"To purify oneself means to remove the tiredness, pain, and troubles of this world."
This is the classic line in the movie "The Mortician", in which the hero has a solemn expression and gently wipes the clothes and makeup of the deceased. The withered face reappeared beautifully, as if he/she was not dead, but just quietly sleeping.
On April 21, 2016, Xi'an Funeral Home, in the sound of mournful music, Wu Jinna, a post-85 mortician, and her assistant cleansed the deceased's body, with soothing and light touch of her fingers, washing away the impurities of the world, recreating the deceased's former appearance in infinite respect, bringing relief to the family.
Death is like the quiet beauty of autumn leaves
"Entering the Mortician" is a Japanese film released in 2008, the year that Wu Jinna is studying to be a mortician in Japan.
Born in 1986 in the picturesque Fujian province of southern Fujian, Wu Jinna has loved sports since childhood. At the age of 12, this wind-like girl ran wildly between heaven and earth and let go of her dreams.
She wanted to be an athlete, and she wanted to be a sports coach. In the simple world of girls, how cool it is to stand in front of many athletes and wield freely.
But it was also in this year that an event happened that Made Wu Jinna unforgettable, which changed her life ideals and became the beginning of her road to becoming a mortician.
One evening in 1998, Wu Jinna bounced back home, but she didn't see her parents. Late at night, my parents returned and brought back the bad news of my aunt's death.
In Wu Jinna's memory, her aunt was beautiful, gentle, and extremely kind to her.
Wu Jinna cried and begged her parents to take her to see her aunt for the last time, and her mother also cried, but she did not agree.
The aunt was completely disfigured in the tragic car accident, and they were afraid of scaring Wu Jinna.
This became Wu Jinna's lifelong regret, and after that, in the words of her parents, she vaguely knew the tragic situation after her aunt's death.
Little Wu Jinna felt sad, the aunt who loved beauty all her life let the world see her most miserable appearance after her death, if the aunt knew heaven, how sad.
At the age of 15, Wu Jinna was in the third year of junior high school, with excellent academic performance, and was ready to take the middle school entrance examination.
However, after inadvertently seeing the enrollment brochure of Fujian Civil Affairs School, she changed her mind and decided to give up the middle school entrance examination and apply for the school's modern funeral technology and management major.
Her choice was met with confusion and strong opposition from her parents, "You have to go to high school and go to college!" "Funeral is not all day long against the dead, obscure!" ”......
Wu Jinna stubbornly insisted, refusing to change her mind.
In order to persuade her parents, she found her grandparents and mentioned her aunt, and the two old men wept bitterly, and they understood their granddaughter's good intentions.
Under the persuasion of the old man, Wu Jinna's parents finally reluctantly agreed to her decision.
In the autumn of 2001, Wu Jinna entered the Fujian Civil Affairs School as she wished, and began to learn funeral knowledge from scratch.
Funeral profession is divided into four directions: funeral services, anti-embalming and plastic surgery, funeral equipment, and cemetery design, Wu Jinna studied anti-embalming and plastic surgery, the main content of which is body embalming and makeup and beauty.
In the three years of school, the curriculum is very compact, Wu Jinna and her classmates not only have to learn body convergence and plastic surgery, but also take into account feng shui, infectious diseases, bang lian writing and other courses.
The facial damage of the unnatural death of the body is large, there are also limb mutilations, and the mortician naturally needs to learn human anatomy, at this time, Wu Jinna feels that she is not only a funeral student, but also a forensic doctor.
After three years in school, in the face of heavy courses, Wu Jinna deeply felt that the funeral industry has a deep heritage, and it is not possible to master it in just three years.
Therefore, after graduation, she chose to work and study in Toyokawa City, Aichi Prefecture, Japan, and spent nine years concentrating on learning how to become a professional mortician.
Japan has entered an aging society as early as 1970, with the number of deaths increasing year by year, the output value of the funeral industry has grown rapidly, the industrial scale is as high as 5 billion US dollars per year, and there are several large-scale funeral companies with hundreds of employees.
Wu Jinna joined such a large funeral company, the company has more than 300 employees, 8 ceremonial halls, and holds thousands of funerals every year.
Here, Wu Jinna learned about Japan's most traditional Shinto and Buddhist funeral rites, which have been used since 1938 and have a rigorous process.
The "bathing of the deceased" is the most important part of this, which includes steps such as purifying, changing clothes and putting on makeup for the deceased.
Wu Jinna learned to bathe in the deceased, and the first deceased person she came into contact with in Japan died for only 5 minutes, and her body still had residual warmth. Although wearing thin gloves, her hand subconsciously shrank back after touching the deceased's skin.
The warm, soft touch made her feel as if the deceased had not left. That night, Wu Jinna dreamed of the deceased, and when she woke up, she could not sleep for a long time.
And this is just the beginning, to become a qualified mortician, you must pass the psychological barrier.
The 19-year-old girl must face all kinds of remains, the fragmentation of the car accident, the unbearable suicide, the face of the fire scene...
The huge test challenged Wu Jinna's psychological limits, during that time she had nightmares almost every night, could not swallow food, and what supported her to go down was the thought of her aunt and admiration for other morticians.
Whenever she sees the deceased, she will think that they, like her aunt, were living and beautiful people, and now that the tragedy is tragic, she wants to use her own hands to help them restore their appearance before they died, in the hope of "dying like the quiet beauty of autumn leaves" and comforting the spirit of the deceased in heaven.
The other morticians' respect for the deceased and their caution over the remains also allowed Wu Jinna to revisit her work.
She believes that the deceased, like the living, need dignity, and she treats every body as her own relative in her work, helping them to face the world with dignity for the last time.
After following her teacher and participating in the funeral work hundreds of times, Wu Jinna finally got the opportunity to practice.
But after getting started, she found that the real body was completely different from the model she usually used for practice.
The body is very fragile, especially the hair, the first time to wash the hair of the deceased, Wu Jinna felt that she had been very careful, but still pulled off a large handful of hair.
The teacher immediately lowered her face, ordered her to stop working, and then personally came to do the follow-up work.
Afterwards, the teacher and Wu Jinna had a long conversation, he believed that Wu Jinna's skills have been very skilled, what is lacking is careful and patient in practical operation, "Wu Jun remembers, the body is fragile like an antique, please be cautious." ”
Death lives on as part of life
During her nine years in Japan, Wu Jinna learned the full range of funeral service techniques.
In 2013, she returned to her motherland and set up Zhigui Etiquette Service Co., Ltd. in Shanghai and set up a professional team of morticians.
The company focuses on the "bathing of the deceased" service, Wu Jinna believes that there are two baptisms in life, the baptism of the baby is completed by the parents, and she and her team are to complete the final baptism of life for the deceased, so that the deceased can be clean and bid farewell to the world with dignity.
As the main force of the team, Wu Jinna led the members to sort out a whole set of processes of "bathing in the deceased". Before the bath begins, everyone present bows to the deceased, after which the mortician begins to purify the deceased under the watchful eyes of the family.
The full process takes 40 minutes and includes body cleansing, shampooing, nail trimming, changing clothes and makeup, etc.
During the whole operation, the deceased bather needs to wear gloves, one is because the body is very fragile, wearing gloves can prevent the deceased bather's hand from directly touching the skin of the deceased and forming corpse spots and bruises; The second is to prevent the bacteria in the body from infecting the mortician.
The first is facial cleansing, in which the bather puts a clean towel under the deceased's head and then gently washes the face with water.
Then there was the shampoo, and since the deceased was prone to hair loss, Wu Jinna and her team did at least two hundred experiments to choose a shampoo that could wash away the dirt and not lose their hair.
Throughout the bathing process, there is always a large bath towel covering the body of the deceased, and before washing her feet, Wu Jinna will also cross the feet of the deceased to avoid exposing the privacy of the deceased during the cleaning process.
Wu Jinna believes that since she chose to do the "bath of the deceased", she will make this service a boutique. Even if she simply cuts her nails, she will carefully polish and polish the nails one by one after trimming to avoid subsequent nail hooks, damage to clothing or injuries to family members.
In Wu Jinna's team, a deceased bather like her needs at least three years of skill, and in these three years, an average of 15 deceased people are operated every day, and more than 5,000 bodies are left a year, so that they can be called professional deceased bathers.
Therefore, it is not easy to stick to Wu Jinna's team for a long time. At the beginning of the team formation, there were not enough mannequins, and Wu Jinna simply let the members take turns lying on the shower bed as models.
In this way, it not only saves the money to buy the model, but also allows the members to truly feel the bathing process, summarize the experience from it, and finally successfully build the previous set of service models.
The members who have followed the team for many years thought about this matter and were very emotional, "Sister Wu and we really treat the bathing standards of the living people to treat the bathing of the deceased. ”
Because the skin of the body has no metabolism, it will turn black in a short period of time, in order to make the face of the deceased regain its brilliance, Wu Jinna has finally determined to use a powerful whitening mask to restore the deceased's appearance in a short period of time.
The water-separated neck cover for washing the face is made of silicone specially imported from Taiwan, and the stretcher for the deceased to carry the deceased is a special stretcher for the deceased purchased from Japan. Wu Jinna and her team try their best to make everything perfect, providing the deceased with the last meticulous care of life.
At her suggestion, the families of the deceased will also participate in the process of serving the deceased, the most common of which is that the family members dress and button the deceased.
Wu Jinna said: "Most of the deceased are old people, when they were young, they dressed their children, and now that the old people have passed away, they should be the last time to sort out clothes for their parents." ”
In the quiet and solemn atmosphere, the family members were deeply touched to see the deceased being so respected and cared for by the deceased bather. After the bath, Wu Jinna and her team members accepted the gratitude of the family, and their feelings were slightly complicated while they were happy.
Since choosing the funeral profession at the age of 15, Wu Jinna has felt discrimination and criticism from all walks of life, the opposition of parents, the incomprehension of relatives and friends, and the dislike of strangers.
Fruits brought by her hand to relatives during the New Year's Festival will be thrown away, and people will always see her twitching her nose consciously or unconsciously, as if she has a corpse smell on her body.
The business cards she handed out would be thrown in the trash by others, no one would want to shake her hand, and relatives and friends would never invite her when they got married.
Seeing a cute child who wants to hug, he will also be politely rejected by the other parent.
Even Wu Jinna's mother sighed, "How did you do such a job?" Obscure, unlucky, how to marry in the future? ”
Indeed, employees in the funeral industry are not easy to find, and they are generally solved within the system. But now for all this, Wu Jinna has looked away, she does not expect to change the concept of others, only want to work hard to do her job, bring dignity to the deceased, and give the family the greatest psychological comfort.
Wu Jinna said that her employees are much harder than the average industry insider, and she brought back the strict working standards of Japanese morticians to the company, requiring employees to maintain a high degree of professionalism at all times. The death of the deceased is uncertain, but the professional attitude of the employees must be consistent during the day and late at night.
Other people's chicken babies, Wu Jinna chicken employees, in her company, employees must maintain a sunny state like chicken blood every day, and must not have half a touch of the fish phenomenon. There is only one thing that employees focus on, "how to keep every deceased in a good state of burial." "Some employees can't stand it, and they will complain about Wu Jinna, she hears it, and will patiently explain it."
In her opinion, to be a bather of the deceased must remain firm in her heart, this job is the last farewell of life for every deceased, there is no second time, so it must be perfect, and must not be lazy and slack.
However, people are emotional animals after all, and it is inevitable that there will be times of vulnerability. Wu Jinna can also understand the sadness of employees facing death every day. Especially after bathing children or young people, the bather will always have a certain psychological pressure. In her company, there are several deceased bathers who can never afford to send off their children, and Wu Jinna does not exert pressure, but intimately does not assign children to them.
Wu Jinna is not only the manager of the company, she is also a bather who has been in the industry for many years, and she naturally understands the pressure of employees.
When she herself encounters an emotional breakdown, she will close the door after the bath is over and everyone has left, cry in front of the deceased, and finally wipe away her tears and tell the deceased, "You are very beautiful, you can leave with confidence." ”
In the nearly ten years since the establishment of the company, Wu Jinna and her employees have become a well-known domestic bathing team for the deceased, and she is also known as the "first person bathing in the deceased" in China.
She is not limited to Shanghai and the surrounding areas, but travels all over the motherland, performing bathing demonstrations for the deceased at funeral parlors in Xi'an, Chengdu, Beijing and other places.
The ancient bath originated in the Xia Shang period of the mainland, and now through Wu Jinna's re-promotion, it is believed that the living can understand the true meaning of life, understand that death itself is part of the eternal existence of life, and at the same time give the deceased the greatest dignity in leaving the last moment of life.
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China News Network: "Visiting the Funeral Home Bathing Team: Bathing Ceremony Full of Love and Respect"