DE Campus Life 16

Vernie Fountain tells the hypothetical story of a husband and wife who give each other a quick kiss every morning before they say good-bye, expecting to reunite in much the same way at the day’s end.

But 15 minutes later, the husband’s life is changed forever when the woman dies. She has been killed in a fatal accident, and her face is so disfigured that she cannot be identified.

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There is a closed casket funeral and the husband is never able to see his wife again the way he remembered her that morning she left for work.

This lingering uncertainty is what post-mortem reconstructive surgeons such as Fountain hope to eliminate.

To see the body and identify the wife is the point of closure we seek, said Fountain, founder of the Fountain National Academy of Professional Embalming Skills in Springfield, Mo.

To train embalmers in this reconstructive surgery, embalmers came to SIUC for two training seminars over an eight-day period last week.

The three-day seminar involved embalming techniques, and the five-day seminar was spent on techniques of reconstructive surgery. The seminar ended Saturday with the completion of the reconstructions and an open casket viewing.

Funeral directors and embalmers from all over the world attended the seminars, each one of them paying about $1,650 for the experience. The bodies for the seminar were donated by the SIUC Mortuary Science Program, which worked with the SIU School of Medicine to bring the seminar to SIUC.

Thirty people attended the three-day training, while 17 continued in the five-day seminar. Eight cadavers were used in the seminars.

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Fountain said the academy exists to improve embalming skills through a continuing education program. He said that when he began as an embalmer, he could not find the advanced skills he needed in the specialized field of highly traumatized surgery. Fountain decided to create an academy through which people could learn such skills.

If someone shot themselves in the head, there would be bone damage and tissue damage, Cydney Griffith, SIUC assistant professor in the College of Applied Science and Arts, said. They are reconstructing on simulated trauma.

Fountain said a deceased person’s family being unable to identify the body is just as traumatic as not finding a body at all.

Maybe you know someone who has disappeared and you can’t find them, he said. It is tragic and it is important to view and be able to identify the body.

To illustrate his point, Fountain mentioned TWA flight 800, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean just after take-off last summer. He said a number of people have not been recovered, and it is tragic for the families because there has never been a point of closure.

They might sit at home and wait for the person to walk through the door, he said.

Fountain said that if the bodies had been found, the uncertainty about the death could be eliminated because the family could see the loved one as they remembered him or her.

We demonstrate surgical techniques associated with all of that, he said, primarily because of the possibility of viewing.

Fountain reflects on the families of soldiers missing in action in the Vietnam War when he refers to the importance of the reconstructive surgery.

These families would get a point of closure, he said, if they could have seen their loved ones (after death).