“[We have funerals] not because it matters to the dead, but because it matters to the living.” – Thomas Lynch

When Levi Hendricks tells people he wants to be a mortician, he usually gets one of two reactions. Younger people generally find his choice of career morbid. Older people often launch off on a description of a wonderful funeral director who helped them, or someone they know, through a difficult time.

The mortuary science junior attributes the difference in reaction to the extent of the person’s experience with death. Younger people only see the dark side of the career — embalming, cremation, collection of dead bodies from the morgue—because they have often not experienced death personally. Older people understand the integral role of the funeral director in the family’s grieving process.

“My business isn’t death,” Hendricks says. “My business is life. The family, the survivors are my customers.”

Hendricks decided to become a mortician after a funeral director helped him deal with the death of a high school friend. He says he realized that the mortician, by simply doing his everyday job, had a huge impact on the lives of others.

“It was really inspiring.” he says. “I realized I wanted to do that for other people.”

Hendricks is a student in the Program of Mortuary Science at the University of Minnesota. He says there are about 26 students in the graduating class of 2010, a little below the school’s average of 30 students per year. According to Hendricks, the U of M’s program is one of only four four-year programs in the nation. He also says this is one career where the demand is higher than the supply.

“When you have 80 jobs openings and only 26 graduates, that is pretty good job market,” he says.

Michael Matthews, an assistant professor in the program, says that the U of M’s program is unique in that students receive a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in mortuary science. Matthews said he has seen graduates of the program go on to medical school, law school and business school.

“This is not a dead-end degree,” Matthews says.

However, the profession’s connection to death inspires many of the negative stereotypes, said Terri Sutton, an English department staff member.

“The connection with death makes them come off as something eerie or scary,” Sutton said.

The English department, together with the mortuary science program and the creative writing department, is sponsoring “An Evening with Thomas Lynch,” on November 3rd. Lynch is a mortician, poet and essayist whose works, based on his experience as a funeral director in Michigan, were one inspiration for the HBO show “Six Feet Under.” He explores the topics of life, death and mortality in his
writings.

The purpose of the event, according to organizer Kathleen Glasgow, is to attract people who may be interested in listening to an unconventional writer. Lynch will read excerpts from his books.

He will also be speaking about funeral services at the 100th anniversary of the Program of Mortuary Science on Nov. 1.

Lynch’s works humanize the mortician, according to Matthews. He says that his writing shows people that morticians are not “creepy” people.

“We don’t drive hearses instead of cars. We don’t wear black capes and run around at night,” Matthews says. “We are just human beings like the next guy down the street.”

He adds that the show inspired by Lynch’s works might have had an even more profound effect on society’s perceptions because “more people watch TV than read books.”

Sutton says her image of morticians changed after she watched the show. Before watching it she had a very “Dickensian” impression of morticians as pale, scruffy men who wore black and were gloomy. After watching it, however, she realized that morticians are not cold or morbid.

“(Six Feet Under) showed us that the people who put on these events are as full of emotional life as we are,” she says.

Hendricks says that the show provided “insight into the fact that all our lives will have death in them.” He added that many parts of the show were very true-to-life, such as dealing with people in turmoil and the issue of “mega corporations” trying to take over the small family-run funeral homes.

Despite the popularity of “Six Feet Under,” many morticians still face stigmas and stereotypes. Matthews says that while he has never received any negative reaction except for the occasional
reference to “Digger O’Dell,” a character from a 1940’s radio program, two of his former students have gotten divorces because their wives “couldn’t handle” what their husbands did for a living. He also says that some people think it is strange when morticians want to go out for an evening and enjoy themselves. “We like to go out and do things and see daylight and hang out with friends,” Hendricks says. “We are in it to help people. We are very much people persons.”

He adds, however, that it is often very hard to hold onto humanity when you work with death every day. He explains that funeral directors learn to control their emotions, but sometimes this leads to numbness and inability to feel. He says that sometimes it takes a couple weeks for a mortician to fully experience grief. Because of this, he says, the profession has very high rates of substance abuse.

Because they are required to work with families as well as tend to the deceased, students who study mortuary science take not only anatomy, biology and chemistry classes, but also psychology, sociology and public speaking. Hendricks said that the two sides are equally important and go hand-in-hand. People will always remember the funeral director who ran everything smoothly and the embalmer who prepared the body.

“They’ll be forever grateful if you make someone (look) how they looked in life,” Hendricks said. In the past, Matthews says, there were two different licenses—one for funeral directors and one for embalmers. In 1955 Minnesota combined the two licenses under the new title “mortician”. He added that the older term “undertaker” could be used interchangeably with mortician. In the past it was used to describe someone who “undertook” a task no one else wanted to perform.

Today, however, the death service industry is a thriving business with its own professional association:
the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA). According to the NFDA’s official website, there are 21,528 funeral homes in the United States, which create about $11 billion in revenue. Eighty-nine percent of these homes are family-run and average 66 years in business. The average funeral home handles 182 calls a year, but some handle fewer than 50. The NFDA also lists several “trends” or changes in funeral services. These include pre-planning and pre-payment of funerals, an increase in “after care services” such as support groups, and an increase in government regulation.

The NFDA says that there is also an increase in the number of women and minorities working in the funeral industry. One-third of current mortuary science enrollees are women. When Matthews went to school for mortuary science, there was only one woman in his program. She was pulled aside, he says, and told that it was not women’s work because she wouldn’t be able to lift the bodies. He adds that women who work as funeral directors feel very comfortable working with the widows.

Matthews adds that the U of M’s program has adapted with the changing society. He says there is now a class, which is taught by a minister and that receives guest speakers from all different backgrounds and religions.

“Their education goes far beyond their Catholic, Protestant, Jewish backgrounds,” Matthews says of the students.

He says he sees the field continuing to change, but the basics will always stay the same. He thinks the industry will become even more survivor, or family, oriented.

He says, “We deal with the survivors most of the time and we deal with the body very little.”