A mortician and funeral director has shared insights into what occurs if someone passes away with an erection, and how frequently he handles situations of ‘angel lust’.
Victor M. Sweeney, the author of Now Departing: A Small-town Mortician on Death, Life and the Moments in Between, is quite familiar with handling deceased bodies.
Living and working in rural Minnesota, the undertaker first confronted death at a young age when he tragically discovered his best friend deceased in bed at the tender age of three.
“Maybe that’s why I’m doing what I’m doing,” he said openly during an episode of Honesty Box.
“The first dead body I saw on the job was also terrible,” Victor recalled. “I was 18 at the time.
“There was an 18-year-old girl on the table who had died in a car crash around graduation time. And that was awful because there’s no better way to see yourself on the table than to see someone your same age.”
He confessed that he ‘almost passed out’ during that first experience, observing as the mortician embalmed the young girl.
Despite this, it didn’t deter him, and he returned to work the very next day, assisting with a deceased infant.
“And then after that, everything has gotten much easier. But there is my harrowing introduction to dead bodies,” Victor said.
Now an experienced professional in his field, the 34-year-old father has seen a wide array of cases and intriguingly harbors no fear of his own mortality.
Victor has also discussed the protocol when his funeral home is entrusted with embalming a deceased person in a compromised state, specifically, with an erection.
When posed with the question, he chuckled at its humorous nature before revealing that he has never encountered that particular scenario.
“I’ve never had anybody die with an erection… yet. I’m not sure how that would work,” Victor said.
“It’s a nervous response, right? There’s the physicality of the thing but there’s a nervous response.
“So I’d have to believe that when the nervous system and the brain stops working, that the erection goes away. But I don’t know for sure.”
However, Victor mentions having encountered ‘angel lust’, a phenomenon where a man’s penis becomes erect suddenly during the embalming process.
“I have embalmed bodies where inexplicably all the pressure ends up in the c**k, and it becomes an erection again,” he explained. “And then that also eventually goes away when the abdominal pressure goes down, but that doesn’t happen very often.
“I’ve heard of people calling it ‘angel lust’, but I’ve only had that happen like twice in my career, so not super common.”
Despite this, Victor shared that it is not the worst situation he has faced, having encountered some severe injuries during his career.
He expressed a particular aversion to broken bones, describing them as ‘icky’ since he sometimes has to realign them during embalming.
Other traumatic injuries, such as heads being split open and gunshot wounds, particularly those that are self-inflicted, are uniformly distressing.
Victor added: “So there are sometimes really gross things that a person has to deal with and you just suck it up and do it mostly out of love, weirdly enough. You do it because you love the people that are suffering through the loss.
“That’s what you have to keep in mind when you’re dealing with things that really make you wanna puke.”