You do what for a living??!! Part One
The post this week comes from our awsome funeral director Toni -
Funeral directors, especially female ones, hear that question often. As a culture I really think we are both fascinated and repelled by death. Most of us are “death deniers” and yet we all look at the car wreck as we go by.
Since I get asked just this question by almost everyone I meet for the first time, I thought I’d share how I came to be a mortician.
I’ve had LOTS of different jobs starting in high school with restaurant work. I’ve worked in Yellowstone Park, a Nebraska meat packing plant, had my own small catering company, helped run our family restaurant, taught special ed. and 6th grade; worked in a library……you get the idea. Some of them I did for a short time, some for years. None of them were as satisfying and as varied as I have found Funeral Service to be.
So, one evening in 1994 or 95, I’m standing at the char broiler at our family’s restaurant in Eureka, Montana looking at a 10pm closing and clean up after that… after putting in 6 hours at the grade school. With the same exact line up for the next day…& the next… And I think to myself….I DON’T want to be doing this same exact thing when I’m 60. Even if I do own it…really the business owned me. I didn’t know what exactly I DID want to do, but knew that at 38 I’d better get on the stick and figure out something.
I went to a local community college’s counseling center and took a bunch of aptitude & temperament tests, trying to get an idea of what I might be suited to. Lo & behold a pattern emerged! Not what I thought or expected to be suitable career choices, but really, the ones I had done weren’t doing it for me anyway. So, what kept coming up were: Beautician, social worker and mortician.
Hmmm…mortician. That was nothing that had ever crossed my mind. But after a little investigation, I figured that being a mortician would incorporate the beautician and social worker aspect and be completely different from anything I’d ever done before. Boy was that ever right on! But more on that in part two.
Until then, take care. Toni