25-Cent Urns & Nosey Barbers | 4M #199

Welcome to the hundred-and-ninety-ninth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #199, where we’ll serve up bite-sized, easily-digestible nuggets of the deathcare news you need to crush conversations in the week ahead. Bon appetit!

Caretaker Zuckerberg

Following a recent expansion of his property holdings, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg now owns more than 2,300 acres of property in Kauai, Hawaii — including a centuries-old family burial ground. According to WIRED, several ancestors of resident Julian Ako are buried on the property. Ako has successfully registered the graves with the state, and coordinates visits with Zuckerberg’s team. WIRED also reported that the graves have been fenced off and will be maintained.

More drama

In a recent 4M, we shared the story of a now-former funeral home employee who had gone viral for disturbing social media posts he recorded in the selection room. Now the same funeral home is taking heat for a video a barber has posted online of nude, deceased bodies being prepared for services. The barber, who is not an employee, was allowed into the preparation area to style the hair of one person, but while there accessed and videoed the other deceased persons without knowledge of the staff. 

A quarter a piece

After purchasing four urns at a garage sale for $1 (25 cents each) — and confirming with a funeral home that the urns were indeed filled with human remains — an Indiana woman is trying to reunite the remains with family members. She’s facing an uphill battle, though. The seller told her the urns were among the auctioned contents of a storage unit whose owner had defaulted on payments, so they did not know the name of the owner. The article didn’t mention whether she or the funeral home had identified a tag within the remains, either. In desperation, she appealed to the public via her local news outlets. This story makes you wonder just how many sets of human remains are abandoned in storage buildings and other places every year; it’s just another argument for permanent memorialization.