Ural mourning florist crafts wreaths for exes with dark humor

“I lived in a village, and while all the children were playing and having fun, I was always crawling around the cemetery. I would examine wreaths, could lie down on a grave. My mother always scolded me for that,” — Helga says.

Helga Mashkantseva is from the small Ural town of Kushva. She is 37 years old and was previously named Olga. She worked in the beauty industry, launched her own hair care brand, and even opened two beauty studios. But a couple of years ago, she started a new life, began studying funeral art, and even changed her name. This article tells the unusual story of a woman who changed everything to find herself.

Helga mastered the profession of a thanatopractor; she prepares the bodies of the deceased for burial. In parallel, she engages in making mourning wreaths. The turning point in her life was the death of her mother.

“I started looking for some unusual wreath for her. I didn’t find anything at all. No matter how many places I went in our city, no matter how much I looked on websites in other cities — everything was the same. Just standard wreaths made from cheap flowers. In the end, I decided to make a wreath myself. And somehow it all started,” — Helga says.

At first, Helga made wreaths only for close ones. Unfortunately, she had plenty of opportunity to gain experience. Over several years, men in her family died. First, her father passed away, then her brother was killed, after some time her 12-year-old nephew died. And on 31 December 2019, her husband was found dead on the floor in his own apartment.

“For my husband, I made a wreath on the anniversary. I made it with soul, I sat and cried. I believe that wreaths are not just a composition of flowers, they are emotions after all,” — Helga says.

When people started asking Helga where she got such wreaths, she realized she could build a business on this. She applied for a social contract and won a grant to open her own workshop. She assembles wreaths based on individual orders. Things improved in her life too — Helga is now married for the second time. Her husband supports her in everything.

Wreath for an Ex

The buds that the florist weaves into her wreaths look very lifelike. But they are still artificial. Helga uses mainly roses, peonies, carnations, and lilies in her compositions — traditional mourning flowers. But at the customer’s request, she can add others, for example, if the deceased loved them in life.

The ribbons she prints herself. Instead of banal inscriptions like “from colleagues,” “from relatives,” she decorates wreaths with lines from poems and personal phrases.

“A girl approached, asked to make a wreath for her ex. She was very offended, apparently, and asked to write the line: ‘Earth with concrete, you bastard.’ She just knows that no one else will make such a thing for her anywhere, and I agreed,” — Helga says.

On the topic of death, the mourning florist generally approaches with black humor. On her social media, she posts humorous videos about her profession, talks about funeral traditions, and walks through cemeteries.

“It’s a very interesting topic. Some people are afraid, of course, think I’m crazy. Many have even rejected me, stopped communicating with me. They say: it’s not normal, you’ve erased all boundaries, have no fears, need to respect death. And it’s generally such a closed topic, but I, on the contrary, promote it, tell everything,” — the mourning florist says.

But Helga never mocks the grief of her clients. On the contrary, she says that she internalizes their stories. And even professional cynicism sometimes doesn’t help cope with emotions.

“Once I was making a wreath for a child. I saw a post from a girl, she’s not even from here, not from our region, her child fell out of a window. She was suffering a lot. I wrote to her myself and offered to make a wreath,” — Helga says. — “The wreath had flowers and toys.”

Author’s wreaths cost from two thousand rubles (about $22). This is the usual price on the market. The most expensive one that Helga assembled, she sold for 20,000 rubles (about $222).

Battle of the Psychics

Helga says that she possesses supernatural abilities. She began developing them after participating in “Battle of the Psychics.” In 2020, the girl went on the show with her sisters to find out why in their family men were dying one after another.

It was after filming the program that she believed in the afterlife. And for the first time, she thought about the funeral business. However, she nurtured the idea for several years. And first, she mastered the profession not of a mourning florist, but of a thanatopractor. She learned to do makeup for the dead, stitch and glue wounds, and embalm bodies.

Helga did her practice in a morgue, but now she only goes out on private orders.

“I understand like no one else how important this specialty is. When my brother was buried in a closed coffin and there was an unbearable smell… He was swollen and black. They couldn’t bury him properly because there was no person with such knowledge. I want to help people so that they say goodbye to their relatives and don’t see those terrible changes that erase ‘traces of life’ from the face,” — the girl shared.

Now Helga combines two funeral specialties: florist and body restorer. Psychic abilities, the girl says, interfere more with her work.

“You feel more than ordinary people. You somehow penetrate deeply. Even when making a wreath, sometimes some images come. If an acquaintance comes to me, I might ask, did your mother or daughter, for example, have such and such? Because an image came to me. Sometimes I take the wreath to the cemetery, then for several days I walk around, and in my head, I keep thinking about what happened to the person,” — Helga says.

Earlier we published an interview with a thanatopractor. We also told about a smart blonde with red lips who manages the ‘creepiest’ department of a large hospital.