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Comment by tengwar2 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. This is one of the things that differs hugely between countries. I've taken about 550 funerals in the UK (I have what you might call a "portmanteau career"). I've only had one open-coffin funeral, and that was for a Caribbean family. It's not uncommon for the immediate family to visit the body before the funeral, but I haven't heard of restoration being used for that and I think embalming is quite unusual as well. In fact I was at the National Funeral Exhibition recently, and I didn't see anyone doing restorative services.

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Here in Argentina, most funeral are open-coffin, but very short. Let's say that the guy dies on Monday, then the open-coffin visit is on Tuesday afternoon and early night, there is a short additional time on Wednesday morning and then he is carried in a black car to the cemetery/crematory. So the preparation of the body is very simple.

Yes - in Ireland (both the Republic and Northern Ireland, and irrespective of religion), the funeral is usually within three days. I'm based in England, the south-eastern part of the UK, and here funerals are typically 3-5 weeks after the death, and getting later. This is partly because of needing to get a slot at the crematorium (though this is largely a manufactured problem in my view). However the main reason for delay is additional checks after a serial killer doctor was discovered in 1998.

Usually here te funeral in in the next two days and for cremation after that the body is keep in a storage at the cemetery and you must go two weeks later to pick up the urn. The cremation may be at a random unspecified time like 2am. If you wish, you can pay an additional amount of money to fix the time, during the day, so the family can be there.

> It's not uncommon for the immediate family to visit the body before the funeral, but I haven't heard of restoration being used for that and I think embalming is quite unusual as well.

As you say, that would vary by country. Here in France, while I wasn't the one who managed that, I know that for my grandmother someone intervened so that the body could stay in her home where she died until she was taken for burial a few days later. I think it would have been a Thanatopracteur, which can be translated to embalmer. And for my grandfather, if I remember correctly, died after a fall that left him bruised, bruises which were hidden before I went to visit the body before the burial. But neither of those burials were open-casket, I think it's quite unusual here.

I wonder if there is any correlation between open caskets and debt collection rules / norms in each country.

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