My job is to prepare faces for burial. How friends from Dnipro are changing the culture of farewell in Ukraine

Olena Holotsvan has been working as a thanatopractor for seven years, restoring the faces of the deceased before burial. Sometimes, special makeup is enough for a farewell in an open coffin, while other times, parts of the face that are missing have to be recreated. For example, this happens after injuries. Together with her friend Anna Hryshyna, Olena opened her own funeral home in Dnipro. Read about why the work of a thanatopractor is creative and what it's like to work with death every day in this article. LIGA.net.

In the middle of the large hall stands an open coffin. It is separated from the rest of the space by metal bars, on which funeral wreaths are draped with inscriptions: "from mother", "from wife", "from brother" and "from friends". On the wall nearby is a television. It plays a video in a loop about the life of the person lying in the coffin: here he is with his wife, here with friends, here at a celebration.

A woman in a black jacket, leggings, and a white hat leans over the coffin. She looks at the deceased's face with an assessing gaze, thinks for a few seconds, then disappears into the pantry and returns with two small suitcases. Inside them are cosmetics and several metal tools.

This is Olena Holotsvan, she is 36 years old, and for seven of those years, she has been working as a thanatopractor – applying makeup and restoring the faces of the deceased before burials. In 2024, Olena, her friend Anna Hryshyna, and their acquaintance Yevhen opened the funeral home "Tseremonial" in Dnipro. Olena is responsible for thanatopraxy, Anna communicates with relatives, writes obituaries, and then reads them at the farewell ceremony, which she also conducts. Yevhen is responsible for accounting and helps with organizing farewells – he looks for people to carry the coffin and ensures that an ambulance is always nearby.

Get to know the deceased

On average, "Tseremonial" conducts 15 farewells a month – this includes restoring faces before burial, the farewell ceremony, and escorting to the cemetery. The team learns about a new "order" two or three days in advance, when the body is already in the morgue and the relatives have decided on the date of the funeral. On such days, work always starts early and continues until six in the evening. While Olena prepares the deceased's body for the farewell, others take care of the hall – they fix wreaths, arrange bottles of water and farewell packages (bags with sweets), and sweep the floor.

And so it was today. The white van with the deceased's body arrived from the morgue at the funeral home at 6:50 AM. It stopped in front of a two-story orange brick building located on one of the city's central streets. This is "The Ceremonial."

Six men gathered around the car. Yevhen had called them to help carry the coffin. First from the car to the hall, then into the hearse and to the cemetery. Some of the men shuffled their feet to keep warm on the cool autumn morning. Others were talking among themselves:

"How old was he?" asks the first.

"Born in 1996, very young," the second one replies. "Died of blood poisoning after a failed operation."

"I feel sorry for the guy," the other one says, exhaling.

"The hall is open, you can bring it in," Yevhen interrupts their conversation.

Anna enters the funeral home. First, she goes to the coffin and opens it. It's their tradition to look at the deceased and "get acquainted with them."

Next, she starts preparing the hall: she sets up a table where the deceased's relatives will place flowers, lays a tablecloth, and puts out bottles of water. She checks if everything is alright with the wreaths that were brought in last night. She notices three wreaths that are not from their funeral home – on one of them, the words are written not from left to right, but the other way around. Anna gets angry but can't do anything. She calms herself by looking at her own wreaths – they have a neater inscription and a better combination of colors.

Anna takes the memorial bread out of the bag and places it near the coffin – it will be distributed at the cemetery. She baked it herself last night. It was her first time doing so, as she couldn't fall asleep for a long time and needed something to occupy herself with. This was all because she had been talking to the deceased's relatives late into the night to write an obituary.

"I love the process of preparing for a farewell. It's sacred to me," says Anna, adding, "But an obituary is always difficult for me. While I'm writing it, I fall in love with that person. Their death becomes my loss too. It happens every time."

How a thanatopractor works

Olena is the last to enter the room, and she also goes to the coffin first, looks at the deceased, and prepares for work. She puts on gloves, a medical mask, and a surgical gown with ties at the back. While she arranges jars of thanatocosmetics, Anna sits in a chair to write an obituary. From time to time, they talk about the deceased's life – it's easier for Anna if she shares her emotions with others.

"Well, let's get started!" Olena says to the whole room and gets to work. First, she presses on the abdomen, checking if all gases have been released from the body during the autopsy – this stops further bloating and makes the contours of the face and torso more natural. She opens the deceased's mouth and feels the cheeks to understand the condition of the skin on the face – three days after death, it has turned slightly yellow, grey-blue spots have appeared in places, and the closed eyes have lost their natural volume.

Olena places a disposable diaper under the deceased's head to avoid staining the suit with makeup. While doing so, she turns to Anna and asks why no one at the Kyiv morgue – the city where the man died – applied a embalming mask to preserve his skin tone. Neither of them has an answer; they get angry and question each other about how this could have happened.

Inside the open suitcase are a dozen jars of white-pink liquid in various shades. Olena takes one of them and fills a syringe, wipes the deceased's face with a napkin, and injects the liquid into different parts of it. This is thanogel – it embalms and evens out skin tone. It can be injected or diluted and applied to the face as a mask. Regular cosmetics cannot be used in such cases – they will not adhere to dead skin.

This task is one of the easiest in Olena's work. It is more difficult, but also more interesting for her, to work with larger defects – deep abrasions or when the deceased is missing part of their face. This happens to soldiers due to injuries, or to civilians who died from shelling. Then Olena uses a special wax that replaces the lost part of the skin.

"No one, anywhere, will teach you what to do when a person is missing not only a part of their skin, but also, for example, muscles. Just a hole in the face, and there's no manual on what to do about it," Olena explains. "Every such case is a challenge. It's a creative profession, and that's what I like about it."

While working, Olena talks to Anna and Yevhen. But she does it absentmindedly, because she is too engrossed in her work. Anna's sudden question distracts her from her makeup. She asks it half-jokingly, but Olena doesn't get the joke:

"So how am I supposed to write an obituary?" Anna's voice is heard.

"What happened?" Olena asks, a little worriedly.

"The deceased's mother says her son was an excellent student at school. His friends say he was a notorious underachiever, and they often skipped classes together. Which of these is true?" says Anna.

"Just write it down, a failing student and a straight-A student in one person," Olena jokes.

Today there are many jokes during work, but it is not always the case. The ease of their conversation depends on who they are working with. If there is a child in the coffin, usually all the preparations take place in complete silence – "because it is an interrupted life story, and it is always a great sadness."

If the deceased was a cheerful person in life, the conversations don't stop. Anna usually learns about this when she talks to relatives for the obituary. It's also evident from the videos that relatives sometimes make for the farewell ceremony. Right now, one is playing on a large TV on the wall. Photos and short videos from the deceased's life flash by – where they are with their spouse, children, at holidays.

Olena accidentally raises her head, looks at one of the photos, and remembers: two weeks ago, the deceased was in this hall, saying goodbye to a friend who had committed suicide. He already knew he was ill and understood that his own funeral might be soon. From a mutual acquaintance, Olena learned that he wanted "Ceremonial" to handle his funeral.

The woman talks about it, and silence falls in the room. Anna continues to write the obituary. Olena silently applies tanatogel to the face with a brush. Then she opens the deceased's eyes and inserts special lenses, hemispheres, into them – they prevent the eye from decomposing and restore the natural shape of the eyelids.

The final touches remain. Olena takes a cotton swab with tweezers and wipes the nostrils. She trims the beard with scissors and fixes the hairstyle. She again inspects the deceased with an assessing gaze and seems satisfied with what she sees: "it turned out well." And indeed: if you only look at the face, it seems as if the man is just sleeping.

I love my job – doing it and seeing the result. I am not to blame for a person's death, and there is nothing I can do about that fact. The only thing I can do is make the farewell easier for the family. So that they can see their loved one for the last time as they saw them in life.

The Path to Thanatopractice

Olena has been working as a thanatopractor for the past seven years. Before that, she couldn't find a job she liked and kept changing them one after another. She was a model, editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine, did makeup on commission, and organized events – "but she quickly got bored of everything."

Death is perhaps the only thing that has always interested her. As a child, Olena loved to ponder what happens to animals and their bodies when they die. And from the age of 14, she dreamed of going to a morgue and seeing a dead person. "I don't know where I got this desire from, it's like it was always with me. Everyone was afraid of it, but I, on the contrary, wanted to," she says.

The same phone call that changed her life happened 15 years later:

– Hello, do you want to go to the morgue?

– Of course I do!

– Then get ready and come to me (sounds of telephone ringing)...

It was a friend who had been working as a thanatopractor for some time and had her own funeral agency.

At the morgue, besides her friend, an unfriendly orderly was waiting for Olena:

"There's one body, no one has claimed it for a long time. I've already washed and dressed it, but it's bloated again. I need to unsew it, release the gases, and dress it again," the orderly said his plan of action aloud.

"Okay," replied Olena, waiting for everything to begin.

The orderly transferred the body to the dissection table, where pathological autopsies and forensic examinations are performed. He undressed the body and began to cut the stitches he had made a few days earlier after the autopsy. He pressed on the abdomen and released the accumulated gases.

"You understand that this is my first time, right?" Olena asked.

"Yes?" the orderly asked, without much surprise. "Well, if you don't get sick, you can stay here and work."

But Olena wasn't planning on staying: "I never wanted to work in a morgue, and I don't have a medical education. I was just curious to see how everything is set up there."

The orderly finished his work and sewed the body back up. He offered Olena to put it on. She didn't refuse. It was interesting to know what would happen next, what she would feel and how she would behave. She reached for medical gloves to begin.

"Little one, what are you doing? Why do you need those gloves? It will be easier without them. Trust me," the orderly suddenly interrupted her.

Olena refused at first. She tried to put the sleeve of the shirt on the deceased's arm, but nothing worked. Then she took off her gloves and did what she had to do.

It was the first time I touched a dead body, and I realized I wasn't afraid. I handled all those smells fine; I didn't lose consciousness. And I realized that I can and want to work with death.

The girl started learning thanatopraxy from her friend. Later, she attended several professional courses and gradually began working – first at her friend's agency. There, she met Anna and Yevhen.

When the full-scale invasion began, new challenges emerged in Olena's work – burying soldiers with severe facial injuries. She gradually learned to restore them. "In the world, such cases are mostly related to car accidents, so I had a certain level of knowledge on how to work with this. But sometimes I had to figure out what to do myself. It's a creative profession," Olena explains.

Later, she began to be invited to international exhibitions in the funeral industry. At one of them, she met an Italian professor. He was impressed by Olena's work and invited her to come to Italy for a three-week training course.

After returning home, Olena decided to open her own funeral agency and approached Anna and Yevhen with this idea. They agreed and used their own savings – approximately $2000 each – to open a funeral home.

Our own funeral home

In early winter 2024, a two-story building was rented. The renovations were done by the staff themselves – in hats, several jackets, and ski pants, with a cigarette in their mouths, because there was no heating. The walls were covered with burgundy fabric, the first floor was set up as a farewell hall, and the second floor was for selling funeral paraphernalia: wreaths, coffins, and urns.

There was no furniture – and hardly any spare money. Gradually, everyone brought something from home. Anna brought the first armchairs and a sofa so that clients who came to order a ceremony would at least have somewhere to sit. In time, they were able to get a TV on credit – "now it's our pride."

The first orders didn't come in right away. At first, there were three or four a month, then it grew to five or seven, but that was barely enough to cover the rent. So, for the first three months, we constantly had to add our own money. At the same time, everyone had to work extra jobs – Olena worked as a thanatopractor for other agencies, and Anna organized events.

"It was difficult at first. But this job is incredibly interesting. I can't imagine any of us giving it up. Every new order is a challenge. Each person has their own requests: some want fresh flowers, some musicians, and some specific decor. And we have to come up with something new each time to satisfy the customer," says Olena. "We want to change the culture of farewells and show a higher level of quality in funeral services. When funeral workers are not just body disposers, but people who help you get through the trauma."

This applies in particular to the culture of bidding farewell to soldiers. From the very beginning, the funeral home decided not to profit from such ceremonies. Facial reconstruction and the ceremony itself are free for the families of military personnel.

Initially, there were few such requests, but word of mouth spread, and over time, the funeral home began signing memorandums of cooperation with military units. The relatives of a fallen soldier pay for the coffin, wreaths, and cross at cost – with money provided by the state – and the funeral home provides all additional services free of charge.

"It's hard to say how many farewells to soldiers we organize on average. Sometimes there might not be any in a week, and sometimes there can be up to ten," Anna says. "It all depends on the situation at the front. In the summer, there were fierce battles in the Zaporizhzhia direction, and unfortunately, there were many casualties from there. Now we have already started burying soldiers who died here, in our Dnipropetrovsk region."

Support people.

The farewell ceremony begins at 1:00 PM. Friends and relatives of the deceased arrive a little earlier – some of them still need to buy a wreath. Olena escorts them to the second floor, and when they choose a wreath, she asks what to write on the ribbon:

– "From friends," "from relatives," who were you to him?

"Can you write a phrase in Hebrew?" asks the woman who bought the wreath. She understands that Olena most likely doesn't know Hebrew and will refuse. But it's important to her that the inscription is exactly like that.

"I don't know Hebrew, so I won't be able to write it. But I can redraw it, let me try," Olena replies.

She takes a black ribbon and writes symbols she doesn't understand in gold. After each line, she looks at her phone and checks if she's doing everything correctly. In ten minutes, the inscription is ready.

"I'm sorry if I wrote something wrong, or used some swear words. I tried to do my best," says Olena.

"No, no, everything's fine, thank you!" they reply.

"I never found out what that phrase was. I tried to write it correctly because I saw that it was important to the woman. By doing so, we made her loss a little easier," says Olena. "It's a small thing, but most agencies would have most likely refused her."

The roles of Anna and Olena during the ceremony are clearly divided. Anna leads the event, reads the obituary, and monitors whether anyone feels unwell. She has learned to recognize when someone is about to lose consciousness or fall into hysterics. It is important to prevent this, as a wave of despair can spread to everyone present.

When Anna sees someone feeling unwell, she signals Olena with her eyes. Olena then approaches the person and offers the help of doctors, who are on duty at every farewell. Olena also constantly walks among the guests, offering them water or napkins – "this creates a feeling of care, and that's exactly what people in grief need."

When the ceremony ends, Yevhen and six other men carry the coffin to the hearse to go to the cemetery. Anna and Olena also go. Olena is embarrassed that the relatives need to be warned: you can only kiss the deceased on the wreath – a satin ribbon on the forehead. You can't kiss the face – thanatocosmetics contain formalin, which is poisonous to people.

The farewell ceremony at the cemetery is led by a priest, while Anna and Olena monitor the condition of the people, offering tissues, water, or medical assistance. At the end of the farewell, one of the deceased's relatives begins to have a panic attack. Anna runs to him and simultaneously tries to find out where the ambulance is – it has already left for some reason. She has to calm the man down herself – and eventually succeeds.

When it's all over, Anna and Olena return to the funeral home. Yevhen is waiting for them there. After each funeral, the three of them discuss how it went and what could be done better next time.

"We need to say right from the start that you can only kiss the chalice," Olena says, a little indignantly.

"And something needs to be changed with the ambulance service," Anna adds.

"I was in touch with them and gave them the go-ahead to leave because I thought you had already finished," Yevhen explains.

"Then it will be my turn next time," Olena replies.

Anna, Olena, and Yevhen are strict with themselves – they pay more attention to their shortcomings than to what they have achieved. "This is all because we don't want to repeat them again," Anna explains.

"We can't help the one lying in the coffin anymore," she says. "Our task is to protect those standing near that coffin in grief. So that no one breaks down to the point of wanting to end their life or harm themselves. So that the farewell is dignified in every sense and doesn't become a new trauma."