Facts & Arguments is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.
The smell of a specific brand of shampoo reminds me of the deceased.
It’s not a shampoo that I buy, but every once in a while when I shower at a place that is not my home, I see that shampoo and it brings me back to the days when I worked in a funeral home.
Three quarters of the way through my degree in religious studies, during a lecture on ancient Egyptian funeral rituals, I started to wonder about the rituals of modern North American funerals.
Having never attended a funeral in my life, my curiosity was abstract and academic, much like my curiosity about world religions.
I e-mailed a few local funeral homes to learn more and the first funeral director to reply offered me a part-time job as a receptionist when I met him for coffee at the funeral home the following week. When his answers to my two questions (Do you like working here? Is it okay that I’ve never lost someone I loved?) proved satisfactory, I accepted his offer with a firm handshake.
My first task was learning to take a “first call”: that first phone call, usually from an immediate family member, announcing that someone has died. I told my manager, the same funeral director who had hired me, that I felt hopeless taking these calls, that nothing I said felt adequate, and he said that that was the right way to feel.
It was my co-worker, a funeral director in her mid-30s, soft-spoken and warm, who inspired me to become a funeral director. She was elegant, kind and smart, and always knew just what to say.
I wanted to offer grieving families the emotional support that she provided. Also, I had had enough of the academic and abstract: I wanted to do something real.
After graduating from university, I headed to college for my formal funeral director education.
The most daunting task: learning to embalm. At that time, embalming training was a requirement to become licensed as a funeral director.
I approached the gamut of embalming-related courses and labs with an open mind.
I came to see this aspect of the job as being about preserving dignity.
My thought process was as follows: Every person deserves to be treated with respect and dignity. Dignity means being clean, dressed and well groomed. People who are no longer living cannot clean, dress or groom themselves.
But being worthy of respect means that someone has to do it. I could be that person.
As an apprentice, I soon met my first family to make funeral arrangements under the supervision of my manager. Afterward, he told me I would make a great funeral director.
When asked what could possibly give him that impression – I’d spoken too quickly and stumbled over my words – he responded kindly: “Because you care enough to ask.”
I seriously doubted his claim that I could ever be a great funeral director without ever having lost someone I loved. But I knew he was a great mentor.
Over the months, I met dozens of families and continued to feel hopeless and inadequate, but gradually less so.
I placed orders for caskets, flowers and stationery, made phone calls to churches and cemeteries, registered death and burial certificates, wrote obituaries, gave embalming instructions (and embalmed, and washed hair with that shampoo), transferred cremated remains to urns and reminded sons and daughters to drop off clothing at the funeral home for their fathers and mothers to wear at their funerals.
Then, halfway through my apprenticeship, I accepted that I would never be the funeral director I had aspired to be.
I cared deeply about the families I met, but I knew my strength was in the paperwork.
Not a name was misspelled in an obituary and not a comma was out of place on a contract, but I would never know the right thing to say to a mother who had lost her young child and I would never get used to the discomfort.
My career as a funeral director was over before it started. I leveraged my attention to detail and love of reading and writing into a career in law. I left the funeral home for law school the same week I got my funeral director’s licence.
In law school, that licence became a kind of party trick I would pull out when there was a lull in the conversation. It would trigger bemusement and philosophic conversations about death. Depending on the mood, I might share my view that death is not inherently interesting, but that it makes life interesting. I might point out that Wallace Stevens said that death is the mother of beauty. Don’t you wish you were at those parties?
My funeral director’s licence then became a giant question mark on my CV. In job interviews, it was an icebreaker of sorts.
I stopped renewing my funeral director’s licence this year. Now, it’s a part of me that I almost forget about, like the small tattoo I can barely see on the side of my ribcage.
But sometimes, the smell of that shampoo is all it takes to bring back the memories of the wonderful families and funeral directors I met.
Caitlin Morin lives in Toronto.