The deceased attends his own funeral ... embalmed

In short
In March 2016 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 26-year-old Fernando de Jesús Díaz Beato, who had been shot dead, was laid out at his wake sitting on a chair, embalmed, dressed in his own clothes and with his eyes open. These “unconventional funerals” are prepared by the Marín Funeral Home in Río Piedras, which since 2008 has posed the dead as they were in everyday life.

In March 2016 photos of Fernando de Jesús Díaz Beato went around the world. He was a 26-year-old Puerto Rican man shot 15 times outside his home in the Villa Carolina neighborhood of San Juan on March 3.

The photos are from his wake, where he is shown… sitting on a chair.

The deceased attends his own funeral

That’s right: the young man was embalmed and dressed in his everyday clothes, cap and glasses included.

Then he was seated, legs crossed, a cigarette in his hand and his eyes open, as if he were still alive.

It took the technicians about six hours. The chair was his mother’s, which she had never let him sit on in life because she kept it covered in plastic. The family wanted to remember him “happy and active, just as he was”. His sister said their mother, after crying for days, calmed down when she saw him like that.

But it’s not the only case. The Marín Funeral Home in Río Piedras, San Juan, has since 2008 specialized in what it calls “unconventional wakes”. Fernando’s was the ninth, but the first with the deceased’s eyes open.

How the idea was born

The idea didn’t come from the company, but from a 24-year-old, Ángel Luis Pantojas, who always said that if he died he wanted to attend his funeral “standing up”. After his death in 2008, he too a murder victim, his family asked the funeral home whether his wish could be fulfilled.

After studying Puerto Rican law they found no obstacle and so granted the request: Ángel was waked standing up in his family’s living room. In Puerto Rico they call it the “muerto parao”, the standing dead man.

Since then the Marín Funeral Home has organized many unconventional wakes,

posing the dead doing their favorite hobbies: playing dominoes, dressed as boxers in the ring and even on a motorcycle.

There has been no shortage of criticism, which the funeral home’s director, Damaris Marín, shrugs off:

Everyone has the right to their own opinion about it, but we do our work very seriously and respectfully. The wakes we prepare are like any others and they are not jokes.

The president of the Puerto Rico Funeral Home Association noted that many of these wakes are for young people killed in shootings, and interpreted them as a challenge: “You killed me, but you didn’t knock me down”.

With the photos going around the world, the Marín Funeral Home received requests from other countries too, such as Colombia and the Dominican Republic, and said it doesn’t charge anything extra for this kind of service.

Would you like to be embalmed and “attend” your own funeral, rather than have a traditional one?

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