When Your Caretaker Is an Undertaker – Eugene Weekly

One of the most valuable pieces of information I've ever learned is that you shouldn't put Vaseline under your nose to block the smell of decay, because then all you can smell is decay and Vaseline.

This is not a metaphor for facing life head-on or whatever. My mother told me this when I was 9 years old and she went to the morgue to help my grandma run her small funeral home.

My grandmother's funeral home was an integral part of my childhood, almost a sister to my own home. It is white with purple trim, lace curtains and glass angels are everywhere. It features a large window that fills the interior with light. Every Christmas they fill the window with photos of children who have died in the community since the 1970s.

Me, my cousin, and my two younger siblings spent countless hours at the funeral home, reading books, playing with building blocks, asking for money to walk to the nearby store, and gossiping vigorously about small-town rumors while my grandma worked back there.

When my mother followed in my grandmother's footsteps and became a funeral director, I wondered why someone cried at the end of every episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition would choose to put himself in such a situation forever. Her casual response stuck with me: “Because someone must do it.”

Growing up in a family-run funeral home in a small town gave me a very different perspective on death. The world where death is a taboo and a frightening subject, kept secret out of fear and controversy, is alien to me. In my family, death is as casual as going to the grocery store.

However, when I went to the grocery store, sometimes I or one of my siblings would sit in the back because there weren't enough seats in the work van (which occasionally doubled as the family car). On a trip to the grocery store, my mother would often detour to drop off a death certificate, and occasionally one of us would ride with an urn on our lap so she could drop it off along the way.

Almost every day, when we got to the grocery store or when I went somewhere in public, I had contact with someone who would stop me and tell me how much they appreciated the way my mom and grandma took care of their mom and grandma had taken care of.

My mother and my grandmother have given me a lot of advice over the years, although I can't really say that it has come in handy very often: “Lift the coffin with your legs, not your back.” “You have to “Remove the pacemaker so it doesn't explode in the crematorium.” “Do you know where all the church toilets are?” “Embalming should be done sooner rather than later, before the body clots too much.”

There were some life lessons I learned all on my own.

For example, when we were very little, my cousin, my brother and I played hide-and-seek in my grandmother's garden. My brother, the youngest of the three of us, was the searcher, so my cousin and I outsmarted him by hiding together in the back of my grandmother's hearse. It was the best spot of all and we won by a huge margin. After 20 minutes we knew he had given up so we decided to jump out of the hearse and claim our victory.

So we learned that if you end up in the back of a hearse, you generally don't try to get out, so the back doors of hearses don't open from the inside – we had to push our tiny bodies through the cab window and into the front seat.

I also learned that death can sometimes be theatrical. For as long as I can remember, every Christmas our celebrations were temporarily interrupted because my mother and grandmother had to go to work. Many of our childhood plans revolved around their “pendings” – their term for people who were about to die.

If we wanted to have family weekend adventures, they depended on there being no funerals planned, being close enough to town, and always within cell phone range. That way, if someone died, my mother could take care of him. And when one of her clients was on the verge of death, we had to push back our weekend family plans quite a bit.

That doesn't mean we didn't get out. When my mother had a long drive to the morgue ahead of her, even during school hours, she would often throw me and my brother into her van and strap my little sister into the car seat for a fun, two-hour Sunday morning road trip. We chatted, kept each other company, went shopping, and performed the parade when they were ready for us (always accompanied by security or the morgue attendant, who nervously said, “Oh! You brought your kids”).

Then we grabbed something to eat at a drive through and headed home. Normally we don't acknowledge the body in the back of the van other than warm greetings. (You don't have much to contribute to the conversation). Unless putrefaction, the natural postmortem process in which fluids and gases escape the body, has caused us to roll down the windows. And no one batted an eyelid.

Now that I'm older, I understand that my childhood was definitely not conventional. There were nights when dinner was at the morgue at 10 p.m. because my mother was up late doing embalming. My duties in high school included distributing programs and setting up chairs at funerals. My mother can sew, but she can't make me new clothes – if you know what I mean.

But I was able to grow up with the two strongest and most influential role models imaginable.

I watched my mom and grandma help grieving people while they themselves were experiencing debilitating grief. I've seen them hold funerals all over town and make everyone feel like their funeral was the only one. I watched them wake up at 2 a.m. and drive hours to be with their families on the worst night of their lives. I have seen them sacrifice forever and yet remain ever present.

And I watched them do it all while looking professional with their forever-matching purple hair. They are the most important women in my life and I love them so much. I sincerely hope that I can be as full of life as the two undertakers who raised me. (My dad raised me too – I love you, Dad – but he's a roofer.)

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