Oops…
Do cremated remains ever get mixed up?
The short answer is yes, although hopefully not often. Obviously crematory operators have a lot of protocols in place to identify decedents and keep track of them, but…. Every sort of mix-up that could happen to a body almost certainly has happened. Cremation in particular is the fussiest form of disposition, because it’s permanent. If someone buries your grandmother in the wrong casket—or in the wrong grave—that is still fixable. There’s no coming back from the retort.
In theory, could you have been handed back a stranger’s remains instead of your loved one’s? Yes. However, unless you have good reason to believe this, try not to stress about it.
The same answer applies for everyone who’s expressed concern that cremated remains might be comingled out of carelessness or a poorly vacuumed retort. It is possible, but try to imagine it in a sense of cosmic unity. We’re all the same stardust, after all. We can be the same finely ground carbon, too.
How does a funeral home lose someone’s body?
The most recent time someone asked me this, they then clarified that the funeral home found the straying corpse shortly afterward. I don’t know any details of this particular anecdote, but my somewhat cynical assumption is that services must have been delayed for the funeral home to have told the family about the misplacement at all.
If it makes you feel any better, though, there was a panic at the mortuary that day.
The reality is, humans lose track of things all the time. Keys, books, wallets, cars in parking lots, etc. Employees go home with work keys in their pockets. Books get misshelved in libraries. The good news is, most corpses don’t fit in a jacket pocket.
To be less facetious, the real answer is most often either a paperwork mix-up, or a computer mix-up. Two bodies are being checked in or moved at the same time, and paperwork is set down on the wrong cot. If no one checks an ankle tag, the mistake might not be noticed for days. In funeral homes with computerized records, a typo means that the body that was just racked in 3-B is checked into 3-D instead. The more decedents a facility has in their care, the more likely these things are to happen. When my funeral home in Texas had multiple ancillary coolers and refrigerated trucks during the worst of COVID, we were regularly scurrying to make sure that everyone was accounted for because someone had been checked out of their designated spot in the computer. We never lost a body, but there were a few tense moments.
Occasionally, those mix-ups do end very badly. As in, the wrong person was cremated. I have a morbid sense of humor, but even I won’t laugh about that.
One particular funeral home in San Antonio has extraordinarily bad luck. In 2015 a woman’s body was stolen from the funeral home overnight, in between her services and her final disposition. This was the source of much head-shaking and speculation when I was in mortuary school in 2019—as far as I know, her remains have never been located. In 2020, the same funeral home mixed up two decedents, leading to one being buried in the wrong grave. That error was caught and corrected, at least, but…yikes.
My greatest source of anxiety (other than the intrusive image of a double-decker cargo van full of corpses crashing on I-35 and sending bodies skating down the highway) was always embalming the wrong person. Any possibility worse than that fills my brain with static.
Diana asks: “Could it be that the ‘dead’ are actually those we consider alive, and that the dead are the ones who are really alive and free outside of this three-dimensional world?”
Entirely possible!
And Zach asks: “What if anything have you found helps relieve your fear of death? In terms of beliefs, practices, attitudes.”
As they say on the internet these days…bold of you to assume. I don’t remember having ever been afraid of death. Of things that might kill me, of course. I’m not trying to be an edgelord. I was in a bad car accident once that left me twitchy about driving in the rain. I watched Jaws when I was young and assume there’s a shark waiting in every body of water. But I’m afraid of harm, of suffering, of losing the people I love. Dying is the hard part, and I’m in no rush to speed that up. I don’t know if what comes after that will be a new adventure or a peaceful nothing, but I know that part doesn’t scare me at all.
In the same vein, people have asked me what I do to replenish my spirit. To carry the weight of the work I do. And the answer is simple: the work itself. Yes, I witness grief in layers and layers. I see the aftermath of violence, neglect, and suffering. I see loneliness that breaks my heart. But caring for the dead is the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done. The work lifts the weight.
Moving into a teaching position has been amazing, and I love it so much. But I knew when I accepted the job that I would miss funeral embalming immediately, and I do.
In my new role as Professor Necromancer, I’m inundated with questions daily. Some of them are wonderful questions, like when my office neighbor asked to borrow a heart. Most of them, however, involve syllabi, quizzes, and how to log in to Zoom sessions. So I beg you, dear readers, to send us your own questions: more interesting than the syllabus, less complicated than Canvas. Use the portal at thedeadlands.com, or find us on Bluesky or other social media.
Amanda Downum is the author of The Necromancer Chronicles, Dreams of Shreds & Tatters, and the World Fantasy Award-nominated collection Still So Strange. Not content with armchair necromancy, she is also a licensed mortician. You can summon her at a crossroads at midnight on the night of a new moon, or find her on social media as @stillsostrange.
