Frozen Dead Guys & Coffin Coffee Tables | 4M #180

Welcome to the hundred-and-eightieth edition of Morticians’ Monday Morning Mashup, 4M #180, 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!

Fun while it lasted

We were “today old” when we heard about the Frozen Dead Guy Festival in Nederland, Colorado, and, alas, we are five years too late to participate in the celebration of a Norwegian man who died in 1989 and was stored in a cryogenic capsule in a shed in the tiny 1.6-square-mile town. The festival was created in 2002 as a way to promote tourism, and until Covid interfered, it attracted thousands of tourists for coffin races, polar plunges, and hearse parades. 

Remembering the royals

Speaking of newly discovered fun(eral) facts: Did you know that both Princess Diana and her father-in-law Prince Philip were buried in lead-lined coffins? The Royal Observer shared these “lesser-known” details just last week, commenting that Diana’s coffin weighed more than 700 pounds, and Philip’s lead-lined English oak coffin was made for him 30 years before his death in 2021. While the primary purpose of the lead was to “prevent moisture” and therefore keep the body intact for a longer time, a 2019 tweet shared in the article said the lead in Diana’s coffin also helped to “protect her body from any paparazzi or obsessed fans using x-rays to see through the casket.”

Three-in-one

Prince Philip may have had the right idea when he had his casket made for him a full three decades before his death. A now-34-year-old California welder and artist constructed her own five-sided coffin during her senior year of college as she was “unconsciously processing the dread of leaving school and not having a clear idea of what life would look like.” Today, the casket sits in her living room, serving as a coffee table and storage for clothing, blankets, and pillows. She’s also hosted “coffin parties” where she “invites guests to lie in the coffin and contemplate their mortality.”

Website worries

Arlington National Cemetery is the final resting place for more than 400,000 individuals, including presidents, high-ranking military officials, and people who left their mark on the history of our country. Until recently, the names and accomplishments of some of the more notable inhabitants were listed on the cemetery’s website on pages that also highlighted aspects of their race, gender, or ethnicity (for example, one page highlighted the graves of Black soldiers). Last week, Arlington removed most of the pages from the website, citing President Trump’s executive orders to scrub content promoting “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.” Officials told The New York Times that they are committed to restoring this content in accordance with the new guidelines as soon as possible. Although these separate listings and guides to these particular gravesites are no longer on the site, every grave within Arlington can still be found using the website’s ANC Explorer tool, a grave locator app.