UPTOWNflavor

This was a creepy, yet interesting story about what embalmers do.  It focuses on the Owens Funeral Home on Lenox Avenue. Be sure to check out the photos – they look like something out of a horror film.

The deceased — in life he was a doorman — was lying on a gurney in the basement. He was naked, as wrinkled as a rhino, and face up on a sheet.

Around him in the clammy room were the tools of his embalmer: the trocar that had emptied out his stomach, the scalpel that had dug into his jugular, the Duotronic pump machine that had given him that vinegary odor from the fluid it had put into his veins.

He had come to rest at last: here, at the inevitable endpoint, in a small embalming room in Harlem. A necessary place, no doubt, but one whose actuality, whose actual existence the human brain will often keep at bay.

“No one wants to hear about embalming,” said the room’s owner, Isaiah Owens, proprietor of the Owens Funeral Home on Lenox Avenue and 121st Street.

Read the rest of the article: New York Times