How funeral directors keep your eyes closed after you die

Image: Flickr, Deeped Niclas & Amanda Strandh

Seeing your loved ones after they die can be extremely difficult, but it can provide crucial closure for people in mourning.

Funeral directors go through great lengths to alleviate the trauma of the experience by developing special techniques to make the dead look as close to they did when they were alive as possible.

A Reddit user discovered the creative way some morticians ensure that the eyes remain shut after death, and it turned into a fascinating conversation about the practice of embalming.

Eyes naturally remain partially open after death due to muscle relaxation. For many years, cotton was placed under the eyelids to help keep them shut and maintain the proper shape for open casket services. Now spiky "contacts" called eye caps hold the eyelids in place.

A mortician with the very appropriate username "3mbalmber" chimed into the discussion and provided some professional insight.

"Those are called eye caps. We use them in the embalming process," he wrote. "Place them in before we start injecting during what we call setting the features."

If the person's eyes have been donated, special ping-pong-like contraptions are used to mimic the shape of the eye and keep the lids shut.

Funeral directors also use a vinyl device with similar spikes to help maintain the mouth's shape and a special needle gun is then used to keep the mouth closed.

For more information about the embalming process and insiders' perspectives on what it's like to be a a mortician, check out the Ask Funeral Directors subreddit.