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For fifteen years, Nanou has been a thanatopractice. His job is to take care of the bodies and perform conservation care on the deceased. For Brut, she agreed to reveal her daily life.
“It’s not really me who chose to be an embalmer, it’s the story of my life with death.“Having lost her father in a motorcycle accident at the age of 7, Nanou has always had a special relationship with death. At the age of 10, when she discovered the profession of embalming, she announced to her mother: “that’s what i want to do”. And today, she does.
“You need a lot of concentration, you have to use all your senses”
“I have always been intrigued by death. What was going on? Was the body really dead? Was the person no longer there?” For about 15 years, Nanou has been a thanatopractice. Daily, she performs conservation care on the deceased. “We remove the pacemaker, we also do the toilet sometimes. We are going to do reconstruction care and sometimes, also, international care, since there are countries that have signed agreements with France for returns to these countries, there is an obligation for conservation care.”
What motivates her in her job is to “allow a family to gather in the best possible conditions, without traumatic visual aspect, without smell, without decomposition”. But the job remains difficult. “What is sometimes difficult is the psychological pressure that we have behind by the funeral directors or sometimes the family. It’s that intense pressure to succeed. Afterwards, the goal is not to denature a human being or to make wax dolls of them. The goal, precisely, is to leave it with an aspect as the family knew them.”