Where beauty softens grief

I’m indebted to Pam Vetter for pointing me to an article about post-mortem cosmetic procedures. This is not a big issue in the UK as it is in the US (Pam lives in LA), but it goes on here all the same. Funeral directors earn gratitude for presenting bodies looking as if they quite like being dead; embalmers take enormous pride in their work, both cosmetic and restorative (say, for example, reconstructing someone’s skull after a traffic accident).