In her shag-at-sea grace..

[Rev. Rye]

Embalming first became popular for funerals sometime during the Civil War, if my research is accurate. At that point, it was more or less a necessity for soldiers whose families would have preferred their sons be buried where they lived and not near the battlefield. The decision to give Abraham Lincoln's corpse a farewell tour for a few weeks after his assassination made it the next big thing, and then things snowballed from there up to a bunch of set ideas that become largely enforced by a combination of cultural conventional wisdom and this one corporation that turned into a monopoly that controls most everything about funerals.