy smile and an off-kilter sense of humor; when strangers ask her what she does for a living, she likes to joke that she works in human resources. During our debrief, Bugos admitted that, whether it showed or not, she’d had a difficult time working with the zombie head, which was softer and more yielding than the typical cadaver. This was a common gripe among the contestants, and it pointed to a limitation of the showcase: the morticians had been charged with producing a pristine example of their work while plowing away under conditions that were less than ideal. It wasn’t just the fake heads, but the new compounds provided by a sponsor, an aggressive deadline, and a pesky reporter asking them impertinent questions about what, exactly, they were doing. Astorino, the textbook author, went so far as to decry the showcase as something close to blasphemy. “I’m not a fan of that type of stuff,” he sniffed when we spoke over the phone. “Real restorative art isn’t done on plastic heads, for medals, in a game-show setting. Real restorative art takes years of practice. There’s an importance, and reverence, to the work. There’s so much riding on it. People who are so brokenhearted, who are desperately hoping that you can give them the ability to say goodbye. That’s not a joke.”

Astorino had a point. A jiggly polymer cast cannot compare, tangibly or ontologically, to the real thing. The PMRC prop may be a good training tool, but to understand the finer points of restoration, you really can’t beat the twenty-two fused bones and accompanying matrix of muscle and soft tissue that make up an actual human head. And so, a few months later, after the contestants had returned to their respective parlors, I took a train down to Washington to see a dead body.

The sunken hallway of Georgetown University’s Medical Dental Building, home to its anatomical donor program, is unnervingly cheerful. The walls are robin’s-egg blue, painted with images of meditating skeletons and vaguely inspirational maxims. On the day that I visited, I stopped to read one such phrase, written—incorrectly, I would later learn—in Latin: mortuis parasdium et vocem /dare necesse est. It was translated into English below as “The deceased must be protected /and given a voice.” I assumed this was a shard of ancient wisdom, recovered from the likes of Virgil or Cicero. Turns out it’s the corporate motto of a “thanatology specialty service company” called 1-800-AUTOPSY that offers private postmortem examinations and diagnoses.

I’d come to Georgetown at the invitation of Colquitt, who was dressed that day in faded burgundy scrubs and a white lab coat embossed with the Embody Grace logo: an e and a g bisected by a paintbrush. Colquitt would be restoring the body of a ninety-six-year-old woman who was laid out on a stainless-steel gurney inside her lab. She began the process by mending a laceration along the woman’s zygomatic arch, a part of the skull connecting the cheek to the temple, while humming along to Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.” Colquitt likes to listen to music when she works; a “Soulful Vibes” playlist piped out of a nearby Bluetooth speaker throughout the afternoon. The songs could sound incongruous, to say the least, surrounded as we were by bagged bodies and cabinets stacked with big plastic containers full of pale, yellowish organs: so-called wet specimens that had been pickled in a mixture of water and alcohol for future study. At one point, a Georgetown neurosurgeon popped in to ask where he could dispose of a small bin filled with human brains.

The woman on Colquitt’s table was a donor to Georgetown’s medical school about whom I was told very little and can publish even less. Let’s call her Madeline. Her body had recently arrived at the lab following a stay in hospice. She was emaciated, and part of her right carotid artery was exposed, having been raised with a ligature so that embalming fluid could be pumped throughout her body. Some of it had escaped through a gash in her shin, forming a small gray-pink puddle by her ankle that gave off an astringent smell. The embalming process had considerably firmed up Madeline’s face, which made her easier to work on than the showcase’s dummies. But she also looked mummyish, sallow, and altogether unlovely. That gradually began to change over a few hours of Colquitt’s patient mending, shadowing, blushing, and eyelash-affixing.

Outside the constraints of the competition, Colquitt was a calm and methodical artisan. She pressed a slice of makeup sponge into the cut along Madeline’s cheek before sealing it with wax, then smoothed over the wound with a small shaping tool, a process that reminded me of applying a drywall patch and some plaster to cover a hole in a wall. Next, to make Madeline’s mouth appear less withered, Colquitt carved new lip lines for her using another wax, finessing them with her index finger for a softened effect. After filling in a silver-dollar-size divot in Madeline’s forehead, she began applying special mortuary foundation, as well as over-the-counter makeup. Colquitt prefers cosmetics with a slight red tint, which suggest a rosiness normally imparted by the blood in our capillaries. For the final step, she pulled out an electric hair straightener to tame a fussy black wig. Together, we gently affixed it to Madeline’s head, completing the work and the illusion.

In all the time I’d spent that day around the cadavers in Colquitt’s lab—some dissected such that their skin lay open in flaps, others with their faces obscured by plastic—I had yet to feel truly uncomfortable. It was all just stuff, I told myself. But as Madeline’s restoration entered its final stages, a pit began to form in my stomach. I wouldn’t have been surprised if, at any moment, she bolted upright and opened her eyes. It was as if life itself was being restored to her. Freud called this sensation the uncanny: a kind of defamiliarization that occurs when something utterly benign is haunted by an aura of strangeness, and that people experience “in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies,” fearing that they might become animate once more. For skeptics of embalming and the restorative arts, however, this feeling is the denial that they deplore: death given a rosy blush to trick not only the eye, but also the mind, and thus defer any kind of honest reckoning with mortality.

Having watched the work up close, I found this argument harder to countenance. Of course, corpses don’t really look like Madeline did, after she’d been made up. But is it any less of an evasion to incinerate a body in an industrial furnace and then stash the cinders in some chintzy urn on the mantel, flanked by tchotchkes and family photos? That restoration was still being performed with such care under the shadow of its possible extinction gave it an additional measure of honor, the same way that, when I pass by a store that repairs old typewriters, I can’t help but admire the proprietors’ rage against prevailing trends (and profitability). The vanishing of any craft is a tragedy to all who prefer the existence of a thing to its opposite, but restorative art represents more than just a niche domain of aesthetic achievement or a macabre postmortem racket. With its disappearance, we stand to lose a whole way of memorializing our dead: one that might be pricey, unnecessary, and even a little absurd, but only out of commitment to the notion that an occasion as final as death is worthy of pomp and circumstance.

Most restorative artists will tell you that their labor is intended for the living. Certainly it stands to reason that a corpse hardly cares what it looks like, freed as it is from all want. But more than easing the grief of the bereaved, Colquitt wants to do right by the dead themselves. She regards the distinction between a body and a person, even a person like Madeline, about whom she knows basically nothing, as immaterial. This may be where the “grace” in Embody Grace comes in. Colquitt sincerely believes that her work can restore the dignity too often denied people in their last days. “What really sets it off is when they’re fully dressed, in the casket, with the flowers,” she told me, grazing Madeline’s face with a makeup brush to blend the pigment she’d applied into skin as thin as cellophane. “You look at them and you’re like, Yeah. This is her.”