Professional vs. Personal - A Mortician’s View on Balancing Life

Personal life? What's that? Ever since becoming a funeral director and embalmer and number of years ago, it seems as though I have signed off on my personal life. It's like I traded in my horse training gear and runway stilettos for a closet full of black suits and hours of sleepless nights.

It is very difficult for a mortician to balance personal and professional lives. That's because this job isn't really a normal job. It is not a Monday - Friday, 9 to 5 sort of career. This job keeps its professionals super busy on weekends with funerals, up late at night with wakes and vigils, awake in the wee hours of the morning with death calls and removals, and occupied with stacks of legal paperwork during regular office hours.

We have taken on the responsibility to clean up death and hide it from the public. The people we meet with on a regular basis are almost always sad, depressed, emotionally lame, and often angry. Funeral service can be a difficult and demanding business, but it is a business nevertheless. Oftentimes, it is difficult to leave all of the stress and emotion at work when it is time to go home.

After I took a job as a licensed funeral director and embalmer, I married a man that fights fires and drives an ambulance. Because of his job, he understood the late hours and he thought he knew what he was getting into when he married me. We have found it difficult in the budding stages of our marriage to build the kind of relationship a husband and wife should have. We love each other madly, but when I have to work every weekend or stay at the funeral home for a late vigil, we don't spend the sort of quality time together that we should. After a long night of embalming, I often come home smelling of formaldehyde-based fluids and death. That makes it difficult to greet my husband with a hug before showering. And just when it seems as though you're going to get a good night's sleep, the phone rings and you have to wake up, put on a suit, and take care of business. And there are those times when you'd give anything to be able to burn your black suits and wear a bright color for a day, but in this business you have to be as conservative as possible. That's what people expect. It is tradition and it will probably never change.

Now that I have hit on all of the low points of a mortician's professional life, you probably understand that it takes a special breed of cat to do this job. I love this profession. I love the challenges of embalming. I love helping families when they need it most. And I love driving the hearse :) Besides, if I was really serious about decent hours and weekends off to spend time with my new family, I would get a job with Service Corporation International rather than a family-owned funeral home.