Meet the 'World's Favorite Mortician' Who Works in Small Town MN

You wouldn't typically put the words 'world's favorite mortician' together in a phrase but that's the title that Victor M. Sweeney has earned for himself.

Victor is a mortician and I was first introduced to him through a video I was served on YouTube. It's called 'Mortician Answers Dead Body Questions From Twitter'.

How I Learned About Victor M. Sweeney

The video was done by Wired, which has a series called Tech Support on its channel. I love watching their Tech Support videos because they feature people who are experts in their field answering questions that people have asked on X/Twitter.

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It's so fascinating to me to hear about fields of work that I would have otherwise never learned anything about. I watched the video that Victor did and I was so impressed by his demeanor and how he speaks about death, something that he sees every day.

The video did insanely well. It's been up for 3 years and has over 25 million views!

Wired has had Victor back on their channel multiple times and all of the videos get millions of views. He's done other interviews as well with YouTubers like Anthony Padilla and news channels like CNBC.

Victor's CNBC interview was done just a month ago and when I watched it my jaw fell to the floor. Here I was thinking that this guy must work in a big city to have been discovered by these YouTube channels. But no, in this video I learned that Victor actually lives and works in small-town in northern Minnesota.

So I had to talk to him! I needed to know how he ended up in small-town Minnesota, how he got this internet fame, and what he likes about being a Minnesotan.

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My Interview with Victor M. Sweeney

I called Victor and chatted with him at the end of last week. He lives and works in the town of Warren, MN, population of 1,605, not too far from North Dakota and just northeast of Grand Forks.

Also, if you'd like to listen to our whole conversation, I have it at the bottom of the condensed, typed-out version!

CARLY: So my first question is, why did you decide to become a mortician? Because that's such a unique career path.

VICTOR: I always wanted to be a priest when I was a little kid. And when I was 17, 18, I discerned out of that. And then I was left to the question of, what now? And I'm like, well, I don't like business or science, really my only skill is talking to people, I think, and I want to be helpful. So how do I find a job that does those things?

And then in the background of that, as you probably know, I had a close death to me when I was a young boy.

(The first death Victor experienced was when he went to play with a friend. He was told his friend was still sleeping and to go wake him up. His friend had actually passed away from a seizure due to undiagnosed epilepsy and Victor was the one who found him.)

I had 10 family deaths in as many years as a teenager. And my parent's first child died the day she was born. So we grew up going to the cemetery and we were just around a very death-positive kind of family.

My godfather came to me when I was in high school and he's like, 'Hey, I have a friend from high school who wrote a book. You'd find it really interesting, I bet. And it's called The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch.' Lynch is a mortician and poet in Michigan.

So I read this book and I was like, 'Hmm, this has all the things that I was hoping for.' So then I just kind of took a leap and got a job at a funeral home in Bismarck where I graduated from high school and that's where I started.

CARLY: A very common fear that people have is a fear of dying. But you work with that every day. Is that ever something that you had an issue with?

VICTOR: Not really. I never really had one to begin with. As I said with the death-positive family and having attended my first deathbed when I was three, I just didn't grow up with that kind of fear.

I think it's just one of those things that you just get comfortable with the idea and, in some ways, you see yourself in practically every body that comes through the funeral home in some way or another. And so it's not that discomforting to be a dead body and realize like I'm also going to be one someday, maybe on this very table.

(We spoke about his recent video he did with CNBC and then we started talking about how he ended up being asked to be a part of these YouTube videos.)

VICTOR: So this would have been in 2019. I buried a farmer north of town. And his son and his son-in-law helped me carry him out.

I ended up kind of becoming friends with the son-in-law, John. He got back to me a year later and said, 'Hey, I can't stop thinking about this whole situation with my father-in-law. Just the fact that he went from being jaundiced in a bedroom to looking like himself in the casket, to this moment we shared when we picked him up, to you being there at the actual burial, you were just there the whole time. Amost as a way of saying thank you, I just wanna follow you around and write a story.' He's like, I'm a writer for Minnesota Public Radio. And so I was like, sure, just come hang out for a day.

He just followed me around for the day and nothing monumental happened. But afterward, he wrote a story that you'll have to research because I can never remember the title. But it was something like 'Need for Morticians Increases as Minnesota Ages' or something like that.

(I did, in fact, find the story! 'As Minnesota ages, need for morticians becomes a life and death issue')

I was like, cool. And then it got, it got picked up by the AP and it was splashed all over the country. I was getting letters from random strangers.

Then a year later in 2020 it must have been or maybe early 21, I got an email from Conde Nast, the conglomerate that owns Wired Magazine. They were like, hey, we think you'd be a great fit for a mortician video. And I was like, this is spam. I'll just send them an email back telling them someone's trying to spam with their account. Turned out it was real and the next thing I know I'm on a Zoom call with people in the World Trade Center. And they're like, hey, we wanna make this video. Would you do it?

It must've been 2020, I was like, this is as busy as I've ever been. I can't go to New York and with restrictions, even if I did go to New York, I probably couldn't get out. So what I ended up doing is they sent a film crew to the funeral home. And so that first video, the viral one with 25 million views, was actually shot in Minnesota. It was shot in my funeral home chapel.

And then we just made that wonderful lightning-in-a-bottle video.

CARLY: I saw in the CNBC interview that you said that you've been getting job offers from everywhere, but you wanted to stay in small-town Minnesota because of the connection that you can have with these people.

VICTOR: Yeah, I think the thing is, like any job, but especially funeral services, one that's kind of founded on relationship and trust, to be a stranger to every person that walks through the door and have to build trust, like that's a good thing. I've done that. But there is something really beautiful about just being friends from the get-go.

For whatever disadvantages small-town life has, the advantages in that regard and that kind of close human connection just totally outweigh anything else.

I've done a lot of stuff but then to land here in a way that I thought was very temporary, I found it's wonderful. And I've been here 10 years in a way that I never could have possibly imagined.

CARLY: On the YouTube videos that you've done, have you ever looked at the comments that people leave?

VICTOR: Yeah, I have!

CARLY: Some of my favorites that I've read, and maybe you've seen these, are "this man is really the Internet's favorite mortician." "If this guy isn't my mortician, I'm not dying." And "he's an amazing role model." So comments like that, what does that make you feel?

VICTOR: You know, it's very strange. I try not to get too puffed up about it. I have read them on a bad day when you're dealing with a family you don't like, it's nice to have a little escape valve of strangers on the internet telling you nice things.

But I realized that none of them know me, though. They know of me and whatever modification of myself I have to put on YouTube, but none of them know me. So whether it's good or bad, if it's bad, I can blow that off because they don't know me. But if it's good, I should also blow that off because like it's, you know, I can't take credit for it because they also don't know me.

I've been trying to stay neutral, but it is very pleasant. I won't lie.

CARLY: What would you say is the best part about your job?

VICTOR: It sounds redundant, I guess, because it's what we've been talking about, but I think it's the connection. It's the ability to walk into a room on someone's worst day of their life when their mom or dad or brother or sister has died, and they see you and you can just feel this sense of relief from everybody in the room.

CARLY: What would you say is the hardest part about your job?

VICTOR: It's burying friends. It's burying a little old lady that you're friends with. Burying children is universally hard. That's the hard part. But also there is that kind of silver lining in that, for that family I was in a position where I could actually do something.

CARLY: When you aren't working, what do you like to do for fun?

VICTOR: I read a lot. I read a great deal. I was hoping to read 52 books this year. I'm at 45, I won't reach 52 before the end of the year.

CARLY: That's crazy. That's very impressive.

VICTOR: Yeah, thank you. I like to read a lot. As you know, I do a little stone carving. That's fun, but in the winter you can't do that. In my unheated garage it's too cold.

(What he's referencing with the stone carving comes from the CNBC interview. Victor will find gravesites that have been forgotten and he will do research and figure out who is buried there and give them a proper headstone or fix up the existing one.)

CARLY: What is your favorite part about living in Minnesota?

VICTOR: There's Old Mill State Park just north of me and that is probably my singular favorite place in the world because they have hiking, but it's very flat up here. So it's just smooth strolling through the woods and it's beautiful.

And they have a swimming hole, by the way. they pump up water from the river into the swimming hole that's been around since the thirties or twenties or something.

CARLY: What would you say is your least favorite part about living in Minnesota?

VICTOR: Do you want to guess?

CARLY: Right now?

VICTOR: Yeah, yeah, you got it. Yeah, right now is my least favorite part. Standing in a cemetery in negative 20 with dress shoes is miserable. Miserable. Hate it. Yeah, it's the weather. I know it's cliche, but it's the weather.

CARLY: Do you ever go to the Twin Cities or go to Duluth or anything like that very often?

VICTOR: Rarely. I went to school in Minneapolis.

CARLY: That's right. You went to the U of M, right?

VICTOR: Yeah, I did. I lived in Dinkytown. But I just have no desire to go back there. I'm very content where I'm at. I was raised in a metropolitan area so it doesn't make me nervous or anything like that. But I just I'm just so darn happy with what I have up here. There's just no reason to look any further.