Mom's in Cold Storage, But That's Legal
Two British sisters who have kept their mother’s body in cold storage at a London funeral home for a decade as they visited her there almost weekly have broken no laws.
But family friends are now trying to end the two 50-something sisters’ practice of regularly sitting with their 84-year-old mother’s mummified body at the funeral home, reports the Sun, a British tabloid. (It has also interested readers of the upscale London Times, who have put the Times version on the paper’s most-read list.) The sisters have paid G. Saville and Sons of Wembley to refrigerate their mother’s body for a decade at a cost of 20 pounds per week, and the funeral home also regularly touches up her makeup.
“No health and safety violations have been breached, and the corpse does not smell,” funeral director Phillip Saville tells the Sun. “There are no laws saying people can’t keep a corpse for years after registering the death, though it is normal to bury the body after just two weeks.”
