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“Time,” said Anthony Saldivar, his eyeglasses slipping down his broad nose, “is always the biggest enemy.” Sporting a black tie and thick suspenders, his shirtsleeves cuffed at the elbows, Saldivar was one of eight contestants stationed across four folding tables inside a cavernous glass-and-steel convention center in Chicago, all of whom were attending to the same ticking-clock task. They had three hours, split over two afternoons, to rehabilitate a decomposing human head. The heads, of course, weren’t real. They were props furnished by funerary-cosmetics supplier Post Mortem Restorative Cosmetics, a company founded by the Hollywood special-effects technician Dean Jones, who parlayed techniques honed on the sets of Blue Velvet and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine into a career in the mortuary sciences.
PMRC casts its heads, which retail for $855, in a proprietary blend of silicone polymers. Dark gray in hue and riddled with disfigurements—a sunken mouth, a smashed nose, an exposed patch of skull, scars and divots along the cheeks—they are used to train undertakers in the specialty of mortuary beautification known as restorative art, the process by which dead bodies are gussied up for viewing and the big sleep. Organizers had distributed the heads among the elite group of undertakers, who were participating in the inaugural Restorative Art Technical Showcase, the highlight event of last year’s National Funeral Directors Association convention. Armed with various putties, fillers, waxes, and bundles of human hair, their goal was to produce a visage worthy of an open casket.
At fifty years old, Saldivar was used to performing under pressure. As an army infantry veteran, he completed one tour in Afghanistan and two in Iraq, all of which were, as he put it, “very kinetic.” During a particularly violent fifteen-month deployment in Baqubah, a city situated about thirty miles north of Baghdad, he would decompress by reading copies of Fangoria, the long-running periodical dedicated to horror movies and their fandoms. Leafing through an issue, he came across an article about a makeup-effects school whose curriculum was designed by Tom Savini, the award-winning gore meister and Vietnam War vet who lent his prowess with prostheses to such venerable franchises as Friday the 13th, the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Night of the Living Dead. “It just hit me like a sack of bricks,” he recalled thinking. “Why am I not doing this?”
Saldivar’s business card is long and hexagonal, like a classic haunted-house coffin. With his bald dome, severe features, and gray-black beard that drapes down to his sternum, he looks a bit like Kerry King, the stone-faced guitarist of the thrash-metal band Slayer. When I told him as much, his eyes widened. “You are my best friend!” he shouted. But his enthusiasm for heavy metal, horror cinema, and all things that go bump in the night belies a simple truth: Saldivar is a total sweetheart. He speaks thoughtfully and with almost exaggeratedly precise elocution about how his military service accustomed him to the sight of the human body in various states of degradation. The experience, he said, also made him aware of his deep wells of compassion and respect for the dead. Like many of those called to his vocation, he describes it in language that freely blends the material with the metaphysical. “I am here to help this person,” he told me of his approach as a mortician. “It may just be their vessel. But there are people that love this person.”
When he left the military, Saldivar decamped to the West Coast to enroll in a special-effects program in Los Angeles. But Hollywood didn’t agree with him, so after graduating, he headed home to Texas, where he started a two-year mortuary-sciences degree. Saldivar had struggled to make sense of civilian life after a long stint in the service, and the work invested his life with newfound meaning. “I became a sheepdog for the dead,” he said, “protecting their bodies.” After completing the program, he finally made it to the Savini school he’d read about in Iraq. There, he learned the tools of the horror-movie trade: sculpting and casting monster masks, airbrushing makeup, and simulating all manner of bloodcurdling wounds. The techniques felt surprisingly applicable to the restorations he’d performed on cadavers in mortuary school. He soon began working as a freelance undertaker, essentially using his Savini education in reverse: instead of making human actors look maimed, mutilated, or straight-up dead, he would help the dead better resemble the living.
At the Restorative Art Technical Showcase, Saldivar and his fellow contestants had the opportunity to put their highly particular talents to the test. Ranging in age from mid-twenties to mid-sixties, they had traveled to Chicago from cities like Pittsburgh and San Antonio, as well as from tiny towns in North and South Dakota. To the victor, i.e., whoever produced the most convincingly intact head, would go a trophy, some makeup vouchers, free seminars provided by leading experts in the field, and a lab coat branded with the PMRC logo. Most coveted of all was the esteem of their peers and other funeral-industry professionals, who’d packed themselves into a cordoned-off patch of the convention floor to watch the competitors work.
The showcase was conceived at a critical moment for restorative art, whose future has never looked more uncertain amid a changing funeral industry. As consumer tastes shift toward closed caskets and cremations, reflecting a general American ambivalence toward the traditions of ritualized bereavement, demand for posthumous primping has fallen dramatically. While restorative artists are accustomed to battling the ravages of time, it is now coming for their own discipline.
About a decade ago, cremation surpassed traditional burial as the most popular method of disposition in the United States. Last year, data provided by the NFDA showed that the cremation rate has since risen to 63.4 percent and is on track to hit 82.3 percent by 2045. Of the number of total cremations, an estimated 40 percent are direct cremations: those in which a body is delivered to a furnace shortly after death, circumventing any kind of casket, embalming, or restoration altogether.
There is no shortage of explanations for this broad cultural shift. There’s the decline in regular religious attendance, which now stands at 34 percent, and the corresponding waning of associated ceremonies. Some morticians cite the widespread adoption of smartphone cameras and the ready availability of photos of our loved ones, which may diminish people’s interest in creating what is sometimes called a memory picture, or final mental image, of the departed. There are environmental concerns that traditional burials monopolize too much land and employ toxins that can leach into the soil and groundwater. Cremation is often seen as a greener end-of-life option, even though the process releases into the atmosphere about a quarter ton of carbon dioxide—the equivalent of a 637-mile journey in the average gas-powered car—when the body’s carbon reservoirs are kindled. But the most frequently cited reason for the plunge in traditional burial services is also the most obvious one: the cost.
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