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Telling the story behind the scenes of death: Stéphanie Sounac, embalmer, presents her shadow profession to hundreds of thousands of people on social networks and publishes a book to make it better known.
Thanatopractor. A word not easy to pronounce, for a profession which consists of providing conservation care to slow down the process of decomposition of the body after death, and thus cushion the shock of its presentation to loved ones.
Stéphanie Sounac (aka Thana Nanou on social networks) has nearly 300,000 subscribers on TikTok and more than 130,000 on Instagram, where she shares photos and short videos of her job.
It was after the Covid-19 pandemic, at the end of 2021, that Ms. Sounac, 40, launched herself onto the networks, first to present “mortuary casts”. She is a “big fan”, she confides to AFP. “I wondered how I could inform as many people as possible in as little time as possible.” on these funerary masks.
She begins without showing her face, for fear of hateful reactions. But one of his videos has 100,000 views “in less than 24 hours”. Questions from Internet users are pouring out. Stéphanie Sounac then answers it in numerous videos.
Last goodbye
She also posts a photo of belts, with a word: “Clothes in case of death”, and in the caption “the meaning of the word +predict+ takes on a whole new dimension here“. Below, dozens of comments tell of the loss of a loved one and other personal stories. For Ms. Sounac, her community is “extraordinary” in its kindness.
In her book “The eyes that we close” (Editions 41, 245 pages, released October 24), Ms. Sounac evokes the actions she performs on the deceased, such as disinfecting the body or injecting a mixture of formaldehyde and water, often through the arteries, to “enable the hydration of the tissues and their recoloring” and avoid the lividities which appear “only a few hours” after death.
This does not “cover up” the death, so that the loved ones of the deceased are well aware that he is no longer alive. But the care “reduce visual shocks that could be traumatic“.
Since her adolescence, Ms. Sounac has dreamed of pursuing this profession. “I owe this mission to the adults who prevented me from seeing my deceased father and saying goodbye to him.” when she was only seven years old, she writes.
She sometimes advises parents to let their young children who wish to see their loved one one last time, to avoid the trauma that she herself experienced.
It was only after two and a half years of sharing her job, its pace, its difficulty, that Stéphanie Sounac decided to post the price of conservation care on her networks. “I was very surprised, because people expected a lot more than that“, she said.
A treatment costs on average between 250 and 450 euros.
A report from the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs (Igas) carried out in 2013 indicates that this care would represent “10% of funeral costs” and 6% of funeral directors’ turnover.
“Little soldiers” of death
This could explain why many families refuse treatment even before knowing the price.
According to a 2018 Defender of Rights report, “more than 45% of the deceased received embalming care” in France in 2016.
In her book, she denounces the prices charged by funeral directors, which “barely cover the care”. Especially since based on the Franco-Belgian border, very close to Luxembourg where she also practices, she travels through Lorraine and the border countries, carrying out on average 1,000 treatments per year, driving 4,000 km per month.
She regrets that in France, embalmers depend exclusively on funeral directors, who can decide to do without them from one day to the next, a painful experience that Ms. Sounac experienced with “her biggest client” after more than five years of service.
Stéphanie Sounac pleads for better consideration of the mental health of these “little soldiers who go to the front” and rub shoulders with the dead every day.