After You Die, Monica Torres Can Bring Life Back to Your Body

The groundbreaking mortician is pioneering new techniques to restore the dead and provide closure to grieving families.

- By Eleanor Cummins

From the moment tyrone timms pulled up outside his father's Arizona home on Veterans Day 2019, he knew something was wrong. John Gause, a Vietnam War veteran, hadn't picked up the phone. The blinds were drawn. Mailers littered the porch. When Timms cracked the door, the scent was overpowering. A body was lying in the hallway-his father's, now unrecognizable due to decomposition.

Gause's remains were turned over to the Maricopa Medical Examiner for autopsy. The results indicated he died of natural causes, roughly four days before Timms found him. Their investigation complete, the medical examiner released Gause's body to a local funeral home. In a tiny planning room at Thompson Funeral Chapel, Timms and his family asked for the seemingly impossible: Could they have an open-casket service?

That's how Timms met Monica Torres, a Phoenix-based embalmer, funeral director, and reconstruction specialist. Torres, a 5-foot-2 Latina in her 40s, stands out in her colorful dresses and partially shaved head in a field still dominated by older white male funeral home owners in three-piece suits. When funeral homes have a tough case, it's Torres who picks up the call.

Torres is a visionary in the end-of-life industry and a specialist in traumatic deaths: miscarriages and murders, car crashes and suicides. Over the last decade, Torres has launched what she calls her "dark arts" into an internationally recognized brand with more than 27,000 Instagram followers who know her as "Cold Hands." By day, Torres leads continuing education classes for embalmers around the world. By night, she drives from one funeral home to another with her wheeled embalming kit, restoring bodies in the perfect quiet.